showing up

Hi, everyone, and thanks for tuning in. I am

feeling uncommonly mellow today. And that's a weird feeling. And

I don't usually sit down to record when I'm feeling mellow,

because I have to admit, I have a little fear that you won't be

as interested, or you won't feel as engaged or you won't think

that, that this is as worth your time, if I'm not kind of pitched

up here and really excited and... and I am, I'm still

excited. But intensives, we go through these phases of go and

then these phases of stop and I've learned that if I try to

fight that cycle, nothing good comes of it. Like the stuff I

produce is just not great, because it's out of alignment of

where I am. And, and so I'm trying an experiment today, and

I'm bringing you along for the ride because I'm going to talk

about stuff even though I'm not in that hyped up super energetic

place right now. I figure the world is full of a lot of hyped

up energy, and maybe it's okay for you to come with me on these

more mellow moments, too. So this is going to be a slightly

longer episode, we're not sticking to five minutes and and

I'm going to allow you into this softer, more thoughtful space

that I sometimes occupy. This feels like a more private space

to me. And I think that's true for a lot of intensives that

we're very comfortable kind of projecting that thing that often

people think of as extraversion- I was just on a Facebook Live

the other day with Grace Edison, who is fantastic. By the way, if

you're looking for support with sales, you should absolutely get

in touch with her. Also, if you're just looking for a

fantastic person, you should just get in touch with her. She

lives in works out of rural British Columbia. And, and she

has the most interesting, interesting life. And I mean

that in all the good and bad ways, but she has made something

fabulous out of it. So anyway, I was on this, having this

conversation with Grace, and we were talking about introversion

and extraversion. And we were both really uncharacteristically

mellow and, and she was talking about how how people are often

like down on extroverts that are like telling extroverts, so they

have to hush and step back, so that introverts can have more

space in a space. And, and she kind of one of the questions she

asked me was what I think of that? And is it her

responsibility to make that space? And I said, Well, who are

you in the space? Right? What is your leadership role in the

space? Are you just a participant? I mean, just quote

unquote, participation is very important. But are you a

participant? Are you carrying some privilege vis a vis the

other people in the room? Or are you the facilitator? Because

each one of those occupying each one of those spaces requires a

different thing from you, as a person in that role. And then I

was thinking about, and I was thinking about how, how we get

told, we're not supposed to be proud of ourselves, we're not

supposed to, you know, pretty as pretty does and we shouldn't, we

shouldn't claim space, we shouldn't be out and loud and

proud and how, especially in queer spaces, and in a lot of

people of color spaces, right, we've had to, we've had to teach

ourselves and encourage each other to take up that space that

we've been taught not to take up. I know that it's true in

black and indigenous spaces. It's also true in South Asian

spaces. I'm projecting that it's also true in other spaces that

are occupied by other communities of color, and we see

some of that on Tik Tok in places where people are able to

occupy and define their own stage, their own way of sharing

who they are and what they do. And thenI was thinking about my

clothes, because I have gone through a long period of not

really, not really wanting to call attention to myself,

visually, for a variety of reasons. And recently, I've

started to come out of that only as I started to have the

capacity to make clothes for myself because part of what I'm

discovering is that I didn't want to wear clothes, and call

attention to myself in clothes, that I didn't feel comfortable

in, that I didn't feel like we're representative of me,

myself, my values, how I want to look, like none of that. And of

course, being me, being an intensive, what I want is a

little bit outside the norm. It's a little bit different from

what everybody else wants.

And in the case of my clothes, that means that I'm wearing a

combination of 18th century menswear mostly that I'm making

myself and I have been through a months and months long project--

I'm really proud of myself actually. Because ordinarily

when I end up stuck on a project, I end up shelving it

and I walk away. And in this case, I, I have been working on

this fitted Banyan. So there are two kinds of Banyans, fitted and

unfitted, and I've been working on a fitted Banyon, which is

basically just a glorified very elegant bathrobe, for months

trying to get this pattern from what it was. I started with a

pattern derived from an extant garment, in the LA County Museum

of Art, all the way to a pattern that fits me, which looks

tremendously different from the original pattern. I don't know

if the original pattern was made for a boy, or if the original

piece was made for a very small man, but it was certainly not

made for somebody of my size, and I've had to scale a lot of

it up in order to get it to where I need it to be. But

scaling it up is not as simple as adding inches around the

edges, you end up having to readjust the entire pattern,

which is what I've been learning. So I've learned a lot.

But the reason that I've persisted, I've actually

persisted, I've stayed with it because it has novelty, because

it's this giant like three dimensional jigsaw puzzle,

because it uses parts of my brain that I don't get to use,

in the same way in my work, but I do use those parts in my work,

right? If you've ever worked with me, or if you're familiar

with my work, you know, that I will take an existing system or

an existing structure and restructure it to fit the people

or the institution that's using it. I will, rather than saying,

Well, you have to fit into this box, I'll say, well, let's build

a different container. A box isn't even the right thing, we

shouldn't even be using cardboard, we should be using

wood, and it shouldn't be six sided, it should have, you know,

17 sides, because that would accommodate you better. And next

thing, you know, we have a completely different kind of

containing structure, that fits the institution that needs it,

that supports the institution that needs it, maybe we leave

the top off so the institution can continue to grow. And I'm

only able to do that, because I have finally, in my late 40s,

come to a place where I'm willing to be out and proud not

just about all of the identity pieces that we've had to be

politically and socially in order to keep and advance human

rights, but also out and proud about what I do and what goes on

in my head. I had this really interesting experience when I

was growing up that I kept having original ideas. And I

kept trying to put them forth as legitimate thoughts. And people

kept telling me, in academia, this is very common, people kept

telling me over and over well, you have to come up with, you

have to come up with a source this has to come from somewhere,

you got to cite somebody, and I said, but there is no source, I

came up with this. And they essentially told me that my

ideas didn't count, that the only ideas that counted were

ideas that came from external sources. And so if I couldn't

find somebody else having already said it, then I couldn't

put it in my paper, then I couldn't write it down anywhere

then I couldn't build on it. And I found this both insulting and

frustrating. And as I got older and found out exactly how old

Emerson and Thoreau were when they wrote some of their most

famous works and, and institutions that I was studying

in really elevated Emerson and Thoreau and their peers and

contemporaries-- as I started to realize that quite young white

men had been allowed to have original thoughts for a very

long time, and that we base a lot of our current thinking on

their thinking from when they were like, in their late teens

or early 20s, I became really clear that I was not going to be

constrained by the limits of academia. And I actually think

that's when the seeds of my resistance to academic

structures started. So I continued on I mean, I have a

graduate degree, but my graduate degree is a Master's of

divinity, which is a practicing degree it's a it's a degree of

praxis. In the same way that an MD is a degree of practice in

the same way that

a JD is a degree of practice, right? There are two different

kinds of graduate degrees there degrees that are more

theoretical and degrees that are really about how do you practice

this thing you've learned; how do you make it into something

tangible and tactical in the world? And I chose to go that

route. I ended up with a master's degree because that's--

it's not actually the last degree you can get anymore, you

can get a Doctor of Ministry, but the master's degree is

considered complete. It's it's the most degree you need to do

ministry work in the world. And and so I got this master's

degree, which is it's a very it's like an MSW. It's three

years plus field work kind of situation. So by the time you

are fully accredited and degreed, you've done four years

of work. But because of the vagaries of our academic system,

you only have a master's. But I decided to get a master's

degree, that was not an academic degree. And I decided not to get

say a ThD, which is a Doctorate of theology or a PhD,In my

field, partially because I was interested in practical

applications. I was interested in taking what we were doing and

doing it in the world. I had no idea when I graduated with my M

div, that I was going to leave the institutional church as the

primary container of my work, and that I was going to go out

into the world and instead, do this, do this very fusion kind

of work, right, where I, where I take some of the principles of,

you know, goodness in the world with the ideals of being good

and being good for the world. And I bring them into the

business context. And that kind of interdisciplinarity was very

new when I was in an undergraduate and I was doing

some similar things there. And I really shouldn't, I guess, be as

surprised as I am, that I ended up where I am, doing what I do.

But the only reason that I'm able to go out in the world and

say this, this mashup of, of theory and philosophy and belief

and, and world transformation is relevant in the business world.

It's important in the business world, it's what we need to be

doing in the business world, the only reason that I'm able to do

that, and the only reason that I'm able to say, these things

that I know I need are also things that I am noticing other

people need. And when we provide those things for people like us

what happens? We become better. All of us. Our institutions, us

as individuals, the other people we're interacting with,

everything gets better when we do this. So we're making the

world a better place by making space for intensives. By

carrying that intensiveness forward and by being out and

loud and proud, as intensives. As intensives. The only way

reason I can do that is because I am finally at this place where

I'm willing to say this version of the world that I'm imagining

has legitimacy. It deserves to take up space, it deserves to be

on the page, it deserves to be in the front of the room. It

deserves to be heard and seen and understood and perceived and

grasped in all the ways that people interact with ideas.

Because it's not just a theory that has no impact. It's... it's

a seed, it's a seed of what could be if we all get together

and do it. And we have to be able to be proud, we have to be

able to be loud. And if I could go back and tell ninth grade me

who wanted to do original research on the children's

anti-Nazi resistance movement in Scandinavia, that me trying to

chase down sources for a ninth grade paper would lead me

eventually, to a place where I had the confidence and the

audacity to write a book. Without an academic degree

behind it. I have a degree but it's not a degree that that most

people would consider qualifies me to write that book. But the

book needed to be written and the ideas are valid and

validated in the real world by people like you and me.

And that's why that book had to exist, regardless of whether or

not I had a PhD after my name. My father has a doctorate. And I

thought for years that I couldn't legitimately occupy

intellectual space without one. And now I know better. And now I

know that there are lots of ways of knowing. That academia,

upholds some of those ways of knowing but not all of them. And

that we can validate ourselves and each other, we validate

ourselves and each other. And that's why this work is

important. Because everybody's way of being needs space. That

doesn't mean that you get to harm other people with your way

of being. But it does mean that there are spaces and needs to

find the ways that we can all be in our own ways of being and

bring what we have to bring and give what we have to give

without being told that we're wrong. Without squishing

ourselves and without harming others. This was a lot easier in

the times and places before the internet. Because now, if I'm

having a thought, I might sit down and write about it first,

like privately, offline, in a journal somewhere. But I might

just sit down and write a public post, or I might just sit down

and record a podcast episode, and put my ideas right out there

without, without doing a lot of digestion. And that's a

legitimate way of telling stories, that's a legitimate way

of transmitting ideas and knowledge. There's not

necessarily a requirement to refine and refine and refine;

refining is one method. But it's not the only method. And

sometimes, when I refine my stuff too much, it loses its

energy. And so I have to come to this space, willing to be a

little bit less refined, really willing to carry forward a rough

draft in order to carry forward the energy that comes with that

rough draft. And the advantage of that, is that when I bring a

rough draft, I'm more open to friendly amendments. I'm more

open to other people's ideas. It's still soft, it's still

forming, it doesn't have to be perfect. It just needs to get

out there. So it can be a seed. So it can be a pile of seeds. So

it can be a handful of seeds scattered on the ground. And

someone somewhere will pick up one of those seeds and make

something of it. And that's what's most important. Of

course, this is capitalism. So it's also important that I

figure out how to get credit. I figure out how to occupy public

space that I figure out how to hold my presence as one of the

presences in the discourse as it proceeds, and to interact with

the results of my own ideas, to engage to be engaged to be

credited, and... and profit; to benefit from the results of my

ideas. All of that is important. And one of the joys of this

immediate publication social media world is that we can bring

partially formed rough draft wet clay to the table. And then we

can find out what happens when it's not just us in isolation.

Sometimes we need isolation. Sometimes we need privacy.

Sometimes we need cogitation, sometimes we need rumination,

but we don't have to do that all the time. We can mix it, it's a

tool, those are all tools. And we have access to all these

different tools. When clergy used to write sermons that were

supposed to be all day services. And I mean all day, or when they

still do, probably, I don't know. But when they used to,

they would just be writing alone, it was them, and a whole

bunch of parchment and a quill pen, and a cup of tea and a

break for lunch until they had like four or five hours worth of

writing to read. And we don't have to do that anymore. Not

only can we consult books, which they could consult whatever they

had in their library, whatever their next door neighbor had in

their library, whatever the church had in its library. But

not only can we consult texts, we can also consult people,

living people with living experience. And that's what

makes it possible for us to be ourselves because we don't have

to represent everybody. I can represent myself and other

people like me, and the minute somebody feels like I don't

represent them anymore, that's cool.

That's all right. I don't have to represent everybody. We don't

have one spokesperson for this and one spokesperson for that

one representative of this and one representative of that. We

have all these examples of all these kinds of ways of being and

all these people and all these presences. But the only way that

that amalgamation of experience is accurate is if a lot of us

get out there and occupy space that we've been told we

shouldn't occupy for some reason or other. Now I'm an introvert.

I'm not an extrovert, but I am an intensive. And so often I get

out there and I occupy a lot of space with really big ideas.

That's part of my role in the world. That's not everybody's

job. And that's okay, too. Some people are not doing that. Some

people are, are collating, they're aggregating. They're

weaving together and that's also important. If there's nothing

that anybody learns from my work except that we can value

everybody, we can value what all the people bring to the table,

we can value the loud voices and the quiet voices, we can value

the big movements and the small movements, we can value, the...

the... cacophony and the silence. We can value, the in

breath, and the outbreath. The tides rise and the tides fall,

the salty and the sweet. And it's everything together that

allows us to know ourselves well enough to move forward.

When I'm not wearing 18th century clothes that I made

myself, I'm wearing one of two things. Either I'm wearing

saris, which I typically drape in ways that are slightly

unconventional, to suit me, because they're incredibly

flexible garments. Or, I'm wearing the default uniform that

I fell back on, which is a black V neck t shirt, and this single

pair of pandemic pants. I keep wanting to tell the story of

getting so annoyed with pants that I stopped wearing any other

pairs of pants, and how that led to my clothing being mostly hand

sewn, or draped. But I do also have this fallback position of

pandemic pants. At some point, I will actually put the whole

story up on the YouTube. But the funny thing about having a

neutral, a default, a thing I can fall back on is that it

provides me a place to rest. It provides me a place to go when

my energy isn't high. And when I'm not prepared to even be loud

about myself in public, when I'm in that cogitation, that

internal space. And I just, I just want to be in there. There

may have been a time in this world where I could have worn

these clothes quietly and gone about my day, and nobody would

have noticed. But that was a number of hundreds of years ago.

And that time was terrible in a lot of other ways. So let's not

go back there. So when I need to get dressed, when I need to go

out in public, when I need to present myself on social media

even, I get to decide how I'm going to bring all of myself in

that moment. Sometimes it's bright colors, flowing silks,

exotic, imported, rich, delightful, sensual stuff.

Sometimes it's... sometimes it's flamboyant in a completely

different way. And I'm fully cognizant of the negative

connotations of both flamboyant and exotic and, and I'm aware

that that is part of what I'm carrying with me into the space.

That some people will have those thoughts, those ideas, those

overtones, those undertones when they see me in those clothes.

And sometimes, that's not what I want. Sometimes I want to be

absolutely unremarkable. Sometimes I want the words or

the art that I'm making to be front and center. The only thing

that people notice. And if that's what I want, then I put

ont a black V neck t shirt and a pair of pandemic pants. So I'm

not saying that you have to go out there and be shiny all the

time. But I am also saying that you do not have to not. No

matter what anybody has told you.