We had our monthly Sunny Way staff meeting in my backyard on Saturday, and it was a gloriously bright and breezy day. Normally, we brainstorm and talk about details of where the site is going, but at this point, a few months into the project and after sorting out the tech problems that kept us offline for a week, we thought it was a good time to step back and re-assess from a larger, more holacratic perspective—What does The Sunny Way want to be, and how can we work together to allow that to happen?ﾠ

It’s easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day reality of coordinating content, finding relevant links, posting, writing ... and bogged down is exactly how we were starting to feel. But when it comes down to it, The Sunny Way is not about posting every day on the internet. It’s about experimenting with new ways to live, talking to people who have all kinds of different perpsectives, and sharing the whole struggle with each other.ﾠ

So—to refocus on the big picture, as we all need to do sometimes, we put our attention on our mission statement: Bring the possibility of a magnificent future alive for ourselves and our readers, and awaken responsibility for creating it.ﾠ

This project is about creating a new world! And creativity, like life itself, is messy. So what came out of our discussion is the need to let it all hang out a bit more around here. We want to break down ideas of what environmentalism is, try on new ways of being, and bring some surprises into the mix.ﾠ

You can read about how to make homemade cleaners and buy local foods and drive less at about a million different sites. What we want to contribute is something different: we want to build a new context for living, where we question and experiment instead of assuming we already know the answers. Creating the future is not a done deal—there’s no Google Maps printout to tell us how to get there. So if we need to stumble around a bit, so be it. Instead of striving to be great, we’re striving to learn, even if it means messing up and looking stupid from time to time.ﾠ

As it turns out, building a new world ends up having a lot to do with personal growth and development, so we will also continue to share our trials and errors as we take on projects around research and activism. Whether we hit the wall or break on through, we will keep going as transparently as we can.ﾠ

We’ve also found it very important to think more impersonally about what we are trying to do. As the editor of the site, I’ve taken a lot of missed deadlines and dropped balls quite personally, which is understandable and a very common pattern for leaders to fall into. But it’s not productive.ﾠ

Ultimately, when we make commitments, we are making them to The Sunny Way, to ourselves, and to the future. So I’m quite happy to relinquish my role as mom and allow myself and everyone involved to govern ourselves and discover what kind of order rises from the chaos. To make sure we’re all clear on what we’re up to, we’re trying on a new process to share with each other our commitments and our progress on them every week.ﾠ

Creating The Sunny Way is a microcosm for creating the future at large. We are learning how to commit, how to work with each other, how to use obstacles to help us grow and improve, and how to fearlessly share what we are going through. So far, focusing on the big picture and constantly reassessing/navigating seem to be serving this project well.ﾠ If we keep our eyes clear, our minds open, and our hands on, we can’t help but get closer to our goal.

(video by Nogwater via flickr)