2023-02-16

Still at Liminal Village with Lunation 38 drawing to a close.

Looking back earlier to 2023-02-01 I have spectacularly failed to write a lot. So let's consider the many many threads competing for what feels like very limited time to write.

If I imagine I'm writing for a friend (and why not, maybe you are a friend?) maybe I would start by letting you know about some of those threads.

• Being the “good parent”. This is one of the parts of me that came into focus during my stay at the Life Itself Bergerac hub in November. I still feel the pull, when situations arise. My development goal is not to grasp at some kind of need to be the helper figure, but to wait until either the need is clearly apparent, or I am asked. Even then, to respond to the request with wisdom: not all requests should be agreed to.
• Asking for help with just those things where I genuinely need help. There seems to be in me (as in others?) a part that is afraid of coming across as needy. Maybe this is protecting an old part of young age where a genuine need was not met? The imperative would be, I must manage this by myself! This is good, perhaps, for developing DIY skills One of the things I genuinely need help with is self-motivation and the related self-confidence. If self-confidence is lacking, it makes sense that self-motivation will suffer. Or, following IFS, maybe I should write that as “Self-confidence”.
• Following the trailheads brought up in conversation here, particularly with Roberto.
  • Permaculture as applied to human community — this extends easily and naturally to the living system at Liminal Village itself. Can we establish some axioms as a fertile container?
  • The vision of a distributed research consultancy for the regen / commons / permaculture and related communities
• Leads from other concurrent conversational threads:
  • What is conscious technology? For that matter what would a conscious economy look like? There is space for deeper dialogue around this human psychological dimension to technology.
  • What's the knowledge base, and the practices around that, which would support this economy?
  • What do we mean by ontology, actually? Beyond the world of OWL and the computer science approach to ontology, is there a coherently expressible concept of ontological commoning, as in the CTA proposal we put in (on Hylo?)
• Then my own longer-term enquiry about what learning and education might look like if we could have a linked knowledge base (wiki-like, perhaps, or more) that provided the stepping stones for self-directed learning?
• And the question, still hanging in the air around me, how do we envision a wider ecosystem encompassing this approach to education along with the research institute?

It's all too much to hold consciously in mind at one time. Which has led to my feeling a little confusion or overwhelm: my dominant coping strategy of trying to rationally understand everything is cracking under the strain, and yet the whole is not dispiriting, it feels more uplifting. Where do I want to go first, from this long list? I would love to be able to write about everything all at once. Is this a little like being a three-dimensional creature wishing I could see multidimensionally? I will have to make do with starting on a multi-perspectival approach, hopefully becoming aperspectival or trans-perspectival; I will have to choose between alternatives all of which seem inadequate.

Such is life.

On 2023-02-22 I wrote up an outline of the ontological commoning ideas.