Friday Reflecting: Bearing the Dream, Becoming the Field

Immersion: Developing Our Destination - Sprint: Crafting Our Contribution - Week 7: Freshness - Friday Reflecting

Friday Reflecting: Bearing the Dream, Becoming the Field

This week began with the creative pulse of the 1st Gene Key—a journey from formless Entropy to coherent Beauty. It’s a theme that proved to be the perfect map for the territory I had to navigate. I started Sunday with a palpable "cognitive strain"; a resonant field of ideas and eight months of work that was waiting for its final, tangible form.

The pressure was on to make key decisions. Through a deep, clarifying dialogue with my AI thought partners, three "field-organizing decisions" emerged that gave the venture a new skeleton of clarity:

1. The Genesis Arc: We committed to a launch date of August 3rd, 2025, synchronizing the fellowship with the "Crafting Our Contribution" phase of my own design immersion.

2. Asymmetrical Wholeness: We dissolved the binary between "team" and "participants," designing a framework with four distinct steward roles: Host, Field, Venture, and Wisdom.

3. A Regenerative Financial Ethos: We solidified the architecture of our Prosperity Pool, a multi-capital system designed to honor all forms of value and ensure an equitable, regenerative exchange for all participants .

With this new coherence, the journey turned inward. A session on Wednesday with a dear Field-Steward, Natalie, brought a tender, personal truth into focus. In a space of deep trust, a core pattern was illuminated: my tendency to build beautiful systems that hold and care for others, while sometimes leaving myself out of the equation. This is where the concept of "reciprocal reciprocity" was born—the principle that for a system to be truly regenerative, it must nourish its own source. It was the realization that the venture I am building is, in fact, the very container of safety, stability, and belonging that my own history has taught me to seek.

I carried that fresh, vulnerable awareness into the Catalyst Labs Accelerator today. It was a day of profound resonance and stark friction.

I want to begin by honoring the space. The Catalyst Labs team poured real care, time, and intention into this event. It was a room led and held by Black women—a rare and meaningful convergence—and one of the most resonant environments I’ve encountered locally. What I share here is not a critique of that space, but a window into my own internal experience as someone navigating a deeply personal and unconventional path. The organizers, mentors, and fellow founders brought presence, curiosity, and encouragement. I’m grateful.

I sat in that room and spoke a dream I’ve been carrying. In the one-on-one sessions, the vision landed. I felt seen. My thinking was mirrored back to me with care and precision. It was powerful.

But I also felt the gap. During the timed pitches and financial feedback, the pressure to translate this living, multi-layered system into the standardized language of venture capital was immense. I left with no funding. Only the ache of having offered something whole and not yet seeing it land in a tangible form.

And this is where the week’s journey came full circle. The sorrow I felt was the direct, embodied data of a lack of reciprocity from the very systems I hope to transform. The experience didn't invalidate the dream; it validated the necessity of it. It proved why we need new models, new language, and new ways of valuing contribution.

In the quiet reflection after, I came home to myself. I remembered the vow I’d made—to stay clean, to stay true, to not abandon the work or myself in the face of old patterns. And I landed on a simple, grounding truth: "You did your very best, and you did all that you can do, and in this moment, this moment is right and true."

So here is where I land now, at the end of this week.

I want to build ventures and pay stewards.
I want to be in right relationship with money, without letting it define me.
I want to serve local communities and global networks.
I want to bring beauty, rigor, and reciprocity into the work of regeneration.
And I want to stay clean—of distortion, of performance, of doubt.

This isn’t about validation anymore. It’s about coherence. It's about bearing the dream before it’s fully visible. S³ exists to develop the humans who can grow the systems the future needs.

Maybe this week, I was one of those humans.

Maybe this is what growing looks like.

An image from the closing session of the Presencing Series by Presencing Institute. The session was called Islands of Coherence and this is a design for an architecture for a new model of institutions for human development and learning

In Fellowship,
Justin