Building this site

Why: this?

A confluence of factors have driven me to set up this site:

• wanting to clarify my thinking by writing; framing my thoughts in prose and paragraph,
• wanting to have a place to publish these writings,
• the desire to move more of my online life off social media and on to my own ‘platform’, and
• using all that as an opportunity to dabble in a few technologies

Why: which topics?

I consider having a board range of interesting and pursuits to be a strong foundation for living a ‘good life’. I will be covering a range of topics, touching on the mind, embodied living and the soul. Each of the different topics and their importance may warrant a deeper look at another time but I want to touch on them briefly here.

Dance is the easiest

In large part because its expression is non-verbal. When I post up some of my movement practice, I might make a comment about the context or the music. But so much of movement and dance for me is the escape from words and that way of thinking.

Engineering and systems thinking

Documenting what I am learning and thinking about from a systems-design or engineering perspective. The journey into this technical domain began with my career as a geospatial analyst; a cartographer of sorts. I still get to wrestle with the challenges of the geospatial domain in my current role.

Rites of Passage

I am fortunate to be able to volunteer my time to lead a youth group. The organization that backs the youth group, The Stepping Stones Project is focused on rites of passage and developing our relationships to community and nature. Their model begins with this premise; many industrialized societies have forgotten or lost the ceremony and structure around teenage rites of passage. There are deep and rich traditions of marking the transitions of our life in some areas (such as funerals and weddings). However, the marking of a transition from childhood to adolescence is sorely missing in the lives of many youth coming of age today. Stepping Stones seeks to change that. This leads to my next topic.

Masculinity for 21st century

In my eyes, masculinity (male gender roles) needs to be updated. And certainly not in the revisionist, retrograde fashion that some folk suggest. As intersectional feminism continues its push for multi-generational change in the roles and possibilities for women and equality for all, some men have been triggered by the uncertainty of change and the resetting of power dynamics. Operating under a scarcity mindset, from a place of fear and of understanding the world in zero-sum game terms (more for someone else, automatically means less for me), these men (and some women) yearn to return to ‘simpler’ times when gender roles were more or less fixed. I seek to articulate and build new masculinities (plural!), that adapt and integrate intersectional liberation of all people.

How humans get things done

This is probably my broadest topics, used as a catch all for my general fascination with how people come together, and how they get things done together. Covering both the communal, being together aspect and the productive, coordinating, collaborating aspects of groups of humans.

I’ll start from here. Perhaps time will reveal some other themes that I continue to return to