Hey everyone,
Happy Labour Day from Canada! Apologies for releasing this monthly issue a few days later for I didn't get a chance to write on the last week of the past month like I normally do because I spent that time on a week long canoe trip. It was quite grounding to say the least.
Back to the update…
This past August I was in SF for a week, having stimulating conversations with mutuals, eating delicious food and trying out fun, experimental activities.
Throughout my time in SF, I thought about how I was in the belly of the beast, especially if you were to take a look at a the city at 9pm and notice just how empty it was. Not much of a restaurant patio culture like I've seen in other cities. But it turns out that the real action is taking place in house parties and third spaces (more on that later). The story seems to be that the pandemic hollowed out the city and it has yet to recover, but interesting things are taking place on the periphery. I guess it does take a disaster to differentiate the true builders from the scene queens...
When it came to the people there, I came across a few tech startup builders in my trip, but I was mostly around friendly, spiritual open people. I rarely got to talk about work with these people, but if I did, it was mostly about work in service of increasing social good. I had an interesting conversation with someone in which I was asked “Does the work that I normally do overlap with this work?”. I laughed and replied with “Kind of.”. It's the kind of question that made me think how this interest fits in with the rest of my life and which part should I continue doing. She also recommended I go to an event at The Commons called “The Confidence Studio”, a workshop that helps people navigate their lives collectively, which I attended. It also just so happened that the theme was “realigning priorities” and that could not have come at a better time.
Going to that event made it more apparent to me that I would like to pay more attention and commitment to my personal relationships, especially around friendships and dating. And it's quite obvious to me that the events I post are the types of events that I'd go with my ideal friends. Additionally, as much as I want to be a participant in scenes that find creative ways to elevate social good, I also want to feel alive doing it. What good is it to make a better world if I'm not friends with the people who are helping to build it? And would I even have the strength to participate and contribute without collaborators and friends? What did help though was having moments of “connecting to self” via meditation and giving myself the trust to explore these questions without any definitive answer. It's almost as if I didn't get as much opportunities to explore my intuitions when I was younger that the chance to explore and unblock that part of myself becomes its own desired outcome.
But what really set the tone for my trip was asking myself “If I didn't know anybody, where could I go to be around like minded people?”. This led me to three spaces in particular: The Center SF, The Commons, and Berkeley Alembic. With Alembic in particular, I bumped into not one, but two familiar faces on a particular Thursday night. It's really nice to pick up where you left off in online conversations, this time in person. It's becoming more obvious to me that third spaces can act as physical Schelling points for online mutuals to converge without planning and deepen their ties and relationships with each other. These Schelling points can also act as fertile ground for various subcultures to plant their roots and rewild together. These physical Schelling points will be essential in integrating countercultural processes and bridging the everyday and ritual. But what do I mean by this?
Integration
You know how you have a transformative, awe-inspiring experience that you can't stop thinking about and then you dread going back to everyday life? There's almost this implicit feeling that you need to “escape” in order to experience something awesome. But what if it didn't have to be that way? What if magic was within reach and in plain sight? Because what I noticed about these Schelling points in SF is that they resembled tea houses / coffeehouses / cafes, spaces that anyone from any walk of life can stumble into and work and have a hot beverage. However, what makes these spaces are the volunteers, members, and creators that bring life into spaces with their creative ideas and good vibes. I love it when people bring what they've learned from festivals and retreats into workshops that contain heuristics that can be incorporated into our everyday lives. So not only can we learn to “not escape” (which is becoming more of an impossibility anyways, given our current set of global problems), but we can also integrate transformative experiences much faster because ritual is not as displaced as it once was. Instead, ritual can be woven into communities of practice, stored within physical Schelling points where you get to learn from experienced practitioners. Awe and wonder no longer have to be isolated, coincidental events, but instead intentionally set and practised often in a continuous manner. A continuous stream of awe and wonder sounds pretty good all things considered. It means you don't have to be in isolation, thinking “WTF happened?”, but you can have more bits of that awesome transformative experience in your everyday life and gain new insights on that experience in the process.
And so maybe you don't need to travel to the desert (and risk being stuck there) to experience some ritual and maybe the counterculture is not “over there”. Maybe the counterculture is in between our interactions with the projects, cultures, and spaces we make, facilitate, and steward as we go on with our lives. The alternative to living a completely different life outside the city is to take an hour or two of your time every week to participate in something out of the ordinary. For a lot of people that used to be church. But if church is not for you, there's plenty of other things out there to experience belonging, direction, and devotion to something beyond one's self. Perhaps, I'm just talking about neo-monasteries or “the feeling of home” that transcends place. Nevertheless, I do think a physical place can help reinforce the latter. And I'm pretty excited about various cities around the world designing their own physical Schelling points. I have seen ones emerging in Toronto, NYC, Austin, and now, the Bay Area. Perhaps I should see what Berlin and Lisbon have to offer next...
The bridging of everyday space and ritual space is already happening and the question is “Can you welcome it and welcome others to it as well?”.
Upcoming events:
But first, a comment. You'll notice that I am promoting fewer events this month, but concentrating on transformative initiatives and projects aiming to bridge the everyday and the ritual.
Sept 9-10: Visions of Gaia Course @ Joshua Creek Heritage Art Centre
Sept 11: This is Not the Show: Trampoline Hall Party
Sept 14-17: Constructing Consciousness Retreat (Speaking with organizers and/or participants highly recommended. Start with Tucker Walsh and his network)
Sept 14-17: Camp Reset (last minute waitlist only)
Sept 19: You're Not Alone: Let's Talk About Your Heartbreak @ Danu Social House
Sept 23: Connection Lab @ Modo Yoga Bloor West
Sept 27: Unified Playfulness Workshop
Sept 28: The Living Question Game: Discussing Power @ Danu Social House
Sept 28 – Oct 1: Unified Playfulness Mini-Retreat @ Willow Monastic Academy
Suggestions always appreciated
Thanks again for sharing your "travel impressions". I'm so glad we got to meet in person a while back, and have taken quite some inspiration from our conversation. As I speak with people from different spaces, it becomes ever clearer that there is a real hunger and appetite for finding a perspective that allows the integration of individual needs, building functioning collective reciprocity (and reliability), and then also transcending the scarcity mindset built into some of our current systems in favor of a more faith-based approach. I, for one, am really optimistic that you are among the people who will be learning about (if not developing) this shift, and then write about it for everyone else's benefit! :)