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While playing the 3 minute game last year, the presence of a dilemma associated with this blog came to my awareness.

It's this.

On one hand what i love about writing is that it helps me integrate my day to day learnings. The project, and the facilitation program, offer such a rich set of experiences, and these experiences seem to stimulate my learning more than any other thing lately. One of the ways i decompress is to write. Through a process of successive revisions, and sleep cycles, i get to iteratively approach my truth, as it is available to me, and such as it exists on a particular given day. From a wise mind perspective, I see this as neither THE absolute truth, nor even my absolute truth, just what i can see just now, as clearly as my present biological limits allow.

On the other hand, i notice a fear that my experiences inevitably involve other people, and part of their experience is implicated in my writing. My fear is that, to the extent that my writing is imperfect or unskillful, to the extent that my language is unowned... this part of me very much wants NOT to write.

Yeah, saying that out loud, it somehow sounds familiar to my world. In fact it has probably been my defining life strategy. To solve the problem by avoiding initiative, avoiding engaging. Avoiding relating.

Now, what feels juicy here is to take something of a pendulum approach to this story. So here is a little more of my why, and my fear of writing, as i swing back and forth between both sides of the dilemma.

I don't normally like to talk about the past much, so the following seems like an experiment. Lets see...

All of us in this movement carry the DNA of AR with us. Somewhere along the way we each inadvertently become one of a small dispersed group of torch bearers who together carry a body of knowledge handed down by our predecessors.

In my case, that's the legacy of the Boulder school. I first trained at ART international, for 6 hours a week over an 18 month period. It was something of an immersion. ART was founded by Digges and Kestano, both of who came out of the Integral Center at Boulder in the 2010s. Cunov, Bayer, McNaughton, Porcelli, were their teachers and as such these and others in turn became my heroes.

Ness and Allen were two others that took the Boulder school forward into Authentic Revolution and The Relateful Company respectively. It was the latter that i was to turn to after moving on from ART. It was there that i became truly inspired, it was there that i finally realised the potential of this work to change me, to change us, to change the world. It was there that i saw the power of grounded facilitation to inform my experience as a practitioner. It was there that i saw in people like Jordan how this work can transform through practice, of a practice that is anchored by the rigors of an intentionally crafted framework.

If that framework is a context, then now, that context is a huge part of my context.

So, as the pendulum swings back, I'm noticing this fear, in real time, that people will hear this as: "Here we go again, making yet another claim to the truth. It is not my truth!"

I notice part of me want's others to get my context, then i notice that sounds self absorbed. Then i notice, well my context feels important to me, then i notice a desire to hold everybody's context as important.... And so on, on and on, spiraling into some dark unfathomable place.

And I also believe that that context, while its my own personal context, is, no matter how imperfectly expressed, embedded in the projects documented context. That makes some of this OUR context. But i find myself doubting where the line is between my context, and our context is.

When the pendulum swings back to why i write, there's one more piece. And that's the value of documenting our journey. As someone who loves open source, from the industry where it was actually born, and i where i know it best. From the world of open source software.

The entire software stack of the project's website is open source. The linux operating system is open source, the webserver, mailserver, database server they are all each open source projects. The TCP web application itself is 20,000 lines of open source code that will soon be on available on github, where anyone can make use of it.

What i love about open source is not the philosophy, but the practice of documenting our stuff and in very practical terms making it available to others, so that they can stand on its shoulders. When a person publishes a piece of open source software, i see this not as a claim to the truth, its just the offering of a possible iterative step along the path, to some future, potential truth. As in the desire of the system to grow and transform. Others will take that code, and say well, i don't agree with this bit, lets leave that, but the rest of feels worth keeping and building on.

Its that spirit, with which i feel moved to publish my writing. I hate the idea of being that person that espouses open source, but never gets around to publishing it, who never shares that part of the collective juice that i carry.

This reminds me of that flower child era novel the Celestine Prophecy. There's a group of people standing in a circle. Most have spoken their mind. Now they are all looking at this one person. This person is like, what, why are you all looking at me? They respond as one voice, because we all here carry the wisdom. We sense that you hold the remaining piece of the puzzle, and we want to hear it.

Said another way, I see this whole intellectual property idea, even if its expressed by a neglect of publishing, as so last century, its just not who i am. I cant do it.

So to wrap up i want to return to the other side. How i want to temper my writing to be as sensitive as i can to the other people that are necessarily involved in it (i sometimes think of us all as guinea pigs in our own social laboratory experiment). To this end, i like the idea of sending drafts to anyone who i think might be affected, so as to invite input or consent.

I also notice wanting to delay publication of material that relates to topics that are live, current hot topics. I like this because it allows us all to find our own way, in our own way. To do otherwise doesn't honor reciprocity, (if i am one person of 10, and speak for more than 10% etc).

I also long to incrementally improve my use of unowned language. To reduce the number of truth claims i make. That's one of the bad habits i inherited from my ancestors, and one that i am working hard to change lately. So, you have my explicit consent to point out instances of truth claims in my writing, and i give an undertaking, to say: thank you, i will reword it to sound more like a reveal of my experience. What i love. What i believe. What i desire.

The same also goes for conversation. You hereby have my standing consent to say to me: "Is that a truth claim?", or "Is that owned?" . You have my commitment to try to repair those asap.