Weave - Intimate Community

Regenerative networking potluck at the MycoCosm - Tuesday (2/27) 530pm

Welcome to the Weave. We are Woven Web, a community in active exploration around the intersectionality of technology, society, nature, and self; seeking to bring people together to engage in meaningful dialogue and foster genuine coherence in our community in Boulder and beyond.

In this Weave:

• Last Week - Improv Night

• This Week - Regen Potluck

• Intimate community - the real woven web

Last Week - Improv Night

Last Thursday we had our second improv night, at Myco Cafe. We had an awesome group, around 13 people, and had a great experience building coherence through play. We brought in some of the same improv games from last week, and we also had a new participant bring a story game that put us all in the experience of weaving a spontaneous story together. It was a lot of fun, and strongly affirmed the idea that improvisational play can catalyze group togetherness and flow. We hope you'll join us next month! Are there games or exercises that help you get into flow with others? Reply to this email and let us know your thoughts! (Forgive us for the lack of a photo, we were very invested in the games).

This Week - Regen Potluck

This Tuesday (tomorrow, or maybe today by the time you read this), we'll be hosting a regenerative networking potluck at the Mycocosm. Make sure to RSVP if you plan to attend. We love having this space for us to gather, share food, and connect around a shared interest in nature and regenerative solutions. If you're curious to get more involved in the regeneration space in Boulder, or if you already are involved and would like to weave more community into what you're up to, then please join us on Tuesday.

Intimate community - the real woven web

Something that's of deep interest to me is how we can cultivate more intimacy in our community. I'm not necessarily talking about sexual and romantic intimacy, but rather the intimacy of deeply knowing each other, loving each other, supporting each other. How can we cultivate communities that are deeply connected, bound together in our shared love for one another and for this woven world that we are a part of?

This last weekend, I attended two sweet gatherings, birthday parties for dear friends of mine, and I walked away from each one feeling deeply nourished and connected. I was reflecting on what are the magic ingredients that make gatherings like this so special. Two things I came to were the intention and the invite. For birthday parties, the invite usually goes to people the birthday person considers friends, people they value, and these people then gather together with the intention of sharing their love for the birthday person.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to what we’re doing with Woven Web. I think there’s a lot that we’re able to accomplish with our regular public events, as it creates a space for folks to come into community and to engage in dialogue that helps us move forward our culture here. But by virtue of sharing all these events in a public and open way, we actually miss out on some of the beauty of the “invite”. I think addressing this requires being a bit more dynamic in our approach to events. This probably involves continuing to have some events that are open to the public but it also probably involves curating events with a more specified invite. Finally, I think it requires expanding our view of what “woven web is”.

I don’t think of woven web events as just the events that we discuss on this newsletter, or even just the events that our team are putting together. To me, "woven web” is speaking to an intimately interconnected community of communities that’s not easily defined by any label or structure. My goal with this organization of “woven web” is to point towards what is the real woven web, here in Boulder and beyond; and to help us find ways to participate more effectively in the weaving of that web.

In the coming months, we’ve got a few things we’re excited to bring forward. One is that we’re working on building partnerships with other community focused organizations in Boulder, to explore co-creating events that support weaving in specific communities, such as psychedelics, business, climate, and more. Doing so helps us to focus the intention and the invite so we can more directly create the impact we’re looking for. We’re also taking a look at how we can more directly support the kind of intimate convergences that can’t easily be held by an organization, but that have to emerge through our own relationships in community. This will probably involve creating spaces for conversation to dive deeper into the art of gathering and community building and helping to weave together community leaders in networks of mutual support, and it will also probably involve some interesting technological solutions, which I’ll share about another time.

Thanks for tuning in. Reply to this email and let us know what you’re thinking and how you’d like to engage with community. And forward this email to someone who you’d like to participate more in community with!

See you in the web,

~ aaron gabriel & woven web