Weave - Welcoming & Weaving In

Welcome to the Weekly Weave!

Woven Web is a community rooted in Boulder Colorado and reaching beyond, with a deeply held vision for a more connected world. We seek to find greater harmony between technology, society, and nature through understanding self and all of it's creative and destructive potential.

In this Weave

• Coming Up in Community

• Welcoming & Weaving In

Coming Up in Community

Spring time is fully upon us in Boulder, and the opportunities to get out and connect are as abundant as the flowers popping up in gardens all around town.

This memorial day weekend there are two great gatherings in Boulder!
The Boulder Creek Festival will be May 24-27th around Central Park area.
Buddhist Arts & Film Festival will be May 24th-26th at The Dairy.

And make sure to check out boulder.earth and CoolBoulder for some great opportunities to get outside, sew some seeds, support your ecosystem, and connect with community!

Welcoming & Weaving In

Last week, we spoke about building for belonging. This places an emphasis on the systems level, building better social systems and technology. The systems level is crucial for affecting culture in the way we’re seeking, but perhaps even more important is the level of the individual and relationships. What are we doing to welcome and weave in more people so that they feel a sense of belonging in our communities and in our world?

Personally, I often think of Boulder as an incredibly welcoming and well-woven place, where people can come and find community that resonates with them, because that’s been my experience. But that’s certainly not everyones experience. Honestly, a lot of people come to Boulder, stay for a while and then leave, never finding a real sense of belonging here. This seems to be most commonly experienced by members of groups that are not well represented in Boulder, especially groups defined by racial, political and socioeconomic boundaries; it’s harder to feel welcomed into a place when we don’t see others like us in that place.

If we are going to cultivate a welcoming and inclusive community, whether in Boulder or elsewhere, it will take an active effort from us. It’s worth examining our own biases first, looking at the boundaries we create as we define our own sense of “in”. Through understanding our own bias, we are more prepared to truly understand another as a whole being and therefore more prepared to genuinely welcome them in. If I’m caught up excluding the parts of you that I don’t like, then I’m not doing a great job of helping you feel you belong.

Welcoming is one step to belonging but another step we don’t often talk about is the weaving in. When I think of weaving in, I think of some friends who do a great job at this. Once they meet someone and they want to bring them into community, they start adding them to group chats and keeping them in mind to invite them to different events that are happening where they can meet more people. I think we could all apply a more direct and personal touch as we look to weave new friends deeper into community. At a time where our world is in such deep crisis, it seems vital that we deepen our bonds with each other and the world around us, and work to support each other to bringing about a positive change for this planet.

As you enter the weekend and consider what you might be getting up to, I invite you to contemplate who you might like to weave in. And I invite you to not just think about who you personally would enjoy seeing, but also who you know that might gain some benefit from a bit of a closer touch and a bit more community connection. And see if you might use language in such a way that you can genuinely help them to feel welcomed.

Thanks for reading my friend. I’m glad to be in community with you and I hope to weave deeper with you soon.

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