conversations and companies and community

Goodness. It's been ages.

I always feel so self-conscious updating here after a long period of silence; I feel oddly obliged to provide an excuse or overview of what I've been doing since the 11th (from a beautiful Earth Day weekend—from which I'm still quite sunburnt—to a visit from my mama and little brother to all manner of planning and dreaming for a series of Gaia-related events this spring and summer). Instead, though, I'm just going to carry on as though I've been writing regularly. After all, I haven't exactly gone anywhere. :)


I spent most Wednesday afternoon on the phone with Gay Hendricks. I don't recall if I've mentioned his name before; I met him when our whole Zaadz crew came out to Boulder for the first time last Fall. What an amazing human being. (I'll confess I get little awed sometimes by the people connected to this space; the mere fact that we're getting to host Peter Russell at a Gaia event in Boulder this summer is enough to make me wonder what sort of saint I was in my former life to deserve such a blessing, and even then neither Gay or Peter hold a candle to the sheer wonder of the hundreds upon hundreds of others I meet here, in this space. I mean, I had dinner the other night with Dawn and her son at Sunflower. I met Brian through these pages. It's funny to discover family in people with no actual blood connection.)

But I digress.

We talked for a long time about Gaia, and about the inspiration that started this whole site, and about our future, and the potential of where we might go and who we might touch and what we might offer... and, most of all, what we'll need to sustain ourselves.

I don't know how much it always shows on the site, but part of what concerns me most at a day-to-day level involves ensuring that we (that is, Gaia Community) pull our financial weight when it comes to the company as a whole. After all, this site started as an independent business, not a non-profit, and ensuring that we're at least sustainable is personally important to me. Right now our ads and newsletters cover only a minute amount of the costs involved in supporting this site, and I'm adamant that we do our part to show our appreciation for our adopted parent company. Hosting and maintaining an online community is by no means an inexpensive (in terms of time and money both) endeavor, and this, I think, has been one of the greatest ongoing challenges since we began.

In any case, I always get such a quiver of joy from speaking with people who are both intellectually and heart-fully gifted; Gay's brilliant but his sweetness and genuine care for others tends to outshine his mind. (His blog, if you're interested, his over here, and if you'd like to read a few chapters of his last book, Five Wishes, just click here.) His support and input and enthusiasm around what we might do to create a means to better support Gaia Community was wonderful, and I'm anxiously excited about the opportunity to work quite a bit with Gay over the course of the summer. His ideas around what we might do to develop a creative and viable business model (and one that supports and respects the free community and sheer planetary significant of the wonderful energy generated here) were inspiring and exciting and strong.

(We're just now in the process of planning a free telegathering for the whole community, so you'll all, if you wish, get to meet--at least in-voice... but more on all this later. )


Yesterday afternoon I had a wonderful conversation (as a preface to an interview this Saturday) with Jeff Carreira, from What Is Enlightenment? He's working on the weekly "Universe Project" and will be interviewing me this weekend about Gaia Community.

It was great connection—almost surprisingly so.

I'll be the first to admit that I'm not much of either a Wilber-or-Cohen-ite. I have my own quibbles with the conception of consciousness as something with an evolutionary direction, and can't shrug my own intuitive sense of the ongoing process and cycle of living and dying. To put it another way, I'm all about encouraging and supporting healthy development, but I have a hard time taking seriously any developmental theory that doesn't include the other side—that is, the process of senescence and aging and death.

I don't know whether it's an unshakeable existentialism or a too-vivid knowledge about the gritty and unpredictable ferment of the world—the chaotic, unquantifiable messiness of death, the inevitable rupture of birth, the explosive unpredictability of life in all its forms—but my own inner process tends more toward embracing and accepting those mysteries than trying to understand or direct them. I want to engage, of course, and participate in this crazy game, but unlike so many spiritual paths, I'm a bit agnostic as to the direction.

So we talked about that.

We also talked about communities and individuals and the interrelationship or interdependency of the emotional (or psychological or spiritual) energies of both.

It was a treat speaking with someone who had such a deep lived experience of the awareness of that interconnection; I think it can be all to easy to confuse our feeling state with the feeling state of the community or group (or country) we belong to, and to either allow ourselves to get affected by that energy, or, conversely, to mindlessly contribute to a destructive collective emotion by broadcasting our own anger or rage or disenchantment to those around us. By being aware of the way in which the emotional state we're in affects, strongly, the state of those around us (and how we might be affected in turn), we're able to consciously participate in the holding or creation of a more positive collective felt-sense.

I'm sure all of us have experienced this in some small way, in how one person in a group of three or for can drag down what was an exuberant conversation, or how the presence of one grounded and calm person can help stabilize and calm those around her. I've found, though, that those who are skilled at sensing and understanding this process can have profound effects on very large numbers of people—serving to create a space of peace even when others are upset, or to shift the emotional quality of a group. To my mind, merely being aware of this relationship goes a long way in developing that ability.

And so we talked about this with respect to Gaia, and how this community harbors so many who are wonderfully conscious around the way in which their own feelings and attitudes affects the collective, and what a strong role they might play in maintaining a place of peace and inspiration and support. And we talked about the implications of this for the world at large...

Anyway. It was a good chat, and I'm looking forward to Saturday's longer call.


Well. Maybe this explains why I don't update too regularly. I do tend to run on, and on, and on... Perhaps I should stick to status updates instead. ;)