Collective Dreaming in the Sierras

In mid-September the SubRosa collective went on a retreat to a land project in the Sierras.  We had many intentions about why we would travel over four hours to be together for  four or five days.  There were themes that we shared in common:  to be together in a different place and have fun and share our days and nights...to be on and with the land and to share that experience together...to dream about SubRosa and the collective, about how those are now and could be.

We accomplished all of this and more...from coffee and yerba mate in the morning to honoring the bottle at night, we had full days of varied experiences...games and solo wanderings and focused conversations about our lives, about the project, about anarchy, about the place we live...what is and could be...

Changes are in the air...the continued changes in the season from fall to winter...and changes also at SubRosa...some quick and some slow...

Come visit us and we welcome you to join with us at this pivotall time of grounding our dreams.

And so it has been a couple of months that we in the collective have been back from the retreat.  Change can come at a varied pace.  Earlier in this journal there is a post about the starting the project, and over time we have changed, in part as a reflection of who is in the collective in this moment.  I feel that it is healthy and important for the project to shift and change so that  it is alive and to not stay the same, to not fall into the trap of the founders' syndrome, where the original intentions for the project become set in concrete and growth becomes inhibited.  This can be a delicate balancing, where the fulcrum can have a shifting place, to be grounded in set intentions, learning along the way and to also be flexible to try new things and to honor the energy of folks that are currently involved.

A sign we put on the gate reads:  Hello! The SubRosa collective is making changes to this space and to our intentions for its use.  For the next month or so, we may not be open during the usual times, but we will be hosting the  events listed on the calendar below. In the long term we will still hold open hours, with more energy focused on events: shows, classes, workshops, and more!  More info at subrosaproject.org.  And email us event proposals (meetings, performances, art projects, or something else) at subrosa-events@riseup.net

And we are still in that process of moving away from the main way we operate is in terms of open hours, to embrace more specific usages of the space.  At the same time, we need to bring in money to pay the rent and other expenses.  So, this is something we are still brainstorming about and putting into practice (more on that in another post).

We in the collective are figuring out how to put more direct energy into the space, to hold events and/or reach out to others that want to do so.  The previous model of staffing open hours as the primary way of being involved in the project had become routine and uninspiring.  We are working on a process of letting go, of including others to have have access to the space, who aren't collective members, of finding new ways for folks to be meaningfully involved in the project.

We had a get-together about that last Monday, as a response to someone in the collective who had questions about SubRosa's health and our general follow through after the retreat.  We emerged committed to this shift, to have SubRosa be a vibrant community space, where so much does and can happen.