I’m finally able to work on the sacred spaces launch today and a bit tomorrow. Getting to this point has felt a bit like a steep uphill struggle.

In part I’ve been drawn away from work on One because of a project brewing around a new Bahá’í site for 10- to 14-year-olds, which brought me to San Francisco for a weekend summit meeting. Mentally, for me, the projects can get a bit mixed, vexing as that may be.

But in addition to that, I’ve been feeling the urge to do something different with One now that we’re entering its second year as a Web site. This urge arrives in the guise of a great huge cloud of grumpiness. Sometimes a person has to wait until the cloud can lift a bit to see what all is hidden inside. This waiting period can be very frustrating. There is a creative aspect that is simply not possible to control in a linear fashion.

Today, sorting out these issues through a bit of talking with River, who is One’s art director, I realized that a change in Web format would be a great thing. What if One were a semi-steady blog instead of a static, non-commentable theme-oriented product? Even a semi-steady blog could maintain the theme concept, if it’s even worth hanging onto. (It helps me anchor article ideas, but I don’t know if it helps contributors at all.)

Another knot I’m trying to untangle is how to continue to work with contributors and possible editors. In the last year we’ve seen a lot of highs and lows in the teamwork process. I’ve realized that I do myself a favor when I work with other people face-to-face, especially people under the age of, say, 24. (Folks older than that tend to be more steadily available over email, even if they are otherwise occupied a lot with school, work or family.) But putting together a local team is like herding cats. Sometimes it just clicks, but it doesn’t seem to be because of anything I do. Therefore, I wonder what’s worth doing.

I want One magazine to survive but it’s hard to do in a vacuum. What tactics might I employ to lessen that sense of vacuum, and foster instead a sense of community, of readership, collective art, participation and commentary; mutual exploration; a showcase of what we do individually and in groups? A place where anyone can drop in and find something to appreciate?

I’ll continue to ponder these questions as I assemble what will likely be the final piece of a certain nine-part series—One magazine’s first year online, beginning and ending in springtime (in the northern hemisphere anyway).

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a slight delay in the publication of the next issue of One on sacred spaces.

Hopefully, it’ll be worth the wait.

In tandem with this delay, all other deadlines are going to be pushed back, so stay tuned. If you’ve been working on anything for the forthcoming issue on the past, you have more time.

When the next issue’s up, I’ll post here, so keep your RSS reader at the ready.

After some delay this time around, archives for the justice issue are now available for perusal and reference.

I’m at the two-week point prior to yet another launch, and once again, it’s a bit like prepping for a sprint. While watching one of my favorite sports during this year’s Olympics in Italy, short track speed skating, I was reminded of the feeling of this mode of preparation. The precise moment of maximum insanity is not when the racers are on the sidelines, or even when they step out onto the ice and mill around and puff a lot of air and yawn. It’s when they get up to their starting spot, and hunker down, and place their skates. It’s in those few seconds between getting into position, and actually being able to start. It’s when the brain is most likely to revolt; it’s when all forms of thought can enter between any possible mental cracks in the surface, and undo weeks, months, years of training.

Not that producing an online magazine is an Olympic sport. But it can be a mental game just as much as anything else. I don’t want to overdo it, and I don’t want to underdo it. I want to keep myself limber, but I don’t want to cause myself injury from… too much editing. Or, rather, too much time spent on something that gives back in some proportion, for when one over-gives, it can lead to bitterness and frustration, and leaves the realm of love-labor.

This is why I try to walk away, and think of other things, and make sure that plenty of life is happening on and off the “field,” and make sure that there is a porous environment for creativity and other avenues of service. I don’t want to suffocate in the space that is One mag.

At the same time, I want to do well with it, and when I get to that starting line, I want to feel confident that I can do it at all. It means not worrying too much about whether there are any people working on it with me (sometimes there are, sometimes there aren’t). It means I have to remain just buoyant and detached enough that “winning” and “losing” aren’t part of the self-dialogue; instead it’s all about “doing it as well as I can,” and aggressively so. I don’t want any fissures on the surface for insecurities and worries to seep in: I want this to be excellently fun.

Along the lines of the current identity issue in One, the Mavin Foundation publishes a “high-quality, cutting-edge magazine that explores the experiences of mixed race people, transracial adoptees, and our families. Our articles redefine diversity by thinking about race and culture outside the box.” Check it out. You can get back issues (along with t-shirts) at the Mavin Foundation store. The shirts celebrate “hybrid vigor” and “TRA,” or transracial adoption: “The perfect shirt for your mixed heritage.”

In our recent issue on justice, we published an article by Aníse Meccouri, “The Hotbed of Bed-Stuy,” which covered the topic of gentrification in the Brooklyn neighborhood, and offered a small window onto the experience of its residents.

One thing Aníse mentioned to me is that, when presenting the ideas in his piece to a college class he was taking at the time, he had suggested that if white people were looking to relocate, maybe they could avoid considering Bed-Stuy. His reasoning, as I understood it, was that the community there was under a lot of pressure, and it is all too easy for whites to move in as though they have the right, once a place becomes “attractive” to them. As Aníse told the story, the idea was not necessarily well-received among his classmates.

For this reason, I’ve been tracking with interest the Internet searches that bring people to the “Hotbed” article. A sampling below, from February 2006:

“how safe is it for white people to live in bedford stuyvesant” x 2
“stuyvesant heights” x 2
“bed stuy crime” x 2
“bed stuy organic” x 2
“bed stuy best areas”
“whites in bed-stuy?” x 2
“stuyvesant heights parents group”
“bed-stuy brooklyn crime”
“bed-stuy safe real estate”
“bedstuy brooklyns gangs”
“stuyvesant heights crime”

I think the first search item listed really says it all about the question on some people’s minds. And, for me, it makes Aníse’s article that much more timely. As part of the research, he also produced a video, documenting interviews with some of the residents of Bed-Stuy. I haven’t yet viewed it, but my sense from talking with Aníse is that the interviews provide a very precise idea of how protective some residents feel about their neighborhood, and just sampling these search strings, we can get a sense for why. It’s uncomfortable being under the microscope, and being targeted as somehow still suspect as a neighborhood, yet deemed “desirable.”

The identity issue launched today. Take a look and come back here to give feedback if you like. The color palette of this new issue offers up plenty of red to brighten your February and March (should they need brightening).