The Mossless Life
Tomorrow’s events:
Social Design Club w/ Freyja and Joe Edelman. July 1st @ 1:30 PM ET. RSVP here. Join the club here.
Breaking the Frame w/ Travis Mann. Every Wednesday @ 7:30 PM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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June 30, 2020
I posted some inspired session ideas for The Stoa on Twitter and somebody replied:
There is no moss growing on Mr. Limberg.
Yes. No moss Limberg is here, and he is ready to create, and there is so much optionality for creation. I had a philosophical inquiry with Andrew yesterday morning. Andrew affectionately refers to me as his thumos bear, and during our conversation I was bear-like, and expelled my messy thoughts with a Dionysian groundlessness, which was greeted by an Apollonian groundedness.
We philosophized for two hours, about my life, and about what is next for The Stoa, and we came to a simple conclusion: this steward will not think he owns The Stoa or put any expectations on it. Equally as important, I will not let others own it, or think they own it, nor will I be unduly influenced by their expectations.
Surely this is easier said than done, but hearing this conclusion emerge ameliorated the uninspired confusion I have been having the last few weeks. This conclusion was already embedded in my intuition when I started this project, but it slipped away at some point. It is good to become conscious of it, and concretize it, through philosophical inquiry.
This also helped segment this project from other aspects of my life, so my expectations, and more critically, my fears, do not become corruptive. Poetically speaking, my role as the steward is to keep the daemonic fire burning. I do not want the fire to be extinguished, nor do I want it to be spread unwisely. If it spreads too quickly, and becomes a daemonic wildfire, it may do more harm than good and will be put out eventually. Emancipating the daemon needs more than a thumos bear endeavoring for a mossless life, it needs some calm-headed prudence.
I have the next two months of this summer, and possibly more afterward, to create what wants to be created. I have a desire to sketch out what wants to be created here, but I am hesitant to do that. I want to avoid unexamined pressures that might quietly emerge from sketching it out in public.
I’ll describe how it feels though: it is like something wants to burst forth, and I want to go go go, and I am impatient, with a countervailing second-order desire to be patient. There is tension here, and it does feel sexual, or maybe it feels that way because sexual metaphors are coming to mind, which is influencing the feeling.
A good lover does not orgasm too soon, and has the skill to hold the tension, and has an intuitive sensitivity of all the pleasures at play. I do not know if I will be a good lover here, but I do know I have the confidence to risk being a bad one, and good lovers are not afraid to take risks.
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