I Think Something is Really Happening Here

What if you could look on one screen at all of the public transportation options in DC at the same time and choose the best route home (metro, bus, capital bike share, zipcar, and car2go)? Have you ever tried to cook from a recipe on your ipad or smartphone without getting food on the screen? A voice controlled cooking app called sous chef and an all in one dc transit app called go dc.me are just two of the ideas generated this week alone at DC Week.  

This week, DC’s business and tech savvy creative class is showing it’s colors at DC Week, a festival slash conference happening all over the city, aimed at bringing together social innovators of all kinds. I think something is really going on here.

photo courtesy of BenDROZphotography

While plenty of people cite the parties (especially the closing party, which is going to be SICK, I hear) as one of the most exciting things about the week, it’s really about social innovation. “We really view it as our job to catalyze as much creation as possible.” said event co-producer Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategy Labs reflecting on the 2011 event. There are just over 100 very diverse events throughout the week, reflecting the depth and reach of this prolific network.

Lots of the events are nearly or already sold out, but not all of them, and contrary to popular belief, you don’t need a badge for all of (actually not for a lot of) the events. (Ps: pls be nice and RSVP if you can.) But hey, maybe you crash one or two and make a new friend and maybe get a free t-shirt or a drink (I know I’ve already gotten several of each and it’s only Monday = #signofagreatweek ) and start exchanging ideas. That’s kind of what they’re going for here. See the full schedule. 

“We’re inviting the community to not only participate, but to drive an agenda.” said Jen Consalvo, COO of Tech Cocktail, and added “This is about about a region coming together to create something bigger and better. Not only that, but to really come together and shine a light on what’s happening and what can happen in this world. This is not just about DC, this is about creatives and thinkers, and people who want to make a difference.”

“the opening party in full swing” photo courtesy of @Corbett3000 

The opening party at Penn Social was a room full of entrepreneurs, product promoters, talent recruiters, and people trying to meet and learn from them. Listen Local First, a DC based initiative creating alternate avenues for local musicians and venues to collaborate with locally owned organizations and businesses, brought Cannon.fm  to the festival, and is working with cannon on an app that will be “like a local spotify or pandora” said LLF co-founder Chris Naoum.

“I think DC Week is about putting us on the map and proving that this is an up-and-coming entrepreneur community that has got a lot going on and is going to be successful.” said Danny Boice, co-founder and CTO of Speek, which just closed a million dollar seed round, almost entirely from DC investors. “DC has been kind of a sleeper city in terms of startups. People say you can’t raise money in DC, but we did, and it wasn’t easy, but it never is.” 

After being the Series A winner of Distilled Intelligence in October and growing about 12% a week since they launched in June, Speek might be one current flagship of the #DCTech community. However, this is a self-proclaimed tight-knit, openly collaborative community, collectively hunting for new contributors, ways to improve and cross-pollinate ideas, products, solutions and platforms into relentlessly new and better forms.

They’re looking for smart, motivated, innovative people who want to build something.They want to help people start good businesses, and profit from them. (Hello? Did somebody say job-market?) So here’s your chance even if this your first time to hear about it. Find them. Meet them. Make friends with them. These people are up to something great. Something is really going on here.

Some major highlights of DC Week are yet to come in the keynotes, core conference and closing party later this week, but the real gems will only really come to be seen months and maybe years from now. They are the conversations, new connections, and sparks of an idea that maybe, just maybe, will turn into something really great. So for those creatives and thinkers around the District waiting for an invitation to drive and contribute to and build something better, DC Week is an excellent place to start.

Medicinal Love

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the first post, "Poison Love" here.

Love is, perhaps, the most remedial thing in the world. Most of us are quite confident that love is probably the answer to all of our pain and incompleteness. Love is strong medicine. It is a powerful substance. But, like any potent chemical compound the medicine of love can act as poison perhaps more easily than it can act as an antidote. It is a dynamic, volatile solution that - like dynamite or wet cement - left for too long in the wrong state, becomes obstructive, harmful or both. 

Love's natural state is active. It has to be applied to be restorative. It has to be given and received over and over to act as the remedy. 

The dilemma and the miracle of love both arise from the same characteristics: we cannot survive without love, love is more powerful than anything, and love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. 

We cannot survive without love. We were born incomplete. Individually, and collectively - we find ourselves taking the shape of simple, elegant equations, missing one key variable. We are symmetrical creatures, eternally searching for the piece that would complete our symmetry to make us as whole and beautiful as we sense we should be, but currently are not. Love is exactly what we need. In this need, most of us spend our whole lives. Children need to find belonging and provision. Women need to find value and beauty. Men need to find honor and respect. In this need for love, manifested in what I will not, here, attempt to list in it's potentially innumerable ways, we almost always try to use love for the sake of and solely unto ourselves. That will never work, because love is necessarily relational. It cannot be gained or kept. It must be given to be received, and it must be received to be given. For love to bring healing - both must hold hold true and constantly return to reciprocate. 

Better Me, Ilja Hackman

Love is more powerful than anything. Alone, we are weak - naturally moving towards death. Love is the thing that we can take up - we can wield it, but only for the sake of each other - to move each other towards life. Love is necessarily humble and sacrificial. Those you love are the ones you return back to serve consistently, whether in your mind or in the flesh. Love is to directly engage them, to come alongside and join them, to relentlessly vote with your attention and affection. Those you love are the only ones in a position to give you the love that can heal you, if they are able to rightly make use of it's power. Think about what fits the above description in your life. Really everyone is in love with something or someone, even if only in their minds. They are the ones you are in a continually revolving servant-master, master-servant relationship with. They are the ones that can love you - but how will they treat your trust? Love implies risk for the lover and the beloved. For the lover it is in fear of rejection - fear of what you will become if the love and service you give is not reciprocated, and risk that you will begin to wield love as poison on yourself or your beloved in your weakness. For the beloved it is in fear of mistreatment - fear of the lack of sufficiency and grace in your lover's wisdom for how to wield love to heal your ugly and delicate wounds. In these fears, love has more often been used to do harm than to heal, but even so, love is the only medicine. Like only diamonds can cut diamonds, even the wounds caused by mis-applied love must be healed by love, although it may best be done by a more wisely chosen lover. 

Love is everywhere - it cannot be removed. For most, "love" evokes sunset romance, and "medicine" evokes salve or antibiotics, but medicine and love are really much more broad than that. Either might more completely be defined as "what will do you good," or "precisely what will restore you to more complete wholeness." Both are necessarily subjective, and most commonly non-physical and non-erotic. This kind of love permeates and infiltrates every part of the universe. No one can escape it. No one can escape the need for it. No one can escape the desire for it. It is an implied, inescapable risk of danger - which would be horrible were it not the only exit from a worse fate. To approach love is to face fear, but to remain in love is to continually cast it out. Deep consistent healing love always results in the expansion or creation of families, whether biological or not. Love can rarely be sustained as an applied healing force outside of family.

Each of our lives - each of our families - are a history of love. Love desired. Love remembered. Love abandoned. Love grown out of. Love received. Love abused. Love restored. For each one to make sense of it, the history may be approached as an epic adventure or a tragedy. Many potential outcomes lay ahead of you, but you cannot survive or grow alone. To live in love, you must be a champion. You must continually risk pain and face fear. You must relentlessly serve, then allow yourself to be served. You must consider your resources, and wield them as agents of healing and strengthening. All of us interact with, and make use of love, but only those who take it up to heal, overcome and discover will be able to be healed, find victory, and be discovered.

This is the second in a series of posts about love. Read the next post, "Constitutional Love" here.

Lift Up Your Heads, O You Gates

Unsolicited, the thought came through my mind,

"Lift up your heads, O you Gates!

 And be lifted up, O you ancient doors."

I wasn't quite sure where it came from. It marched into my head like a victorious army processing back into it's hometown, building a bridge to something else that has recently been present in my thoughts. I've been reading about the habitual connections of the synapses in our brains. Discoveries in neuroscience over only the last few decades suggest that a healthy mental state requires perpetual interaction with other people's right brain. This gives experiences of relational narratives that create thinking templates. Once our brain's synapses have fired according to a certain template, they are significantly more likely to fire the same way again and again. Unused, many areas of the mind simply shut off eventually, like an abandoned, overgrown neighborhood on the outskirts of town.

Autumn Composition,  Deduar

Common example: "I don't know how to trust anyone, because I'm so used to finding people unreliable or untrustworthy." Even when we come across people who would break our mental stereotypes, we shut them out, because we're following the somewhat implicit neural template. The physical pathways in our brain literally form ruts. Once they're formed, according to some research, most people never change them. Although, unlike at least most other beings on the planet, humans do have the ability to re-form these pathways.

The psychological distress of many can be correlated with the literal lack of physical connectivity between the right (emotional, relational) and left (linear, logical) hemispheres of their brain. It could even be said that people whose brains don't integrate enough with other people's brains, will not be able to form healthy patterns of thought,  and have trouble integrating their own brain, as well as nerve connectivity to "the extended brain", or visceral organs (the heart, lungs and gastrointestinal system), eventually causing physical sickness in some. This gives new meaning to the old wisdom that you shouldn't have a divided heart, or a divided mind.

"Lift up your heads, O you Gates!

 And be lifted up, O you ancient doors."

It's originally from a song, written thousands of years ago, actually by King David, returning victorious from war, with the ark of the covenant, restoring authority, the life of the people, and communion with God back into his city.

For the first time in a long time, I've found myself venturing out into pathways I've left unexplored. After years of trauma, and subsequent hiding in fear, I'm daring myself to love again, to trust. What a welcome verse. What a bold procession. O, dearest hope, that I could find the right levers, that I could find the courage & stamina to join the song and open those gates.

True Story: A Monday Evening

9:02pm: Say goodnight to roommate, head to back patio with a stack of cardboard, matches, fire starter, fire wood, a good book, mosquito repelling candles & wrist to toe mosquito proof clothing in search of adventure/ relaxation. Turn on twinkle lights.

9:06pm: Cardboard fortress surrounding fire starter in a satisfactory manner, light corners of butter & pizza boxes.

9:08pm: Veiled in a cloud of smoke- nothing but 1/8 inch charred box corners, admit defeat at hands of wax coating on cardboard.

9:09pm: Enter significant mass of grocery ads to even the score. Move scooter cover to avoid melting due to large flames.

9:16pm: The un-aided sweet sound of crackling remains... Logs appear to have caught fire.

9:17pm: I love twinkle lights.

9:19pm: Enter roastable hot dogs on sticks. Excellent.

Sitting Bubbles, Karoly Karsay

9:21pm: Sticks may be too short. Fingers may be burning.

9:22pm: Flame very small to not actually there. Commence blowing on heart of the fire to maintain dog roastage.

9:23pm: Face covered in soot, getting kinda sweaty, hot dogs still looking geometric & cold to the touch.

9:25pm: Begin packing up. Throw last pieces of cardboard & paper on firepit more in an attempt to burn 'em up & avoid walking back to the recycling bin I fished them out of earlier than an attempt to re-start the fire. Think pitifully,"Dear God, save my fire?" Go inside to microwave hot dogs.

9:27pm: Return to check that fire is out. Find it cheerfully crackling almost as big as before.

9:28pm: Grab a beer from the fridge. Settle in to put a dent in my book anyway while the flame goes out.

9:29pm: Minor incident with frozen state of beer. Briefly ponder the science of temperature & matter.

9:55pm: Finished a chapter in the book. Fire still burning.

9:56pm: The moon is beautiful. Is this really happening?

10:01pm: Roommate #2 comes home to find me with snack, beer, book & flame. "This is awesome!" she says. I smile & shrug. Not ready to betray my frustration & near defeat. Bid her goodnight after briefly re-counting the events of our day.

10:44pm: Full of book & snack, face still covered in soot, smelling like campfire, satisfied with adventure & the simple pleasures in life, I retreat to my quarters to disengage from consciousness for the day.

The note writer

In junior high I was not the most popular. However, I had a few redeeming qualities. One was note writing. Everyone knows that in grade school and junior high it is cool and exciting to pass and get notes from your friends at all times, for all reasons.

Note writing has become something of a lost art as we've grown older. I was good at it. People who didn't even like me told me so, and that's a big deal in junior high. I wasn't good at sports, I was easily one of the most unfortunate looking, but I could write a two pager complete with artwork that everyone in the class loved and would pass around for days.

I have many reasons for making this attempt at sharing my thoughts on the world wide web, but as I go on, I think the old days of sixth grade philosophy, priceless scribble drawn cartoon commentary on the events of the day and my mystical ability to call something what it was in a way that could make my sworn enemies cackle will inspire the vision for this blog. I have no theme, or if I do, it is yet to be discovered.