Hello, again

Cresting the cusp of Cancer season into Leo season and it’s time to shapeshift again.

By way of (re)introduction, here’s how I applied for a virtual pass to an AI event at MCM curated by Andus Labs I caught wind of via Douglas Rushkoff:

I'm a recovering human-centric content strategist (laid off from a 7-yr agency role last October) with a degree in Philosophy, now deeply influenced by animist cosmologies and indigenous knowledge traditions, passionate about meeting people wherever they are to help them perceive more of the hidden forces shaping their thoughts and behaviors in ways that harm more than they help.

I use personal finance as the gateway (10-year practicing CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® Professional) to help people reclaim their full spectrum of power across not only the material realm with money matters, but also mental (media ecology and behavioral explorations) and mystical (invisible, unconscious, spirit, magic).

Today I focus on how best to create boundaries around engagement with all technology, especially AI, not as restrictive limiters per se but as a way to honor and create a sacred vessel to contain and hold something extraordinarily new in a context that can promote right relation and flourishing of all.

This assembly is exactly the kind of community I'm hungry for, but with my own emergency fund of savings drained I'm afraid the virtual price is out of my budget. I would be so grateful for a scholarship! (And am grateful to have been considered.)

I’m feeling brave enough to repost this here not only because it won me the pass (and what an event!) but it’s one of the better descriptions of how I’m pivoting to reposition the work I feel called to do right now: more declaration of a dream, a desire to weave together what’s helped me come back to life after chronic spells of health flares and unemployment, in ways others may find helpful along their integration journeys, too.

So if that’s the proverbial elevator pitch, here’s a poetic alternative I penned during the course I took last year right as I was getting laid off called Making Sanctuary: Leadership and Change at the Edges of the Human, an Aspen Global Leadership Network offering with Bayo Akomolafe:

PROMPT: Who am I?

I am me.

I am here, now.

I am and have been forever.

I’m an echo, an emanation of the universe othering itself so it can see itself, know itself, love itself, understand itself.

I am a warrior of and for truth, love, and compassion.

I am an infinite particle-wave of consciousness becoming.

I am a memory of the present moment, in this matrix of fluid and flesh in motion.

I am the steward-observer of my garden, nurturer of life and death.

I am the product of generations of choices, of accidents, of surprises, of triumphs.

I am the hope of my ancestors, the frontier of their dreams, the monster they tried so hard to hide.

I am molting, in this menopausal phase. The scales are falling from my eyes and as I see the injustice, the abuse, the violence, the harm, I call it out. I call attention to it. I name it and note it and invite it to transform into something better.

I am a vessel, driven by occasional divinity and thought-beings and persons and emotional fields and ideas.

I am the release of these things, conditionings.

I am more ways of being than meatsuit.

I am the actor. I am acted upon. I notice. I fail to observe.

I fight for the user. I raise the underdog. I aim to restore balance – right relations to all.

I am the call and response. I just have to listen with my whole heart open.

I am made mirror-shadow with others.

I position myself and whatever I can towards mutual flourishing of all and every.

It was nerve-wracking to read this aloud in the small breakout group sessions we were auto-divided into, but when one person asked for a copy of it in text I was glad to have had the guts to not only share it, but own and animate with my breath and voice.

As a chronic oversharer during the early dot-com cycles, I’m fighting the good sense to reel back and restrain some of the woo, especially in this mixed vocational context.

But through my work I hope to make the case for how deeply interrelated the weird and woo already is and has the potential to be in our everyday, ordinary lives.

If this path calls to you, hello! Be welcome.

We’ve got a lot of road ahead of us.