People, Practices & Place

As Liminal (and Permalab) are already on lunar time, I'm glad to see the theme being built on. I've noticed some really freaky synchronicities since tuning into lunar time and I'm not particularly superstitious... 2.5 days before full moon seems to be the time to pay most attention as something weird or whacky usually crops up then. This month keep an eye out on Feb 21st and see if you notice :)

Re the article, I like the inner/outer cross over between phases. If you'd like to work on these patterns further I'd love to riff and cocreate!

The thing I loved most about your lunar time was thinking of the moon as "the great progress bar in the sky" 😂

Have y'all tried naming distinct categories of People (e.g. Friend/Partner) at Liminal yet? Or is there another way to account for the different depth of commitment that different people bring? Or is it governed implicitly?

Yeah, the moons one of our largest commons! It seems we all tend to enjoy lunar memes as well as most people I've described the network to comment positively.

So far yeah, our categories all pretty implicit - when something needs clarification and words need inventing thats cool, we've just not got to a stage of needing to classify things in those dimensions yet.

Re commitment, I believe Ostrom uses the term "the law of equity jurisprudence" to describe the process of reciprocal exchange which is a kinda fuzzy description like "mutual-credit" which I appreciate. For me the danger of labels is the denied potential, and theres always more outside the category or box we put things in! Do you know the game evoloution of trust? The mistakes section is very interesting!

The rough lesson I learned there is that trust is "non-ergodic" or time-varient, which is hard for our monkey minds to grasp... hence how our mistakes tend to land on people, and since few of us are good "at holding the tension", relationships breakdown.

To boil all that down I see two traits to strive towards; one being mindful, two being forgiving. I know I've messed up in the past, and will probably do so again in the future despite attempts to avoid doing so!

I have a question regarding the first ever Gathering: What might be some options for when one Friend is totally unable to join the Gathering in which the first Crews are formed? He is totally supportive of joining the Congregation and he intends to commit to supporting his Crew. However he is unable to join the first ever 2-night residential Gathering for the new mutual aid community. How can we include him in the group's sense of togetherness?

My sense is that this is not an insurmountable challenge.

In my view, the context you co-create in your face-to-face time is essentially impossible to accurately capture for someone who is not present. Accuracy is probably not very important though. You can still attend to the needs of people who are not present, e.g. allocate some time at the end for everyone to reflect for a minute on "what does [our missing Friend] need to know about the experience we just shared?" Answers could be written or an audio/video recording would be nice too.

At minimum, I would recommend that at least a couple of people have separate 1-on-1 conversations with the missing Friend after the gathering, to share something of the experience. When I miss a gathering I find some very simple storytelling can make a big difference in reducing my sense of having missed out. E.g. "we talked about X and it made me think about Y and what's different for me now is Z..."

In case you haven't seen, this feels relevant: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jwqgxiqddUIBzbcXY-CYNNwGNsEwgvyMEwQbu_uvdl0/edit

Feels like you're trying to map out more explicitly this process, which I love