Category: Daily

Good grief

Death is useless as a concept. It needs to felt in the body.

Death is always living here in me, an initiate walking up stone stairs and snuffing out the candles one by one, a flickering ahead.

Or a slasher film. Massacres of mitochondria. My body devoured by bacteria daily.

It is other death, the death of others, that need special rooms, funeral processions. Death happens continually and abundantly and is only important when we love.

Grief is unstoppable, rolling through, a tsunami.

Grief is the body feeling of love without desire, though maybe there’s still a sensuousness in the breaking open. The raw and pulpy underside of my own flesh and sinew somehow palpable then.

Grief is hot and consuming. It’s not the grey and drizzle of sorrow.

Space to feel may be necessary, a church, a forest clearing, light that catches motes. Room for the mess and the roaring silence. The never returning of someone sounds like the earth caving in.

Even imagining this irrevocable absence feels like too much wasabi. Feeling your goneness has been, always, a fire drill for a cascading catastrophe.

My own death is mere anxiety. Alive, I am always in some way terribly alone.

Even as you live, an idea called your death has always been that reminder. Even made from you, between us are the echoing straits. Love is never fully knowing another. Love is the salt, the sand, and the drowning.

Yesterday’s media:

Beginning again

This afternoon, after I made and ate my collards and blackeye peas (vegan! delicious!) I sat down to write to you, because it’s a new year and I am re-intending to do this frequently, as daily as I can, for the purpose of something: A record? An invitation? A practice not a perfect?

It’s been a minute and it feels at times like things are going through me as though I am sand or rocks on a beach that the tide washes over, disrupting, slurping away some grains and depositing others. Things are revealed. Are these things important? Idols and ambergris. And yet I am here, and you are, for this strange and beautiful day, pink and sunshine that has faded into cold and grey. We are here. Alive.

How will a year go?

The last one contained multitudes. Kernels popping.

A few days ago a harbour seal said hello to me on the Seawall. A month ago I was petting a baby elephant outside Nairobi, another before that wandering NYC with new Fellow friends from the Integrity Institute. There were sunshine coffees in California. Wanders in Portland. It’s actually hard to catalogue all the things that happened or didn’t so much happen as became part of me, or I became a part, not apart. Dancing with mountains. Collective process. A lot of people to love.

My musings are often some attempt to capture learning, lessons, some whiff of meaning that drifts through as I write in the morning, they are not ‘about me’ and what me is can be elusive. Who are you? I don’t know if there are really more than questions, but I love a rich, gooey, chewy, brownie question.

In 2023, I read 101 books, not counting the ones I abandoned. That might be approaching a limit. I’m down to discuss any of them.

In 2024, I have a few intentions:

  1. Develop more containers of belonging
  2. Choose freedom
  3. Physically become stronger
  4. Act from love, not fear

This little place where I am putting words down may become more fragmented, perhaps some kind of rubble pile for you to find rare and unexpected treasures. Let’s be on a scavenger hunt together this year. I expect grief. I invite joy. I welcome it all.

A Cold, Cold Problem

One of my apparent side hobbies is reading startup advice books.

These books follow a predictable formula: know your customer, build cheaply, be a painkiller not a vitamin, raise VC, and grow as though your life depends on it. I’ve been in the startup world for a while and most of these books are pretty successful at describing what someone would do to play the game of startup we’ve seen for the last decade or so. They are all manuals for getting funding and then scaling, without much question about whether either one of those is the ideal path for a business.

I remember when I first got into tech and took a lot of this at face value. I wanted to play the game because I wanted to be a winner. I thought people who were successful at tech startups knew something, and that I needed to learn that thing. I learned a lot about building product, and those lessons have been incredibly valuable, no matter what kind of business you want to apply them to. I’ve learned from some very smart people.

But there are some things these books largely ignore or gloss over. For one thing, they will explain how VCs put money into lots of startups but only a few scale, and therefore VC investment is only for products that have huge markets and want to blitzscale. For one thing, this framing instantly leads all founders playing the game to try to win by ‘articulate solutions that are broad-based enough to be a big brand someday ‘go after big markets.’ Most startups should be doing the opposite, looking for niches and building a viable company. What’s more, getting VC funding is, by the accounts of nearly every founder I’ve met who has done it, somewhere between risky and business-killing. Ceding control of your company to VC means trying to extract as much value as quickly as possible, not to build a sustainable and profitable business.

Even if you wanted to play this game, good luck to 50% of the population. Of the companies funded by VCs last year, less than 2% were not men. Imagine the stats for being not male AND not white. Why even bother with the game in the first place?

With the waves of tech layoffs, it seems like perhaps at least a few people will question the very nature of the industry or I don’t know, corporate-centred capitalism. I’m very curious to see if what comes of that might look different or if it’s just going to be more people trying to follow the playbook.

Back when I got into tech, I heard the disparagement of what was known as “lifestyle companies,” which if you weren’t trying to scale and become a monopoly, you were by default. It’s kind of like regular business fundamentals are simply ignorable when you’re a ‘disruptor.’ And the IV of VC keeps that story alive.

I started reading Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem recently. There are some interesting insights about network effects in the book, but I have to admit I get hot under the collar every time he explains how Uber did growth. You have to be willing to hustle, you have to do what works even if it doesn’t scale, so you can ruthlessly undercut the existing industry and find a way to incentivize people to exploit themselves on your behalf. THIS IS HOW YOU WIN!

But is it? What would happen if founders played a different game? Can we get out of winner-take-all if we just radically decide to do something different? Collaborate, for example?

Peter Thiel’s famous paean to monopoly thinking, “competition is for losers” will surely be an epitaph for this age of do-anything-to-win, whether it’s because we burn down the planet or because we learn we actually succeed more sustainably by cooperating- making competition for losers of a different sort.

I’m sure this would have sounded naive to my younger self, but it turns out that when you get on a path to having values and living in integrity, you don’t really give an eff whether people playing the game think you’re an all-star. You’d be surprised how many people actually win by building trust, connection, and products and businesses people care about instead.

I began this post a while back and it’s funny how possibly ‘radical’ or ‘realistic’ I have become since. In the interim time, big tech companies have laid off 200,000 people and SVB and other banks have failed. It’s becoming more apparent to me every day that even when a company isn’t in a VC-driven death spiral, tech is largely being built to reinforce systems of extraction that are a death spiral for the whole world, that tech is being built in a culture with all the hallmarks of white supremacy. It might not be crazy at all to reject the very basis of tech economics, in which foundations and pension funds must, through VC, waste so many resources by funding companies with a 9/10 failure rate, that the answer, even for most investors, is to find “something that can scale.” The game is not just rigged, it’s a battle royale.

Choosing is Freedom

Healing is an act of resistance.

Doing the work of being with one another in love, in acceptance, and in freedom is an act of resistance.

Knowing that every judgement, desire to help, or anything that implies anything that others are incapable of freedom is a chance to look at the ways we still may need love and healing is an act of resistance.

And then maybe I will drop even that framing, which may still be centring the systems of oppression.

The systems don’t need to be resisted so much as loved out of existence.

The more I welcome my own ‘negative emotions,’ the more I get to let go of the behaviours I am using to avoid feeling shame. The more I stop calling myself broken, the more I get to welcome my connection with other beings. The more I am accountable for myself, the more I feel like it’s coming into being without resistance.

Systems of oppression depend on my belief in them. They depend on collective belief.

My freedom comes from my choice to do what feels right and feels aligned when I really allow myself to be. My freedom does not depend on what other people allow me to do. My freedom comes from my interdependence with you. Knowing we are free, right now, and every story that tells us otherwise makes us hide, makes us meek.

These stories come with a threat of violence. Our freedom is so terrifying for some, their own freedom is so terrifying that they need to violate our bodies, to make us know our place, to try and wrest our freedom from us like horror movie monsters pulling out our hearts, still pumping blood through torn veins.

It is very difficult to drop the stories of oppression. Especially as a way to subtly signal our awareness of our status. Our well-meaning gets in the way when we start saying, “I have the privilege to be free but not everyone does.” As though freedom were being free of hardship, of illness, of injustice.

I have to believe in everyone’s inherent freedom to divest myself from oppression and oppressing. I have to realize that no matter what someone’s circumstance may be, they are fully capable to choose freedom.

What depletes the capacity to choose this isn’t struggle, it’s power-over. It’s lack of empathy.

Even saying this I feel myself wanting to put down my freedom. To think of reasons why dominance, my ‘helpful’ dominance, should have a place. I am full of all kinds of strategies still that get in the way of my freedom, of my being in full, unconditional being. I don’t think I will be free, ever, in that sense, I will always feel the tension, the ‘anxiety’ as Peter Block puts it, of choice.

Choosing my freedom means being accountable. Being responsible for taking care of myself, for including and welcoming myself, for being in right relationship with the people I interact with, and for seeing ways my actions, thoughts, behaviours reinforce systems of dominance.

It doesn’t include trying to change other people. It does include working on structures and systems that can support freedom. It includes co-creating containers where those held within are welcome in full.

It’s important to avoid getting into spiritual materialism. To not feel like my choice to see my freedom and believe in it makes me special, better, or more wise. It’s the balance of seeing how systems don’t serve freedom and how behaviours in those system perpetuate harm with the idea that at our human core, we all want to be free. And seeing that many people aren’t choosing that, and wanting to be with people who are.

And most of all, to realize my freedom means nothing without yours. Without ours.

Tools for Collaborative Decision-Making?

Most technology that is out there to help facilitate community either mimic social media (posting! commenting! liking!) or seem to be about ‘how to make decisions as a group.’ I’m definitely not a fan of the former category and I also wonder if we are bypassing something fundamental with decision-making tooling.

When we look at our individual decision-making, we can observe that “making a decision” really is a meta-layer on top of something else, usually avoiding an emotion. When we’re agonizing over a decision, it’s usually because there’s something we don’t want to feel. For example, we might not want to feel the grief of giving up on a possibility of some kind of pleasure, we might not want to feel the judgement of other people, we might not want to feel like we’re disappointing someone, we might not want to feel fear or uncertainty, or any number of other things. When we’re not avoiding these feelings, there aren’t so much decisions as choices, there’s not so much of a story about the ‘importance’ of one choice versus another. (h/t Joe Hudson).

It’s always interesting how rare it is in retrospect for something that feels like “a big decision” to actually have the kind of impact I was projecting on the choice, whereas some things that didn’t feel like ‘major decisions’ have turned out to have big impacts later.

When I can open myself to the feelings and trust that I’m able to feel them without losing myself, I no longer find myself worrying about the outcome of a choice.

What I’ve seen with groups is similar.

We start thinking decisions need to made and mitigated by fair systems and technology mostly because we’re operating outside of trust, partly as a function of size and partly as a function of skipping over trust-building. I’m coming to believe that the gold standard for larger group decision making is really about fractal nesting, building trust and structures where trust is delegated up. Working in groups where the trust is embodied, so that representatives are largely in relationship with one another, and there’s nesting of these bodies of trust.

Groups where trust has been built, which tend to start very small and max out around 30-50 people, are typically able to make decisions about their own group without much technology (simple hand-counts are usually sufficient). When there’s a network involved, then groups can designate someone trusted to participate in a trust-building and decision-making body of up to 30 other such trustees, and up the chain it can go. This works without a bunch of zero-knowledge or anonymous votes as long as we centre trust-building and connection.

Trust is integral. As soon as we try to create organizations or networks or movements without beginning small and involving shared witness, we’re not operating collectively. We’re just a bunch of individuals.

Don’t misunderstand- the fundamental idea here is that we ARE individuals. We do come with our own unique experiences, and as soon as we put boundaries on how much of you we want in the space, we’re eroding belonging, we’re eroding a sense of each person’s responsibility for their own experience.

Trust results from spaces in which we are invited to be seen and heard and we’re acknowledging our own tendencies to look for safety or our temptations to help, manage, or solve. And it results from people voluntarily seeking each other out in pairs or smaller groups beyond the held spaces of the group to be in community and fellowship. And it results from clearly recognising and defining a common purpose.

Trust-building isn’t easy, which may be why there are so many people looking for shortcuts. Many people are out of practice when it comes to trusting. I am seeing in myself that when I am out of trust with others, I’m sometimes out of trust with myself, and sometimes I’m just picking up on other people’s lack of self-trust.

We really are swimming in the “water, what’s that?” of the structures necessary to support extraction and suppress freedom, so it’s not surprising that the tools we think we need reflect the idea that decision-making for groups needs bureaucracy. We all know our follower counts and associate our impact with metrics. That way of thinking is true when we’re measuring and comparing and rating. Leaving this water will require evolution and time. It’s not a returning to the past, it’s not trying to live on the land as hunter-gatherers as before the flood. It’s instead being here, being in relationship, practicing, opening ourselves to amphibious mutations.

On the meta-crisis

I’m in a few spaces where there’s frequent reference to the meta-crisis, this kind of collection of existential threats we find ourselves in as humans (climate, geopolitical nuclear threats, pandemics, social disconnection, etc).

You might sum it up as “the results of structures of domination and extraction.” Much of the conversation around this is too jargon-filled and quasi-academic / post-modern academic for my tastes, but the general idea that we’ll fail by trying to solve things by doubling down on the strategies that have led us here resonates for me.

I’ve noticed the meta-crisis concept brings out the brains when my sense is that most of the actually successful things we can do to be in right relation are embodied, maybe not outright abandoning the mind (enlightenment being some kind of magical state that even the greats eventually say is not a thing– the Buddha is all like, whatever you’re calling enlightenment is of course a notion that undermines whatever experience of enlightenment you may have touched into). So we are not abandoning our thinking but as soon as things get VERY thinking-y then we’re going in a direction usually that is just a perpetuation. Stop thinking so very much and start feeling it. I wonder at this point if it’s easier to think about it or feel it, probably the former. Because it can be a social media thing, the escape by retweet, the ‘I’ve done something so now I am free to relapse into all the worst and self-destructive behaviours.’

To put this more bluntly, I sense an embodied truth that the work I do to be in integrity with myself matters much more than all the achievements I could rack up, but that perspective is terrifying in some way to the part of me that is like ‘omg you are worthless without having done anything important.’ There’s so much trust fall in being like ‘does-higher power/intuition/bigger-than-me-universe-force want me to do something important? If so it will lead me there, I do not have to create a status-seeking strategy.’

In other words, I have to become willing to not do an important thing, because let’s be honest, doing important things has been very integral to our getting to the place we’re in now. How can we extricate doing important things from the extraction and exploitation? The idea of doing important things leads us to believe other people are expendable, that the earth or resources are expendable. There’s a reason why most spiritual leaders are anti-materialist; it’s incongruous to orient around doing important things and acting from love and detachment at the same time, and of course religion is the complete opposite often, where everything goes from the spiritual freedom to materialism.

Being in myself is much harder than coming up with great ideas and talking about great ideas and debating about ideas, and I am so into the thinking and talking. I’m now noticing that thinking and talking and building and designing are possible escapes, that all those activities are simply more effective to address the ‘meta-crisis’ when they are emerging from embodied practice, from learning how to be with ourselves without the story of our worth being tied up in these activities.

This is essentially why, though there are so many big problems we may or may not be able to work our way out of, there’s just no point if we don’t do the work to be both in integrity in ourselves and in right relation with the people we’re interacting with. To do this, we have to shift our mindset away from thinking it’s somehow valuable to know all the things going on as surfaced by unimpartial algorithms, and towards being very present to what is going on in the spaces our bodies (or even our intermediated but still connected virtual bodies) inhabit. This is why we keep returning, to ourselves and to the fractal wisdom of almost all spiritual traditions, that love and responsibility are what can make a difference, we keep hearing it and feeling it, but it’s so seductive to slip back into diagnosing and solving.

Love is change, change is love

“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

—James A. Baldwin

I am noticing more love within me, emerging, changing everything. Not like some kind of soft hippie peace-and-love but the force of uprising, the love that says I must exist, the love that sees all as worthy of love, the love that unmasks us. If we can’t start with love then the whole exercise is useless.

Here we are in it, finding the others who can hold the love because they’ve been hollowed out by pain. Love that knows that as long as we are willing to overlook ongoing trauma and systems of dominance and violence, we aren’t loving ourselves, we are against love for ourselves or for anyone.

This is a love that doesn’t require perfection but doesn’t permit delusion. In this kind of love you lose everything, everything. It feels gut-wrenching and beautiful. This love is grief and possibility, unmeasurable. This love rips away all your defenses and shows you they were unnecessary, they were all made of lead, offering a sense of safety that slowly poisons your mind and body.

This is a love made of responsibility, of freedom, of belonging. Made for liberty. It’s not a love of humanity, it’s a love of being, of beings.

This is a love that sees no difference among us, and that celebrates our differences, that is not indifferent.

This love is the only weapon against tyranny and this love is not a weapon, not a defense, but a force that triumphs, or just creates a different reality altogether. It is larger than life and twice as natural.

It’s not in the slightest bit naive, it is the force that says ‘survive’ when we are hurt or broken. It might be supernatural and it might be just the air and rocks and trees, if you’re listening. It’s what exists before. What will take us to the after. It’s here, always. To feel it is to be swept by a river, a flow, bubbly and rushing through, left breathless.

This love is a chemical reaction, a consequence of collective practice, it is connected and emergent. This is a love with, and not just among. This love changes us, me, everything.

This love blasts out from our chests like a warrior goddess, takes us to a new place, returns us to ourselves.

Healing for the executioner

I’ve been audio-reading NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, and on top of some other books I’ve experienced in this way, like Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, there’s something deep in me that feels the violence described, the brutality that has been so frequently applied to bodies by other humans, especially to Black bodies, that quakes with the horror and the recognition that we are humanly capable of these acts. But how? I spend so much time participating in spaces of love and healing and to feel into that reality, that we humans do terrible violent things, can seem both incomprehensible and all too real.

Mostly it’s male humans who are brutalizing bodies. Of course, if you have been socialized into the idea that you shouldn’t show emotions and empathy is ‘weak’ and then you add in power-over, you will see terrible and algorithmically increasing terror as the power is deployed at scale.

Not just male people deploy this power, though typically male people are the ones enacting the body-level violence. Non-male people use their power-over in more subtle and sometimes sneaky ways. We have to acknowledge the scars that so many people live with as a result of others using power-over them. To name what has happened.

I also think about the healing that needs to happen for all the people who’ve found themselves in power-over as a result of this IWSHP form of extractive capitalism. What kind of grief needs to be felt collectively by those who’ve normalized power over?

We have many fables in WEIRD culture of people who were privileged and then became themselves servants that expose our underlying awareness of the unnatural state of this dynamic. Stories about masters and servants generally reflect the relative lack of virtue in dominance.

Yet it’s so tempting to be like, “I don’t have power over,” despite all the evidence to the contrary, like that people make TikToks based on forcing gig workers to dance for them or the many examples of white people call police on… and the like. As though if we don’t exploit the power-over, we don’t have it.

Power-over robs us of empathy. Can you picture being a servant? Wouldn’t you assume there to be a certain lack of empathy from your ‘master’ simply by virtue of the idea of servitude? You are now seen as simply a less human person by virtue of that role.

Is there any way around it? I don’t think so, because even a compassionate ‘master’ can never be fully trusted. Hierarchy is natural, but slavery and servitude are not; they are ultimately a byproduct of agriculture. We have been trained by wheat, as YNH says, and we have contorted ourselves in so many ways since then

In the U.S., landowning educated white men created a ‘blueprint for freedom for the people’ that excluded a majority of humans actually subject to the laws it enshrined. As a result, our kind of liberty has served as a model of inequity and even genocide.

If we want a world where there is freedom for any human, we can’t live in a world that condones, through laws or norms, command by violence. Someone will always be the slave when there are masters. Taking power-over leads us lose our empathy and start commanding people to do things that are only ‘good for ourselves’ – at the cost of our own humanity. Unpacking how we’ve taken that power and feeling the results within us is a process, but it’s the only path to trusting each other.

Process of Freedom

The individual process of freedom is losing everything.

The collective process of freedom is embracing everyone.

Freedom’s just another word

On Friday, I was lucky enough to be in the virtual room with Peter Block, who was celebrating the release of his new book, Confronting Our Freedom: Leading a Culture of Chosen Accountability and Belonging. I was struck, to use Peter’s word, by the palpable love in the room, and the presence of so many people who have known Peter for many years, have worked with him, and been impacted by his practice and ideas.

As has been the case when I’ve shared a room with Peter in the past, I found myself wanting to write down everything he said, even though I own his books, where these thoughts re-emerge again and again. And still, every time I encounter them, there’s a gong that goes off in my body.

Belonging and freedom and accountability are the same.

People mistake freedom and autonomy; freedom comes from connection.

Liberation is the absence of oppression, but it’s not freedom.

Freedom is the antidote to a leadership mindset. The task of leader is to get people to connect with each other.Leaders are not there to fill the expectations of ‘subordinates,’ they are there to partner.

Peter Block

Belonging = freedom = accountability.

YES!

What an amazing distillation of everything I’ve been thinking about lately. How can I live into my full power, be fully in love, be fully in responsibility, be fully free, be intimately interconnected with everything and everyone, be in connection, be able and willing to hold my boundaries with total compassion and humility? How can everything I build and do and contribute come from a place without fear? (Though Peter talked a lot about the anxiety of accountability – perhaps as I read the new book I’ll understand this more).

Belonging means letting go of so much, as does freedom, as does real responsibility. I belong when I belong to myself, which requires a container that is expansive and also an embrace. I can not belong if I’m only about myself, though. Such a paradox and that’s what real community is about, feeling into the mutual possibilities, taking on the ways I am part of the problem I want to see change, and coming with curiosity to hearing how you and others want a future to look. Coming with the kind of real wonder that is a result of love and letting go of the aspects of identity that depend on othering – othering myself and othering others.

I think this makes sense but I am still working towards this. I still find myself with a sense of frustration that there’s oppression around us, that there are so few BIPOC or disabled or non-binary or trans people or even women in some of the spaces I’m in, despite those spaces often being oriented around collective practices, community, and particularly creating spaces or technologies around bringing people together. I spend time in other spaces where there’s more melanin and queerness and look forward to finding ways to develop more and more overlap.

True community are spaces in which we feel that we are accepted in the wholeness of who we are. And that doesn’t mean that every part of who we are is expressed in every given moment, that’s not possible. But that the body, the collective of people that we are in relationship with, there is no request to leave a part of ourselves behind in order to be accepted in this group of people.

Rev. angel Kyodo williams

To have spaces like this, I think, requires us to not feel like the only, but is “the only” just a story we have of ourselves where we don’t belong to our selves? This stuff is complex, and in the end, I can only work on letting go, freeing the part of me that will love fully and not supposing the rest of me, the layers of protection, the shell, the veil, the disguise, is needed for its protection. That part is the strong part, the badass part, the part that can’t be abandoned because it’s where belonging is freedom and where freedom is owning my experience.