WebsiteCommunityActivities

This is a draft of text to go on Website2021.

Regular meetings and gatherings are central to the life of Star Community. We also organize bigger events on a more irregular basis, often inviting people outside the community to participate. Purposes range from social connection to learning and personal growth to governance and planning to developing the Star Community philosophy and vision.

Here's what the regular activities look like for a typical two-week period:

Feelings-focused gatherings

Star Forum (link to section on New Culture page)

Probably the most important event to learn about, and the one that most defines us as a community, is Forum. This is where we gather, in person and via Zoom, to share what's going on for us and how we feel about it. There is facilitation to take us deeper into the feelings which often helps point the way toward personal transformation. Benefits include feeling fully seen by each other, understanding each other and ourselves more deeply, and making conflicts in the community [[WebsiteTransparency?|transparent]]. We currently hold two Forums a week, one on Wednesday evenings completely over Zoom, and one on Sunday evenings in a living room (alternating between the houses) with remote participants appearing on the TV.

Possibility Management (link to page) meetings

These include Thursday Group sharing and feedback circles, Expand the Box three-day trainings in the basics of PM, and three-day PM Labs where people make deep, intense explorations of their feelings and histories to facilitate personal transformation.

Sex and intimacy discussion groups

These are small private groups where people discuss our experiences and challenges with sex and intimacy, past traumas that influence how we feel and act in intimate relationships, and ways to evolve ourselves and our community culture toward healing and helping everyone have more positive intimate experiences.

Coaching and conflict navigation

[conflict navigation should be a link to WebsiteContextOverProcedure]

Most of our personal growth work is done with one of our community's three expert coaches, who often use techniques from Possibility Management to help us perceive, understand, process, and redirect our feelings. People often set up weekly coaching sessions to ensure continuous progress.

On an as-needed basis, the coaches (and sometimes others) facilitate meetings between two people who have a difficult conflict, creating a safe space where both people can feel heard and work through their triggers without devolving into shouting matches. In some cases, more people need to witness the process because the conflict is between groups or between a person and a group, or because understanding the conflict is important for the whole community.

Social events and holidays

Weekly community dinners

We meet for dinner twice a week, at Ryan House on Mondays and Sky House on Fridays. Generally the participants are the residents of the two houses, but sometimes other community members in the Seattle area drop by. Cooking is done by various house members on a volunteer basis. These dinners help the two houses stay well connected to each other and foster the social bonds that make us a community.

Parties

We organize social events on an irregular basis. They range from music jams to board-game days to movie nights to cuddle and massage parties to the big annual Friends of Star Party in fall. We also celebrate big holidays together, typically including Passover, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Day.

Rituals

There is something about spiritual ceremony that connects people deeply to what matters most to them. Borrowing from Pagan traditions and inventing some of our own, we gather, typically at the Solstices and Equinoxes, to celebrate nature and evolution, mark important transitions, honor the dead, and imagine a bright future together. For example, on the Winter Solstice (PERSON/PEOPLE) lead us in the Wiccan practice of forming a circle with candles to share what we want to leave behind and what to call in for ourselves in the new year, and Ben draws from his science-based religion to poetically retell the story of the birth of the Universe and the Earth.

Practical/governance meetings

House meetings

Each community house meets once every two weeks to discuss issues specific to the house, both logistical and emotional (many issues are a mix of both), and develop concrete plans to address them. The format is agenda-based, but everyone contributes their topics to build the agenda at the beginning of the meeting. Once every three weeks, the two houses meet in a similar space to deal with issues affecting both houses.

Strategy

These weekly meetings are the main venues for practical planning about where the community should go next, from organizing events to setting up resource sharing systems. They're scheduled around when the people with the most passion for this work are available, which varies over time.

Artistic activities

Storytelling Group

|Ben leads a biweekly Zoom gathering where we present stories, typically self-written, and give each other friendly feedback on how they land for the listeners.

Art-making at events

(PERSON) often provides opportunities for community members to participate in creating visual art, typically as part of other events ranging from board-game parties to Monthly Matrixes to New Culture camps.

Gatherings focused on ideas, philosophy, and spirituality

Community Circle

A relatively recent addition to our community, these meetings draw their inspiration from opening and closing circles at Open Space unconferences. As in Forum, people stand as they feel moved and walk around the circle to speak, but the goal is to present opinions and ideas on important community issues or the philosophy and vision of the community as a whole. There will often be an initial focus question that can be freely ignored if people choose to. There is no facilitation. Similar to Quaker friends meetings, there are often long silences. These meetings are held roughly every ten days, in the evening after every third community dinner.

Spiritual Quest

???

Book groups

We've had a number of small groups that meet weekly to work our way through books whose ideas are strongly held by community members. For the most part, these have been books by the founders of Tamera and Damanhur, the two visionary societies that provided inspiration for the community vision. Star Community doesn't currently host any internal book groups, but some of us participate in a Terra Nova Network book group reading Eros Unredeemed by Dieter Duhm of Tamera on Saturday afternoons.

Monthly Matrix

Ideally, every month we pick a Sunday and block out six hours (including a lunch break) for a Monthly Matrix workshop to develop our understanding on an important topic such as Transparency, Trust and a special matrix on Covid 19 and the houses. These can involve a mix of presentations with handwritten/drawn visual aids and group activities.

New Culture Camps

These three-to-ten-day events are in a category all their own, partly because they're the only events we regularly host or attend outside the community houses (although we've hosted Possibility Management Labs offsite in the past and may do so again), but mostly because they don't belong to Star Community so much as Star Community belongs to them. Our history page describes how Star Community's founders came together through Summer Camps and decided to create a place where we could bring that energy into everyday life.

Originally inspired by ZEGG, a visionary community closely tied to Tamera, these camps give participants a chance to live the world we want to create. New Culture is about deep intimacy and transparency, equality, sexual freedom and healing of the divide between men and women, as well as the divide between people and the Earth.

[what actually happens at camps]

Past events

• Mens & Women's groups
• Regular movie nights
• Other book groups
• The moves
• Barracks
• Fishbowls
• Community Labs