You’ve arrived… nice. [a warm smile for you] You’re just inside a clearing, far enough away from the noise, where you can see some wildflowers and shady trees, depending on the season. Maybe you can smell the air.
If you like, you can take a seat beneath a tree, feel your body meet the ground, let the exhale go, and lean back against the trunk. Or come melt into a seat on the porch. [There should be porches on the internet.] No porch swing, but there’s a bench you might like, and a rocker, and a chaise longue if you want to stretch your legs.
You’re welcome to relax here for a bit. Nothing you need to do.
So…., hello, I’m Alex (Alexandra Jacoby).
It’s nice to have you here, at UNDERMININGnormal, an unhurried space for conversations women don’t usually get to have. It’s the digital coffeehouse of my dreams.
How a digital coffeehouse grew out of living room picnics…
In February 2021, I began inviting women I know to living room picnics. Small group conversations around a single topic. Attendance varied and there was never any preparation required. We’d go deep, we’d go light and laughing, and always we’d go wide—on journeys with each other, peeking into our respective worlds, past, present and future.
I have to say that pretty much every week, at some point during the call (we met via Zoom), I’d think to myself:
This is amazing, just listening to her talk, what she said about herself— I had no idea.
I never thought of it like that, or yes, me too! Thank you for saying that for us.
Every week.
Every week these conversations would inspire, nourish and ground me in ways I just can’t do on my own. We were well into COVID-19 pandemic and isolating.
A living room picnic is a small-group conversation that begins around a particular topic, and then goes where it goes. Friendly digital get togethers where you can reflect, relax and have a candid conversation. Anyone can hold a living room picnic.
When I held them, I sent out rambling invitations to start the conversation. I liked to include some silent journaling to ground us in our own thinking and feeling.
We didn’t record them. It was about the experience. I generally shared notes afterwards with attendees.
We didn’t do takeaways at the end. There was no intellectual destination we’re trying to reach, though insights, discoveries, affirmations and learnings often emerged. If there was a goal, it was unhurried conversation. relaxation. It was a picnic.
If you wanted to keep going with the topic, you could inside the coffeehouse. But not many people did, which was fine.
The topics of our living room picnics are listed below. It all started with Maintenance Art, which I discovered while reading How to Do Nothing, Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. Soon after, we explored the principles of Emergent Strategy, Shaping change, Changing Worlds, by adrienne maree brown. And then we wandered on from there, and back to emergent strategy, and into some emotions, a grief ceremony…it was kind of a spiral-shaped path.
Living room picnic topics from Feb 2021 — Jun 2022
Maintenance Art
Taking on other people’s energy
Personal landscapes
Places that shaped you
describing yourself to the world
Small is good.
Small is all.
Change is constant.
There is always enough time for the right work.
There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this time can have.
There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this time can have.
Never a failure, always a lesson.
Trust the People. (If you trust the people, they become trustworthy).
Facilitating Complexity + Social Fertility free form picnic
Cultivating resilience.
Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships.
Less prep, more presence.
What you pay attention to grows.
Making friends and other relationships we make online
