camp

All quotes are paraphrases.

bardo dance

She (wearing black) lies down on the floor, takes off her shoes, takes off her socks, stays still. What thoughts does she float through behind those closed eyes?

in line for kava

We talk about talking about emotions, both pull out pocket notebooks. He shows me the “how we feel” app. I choose “comfortable.”

journey to the center of the self

the protector,
controller
(pay: terrible, hours: eternal),

fixer,

skeptic
↳discernment,

fear
↳awareness,

victim
↳advocate
↳storyteller,

damaged self
(What is the role of the damaged self? To take damage),

vulnerable child
(curiosity, hope, the run of emotions, making friends, open, expressing, play, wonder)
(What would all your parts do if they were in service of the vulnerable child?).

book on polyamory

“When you constrain the relationships people can have, you limit information exchange. Polyamory solves information bottlenecks.

“The species closest to humans are chimps and bonobos. Chimps have to compete with gorillas; they are patriarchal and violent. Bonobos don’t have to compete with gorillas; they are matriarchal and polyamorous. They use sex to build relationships.

“Polyamory is on the rise now that we are moving towards a more bonobo-like environment.”

I often get this inferiority complex talking to polyamorous people. The question I want to ask but never ask is, how does one get to polyamory? It seems like an distant shore, unreachable. I’m stuck here, unenlightened.

And/or I want a reassurance: your dedication, your single-track mind is a-OK 👌 You’re not being left behind in the next stage of human evolution.

I don’t find the answer in the book, but the fault is with me the reader, too shy to ask.

summer solstice

“Last year I came knowing the gender ratio would be 5:1. I wasn’t here to find love. I was married. I fell in love with someone from the other side of the world, we got each other. We had passionate intimacy. We knew it would never work. I’m poly, but she wants to find a husband and start a family as quickly as possible, I’m married. She stayed over for a week, I visited her city and stayed over for a night. Knowing the breakup was inevitable didn’t make it any less painful. I have no regrets.”

“The teacher of a pottery class divided the class into two groups. One group’s goal was to make as many pots as possible. The other group’s goal was to make the best pot possible. At the end, the best pots came from the first group. The second group theorized endlessly about how to make the best pot, and the first group learned to make good pots from experience.”

evening

How to tell when I’m socially burned out: when I stop taking initiative. When I only wallflower (a.k.a. lemur). I can keep going to events, but it’s not worth the deadened interaction.

I read in the room above the tea house.

interlude: collaborative haikus

Fear of freedom / I don’t know where to fly / Still orbiting Earth

Your teeth have big gaps / I hope someone lets you know / Your smile is perfect.

Trees rustle softly / Sunlight gleams through summer leaves / Birds shit on my head.

Noninterfering / We circle separately / Same space, different times

Blades of grass shine green / Noble verdant vorpal blade / My mower is slain 😦

I hate Baltimore / I hate Philadephia / Moving to SF

I pooped my pants / Not such a bad start today / I will breastfeed next

Oars fall into lake / Panic arrives so quickly / Breeze takes me ashore

storywork

“Every three months, I gather my friends for a ritual. A collective ritual equips you to deal with the unknown without fear. For the summer solstice, after we shared our stories, we put our colored ice cubes in a bowl in the center, so all the colors mix together. This sounds better in the imagination, because actually it turns black. We added some vodka and drank it down, our feelings mixed together.

“Equinox is a time of flux, solstice is a time of stability. Each season has the seeds of its opposite, summer joy and winter grief.

“Why stories? Plans give you false confidence. A story is not true or false. It compresses information and leaves open uncertainty. It directs our attention to the points of tension, and we can ask: what does the struggle represent?”

My question: How do I grow a relationship? How do I garden the soil from which relationships grow?

I narrativize my own dating experiences.

Responses: Get to know someone in a multisensory way.

Crushes are stories supervening over reality.

It feels chaotic being the captain of a ship, but from outside, people can see consistency over time. Extend the time over which you are intentional about relating to someone.

How you do anything is how you do everything. How you talk about the relationship in a relationship tells you about the relationship. Perhaps those who don’t react well to honesty are those who would have filtered themselves out of my life.

what we talk about when we talk about body counts

hot seat: “Body count?” “Pass.”

(I’ve never heard the term “body count” like this, but the context soon made it clear.)

“Last year they got people to line up in the order of what they thought their body count was, without communicating.”

overheard, later: “Why do we have the concept of a body count?” “To measure the amount of resources that people can leverage into sex.”

my thoughts 1: No, it’s because of a toxic culture of sexual performativity/competition/comparison/one-upmanship 🐛. Answering the question is a trap because that means you’ve bought into the premise of the question that it is useful information. The premise itself should be questioned. Also you forgot an important point, not just the amount someone can, is able to leverage but actually does, was willing to leverage. Well, but aren’t these the sorts of hazing questions that make us braver and able to talk about taboos, confront us with facts that we would otherwise never know, more information = better? Yes, but: without a container, is it just a black pill? Maybe this is the container and my chance to be part of the conversation, but I don’t know because I stopped eavesdropping.

my thoughts 2: Is the reason I’m aloof and befuddled and not bought into this game just that I’m actually demisexual, like in “The Map of the Homes of the Stars” where the boys keep driving around the houses of the girls because they’re secretly gay??

my thoughts 3: You’re just being an aesthete. (You’re just good at convincing yourself you don’t want things you can’t get.) You’ve only become less sexual to close the cognitive dissonance between your desires and reality, to conveniently put yourself on higher moral ground. If you had the ability… But. Self-fulfilling self-deception is not a bad strategy.

shooting is like meditation

“If you look directly at the target, then you’ll miss. The moment of surrender is necessary to consistently hit the target.”

om nom nominous

In the interactive theater performance, the dinner guests sit in groups of seven: Sol, Luna, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. What a brilliant way to try on a different personality, to have to rise up to your archetype. That, I think, is the most “PSYCHOACTIVE” part of the experience for the dinner guests.

coda

I made the decision to trust people. Conversations are deep, even when brief, hit on something the other person has also thought deeply about, and sometimes we feel I get to the point so fast that, after the exchange, I don’t know how to follow up.

Will this be a blip in my social matrix, an island unmoored from the rest of my life? Or will it be a community that I carry forth with me?

“What’s your takeaway?” People ask. I say something complicated, which the other person boils down to “just do stuff.”

On the road home I hear an interview with Corey Keyes on the radio, about flourishing. It’s not just about having relationships or being in community but “mattering”, contributing, being needed. I’ve become more social, taking advantage of events other people organize, but I want to be more of an architect in bringing people together.