VoiceLog-2026-06-28_Witness-Steve-Leady
VoiceLog-2026-06-28_Witness-Steve-Leady
Voice log, following a three-day, two-night stint in the Airstream on the mountain. Hood River? Not Hood River, Mount Hood. On the flanks of Mount Hood, to be accurate, Parkdale, Oregon.
So the point of this log is to give witness to Steve Leady, L-E-A-D-Y, for his enlightenment of a blind spot or a scotoma that I have had regarding witness, or the ability for me to experience the witness of my work fully so that I know it's been the wisdom, cost, and value have been transferred to others.
That's called a witness. That's what many makers lack. A couple of reasons for that, but let me explain how this comes about.
So Steve brought that up maybe two months ago in one of our meetings in the Airstream, Cowboy Ching, right? So as I was wearing Steve out with my explanations of AI, he would bring it all together and just say to me something like, "Witness."
And what he was doing in bringing up the subject that I couldn't receive at the time was validating the work that I had done, whereas in the past for decades, like for example, in Youth with a Mission, I did seven years to build a building called the Creative Lifestyle Center. It was 10,000 square feet. I pretty much single-handedly remodeled that entire thing from a soccer warehouse into an exhibition space with classrooms, a theater, a recording studio, a commercial kitchen because Graham was the galloping gourmet, Graham Care, who headed the project up.
The project was called Project Lord, L-O-R-D, Long Range Development. So it was a community and economic development model where students from UIWAM would come and study and in turn then they go out to the field to do economic development and ministry work.
So I built the facility. It took me seven years. And within nine months of me finishing it, the ministry ended. They vacated the building. Within a couple of years, the entire building was torn down and replaced with a set of condominiums.
And I took it as a rejection by God to receive my offering. And that wound has been there for a very long time because in several other projects, even in Skatomaville and in Nidium, for example, those that I mistakenly thought would be the first to receive it would be my family, my peers, maybe my community.
And to date, I don't even have a published copy. I have a pre-print author's proof of each of Skatomaville Trilogy and Nidium. I don't even have the final print version. And it's because we've been living under constraints. I haven't had the resources to actually even order more copies of the book. And that just sort of further perpetuated the scars of a gift well done, rejected.
But it turns out it wasn't that at all. It was simply that I was looking for witness in the wrong place. I was looking for validation from carbon rather than formation by God.
So my character has grown significantly richer and I appreciate the journey far more. I savor each of the aspects of fasting for a week because there's no money for food or pulling over and spending two or three nights on the side of the road because you're either out of gas or the vehicle broke down in the desert. True story. Those hardships produced gratitude for the abundance which followed.
So I say all this to get back to Steve and that I know this voice log is going to be dropped into Lattice which transcribes, enriches the amul, puts it in the knowledge base, prepares it for delivery into Principia. But it also can write the article all the way to syndication and then get silicon feedback on the article which when I read that produces silicon to carbon self-reflection.
In other words it takes the story I've told, retells it in a clearer format, condenses it and then can abstract it to a higher level and tell me even where the scotomas are within that. So I get a silicon reflection back which I can use as feedback into the knowledge base again.
So it's a self-referential ascending helix of personal maturation, chasing wid-wid as a personal Everest. Why do I do what I do and learning that and using the tool not to propagate for validation using the tool for actual transmission. That's called witness. I just never had a word for it.
So that's my log and I'm wrapping it up and heading back down to the salt cave for pizza night. All right. Love you guys. Bye.