in our newly remote world, what if we went smaller and more intimate?

a couple weeks ago i was talking with rachel plattus and we had (as per usual) a conversation that was both grounding and visionary.

one thing we discussed was the patterns of response that came from the pandemic. in many ways, people were somewhat responding from places shaped by their trauma. (and to be clear, i am no exception to that rule, though i am working on it). one of these conditioned responses, shaped by the shift of many things to virtual, was: “let me do what i normally do but with way more people.” seems like a fairly reasonable reaction.

the potential trouble is that what this moment needs isn’t necessarily what we were doing before.

something else we have both noticed, partly due to the relative ease of large scale offerings, is relatively little intimacy and vulnerability in these offerings. of course, there are exceptions, but in general, what we both are seeing is mostly theory or action-oriented offerings (check out these four folks share their thinking about the moment, come help us do/organize a thing together). and if it’s not one of those two, the other most popular tendency is towards entertainment. sometimes it’s entertainment as connection and most often it’s entertainment as self-soothing/numbing (no judgement on self-soothing/numbing. we’re in a moment with massive global traumatic potential. self-soothing can be a survival tactic, no doubt).

what we were curious about though is what might happen if more of what we were doing was creating spaces to be intimate together? what would happen if, alongside the five-hour dj sets, we had things like wailing circles and grief practices like the ones joanna macy offers up?

words / writing / post-processing
290w / 15min / 5min