Making things Creatively With our Hands, Reconnecting with the Wider Web of Life, People and the Freedom to Move

Introducing the Points of Experimentation and their corresponding Reflection & Learning Structures

1. Reconnecting to Making things Creatively With our Hands

Will spending multiple short periods of time working with various local people doing artisanry/handicrafts support bringing handicrafts/artisanry more fully into life? 

After doing local artisanry/handicraft activities, I’ll write a section of a reflection blog post on what kinds of crafts I participated in, what I did and with whom with at least five photographs. I will also reflect on:

1. “Carry-forwardness” – “Alignment”: Whether I have a sense of being able to carry the actual craft forward, certain elements of it in terms of skills or certain elements of it in terms of consciousness and ways the craft is practiced that help inform my view on life. 
2. “Carry-forwardness” – “Empowered co-creation”: In working with other people, probably mostly men at times, will we experience what we are doing as actively participating in something or supporting the thing that others, at times mostly men, are doing? 
3. “Carry-forwardness” – “Commitment”: Is there a sense of a growing commitment and capacity to bringing this practice more fully into life? 

When possible, I will incorporate these specific activities into filming, editing and posting a short 8-14 minute vlog a month.

2. Reconnecting to the Wider Web of Life as well as People

Will participating in community farming and food preparation/preservation activities help connect in genuine ways to the local community and feel a part of it?

After participating in community farming, food preparation and preservation activities, I’ll write a section of a reflection blog post on what kinds of community farming and food preparation/preservation activities I participated in, what I did and with whom with at least five photographs. I will also reflect on:

How mobilized I am in relation to:

1. Community farming and food prep/preservation activities.
2. Farming, food preparation and preservation activities this week.
3. In general in my life this week.

When possible, she will incorporate these specific activities into filming, editing and posting a short 8-14 minute vlog a month.

3. Restoring the Freedom to Move

Will walking various pilgrimages with friends for short periods of time in autumn 2025/spring 2026 support restoring regular movement in life?

Every trek I will write a section of a reflection blog post on where I went with at least five photographs. 2-3 blog posts later I will reflect on whether momentum is building in terms of restoring movement in life.

How it Serves the Purpose of Nonviolent Global Liberation

As you may have read elsewhere on the blog, I am part of an organization called NGL. During one of the sessions that I was going through my experiment design, my experiment steward invited me to tie it into how it might serve NGL’s purpose and in what ways. NGL’s purpose is: “To integrate nonviolence into the fabric of human life through ongoing live experiments with truth focused on individual and collective liberation.” So here are the two ways I’ve connected with so far;

1. Providing a do-able and immediately implementable model in the computer work era of contributing online while resourcing ourselves from the land in ways that tangibly connect us and contribute to a local community.

This one is has been of longstanding importance to me and is inspired by Gandhi’s Hand, Heart and Head theory. In my eyes, an ongoing crisis of the times likely influenced by my class background is the disconnection from soil, food, making things with our hands and doing this together with people we leave near and/or with. One of the driving factors to my move to Japan where in the countryside this is still alive in some way, shape and form. Confusable for a lifestyle thing and definitely too simplistic to be applied at the community scale, it may serve as insight for a small pod living together for whom larger-scale community is not yet accessible.

2. Beginning to experiment with implementing practices and principles in another culture and gathering research on the applicability of it in different cultural contexts, adapting it to a different cultural context and the outcomes of trying that.

This one is the point I am most excited about as I think it provides some research and insight into an area that does not have much if anything written on it. For a global community, there is not really any experimentation being done on applying the principles and practices in an East Asian cultural context which from what I’ve experienced so far — is wildly different than the North American one! I imagine being able to make barely a scratch on this topic as it’s so vast and yet am excited to begin reflecting on it with all of you and sharing my discoveries and experiences. For this one, I plan to write a report in conjunction with doing a yearlong NVC Leadership program.