It was almost 3 years ago (August of 2010) that I last wrote here.  It was an article about how, despite not writing much, I needed to – to express much of the random thoughts, opinions, & musings constantly streaming through my mind.  It’s ironic that after writing such an article, I failed to write for the past three years.  I guess I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was.

But the past is the past. And while I’m not making any grand commitments to write a lot, I want to start again.

The past three years have been strange ones for me.  Up until the summer of 2010, I had life pretty well figured out (or so I thought). I was at that time leading an experimental faith community, communitasPHX, in downtown Phoenix.  I was running my small web/print design studio, MethodLab.  I was working to expand both.  I had dreams of building communitasPHX into a more established non-profit exploring spirituality in the developing urban space where traditional faith and church structures aren’t embraced.  We had opened a community art/event space known as fractal (at some expense to my personal finances & without any real business plan).  CommunitasPHX hosted events such as the PHX Brew Party & Taco Day had grown to include larger numbers of people that we knew what to do with. We were in process of bringing on our first paid staff member to pursue new sources of funding and to develop the organization.  As for Methodlab, known as MethodLab Media at the time, we had new office space housed within the fractal space.  My work as Methodlab was becoming more and more public.  As a designer, I was involved in the local design community which offered some amazing relationships & partnerships that benefitted my endeavors.  Business was growing.

And just as quickly as it all happened, it all fell apart.  Fractal quickly became painfully expensive and exhausting to manage.  Some serious miscommunication (I’m sure mostly on my part) caused the relationship with the new communitasPHX staffer to disintegrate. Volunteers we relied on moved away. Trying to develop my design business bored me.  Instead of renewing the lease on our rented 1910 bungalow, Kelli and I decided to purchase a bankruptcy property in Uptown – adding the chaos of moving and a house renovation into the mix of our lives.

Somewhere in all of the chaos and life change, I lost my faith. It wasn’t a complete loss, but enough to shake up my entire world. For the past 3 years, I have been simply existing as a spiritual person, little, if ever, nurturing that part of myself.  But it’s time to reconstruct a faith using the pieces that remain and combining them with pieces that have been newly discovered.

I hope to rediscover a part of myself that has never ceased to exist, but has instead been misplaced. I’ll detail some of it here, but more in depth posts on spirituality can be found at the Open Abbey.

For now, I just needed to get this first post (as jumbled and all over the place as it might be) written as a first step.