I Could Never Be a Delivery Driver

Today one of the boys was ready for school before the other, and in an astounding twist he actually went outside to wait as I asked instead of hanging around to distract his brother. When we joined him a few minutes later, he was posing in front of the car, looking at his reflection clarified by the fresh morning light. He was above the rear tire, near the small triangular window, where there were many angles and curves to create interesting distortions. He was laughing at the way his face and arms were twisted and stretched.

"Come look at me!" he said.

I started to say, "We won't be able to see exactly what you see, because to do that we need to have our eyes where your eyes are. If you move to let us look, your reflection will move with you. If we look from near you, our different perspective will change everything." I started to say that, but didn't need to.

His brother switched places with him. "Whoa, I have three sets of eyes."

"No, you're not looking from the right spot. I saw . . . "

A moment later when we were in the car, I told them they had just embodied a wonderful metaphor for interpersonal interactions. You can never see exactly what another person sees because you will always be in a different location, and that distinct perspective means you will see things differently. Even when you try to look from where they're looking so you can see what they see, it is difficult to get exactly the same position and perspective.

A bit later, after I had dropped them at school and was driving to work, another interesting thought struck me. I was on a busy, main road divided into five lanes: one in each direction for through traffic, a middle turning lane between them, and two generously spaced bike lanes at the edges. There was a car pulled to the side of the road where it shouldn't have been, blocking the bike lane and bordering the driving lane too closely. Someone was walking from the nearest house to the driver's door. I saw from his clothes he had just dropped an Amazon package, and I thought, "I could never work as a delivery driver."

I am annoyed every time I see a delivery vehicle pulled to the side of a road. Annoyed, because they are almost always stopped in such a way that they impede the flow of traffic. It seems the authorities--and we as a society--have decided it is permissible for delivery drivers to put their own convenience ahead of the general welfare. We value speed, efficiency, comfort and consumption so much we allow them to be exempt from traffic laws. I am annoyed not because it slows me down personally and not on principle that rules are being broken, I am annoyed because I see those rules as guidelines for successfully interacting with each other. They help us enact awareness of others and of our impact on them. We agree on these traffic laws, agree to follow them, because they help us be considerate and cooperative. So when delivery vehicles don't follow those rules, when they single out their own needs ahead of the common good, they are opting out of consideration and cooperation.

That's not the kind of person I want to be, so that's a job I could never work.

The thought brings to mind an interaction I had last week with a library patron. It was a mom wanting help finding books that would appeal to her teen daughters yet also not have content that would conflict with their family's values. It's a common issue that almost all parents struggle with in some way. I was called in to help. We sat down together to clarify what they were looking for and I showed her tools and search strategies to help them find books that would work. It was a good interaction that I would consider a success; I believe she went away satisfied with what she'd learned and happy with my patron service.

Though she had one prominent thought intermingled with her satisfaction throughout the interaction, and it remained as a frustration at the end: "Why can't this be easier?" She was frustrated that the types of books she was looking for are lumped in with all the rest of the fiction. That she had to cross-reference with lists, reviews, parent advisory websites, and similar to gain insight into the contents of books and their appropriateness to her needs. To be clear, she didn't want a specific genre or a topic that would be contained in a subject heading--she was concerned with the nature of the stories, with how they were told--so there is no easy way to do a catch-all search for what she was after. It's not hard to find what she wanted, it's just not a simple, one-step process. It takes a bit of time and effort.

"I don't understand why you can't just pull these books out and have them on different shelves as a separate category." She said a version of that quite a few times. "It shouldn't have to be this hard." I assured her it is simply the process of finding books of any nature, that it is the same for everyone. If you're looking for something specific, you have to do the work of looking for it regardless of what that "something" is. We have all sorts of books that appeal to many different types of people, all living side-by-side on the shelves, and it's always a process to find the right sort of book for each type of person. And it doesn't work well to try to have special sections because no book categorizes cleanly and clearly and because each reader brings a unique mix of interests and needs. Books cross genre and topic boundaries; people individually define genres and topics. Still, even at the end, "It would be so much easier if you just pulled out the ones I want and created a special section."

I walked away from the interaction with two thoughts. First, she wanted the world to cater to her and her needs. She wanted everything adjusted to suit her so that she didn't have to adjust to situations and surroundings. She wanted to single out her own needs ahead of the common good, to opt out of consideration and cooperation.

Second, I felt that the discussion we'd just had was a great metaphor for living in a pluralistic, democratic society. We don't--or at least shouldn't--live our lives in special sections, only interacting with those who are the same. We have too much diversity for that. Just like books, people don't categorize cleanly and clearly; we each have a unique mix of identities, experiences, interests, and needs. And we're all interfiled, all mixed together. We don't (shouldn't) cater to one particular type or group, and if you want to find people you resonate with then you have to dive in and do a bit of searching with different strategies and tools. And that's the way it should be, with no particular type privileged above the rest. That's what it means to value diversity and equality.

I'm still pondering the metaphorical possibilities hinted at in this essay. Why everything is gray.

How the Modern World Turned Gray (and Why Color May Be Coming Back)

America is anything but monochrome. It contains multitudes of cultures, climates, and landscapes, and people who disagree, loudly and publicly, about nearly everything. So why, when Americans need a tin of house paint, do they so often reach for the neutral shelf? Why does the average house in this great and varied nation look like it’s been dipped in a vat of Resigned Indifference®? . . . 

The shift was slow but steady, and its cumulative effect was massive. By the late 20th century, grayscale had colonized and dominated a wide range of object categories. To a large extent, this desaturation is a byproduct of mass production. Industrial manufacturing favors repeatability. Neutral tones are easier to standardize, less likely to clash, and more globally marketable than a particular shade of tangerine, which may sell brilliantly in Seville but offend everyone in Seoul. . . . 

The logic behind this near-total surrender is once again financial. Car paint production is expensive, and unusual colors reduce the chance that a vehicle will be sold. So manufacturers rationalize their palettes to a dozen safe tones per model, max. Large institutional buyers — rental companies, fleet operators — reinforce that conservative streak, because they too must eventually bulk-sell whatever they bulk-buy. The result? A self-reinforcing cycle of blandness.

A similar calculus applies to houses and house paints. As any estate agent will tell you, neutral colors maximize the resale value of your house because they offend the fewest buyers. There may well be a future home owner out there who shares your passion for aubergine — but betting on them being in the market precisely when you’re selling is a pretty big gamble, and with one of the most expensive assets you’re ever likely to own.

And so the houses of America, and much of the world, are painted in Agreeable Gray, Mindful Gray, Accessible Beige, and their many relatives from the neutral shelf. Note what these names actually signal: not This is who I am, but Please, don’t mind me. Agreeable Gray — the top choice in Alabama, Arizona, and the Carolinas — doesn’t so much describe a color as a social posture. . . . 

So this is where practicality, resale values, and modernist ideology have gotten us: to a material world that is so drained of color that it might depress the hell out of even Adolf Loos and Le Corbusier.

Interestingly, studies suggest there’s something to that colloquial association between gray and depression. Researchers at the University of Manchester tested healthy volunteers, people with anxiety, and people with depression, asking each to choose a color that represents their current mood. Yellow dominated among healthy subjects. Among both anxious and depressed participants, gray monopolized the top spots — with participants describing it as representing “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or a disinterest in life.” The researchers cited previous studies that found depressed people tend to describe life as “monochromatic” or as having “lost its color.”

Desaturation is a byproduct of mass production.

Can a mass of people be desaturated?

From the entry for "Guilt" in the book Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.

Guilt is not something we need to get over, guilt is where we need to go.

Guilt is the first doorway to our foundational vulnerability and eventually our compassion, where we stand in trepidation at our ability to hurt others, and always in that ability, afraid therefore, that we are not worthy to enter and not worthy of understanding or being understood. . . . 

In guilt is the unrecognized, instinctual, ultimate first step to self-compassion, refusing to let us proceed whole-heartedly, and with a free heart, without including everything and everyone in our understanding.

I alluded to privilege above, and people made aware of their privilege often feel guilt. Getting mired in guilt, resenting it, is a bad thing. But it's the first step in accepting responsibility and making change. Guilt is where we need to go.

A meme recently crossed my feed. It didn't land with me entirely and I'm not sure I endorse the entire message, but I was particularly struck by theological statement, the idea of trying to get people into heaven rather than heaven into people.

A fundamental flaw of the modern church is its primary goal to get people into heaven rather than heaven into people, thereby creating a superficial religious culture that believe they will be saved after death, but do not truly abide by the divine guidance embodied by the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.

A good fifteen years ago I wrote here about my theology being focused on the present much more than future. The afterlife is a source of hope for those whose lives know only despair, that even if they can't imagine their lives ever improving they have something more to keep them moving; but it was never supposed to be about just waiting contently or resignedly for a reward. The Lord's Prayer includes the plea for everything to be on earth as it is in heaven. The goal is not to wait for heaven but to try to actualize it as much as possible here and now. We should do things that bring perfect relationships into the present.

This thought weaves its way into many of my posts--the one I link to above is merely a representative sample. But I don't believe I've ever encountered (or used) that particular turn of phrase before: the goal is to get heaven into people. I like it.

A couple of quick quotes from books I just read.

Miga was itchy in her brain.

It was the worst kind of itch--the kind you can't scratch and yet everything seems to irritate it further.

― Rachel Hartman, Among Ghosts

I can relate to the feeling of having an itchy brain.

Stories are not a simple recounting of events. They are not a thorough reporting of moments over a given period of time. Stories are the crafted representation of events that are related in such a way to demonstrate change over time in the life of the teller.

― Matthew Dicks, Storyworthy

Stories demonstrate change over time.

I was born in the latter part of 1971. I too was class of '89. I was playing D&D in 1983. My spouse and I finally just finished watching all of Stranger Things. And I still regret selling my Deities & Demigods book.

We watched the show when it was new along with everyone else, but for some reason got away from it in the middle of season 3 and never got back. So recently we restarted the series and watched it to the end, finishing it the other night.

"The main Stranger Things characters (Mike, Will, Lucas, Dustin, Eleven, and Max) were mostly born in 1971, making them 12 years old during the season 1 events in November 1983."

I've always felt strongly connected to the group because of our similarities and shared experiences. The same pop culture. My small town was in Kansas instead of Indiana, but similar. I was also mocked for playing D&D and having nerdy inclinations.

I have always appreciated how much mythology I learned from reading the game's manual for gods and god-like figures, Deities & Demigods. Many pantheons from cultures and mythologies around the world. Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian gods and many others. When I was finishing college I decided for a bit to try to sell some of the stuff from the boxes I was having to lug around every time I moved, and I got rid of that book. I regretted it pretty quickly and have ever since. Particularly that night, because the book also included the stats, information, and story of Vecna.

I do still have the Ravenloft  book featuring the vampire Strahd, which is the campaign the group is finishing in their final scene.

And many years later, as an adult librarian, I found a new group of friends to play D&D with. We had a years-long campaign. My character was Degolar the bard, who specialized in sorcerer-like magic at higher levels. One of his proudest moments near the end was when he freed a party member whose brain had been dominated by a mind flayer. Degolar used the charm magic of his music to dominate his teammate even more effectively than the baddie. He managed to out-flay the flayer.

This article fascinates me. And resonates. I love experiencing a flow state, and I seem to find that most often when I am creating, when I'm writing or crafting. I've also written many times that hiking and trail running are my favorite forms of meditation. My mind is most at ease (least itchy) when my body is in motion.

How a Small Shop in Kyoto Connects Mastery with Meditation

Today, meditation is something we do outside of work. We download apps. We schedule sessions with therapists. We carve out time to steady our minds because our days rarely allow for it naturally. Behavioral health has become a booming industry.

This is not an accident.

We live in a time when very few people are allowed — or encouraged — to pursue mastery in a deep, patient sense. Work has become fragmented. Attention is constantly interrupted. Success is measured in metrics and outputs rather than quality or depth. We bounce between tasks, inboxes, and platforms, rarely staying with any one thing long enough to become truly good at it.

And so we seek meditation as a corrective — a counterbalance — a way to reclaim focus in an environment that seems designed to fracture it. . . . 

We often treat focus as a personality trait, or meditation as a wellness accessory. But focus is structural. It emerges when we design our lives and work around fewer, more meaningful pursuits. It appears when we allow ourselves to stay with something long enough for depth to replace novelty.

The tragedy of modern work is not that we ask too much of people — it’s that we ask too little of their attention. We keep people busy but not engaged. Productive but not absorbed. In doing so, we deprive them of one of mastery’s great rewards: the feeling of being fully present in what you’re doing. . . . 

First: Slow down — not everywhere, but somewhere

Slowness doesn’t need to be universal to be effective. You don’t need to slow every part of your life. But you do need at least one domain where speed isn’t the primary metric — one place where you allow yourself to work deliberately, without racing to the next thing. This might be how you write emails. How you prepare for meetings. How you think through a problem before responding. The activity itself matters less than the permission to resist haste. Slowness creates space for attention. And attention is the soil in which mastery grows.

Second: Focus on something worthy — even if it’s small

Not every pursuit needs to be world-changing to matter. The craftsman at Kaikado isn’t reinventing the tea caddy or building a world-conquering app. He’s refining a process, again and again. You can bring this same mindset to something as ordinary as an email. Write it clearly and thoughtfully. Or apply it to a presentation, a report, or a conversation — anything. When you treat small tasks as worthy of care, they become something more valuable for both you and the recipient. They stop being obstacles to clear and become practices to engage with.

Third: Try to get a little better every day

Mastery isn’t dramatic, and it’s rarely noticed until it’s felt. It accumulates through marginal gains that are nearly invisible in the moment. The craftsman I met didn’t expect to be great anytime soon. He expected to be better — over many years.

This is far more sustainable than chasing constant excellence or overnight success. Improvement compounds. Over weeks, months, and years, it reshapes how you think and what becomes possible. Given a steady object of focus, the mind settles. The noise recedes. The work becomes its own reward.

We often assume that peace comes from escape — from stepping away from work and responsibility. But sometimes it comes from the opposite direction: from leaning in, narrowing our focus, and committing to doing one thing well for a very long time.

Mastery, it turns out, may be one of the oldest — and most underrated — forms of meditation we have.

These are ideas not simply for healthier moments, minds, and individuals, but for interactions, relationships, and structures.

There is much in this article related to the previous one, applied structurally.

What 1,000-Year-Old Companies Know about Resilience

For too long, we’ve been sold a version of resilience that looks like a solitary figure bracing against a gale. And as our world grows more volatile, that version of endurance is no longer working; it’s leading to burnout — not durability.

The following exploration of long-lived systems is designed to help you unlearn the myth of the rugged individual — and to move the conversation away from how we “tough it out” and toward how we design lives, businesses, and communities that are inherently built to endure. . . . 

We treat resilience as a character trait. But in the real world, over long horizons, resilience behaves much more like the defining property of an ecosystem.

Think of a forest. A forest isn’t resilient because each individual tree is “tough.” A forest is resilient because it is an interconnected web. If one tree is attacked by pests, it sends chemical signals through the fungal network in the soil to warn its neighbors. If a clearing opens up, the surrounding trees race to fill the gap. The system has redundancy. It has slack.

In business, we have spent the past 40 years trying to eliminate slack. We worship efficiency. We want “just-in-time” supply chains and “lean” headcounts. But efficiency is the enemy of resilience. If you optimize a system for a perfectly sunny day, that system will inevitably shatter the moment it starts to rain.

If we want to fix our understanding of resilience, we have to stop looking at the individual hero and start looking at the architecture of the system. Based on my research into these thousand-year-old outliers, I’ve noticed three specific patterns where we’ve lost our way — and how we can find it again. . . . 

1. The fallacy of the human cost . . . 

A fundamental rule of social systems: Trust is a structural asset. . . . 

Enduring organizations treat people as a form of capital to be preserved, not a variable expense to be managed. They understand that when a crisis hits, you don’t survive because of your balance sheet; you survive because your people are willing to close ranks and solve the problem.

2. The trap of hockey-stick growth . . . 

Growth that outpaces a system’s ability to absorb it is a form of pathology. . . . 

Fast growth creates fragility. . . . 

The long-lived companies I studied grow at what I call “natural speed.” They expand at a pace that allows their internal capabilities to keep up with their external complexity. They don’t want to be the biggest; they want to be the most “coherent.” Coherence is the ability of an organization to coordinate its actions under stress. If you are coherent, you can pivot. If you are only “big” and “fast,” you usually just crash. . . . 

3. The discipline of the unfinished . . . 

The third and perhaps most counterintuitive lesson: the importance of continuous maintenance. . . . 

The secret to longevity is to practice maintenance when things are going well. . . . 

Resilient organizations use their good times to pressure-test their assumptions. They go looking for micro-fractures while they still have the cash and the psychological bandwidth to fix them. They treat maintenance as a form of “organizational exercise” — it’s uncomfortable and easy to skip, but it’s the only thing that builds the underlying strength necessary to survive a system-level rupture. . . . 

Resilience is not a solo sport. It is a collective achievement. It is the result of thousands of small, unglamorous decisions made over decades — decisions to be a little less efficient, a little more human, and a lot more patient. We don’t fix resilience by making individuals tougher. We fix it by building systems that are worth saving.

Look to structures and systems. It is a collective achievement.

Related to the design of structures and systems, this is a really excellent article about the structure of human-AI interactions.

The Hidden Value in the Human-AI Arrangement

There are three publications that saw past this [computation-consciousness] binary more than 50 years ago: Douglas Engelbart’s “Augmenting Human Intellect,” J.C.R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis” and Ted Nelson’s “Computer Lib/Dream Machines.” Each envisioned computational structures designed to deepen rather than bypass human thought, and asked precisely the question that Seth’s framework cannot reach: What emerges when human capability and computational power are arranged to compound rather than to substitute? The field that claims to augment human capability has, it seems, not read the work that defines what augmentation means.

When a human works with an AI system — when a radiologist reads scans with a diagnostic tool, when an analyst constructs a financial model with a computational partner, when an architect tests structural variations with a generative system — something emerges that exists in neither participant. It is not consciousness. The machine does not feel anything. But it is not mere computation, either. It is enacted intelligence: situated, distributed, directional and irreducible to either party. . . . 

Experts across the consciousness domain have demonstrated that cognition is distributed across people, tools and environments; that intelligent action is not the execution of prior plans, but a continuous response to unfolding situations; and that the mind extends beyond the skull into the tools and technologies it couples with. These are not marginal positions. They represent the dominant movement in contemporary cognitive science. . . . 

If cognition is distributed, enacted and extended, then the relevant unit of analysis is not the individual brain (biological or artificial), but rather the configuration in which intelligence operates. The question is not whether the machine is conscious. The question is what the configuration produces — and whether we are preserving or destroying the conditions under which it produces well. . . . 

In a randomized clinical trial . . . physicians who were given access to GPT-4 alongside conventional diagnostic resources were no more accurate in their diagnoses than physicians without it — even as GPT-4 alone outperformed both groups by more than 15%. The same AI. The same clinical task. No significantly measurable benefit — because the arrangement was naive: The technology was bolted onto existing workflows with no designed interaction, no structured dialogue, no preservation of the clinician’s independent reasoning.

When the collaboration was redesigned — requiring clinician and AI to generate independent assessments, then structuring a dialogue that surfaced disagreements and held the clinician’s reasoning in the loop — diagnostic accuracy rose from 75% without AI to 82 to 85% with the collaborative AI. The difference was not in the data. It was in the quality of the human-AI arrangement: whether the human’s judgment was preserved, amplified and compounded by the collaboration, or bypassed, flattened and ultimately eroded. . . . 

When the system was tailored to the expert’s cognitive style — structuring authority, workflows and incentives to preserve expert judgement — on average, client meetings rose more than 40% and sales rose 16%. When the same system was imposed without regard for how the human thinks, sales fell about 20% below the no-AI baseline. Worse than no AI at all. . . . 

For tasks requiring the kind of judgment that AI processes without possessing, AI-assisted consultants performed significantly worse than those working alone. The technology did not fail. The arrangement did. When humans deferred to computational fluency on tasks where human judgment was needed most, the collaboration became a liability. . . . 

The question is whether the configuration preserves the conditions under which human judgment remains active, directional and capable of intervening when the system drifts.

The absence of consciousness in AI is not merely a philosophical finding. It is a design condition with measurable economic consequences. It means that every human-AI system must be architected to preserve the human’s capacity for meaning-making, judgment and coherence-holding.

The mythology of automation: the belief that removing the human from the loop is always an efficiency gain. That judgment is a cost to be eliminated. That capability is a fixed input rather than a compounding asset. That the purpose of AI is to perform tasks currently performed by people, only faster and cheaper. . . . 

The first Industrial Revolution produced what economists call “Engels’ Pause,” a period where output per worker grew by 46% while wages rose by a mere 12%. The Second Industrial Revolution, dominated by enabling technologies, produced broadly shared prosperity. The third, dominated by replacing technologies, has coincided with stagnant wages and rising inequality. The pattern is not technological but institutional: When societies build frameworks for augmentation, wealth distributes; when they default to automation, it concentrates. . . . 

The object-oriented question — What is AI? — is comfortable, containable and philosophically rewarding. The relational question — What does the human-AI arrangement produce, and under what conditions does it produce well? — is uncomfortable, uncontainable and demands that we reorganize our metrics, our institutions and our conception of value itself.

We need to build institutions capable of recognizing where the value lies — not inside the machine, not inside the human skull, but in the arrangement between them. In the conditions under which judgment compounds. In the quality of attention that sustains coherence across discontinuous interactions. In the human capacity to project meaning, test it against reality and revise it under constraint. In the irreducibly relational intelligence that emerges when humans and machines coordinate with shared orientation. . . . 

The more urgent mythology is not the fantasy of conscious machines. It is the quiet, pervasive, economically devastating assumption that human presence in the loop is a cost rather than the source of compounding value. That capability is consumed rather than cultivated. That the point of intelligence is to eliminate the need for judgment rather than to deepen its exercise.

The goal should be not automation, but augmentation. A relationship, an interaction, an exchange.

Something emerges that exists in neither participant.

Daniel Pink posted on Facebook:

This recent study by a neurologist will drastically change how you think about burnout. (The "cure" is surprisingly physical.)

Stress isn't what breaks the brain. Rumination is. The brain can handle intense pressure. But it struggles with endless loops of unprocessed thought.

The study showed brain scans of two people: one after a crisis; one after a day of overthinking. The crisis brain was activated but intact. The overthinking brain looked foggy, fatigued.

The body recovers from adrenaline relatively quickly. It does not recover quickly from mental spinning. That's one reason you can sleep eight or nine hours and still feel depleted.

The study described a young doctor who felt exhausted despite 9 hours of sleep. Tracking showed she spent about 70% of her day in micro-worry: replaying conversations; rehearsing outcomes; planning 50 steps ahead.

Her brain never reached true rest mode. She never got a break. Rumination is stress without resolution.

The antidote? Interrupt the loop with the body. Anything that brings the nervous system into the present gives the brain a chance to reset.

Here's the 5-minute nervous system circuit breakers:

• cold water on the face;
• long exhales or humming;
• stairs or squats;
• shake out arms and legs;
• press feet into the ground, feel your weight;
• look around, name 5 things you see;
• hand on heart + belly, slow breath.

The final message: burnout isn't a psychological failure. It's a neurological backlog. We don't collapse because we feel too much. We collapse because we never stop processing.

Clarity starts in the body before it becomes mental. Your brain needs interruption. Take 5 minutes to shift the state. Take 5 minutes to come home.

Rumination (itchiness) breaks the brain. Physical presence (mindfulness, embodiment, flow, mastery) breaks rumination.

A couple of poems from the book A Rhythm of Prayer: A Collection of Meditations for Renewal, ed. by Sarah Bessey.

A Prayer to Learn to

Love the World Again

by Sarah Bessey

God of herons and heartbreak,

teach us to love the world again.

Teach us to love extravagantly

knowing it may

(it will) break our hearts

and teach us that it is worth it.

God of pandemics and suffering ones,

teach us to love the world again.

God of loneliness and longing,

of bushfires and wilderness,

of soup kitchens and border towns,

of snowfall and children,

teach us to love the world again.

Amen.

-----

The Lantern

and the

Wildflower

by Kaitlin Curtice

If only I could give you

the gift of Adventure.

If only I could box her up

for you,

that big red bow on top,

glimmering.

But this cannot be.

Adventure is not given or earned.

She is a breath that is prayed.

A force that is found,

found in the soul of everyone

and everything.

But maybe, just maybe,

if I cannot box her up for you,

I can at least point you

in her direction.

Maybe, at least,

I can tell you where I saw her last,

what I prayed when I was alone,

waiting in a forest under the pine trees,

waiting for her to appear.

Maybe that will be

your Beginning.

You see, I didn’t learn for a long time.

For years, as soon as I began

searching,

I hid behind fear,

all the while,

Adventure waiting for me

with a lantern and wildflower.

All that time, I only wanted

pictures of her,

without knowing her presence,

her warmth,

her smell.

But when I met her,

I found myself.

When I prayed,

I found God.

If only I could teach you

not to be afraid.

If only I could tell you

that it’s okay if you don’t

have words left

to pray.

If only I could point you

towards that lantern

and that wildflower.

If only I could show you

the way to God.

But God cannot be given or earned.

No, God is found.

So, in that soul of yours,

there is the greatest opportunity.

You.

The world.

Breath and prayer embodied.

Everything sacred.

These things would never fit

into a box

with a big red bow on top,

glimmering.

Everything is sacred. Herons and heartbreak, lanterns and wildflowers. Love extravagantly, knowing it will hurt. Love everything.

From the entry for "Horizons" in the book Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.

Horizons are everywhere: both inside and outside of what only feels like our sense of self. The edge between what I think is me and what I think is you is as much a horizon as any line of mountains or that far dark line on the distant ocean. Horizon is the line between what we think we know and what we do not know, between what we think we see and do not see: horizons mark the threshold between the world that I inhabit and the one that seems to wait for me, between a world I can almost understand and what lies beyond the imagination of my present life. Horizons are creative, disturbing, invitational edges just by the fact that they exist. . . . 

Horizons are invitational edges between what is familiar and what must be imagined. . . . 

As recent medical studies tell us, it appears to be the case, that merely by taking time to gaze at a far horizon, with our head and our eyes uplifted and looking far into the distance, we are put into much happier physiological states of being than when we are looking down, closer to home, most likely into a screen. . . . 

Bringing what lives below the horizon of my inner understanding into conversation with what lies beyond the limits of what I can understand in the outer world is the foundation for what we have always called mystical experience. In that meeting, all horizons start to move and disappear, any static sense of self needing an equally static world fades away and I experience the act of seeing and hearing as both a way I am shaping the world and a way I am being shaped by it at one and the same time. When the unknown inside me is put into conversation with the unknown that lies beyond the horizon outside me I experience a physical sense of radiance that I find I have always carried with me, emerging from below the horizon of my understanding. When inner and outer horizons meet and more importantly, when what they have hidden until now, meet, I walk in new pastures, I come fully alive, I walk, both alone and completely accompanied in friendship, by every corner of creation.

Horizons are creative, disturbing, invitational edges just by the fact that they exist.

Something came across my feed lately, something that felt both familiar and forgotten. I think maybe I had this on a poster in high school or college, but that sense is vague. I haven't thought about it for a long time, but am glad it found me again.

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

by Max Ehrmann ©1927

Desiderata is Latin for "things desired."

you can never see exactly what another person sees

they help us be considerate and cooperative

no particular type privileged above the rest

anything but monochrome

desaturation is a byproduct of mass production

include everything and everyone in our understanding

do things that bring perfect relationships into the present

the feeling of having an itchy brain

stories demonstrate change over time

out-flay the mind flayer

focus is structural

the feeling of being fully present in what you’re doing

the noise recedes

a forest is resilient because it is an interconnected web

trust is a structural asset

they want to be the most “coherent.”

It is a collective achievement

something emerges that exists in neither participant

situated, distributed, directional and irreducible to either party

the mind extends beyond the skull

the arrangement between them

the overthinking brain looked foggy, fatigued

endless loops of unprocessed thought

we collapse because we never stop processing

adventure with a lantern and wildflower.

everything is sacred; herons and heartbreak, lanterns and wildflowers

love extravagantly, knowing it will hurt; love everything.

horizons are creative, disturbing, invitational edges

look to the horizon to bring it closer

Suprarational Polyangulation

I recently learned two new words from Tyson Yunkaporta's book Right Story, Wrong Story (see below) that resonate with me and that I believe could be used to describe some of the content of this blog--or, at least, approaches I try to include--and are elements of what I consider wisdom.

Suprarational

Suprarational describes concepts, truths, or experiences that go beyond the scope of ordinary logic or reason, while often still including it. It represents a higher level of understanding or a deeper truth that cannot be fully explained by intellectual analysis alone, often encompassing intuition, faith, or profound spiritual insights.

Synonyms and Related Concepts:

• Trans-rational: Above or beyond reason.
• Intuitional: Based on instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.
• Transcendent: Going beyond normal or physical human experience.
• Metaphysical: Related to the fundamental nature of reality, beyond the physical or material world.

Suprarational is distinct from irrational, which is contrary to reason, or non-rational, which is outside the realm of reason. It implies a "higher" logic, not an absence of it.

Polyangulation

Polyangulation is a qualitative research approach that extends traditional "triangulation" by utilizing multiple data sources, methods, or theories to analyze complex, multi-layered social realities. It enhances trustworthiness and accuracy by acknowledging that a single viewpoint is insufficient to capture the complexity of research phenomena.

Key Aspects of Polyangulation: 

• Beyond Triangulation: While triangulation typically uses three sources/methods, polyangulation recognizes that modern research often involves many (poly-) layers.
• Application: It is frequently used in action research, case studies, and education to verify findings through varied data sources (e.g., interviews, observations, videos). 
• Goal: To achieve higher validity, trustworthiness, and a richer, more nuanced interpretation of research data. 
• Context: It is often used to ensure that different perspectives (e.g., student and teacher) are accounted for, leading to more credible conclusions.

Though I would say polyangulation is a method that should be applied broadly to all types of understanding, knowledge, and wisdom, not just research.

I never really made a simple, conscious decision to adopt these methods, they have organically emerged as I've continued to develop my process through blogging. My habit has been one of sharing some of the introspective conversations I've been having with the things I've read and experienced. My posts generally include a variety of sources of reading material and my thoughts about them; most importantly, I put myself and those things in dialogue with each other. My different thoughts and perspectives in each post, interacting with each other, commenting on and building on each other, letting patterns and themes emerge as the words caress our associative brains.

True narratives are created over time from an aggregate of viewpoints, including the ignorant ones. Every viewpoint is ignorant, really, in one way or another. Combined over time, in right relation within and across generations, these diverse ignorances create right story. To become right story, it needs to coexist with opposite narratives that are also true, weaving a more diverse and robust understanding.

I'm going to pepper this post with snippets from Right Story, Wrong Story as I build toward properly sharing the book.

A couple of things I wrote the past two weekends after walks; the older one first.

It's the first day of spring, and it's hot. Yesterday set a record for the earliest in the year our Kansas City area reached 90° and today reached 93°. Prior to today the earliest day on record that Kansas City hit 93° was April 29, 1910.

I went for a hike on a wooded trail this afternoon and the heat felt unnatural; the air told me it was early summer while my eyes told me it was late winter. If you look closely, you can find signs of life and new growth, but the predominant color in the woods today was gray. In late autumn and much of the winter, the barren woods are gold and brown--save during the black-and-white starkness of snow cover. But the leafy ground cover gradually fades and bleaches all winter, so that now their gray brings out the grayness of the rocks and trees. The woods feel their most barren right before they spring back to life. The heat made it feel almost like a wasteland.

Aside from that, I had a nice time. Lots of good scenery and wildlife. I saw a couple of bald eagles fairly close. White tails and their deer hopped away when I got too close. I crossed paths with 3 or 4 pencil-sized baby snakes. And at one point a small bobcat appeared around a blind corner 30-40 meters ahead of me on the trail. It froze; I froze. We watched each other for maybe 5 seconds. Then it turned and retreated out of sight.

The first relation is between land and people, and the second relation is between people and people. The second is contingent on the first. We are an integral part of the dynamic system of that country, which is observing itself through our relationship. The magic is in the world, and you can't manipulate it, but merely move with it in ways that direct you towards systems health. We wait for patterns to emerge. we just wait. We're not afraid of uncertainty.

Today, for the first time ever, I did it for the birds.

I see actor Sean Bean has a new birdwatching show out, and he seems to be just one aging celebrity among many doing so. Quotes like this one keep coming up in my feed: "As you age, it's ridiculous how fast bird-watching creeps up on you. You spend your whole life being 100% indifferent to birds, and then one day you're like, 'damn is that a yellow-rumped warbler?'" My American Literature professor in college told us we wouldn't really understand Emily Dickinson's poems about birds until we were older.

I've been slowing down for years. Gladly. Intentionally. Teaching myself to savor the moment, notice my surroundings, feel connected to my environment. Get outside for the nature more than activity. I like to have my camera ready while taking "awe walks" where I try to nurture a sense of wonder by seeing familiar things in new ways.

I used to be the one who was there to exercise. Moving forward with the goal of moving forward, of making progress, covering ground. Head down, earbuds in to focus on my movement. Now, I watch all the others driven with such purpose as part of the scenery along with the birds. In contrast to the birds.

Like my winged companions, I flit and flutter, hop back and forth across the path, weave and meander. My progress is slow and stuttering. Because progress is merely a byproduct of my purpose. I've been learning to slow down and connect, but today, for the first time ever, my main motivation for going walking was to be surrounded by birdsong and the whisper of the wind through the trees. I don't try to know the birds yet, to name and identify them, but I stop to watch them, absorb them.

My behavior was different than everyone else I saw today. The one person who slowed down enough to talk to me as she passed, while displaying the refuse in her hand, said, "I can't believe how much trash there is out here anymore. Someone needs to do something. I write another letter to the council, but. It's just all this shit everywhere." It's true. Just like the sound of the cars on the nearby interstate is ever present in the background. But I don't notice for all the birdsong that surrounds me, just as the only thing I notice about the trash is how it is in the process of being reclaimed by all the new life emerging with spring.

How strange it is to be the slowest one on the path.

Last post I shared a bit about my comic book collection from the late 80s. I pulled a few out the boxes to peruse and read one that I liked so much I read it with my son. Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, vol. 12: Beneath the Useless Universe. Though it's in comic book form, really it's an illustrated short story. In it, an old man is fed up with life and eagerly waiting to die. Death visits, but not to reap him, merely to hang out for a while to relieve the boredom of existence. Here's a section I especially like.

Night after night he lay still in the darkness listening to the restless movement outside his room. For Death does not sleep, Henry Jones soon learned. Death creeps like a shadow, opens your cupboards, goes through your things, and sits in your chair. Death flips through the channels until the anthem is sung, then limbos the rest of the night away like some eternal insomniac. . . . 

"You can help yourself to anything you want, instead of sitting around feeling sorry for yourself because things aren't going your way--because you're old and don't have any stories to tell."

"I don't feel sorry for myself," Henry mumbled.

"Oh, yes, you do," Death retorted. "You just won't admit it. It's so easy to feel sorry for yourself, so easy not to care. You stay inside this little crypt you call a home and drive away anyone who tries to get close. And after awhile, you kind of get to like the self pity. It becomes an obsession. You sit around and let everything that's good pass you by. Then you curl up in a tiny, pathetic ball of woe and wish you were dead because you have nothing." Death drew an angry breath. "And all along you convince yourself that you're the only one who's suffering. You're the only one who's been cheated. Well, there are millions of you out there, Henry Jones. Folks who shut themselves away in dark little caves. Folks who are so busy looking back on things that never happened to them that they just stop living. Folks with no stories to tell. They're out there. You just don't see them because you don't want to--because you'd know that you weren't the only one. You'd know you weren't alone." Death paused, and the anger left his voice. "You think that things will be better when you die. Well, maybe they will. But maybe my little tunnel is as good as it gets--the most exciting place in the afterlife. Perhaps there's really nothing to that light that everyone's so scared of. Perhaps it's only light, and nothing more. What then?"

Henry was looking out the window again. He did not say anything. He was watching the sky. "If you think the universe is useless," Death told him, "then it's useless, and it's going to remain useless every minute of the rest of your life, until they drag your bones away and toss them in the earth. So look around and be sure to take some notes, because when we meet again in my tunnel, on our way to the light, I'll want to hear all about it. I'll want you to tell me the secret to living so long in a world of futility."

Death picked up his scythe, straightened the picture on the opposite wall and went into the living room. Henry Jones climbed onto the bed, drew his knees up tight and squeezed himself into an eighty-six-year-old ball. He fell asleep like that as the window slowly turned black, and when he awoke the next day, Death was gone.

The idea that the universe is useless strikes me as wrong story.

From Yunkaporta.

Dignity, mutual care and respect are our default settings as a species. Consider the possibility that you're nothing without your relations. Apocalypses are unsettling things, but they become much more interesting if you have prepped by stockpiling relationships rather than guns, gold and vitamin supplies. Your belongings are not your property, but your connections. Here's wisdom--every story affects everyone else. You're in relation to everyone and everything. A living culture is one that is in a relationship of exchange with other cultures.

A series of recent articles to cross my feed related to relating to others.

The Real Reason Some People Are Instantly Likable

Small signals of warmth can dramatically change how people respond to you.

Experiences shape your identity, leading you to think, “I am the kind of person people don’t warm to” or “I am the kind of person who connects easily.” And that identity becomes expectation.

Research by Danu Anthony Stinson and colleagues calls this the “acceptance prophecy” — the psychological phenomenon where your expectation of being accepted or rejected subtly shapes your behavior, which in turn influences whether others actually accept or reject you. . . . 

In his mind, he’s being considerate. In reality, he’s protecting himself from a rejection he’s already decided is coming.

People perceive his invisible walls. His short responses feel distant, and his hesitation comes across as disinterest. After a few minutes, people move on to conversations that feel easier. . . . 

A different belief: that people generally enjoy her company. So she walks in curious rather than cautious. She holds eye contact a little longer, asks questions, and stays present for the answers, shares something real without calculating whether it’s impressive enough. She is warm. People respond exactly as they always have, reinforcing the belief she arrived with.

When you enter a social situation, you are almost always carrying a quiet prediction: Will these people like me? If the answer leans toward yes, your behavior opens. If it leans toward no, it contracts. And those small shifts in behavior often determine the entire outcome of the interaction. . . . 

The strongest predictor of whether strangers wanted to accept someone was interpersonal warmth. . . . 

We size people up along two dimensions within seconds of meeting them: warmth and competence. And while both matter, warmth comes first. For evolutionary reasons, the brain asks “Can I trust this person?” before it ever gets to “Can I respect this person?” You could be the most accomplished person in the room, but if people don’t perceive you as warm, they simply won’t want to be around you. . . . 

How to be warmer in your social life

1. Be the welcoming one . . . 
2. Share a small vulnerability . . . 
3. Expect to be liked . . . 
4. Show warmth signals . . . 

So before your next social situation, remember that most people in that room are not there to judge you. They are hoping someone will make it easy. Be that person. Expect connection, relax your body, and make the first warm move — a genuine question, an honest observation, even a simple admission that you feel a little awkward.

Someone has to lower the wall first. Magnetic people are simply the ones who decide that person is them.

Consider the possibility that you're nothing without your relations.

Dignity, mutual care and respect are our default settings as a species.

Are Morally Good People Any Happier or Sadder Than Others?

Being good is sometimes uplifting, and sometimes it’s a bit of a drag. These ordinary moments speak to a puzzle that philosophers have long debated: are moral people happier? Or is there some tradeoff between doing good and feeling good? . . . 

We asked people in the United States to rate the moral relevance of a wide range of traits taken from various personality questionnaires. People thought that compassion, respectfulness, honesty, fairness, loyalty and dependability were most morally relevant. So, we developed a commonsense, consensus-based measure of moral character using these traits. . . . 

We relied on the judgments of observers. Everyday social interactions provide plenty of opportunities to notice how kind, honest, fair and dependable another person is. . . . 

What did we find? As might have been expected, people who were more moral in the eyes of close others tended to experience a greater sense of meaning in life. What’s more, in one sample of undergraduates, those rated as more moral reported greater happiness, too. We found further support for this relationship when we broadened the scope beyond US students – asking Chinese engineers who worked in small teams to confidentially rate each other’s moral character. Again, individuals who were more moral in the eyes of those who knew them tended to report not only greater meaning in life, but greater happiness. . . . 

Across these different ways of assessing character, we found the same pattern: moral people were happier. . . . 

We tested only whether moral character and wellbeing go together – not whether moral character causes greater wellbeing. . . . 

If being more moral does make people happier, however, our studies provide some tentative clues about why, suggesting it could be partly because moral people have better relationships and are more liked and respected by others. But I also suspect that the reasons why moral people are happier might depend somewhat on the particular moral virtue. For example, a kind person might be happier in part because they experience more empathetic joy, whereas an honest person might be happier in part because they are less burdened by the need to hide information (lest they be ‘found out’). . . . 

Doing the right thing is not always easy. Telling the truth, standing up for someone who is being treated unfairly, or honouring commitments can feel uncomfortable or burdensome. But our findings indicate that, in general, there is no tradeoff between morality and wellbeing. Instead, people with stronger moral character tend to experience greater meaning in life and happiness. This suggests that moments of moral effort may be part of a life that, taken as a whole, feels more satisfying. For those striving to live ethically, this offers some reassurance that being good and feeling good are not mutually exclusive but, instead, go hand in hand.

You're in relation to everyone and everything.

Here's wisdom--every story affects everyone else.

How Reading Books Regulates Your Nervous System

Books don’t just stimulate the mind — they trigger physiological changes throughout the body.

Reading changes our neurochemistry in real time. Reading isn’t just about decoding words on a page. It’s a complex neurochemical process that affects everything from our heart rate to our hormone levels.

Reading uses some of the oldest circuitry in the human brain. For most of our evolutionary history, we were readers — just not of books. We read animal tracks in mud, storm patterns in clouds, danger signals in the rustle of leaves. Our ancestors who could decode these natural patterns survived; those who couldn’t often didn’t.

This ancient pattern-recognition system is what we access every time we open a book. Since written language only emerged about 5,000 years ago — recent in evolutionary terms — our brains haven’t had time to evolve dedicated reading circuits. Instead, we’ve repurposed the neural networks that once kept our ancestors alive in the wild. . . . 

This process shifts your entire nervous system into a different state. Unlike the fragmented attention that digital media demands, reading requires sustained focus on a single stream of information.

This focused attention actively shifts your autonomic nervous system from the sympathetic “fight-or-flight” state toward the parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” state. As this happens, you experience measurable physiological changes: your heart rate slows, your breathing deepens and becomes more regular, and your muscle tension decreases. . . . 

Your brain processes fictional experiences as low-stakes rehearsals for actual life, building neural pathways that can be activated when similar situations arise beyond the page. . . . 

Follow your curiosity. The stress-reducing benefits of reading depend on full absorption rather than forced attention. If you’re not connecting with a book, put it down and pick up something you feel genuinely curious about. . . . 

Books offer something incredibly valuable: an activity that simultaneously stimulates your brain and calms your body.

All the experiences of your life are processed through story-making.

Yunkaporta.

All the experiences of your life are processed through story-making. Right story is not about objective truth, but the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities, living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patters of land and creation. Right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relations with each other and with the land.

The pastor of the church we're connected to, someone I respect greatly, has recently started sharing short messages on Facebook. Here is one of them.

What the Greeks Meant by Hypocrite

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns three times against doing your spiritual practice in order to be seen doing it. He says it about almsgiving, about prayer, and about fasting. And each time, the person who is performing for an audience has, as Jesus puts it, already received their reward. They wanted to be seen. They were seen. Transaction complete. That is all there is.

The word he uses for the ones who do this is hypokrites. In Greek, that word did not mean what it means to us now. It did not mean someone who says one thing and does another, though that is often a consequence. In Greek, a hypokrites was an actor. Literally, someone who plays a role for an audience. A professional performer. Someone whose job is to appear to be something in front of people who are watching.

Jesus is saying: if your spiritual life is a performance, you are in the wrong profession. Actors belong on a stage. The kingdom of God is somewhere else.

This word lands differently in an age of social media, which has become an unprecedented infrastructure for spiritual performance. The photograph of the mission trip. The prayer shared for maximum engagement. The liturgical observation posted at exactly the right moment. I am not saying these things are automatically wrong. I am saying that Jesus identified a very human tendency to let the visibility of our piety become a substitute for its reality, and the infrastructure we have now makes it easier to give in to than ever before.

What Jesus offers in place of performance is something quietly radical: he says, go into your room and shut the door, and pray to your God who is in secret. And your God who sees in secret will reward you.

The faith that does not need an audience is stronger than the faith that does. It does not depend on whether anyone is watching. It does not require external validation. It is rooted in the relationship between you and God, which is real whether or not anyone else can see it.

My mother was deeply devout. She took her prayer life and her study of scripture seriously. What I remember most about her faith is that it was quiet. She did not wear it on her sleeve. She did not make a show of it. She simply tried to live it out, day after day, in the way she treated the people around her.

That is what interior faith looks like. Not flashy. Often invisible. Almost never trending. And, in my experience, the most durable kind there is.

This is one of the big ideas I took from my seminary experience, that Jesus was all about overturning the "wrong story" of using religion and religious practices as a way to rank and divide people, create hierarchies, create categories of "us" and "them." God's logic is all about reversing the human tribal inclination for in-groups and out-groups, of privilege and power, to be more truly inclusive and accepting. The first shall be last. The meek shall inherit the earth. You will find God in "the least of these." God's kingdom, communicated in the context of the writers of the bible--with the perspectives, language, references, and understanding of their time and location--is, in essence, about being in right relation with everyone and all of creation.

Yunkaporta.

No information can exist unless it is located. No information can exist unless it is in relation to places, entities, people and phenomena in the landscape. Knowledge is produced, transmitted and stored within relationships. There's never one tool to rule them all, or one message, or one guru. There's no such thing as one truth. For every right story there are a hundred other right stories that contradict it, and we need to be comfortable with that. That's the collective sense-making process. We need something to tether us to reality, but ironically the only things that do this well are superstitions and myths, because they inspire the supra-rational understandings needed to navigate complexity.

The very first thing I wrote for this blog, nearly 20 years ago, was the metaphor that sits in the header at the top of every page--and I'd been developing it in my head for a good 10 years before that.

After passing through the prism, each refraction contains some pure essence of the light, but only an incomplete part. We will always experience some aspect of reality, of the Truth, but only from our perspectives as they are colored by who and where we are. Others will know a different color and none will see the whole, complete light. These are my musings from my particular refraction.

Most of what I've read, experienced, and learned since then has served to reinforce, deepen, and expand that idea. Libraries, for instance, strive for neutrality; I, however, don't think anyone or anything can ever truly be neutral because everything has a location and a perspective--so the closest we can get to neutrality is providing a diverse range of perspectives and looking to the nexus of their interactions. And the further we develop our scientific understandings of quantum mechanics, the more we find the basic essence of reality exists in the interplay between physical components, in the relationships. So I was thrilled to find how much my thoughts echo those in the book that follows, how well it aligns and resonates with my beliefs and helps me find new dimensions and language for them.

Of Right Story, Wrong Story: How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell by Tyson Yunkaporta

This book is wrong story. It necessarily must be, as it was produced by an individual through a relatively isolated process; it represents only a single perspective. Even when the book shares the perspectives of others besides Tyson Yunkaporta, the sharing is his, has been filtered through Yunkaporta's understanding and captured in his context. That means it can only be wrong story regardless of its contents.

In [my previous book] Sand Talk I told a story about education, and it was true, but on its own it can only ever be wrong story. To become right story, it needs to coexist with opposite narratives that are also true, weaving a more diverse and robust understanding.

Yet Yunkaporta lives in two worlds at once, is a part of two cultures--his Aboriginal Australian one and the world's dominant one--and he has produced this book as an attempt to bridge between them. He is using wrong story to try to convey the essence of right story, as understood by Indigenous cultures. Information--knowledge, wisdom--can only be right story when it is communal, is the product of many people with diverse experiences and perspectives in relationship with each other. Right story can only exist between people, in the interactions, and can't come from a single source. It is never fixed or static, constantly adapting. It also must include non-human perspectives, those of animals, the land, and nature. It is a collective story, found in the patterns among us, in our processes of relating.

Attachment to a singular narrative is like pinning an insect to a board and measuring it: if you aren't watching it in flight, you're missing the point.

The book's subtitle is How to Have Fearless Conversations in Hell, and Yunkaporta roughly structures it after Dante's narrative journey through hell in the Divine Comedy. He uses "hell" as a metaphor for the Western culture that is currently the controlling narrative for our world and interactions. He uses right story, the knowledge and processes of his Indigenous culture, to consider the various levels of hell and how we might learn to do things differently. He also does his best to demonstrate the workings of right story in how he has written the book. He calls the book a yarn, his term for conversation among a group of people sitting together sharing stories. He considers the book a conversation between himself and readers, regularly referring to "us-two" as a pronoun for him and his reader. Each chapter includes at least one description of his dialogue with another thinker where they have put their ideas in play with each other and considered each others' viewpoints. Yunkaporta's language is a free-flowing weave of conversational, academic, dialogue, folksy, and storytelling. Because collective Indigenous knowledge is oral and relies on memory tools like repetition and mnemonics, including physical items inscribed with metaphorical, meaning-containing symbols, Yunkaporta also crafted a traditional artifact for each chapter and he records each crafting process as it relates to the knowledge.

Remember, we're partners in this heretical act of looking out at the world together through a glitchy Indigenous lens and riffing on what we see there. We're inquiring through Indigenous knowledge, not about it, and this is a deeply unsettling and unpopular process in a world that gobbles up minority narratives and wisdom like chocolate-covered strawberries and macadamias.

I found this book to be both a challenge and a delight. It was a challenge to get my head fully wrapped--at least somewhat wrapped--around Yunkaporta's ideas and concepts because they are such a departure from the ways we have learned to think and understand. Yet yarning with him was a pleasure because he is such a good tour guide and interpreter. Patient readers will find many rewards and will find themselves expanded by it. I particularly appreciate that Yunkaporta is the opposite of backward-looking: he is not yearning for return to a mythically perfect past or bemoaning all the ways we have already messed things up, he's trying to find a way forward by putting our worldviews into dialogue with each other. He's trying to find ways to apply wisdom learned in the past to our future in order to change our current trajectory. He is both a guide and a fellow traveler, inviting readers to join him.

A living culture is one that is in a relationship of exchange with other cultures. When cultures are damaged by separation, they can recover through such exchange. It's not about turning back the clock, but more like what my friend Douglas Rushkoff the media theorist calls 'retrieving forward'.

A few more quoted passages to let Yunkaporta speak for himself:

There is deep-time story in the echinoid, though, in the intelligent pattern its embodied knowledge left on that stone, and it has been working on me for a few decades now, driving me towards inquiries into distributed cognition and the way true narratives are created over time from an aggregate of viewpoints, including the ignorant ones. . . . Every viewpoint is ignorant, really, in one way or another. Combined over time, in right relation within and across generations, these diverse ignorances create right story.

-----

Us-two, you and I meeting in these pages, we're here to find what is useful and interesting in dialogue. We're not here to score points in a culture war. If I'm talking about failing global institutions and destructive empires, that's not about individuals or communities or cultures--it's about systems and structures that we are all required to live under at this moment in history, and most of us are intensely unhappy and terrified about it all. I'm not sitting down here with you clutching my historical IOUs; I'm here to share some stories, patterns and systems that might be helpful in the next few decades (and even centuries).

-----

Our ancestors, our gods, our prophets, our country, our spirit, our cosmos--however we want to see the community of entities beyond our waking sight . . . All they can do is nudge us-all towards the pattern of creation to find our symbiotic roles within it, in annoyingly vague and non-linear ways that can only be perceived through constant connection with the land and collective processing of that relation.

-----

Schrodinger's wombat is like the expansion pack for that psychotic thought experiment. This is how it works. A wombat is in a hollow log, and we have to decide whether it is alive or dead. However, because the log is not an enclosed system, we are aware of the thousands of exchanges of energy, matter and information between the log and the surrounding country. We see what the insects are doing, the fungi on the log and surrounding trees, how the wombat behaves in that particular season. We see its fresh scat on a nearby rock. We feel the wind direction and the recent tracks that tell us about the animal's behavior and condition. We see no sign of recent snake activity (although you're never more than ten metres away from a snake in the bush). We see a thousand things and know that the wombat is alive and inside the log. We see this because we are not only thinking about the log and what might be inside. Rather, we are an integral part of the dynamic system of that country, which is observing itself through our relationship. So we share in the exchange of energy and information in that system and are therefore not intervening in the system from the outside.

-----

In this sense, there is nothing spiritual or religious about Indigenous knowledge, which is just a peer-driven process of coming to understand all your relations (human and non-human) within creation. But how can we define this process without grounding the description in opposition to spirituality, science or religion? All stories are welcome around our fires, even those that define us as pagan, heathen, other. In the end, our knowledge is human knowledge, accountable to community, ancestors, descendants and the eternal Law of the land. . . .

Authentic science is a genuinely collective commons of knowledge, although it is often defamed by the extractive disciplines as being corrupt and monolithic. I've done this myself, spending half my career depicting science as hostile to Indigenous methods of inquiry in an I am not them, therefore I am kind of way.

But what is science? It is a community with a long lineage, comprising members of almost every culture on the planet, collectively sharing inquiry in rigorous, rule-governed ways, with peers reviewing peers in distributed networks of autonomous institutions that aren't controlled by any single, centralized authority. That also sounds to me like a fairly good description of Indigenous knowledge processes. It has been a mistake for me to divide myself into different parts so I can interact with this infinitely diverse community that I thought was my enemy. Us-two have probably both done a lot of this in our lives and work, dis-integrating ourselves and our relationships for no good reason.

End of review.

More from Yunkaporta about right story and wrong story.

In the story I just shared with you, you can see the processes of a non-centralized knowledge economy embedded in a kind of cognition distributed throughout creation, that carries all knowledge production, transmission and memory. These things are managed within intergenerational relationships in bioregional collectives (both within regions and between interrelated syndicates of regions) stretching across all of time. Knowledge shared within the processes and protocols of this relational economy is something I think of as 'right story'.

Right story is not about objective truth, but the metaphors and relations and narratives of interconnected communities, living in complex contexts of knowledge and economy, aligned with the patters of land and creation. Right story never comes from individuals, but from groups living in right relations with each other and with the land. Wrong story, wrong way--this means unilateral or unbalanced ritual, word and thought.

-----

This is why I love thought experiments--they are like crowdsourced narratives where everybody's contribution to the story, no matter how contradictory, is honoured and included. In that sense, they are the closest thing I can find in the world to the Aboriginal collective process of what we call 'yarning'.

-----

The collective sense-making process, the Wanjau, is bound up ceremonially with that regenerative process. Our shorthand for how we work with this in our think-tank activity has become 'the flows and the weaves'. Tank is certainly not the right word--we're not collecting the water of our collective knowledge in some closed system, but rather letting it snake its way across landscapes of meaning and following it to see where it goes. Nobody would take us seriously if we called our lab a 'knowing flowing', though, so we generally tell people it's a think tank.

-----

I keep stories in that spear about fear, bees, disinformation, crowdsourced outrage and moral panic. It's not helping me to make sense of the world, though, because scared means stupid and the more weapons I make the more terrified I become. As you probably know, when stupid people panic, they tend to get angry and behave badly. I'm striving to avoid this outcome, without much success.

I'm on a hair-trigger as I continue looking for the one perfect thinking tool that will help me avoid the shouting matches, manipulative bullshit, rapturous escapism and cultish ideologies of this era. I can't find it, not in my culture or anyone else's. I guess my community has an aversion to one-size-fits-all solutions, so there's never one tool to rule them all, or one message, or one guru.

We go further than merely triangulating datasets to sift out the gammin (bullshit) stuff--we poly-angulate within a messy and complex field, then sit with all that and yarn, then wait for patterns to emerge. Or we yell and swear and fight, then wait for patterns to emerge. Or we just wait. We're not afraid of uncertainty, so we do not need to rush to any immediate conclusions and are happy to let our stories marinate, sometimes for a few generations.

-----

When learning new things, we are trained to think Is this true or false? But it is so much better to think When will this be useful? Also, When should I not rely on this? When will it fall apart? . . . 

In education you are rewarded for having an opinion and defending it while defeating opposing opinions. You're not rewarded for saying, well it depends, or maybe, even though that's way more accurate and productive. When I find myself digging in my heels, as a practice now I try to give the most persuasive opposite argument--I want to not be too settled.

But who wants to invest in that kind of nuance? Accounting measures things, not actions and relationships.

-----

Remember, we're partners in this heretical act of looking out at the world together through a glitchy Indigenous lens and riffing on what we see there. We're  inquiring through Indigenous knowledge, not about it, and this is a deeply unsettling and unpopular process in a world that gobbles up minority narratives and wisdom like chocolate-covered strawberries and macadamias. . . . 

When we have our gaze set on an idealized past or a mythical future, we miss our chance to engage with right story in the present. Cultural longevity is important, but living cultures must always adapt to current contexts and remain fluid enough to allow for continual emergence.

-----

Since the first sword emerged from the first forge, humans have been struggling to find the right social technology to balance the needs of flesh, land and overpowered tech. The only thing that can meet this challenge is right story, which must never be authored by individuals, but crowdsourced over time by people in communicative relation with the land. This is the uniquely human process that has always been facilitated by riddles, yarns and thought experiments.

-----

Wrong story has always been with us as human beings, but today it takes the form of public relations, propaganda and disinformation, at a scale that has become unmanageable. It is the glove on the fist of technical innovation, providing justification for our worst excesses and putting enough dust and smoke in the air to prevent us from seeing the damage and acting on it.

-----

Story is a psycho-technology that can be more creative than a Cambrian explosion, or more destructive than a nuclear explosion. Story that maintains the continuity of creation requires a lot more work, however, and it develops over time from thousands of datasets held in relationships. This might be better described as a social technology. It never comes from an individual author.

-----

Attachment to a singular narrative is like pinning an insect to a board and measuring it: if you aren't watching it in flight, you're missing the point.

-----

This is right story. Parts of it are subjective and unverifiable, but even if it were factually false, it would still be right story. There are many verifiable facts in the world that are deployed in isolation as wrong story to damage creation, such as the absence of female chess grandmasters. The fact on its own might be true, but the narrative built on top of it is wrong story. In the same way, right story may contain images that are verified in records, or simply images that only exist in our minds. It is often difficult to know the difference between right story and wrong story, because intent and relationality are not easy to measure.

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We might perceive a pattern in all the wrong lines and sick story, a little self-terminating algorithm at the heart of radicalization.

The algorithm emerges from a sneaky line of codes that whispers, 'I am greater than you, you are less than me.' It expands into the protocols of extremism, which lead an in-group to define itself through bad relation with an out-group--a group that is 'other' and must be punished.

-----

There is deep-time story in the echinoid, though, in the intelligent pattern its embodied knowledge left on that stone, and it has been working on me for a few decades now, driving me towards inquiries into distributed cognition and the way true narratives are created over time from an aggregate of viewpoints, including the ignorant ones. . . . Every viewpoint is ignorant, really, in one way or another. Combined over time, in right relation within and across generations, these diverse ignorances create right story.

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All humans need spiritual knowledge they can trust, just as much as they need air to breathe. In a world where spirit has been colonized by cults, it is tempting to take refuge in reason, to the exclusion of all other knowledge. We do this because we need something to tether us to reality, but ironically the only things that do this well are superstitions and myths, because they inspire the supra-rational understandings needed to navigate complexity. We need right story more than ever as the world becomes less complex and more complicated, as it becomes increasingly difficult to know what is true, or whether truth even exists at all.

The idea that there is no such thing as truth is true, but it's only half-true. There's no such thing as one truth. For every right story there are a hundred other right stories that contradict it, and we need to be comfortable with that. If a thousand people stand on a moonlit beach, each one of them will see the moon reflected in a different place on the water.

'It's out past the breakers.'

'No, it's by those rocks.'

If they gather and share their truths around fires on the beach, they might arrive together at the conclusion that the moonlight is striking the entire ocean surface at once. But then, that would not be the end, because earth, sea, moon and people are still in motion and there is more to be known.

In [my previous book] Sand Talk I told a story about education, and it was true, but on its own it can only ever be wrong story. To become right story, it needs to coexist with opposite narratives that are also true, weaving a more diverse and robust understanding.

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Here's wisdom--every story affects everyone else. You're in relation to everyone and everything.

It's too much, I know, but I love it; and that's not all.

More about his worldview.

Consider the possibility that you're nothing without your relations. All your kin--human, non-human, plant, animal, place, blood, water--all these familial links contain your thinking and character, the things you have always imagined to be occurring inside your fabulous individual mind. Ponder the notion that there is almost nothing you can learn about ants by examining a single specimen in a petri dish. It's a good frame for thinking, realizing that even an entire ant colony can't yield much useful insight unless you know the system of seasons, waterways, species and symbiotic relations in which that colony sits.

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Apocalypses are unsettling things, but they become much more interesting if you have prepped by stockpiling relationships rather than guns, gold and vitamin supplies.

That relational web we have in our indigenous communities is a hell of a social safety net, when it's allowed to work properly. It also informs our governance, economies, laws, information storage and diplomatic relations in some pretty wonderful ways that are worth considering at a time in history when most of the world is trying to reboot its failing institutions.

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In our Aboriginal communities, when people first meet you they will often ask, 'Who own you?' This doesn't signify a property relation--it is all about what groups, pairs and lands you belong to in your relationships, which are governed collectively. Belonging and ownership means something completely different from possession in our world. It means being in relation to family and community and place. Your belongings are not your property, but your connections.

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 . . . my idea of Indigenous opposites existing as dyads rather than binaries--they're usually two sides of the same coin rather that two ends of a spectrum. Aboriginal people don't have to choose between the individual and the collective, left and right, because we are both at once. We are unique individuals with no boss, bound in dense and complex systems of relational obligation.

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It is a sad kind of limbo, trying to type on a laptop about stone-tech from a history that is not sanctified by Common Era records. I know my oral history is real, but it sometimes feels like nothing from the past is verifiable unless a monk wrote it down, or some bearded wizard from a faculty of archaeology divined it from shards of bone and rock.

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Standard memorisation techniques may be enhanced by elements of Aboriginal cultural and intellectual practice through the inclusion of locatedness, relatedness, embodiment, orality, narrative and imagery. . . .

Locatedness: In Indigenous culture, no information can exist unless it is located. The knower is always located within a map of knowledge and story that is profoundly place-based and corresponds with real landscapes. . . .

Relatedness: In Indigenous culture, no information can exist unless it is in relation to places, entities, people and phenomena in the landscape. Knowledge is held in the relational space between yourself and others, including non-human others. . . . Information is held in pairs, groups and communities. Knowledge is produced, transmitted and stored within relationships.

Embodiment: In Indigenous culture, knowledge is tangible and embodied in physical reality. Landscapes, the night sky, objects, bodies--all act as mnemonic devices, not just in the abstract but in the sense that information is ritually encoded in these things and can be 'read' from them. Ritual objects can be created and imbued with memory so that recall can be triggered by holding or interacting with that object at any time or in any place. . . .

Orality: In Indigenous culture, language itself encodes memory. Different phrases, words, and combinations of words can embody vast contexts of shared information. As with all human cultures for most of human history, linguistic devices in oral texts can assist with the rote memorisation . . . These devices include rhyme, rhythm, repetition, alliteration and even taboo language. . . .

Narrative: In Indigenous culture, narrative pathways through landscapes of knowledge are encoded in stories for the production, transmission and storage of information. This is a profoundly human practice, one which arguably makes us human. Knowledge is more readily transferred into long-term memory in the form of a story. All the experiences of your life are processed through story-making. This is what the aunties refer to as Lore.

Image: In Indigenous culture, symbols, patterns and images are used to encode knowledge in supra-rational ways. . . . The images are usually not literal codes for specific units of information, but are metaphors that recall larger sets of knowledge.

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Dignity, mutual care and respect are our default settings as a species. Like most mammals, we must also carry the capacity for violent struggle, but that has to be limited by good governance and never held by one person or one group exclusively. It must be accessible to all, moving from actor to actor constantly.

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This is the difference between tech and TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge). TEK ensures innovations work over deep time, while tech ensures innovations work today and need competitive upgrades tomorrow. TEK only allows you to scale up your power, wealth and freedom to the limits of your relational obligations--the responsibilities you carry not only to your living relations (both human and non-human), but to your ancestors and descendants as well.

Everything exists in relation to everything else.

Of the wrong story.

Gluttony isn't just about having more for yourself--it's about making sure that others have less. Excess just doesn't feel satisfying when others are still thriving around you, because you're special.

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I now have a boomerang from Deen, hand-carved from mulga wood and carrying knowledge about governance. He says he's been 'trepidatious' in carving it, because in our way we must engage with these big ideas but avoid defining them as abstracts because, 'The act of defining is the act of death.' . . .

By extension, life itself must consist of knowledge without definitions, processes of being in thoughtful relation, and meaning in flux . . .

Tiddalik story says you don't change a destructive system by attacking those who have too much ego, power and greed, but by bringing people together and having a good laugh. But Deen also struggles with figuring out how to teach the concept of governance as a living process rather than a tool of control and compliance. He says it involves mapping relations rather than distilling key points, and every context in every place is different so there can be no universal list or model to replicate. Defining or writing down policy is the death of relational processes, resulting in the usual Roman constructs of militarism that still infect western systems and destroy collective governance.

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Down here in hell, the ground is littered with people who couldn't keep a leash on their misdirected wrath. They learned too late that rage is a force multiplier that should only be deployed where success is certain, collateral damage is zero and your actions will definitely make the world better for your descendants. The problem is, when we feel certain the time is right for rage, we're usually mistaken and it's our fear and narcissism taking the wheel.

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The whole world did a workshop recently, starting around 2016, inducting us all into the wrong story and bad relation of The Art of the Deal. Most of our interactions are operating from this pattern now, which means there is always a winner and a loser, and the winner is the one who tells the most lies and does the most damage. The loser says, 'Please stop that, it's hurting me,' to which the winner replies, 'I'm not doing that, you're doing that. You're hurting me. You're crazy, you're imagining things. And now you're gaslighting me! Fatty!'

The loser sputters at the outrageous physics of this 5-D chess attack, tries to deal with each lie in turn, becomes exhausted and then pathetic (and later either depressed or vindictive). Meanwhile, the winner spins off into a righteous moral panic, recruiting supporters and kicking up more mendacious dust. Stop hitting yourself. I know you are, but what am I? For the winners in this ridiculous game, the same nastiness that worked for them in kindergarten still works today. The losers are also trapped in the patterns of helplessness they learned in their infancy.

Both roles are twisted and grounded in narcissism and entitlement, feeding into and off each other. Between every movement and every tribe, down to every tiny kinship pair, this curse is inflating wrong relation exponentially everywhere the signal can reach. (And it reaches everywhere.) The worst player wins the game, and power is the prize, in every corner of every home.

Maybe Indigenous wisdom will save the day? Not likely; The Art of the Deal is everywhere now. It's a shameful and shameless process. Flip, lie, contradict yourself, double down and yell until everything is broken, then enjoy your unearnt social advancement as you stand upon the smoking ruins of your relationships. Maggie Thatcher's curse, 'There is no such thing as society', has taken a while to reach us here because of Indigenous exclusion from the economy, but every day more of us become collateral damage in the scorched-earth policies of an economic experiment scaled to the planetary level. We can either join the horrid game and be slowly destroyed, or refuse to play and be destroyed immediately.

Reading that last section, having it articulate my own observations, is far too satisfying.

Of Schrodinger's wombat and what it means to be in relation with the land.

Fire management is something that has been practiced all over the world for millennia and has some universal principles. One of those principles is that it is a good way to heal damaged land. Victor says don't waste time planting trees--burn country, and country will put the trees where it needs to put them. You don't know what trees to put where; only the land knows that.

The smoke will bring in the birds looking for charred insects and the right seeds will be in their shit, which will fall in all the right places for the country to select what grows where. That's why a natural forest beautiful and a plantation forest is ugly and short-lived.

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It is a Law of relationality that you can only learn from the land. The first relation is between land and people, and the second relation is between people and people. The second is contingent on the first.

They are both adamant that we learn this Law best from our totemic connections with diverse species, who teach us ecological ethics that are transferrable to every aspect of society, from governance to economics. These ethics are inscribed in the landscape as Law, statutes translated through Lore--the stories of ancestral beings and living entities such as rivers and forests. The protection and maintenance of these living systems is part of the jurisprudence that is coded into the fabric of the land itself. Aunty Anne can explain this easily when she is talking to physicists, but it is more difficult to translate for laypeople. I offer the aunties one of my pop-science party tricks to assist with the translation of these ideas.

I told them about my work with Rick Shaw, a mathematician from the Gamilaroi tribe, when we invented a thought experiment called Schrodinger's wombat to examine the idea of interconnected living systems as expressions of First Law. Rick looks like a black pirate and quotes Byron and Mandelbrot more than is healthy for any human being. Our thought experiment was a modified version of the famous Schrodinger's cat, designed to guide discussion of the uncertainty principles in physics, whereby observing the velocity of a particle makes it a wave, and observing its location makes it a particle again. Schrodinger asks you to imagine a poisoned cat in a box. You can't see the cat, but must decide whether it is alive or dead. Until you see it, the cat must be alive and dead at the same time.

Schrodinger's wombat is like the expansion pack for that psychotic thought experiment. This is how it works. A wombat is in a hollow log, and we have to decide whether it is alive or dead. However, because the log is not an enclosed system, we are aware of the thousands of exchanges of energy, matter and information between the log and the surrounding country. We see what the insects are doing, the fungi on the log and surrounding trees, how the wombat behaves in that particular season. We see its fresh scat on a nearby rock. We feel the wind direction and the recent tracks that tell us about the animal's behavior and condition. We see no sign of recent snake activity (although you're never more than ten metres away from a snake in the bush). We see a thousand things and know that the wombat is alive and inside the log. We see this because we are not only thinking about the log and what might be inside. Rather, we are an integral part of the dynamic system of that country, which is observing itself through our relationship. So we share in the exchange of energy and information in that system and are therefore not intervening in the system from the outside.

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There is certainly magic in the world, but it only works when you don't try to control and scale it. Spiritual practitioners are severely limited by location and relation in their work, and can only do so much healing and cursing and rainmaking. It's a bit like the placebo effect in medicine research--scientists must acknowledge that the magic of belief can have an effect on experimental trial scores, but they are smart enough to know that while this must be factored into their analysis, it is pointless to attempt to harness the placebo as a health product for mass distribution. The field of positive psychology attempted to scale that magic beyond local applications in the positive-thinking industry, but that only resulted in a pandemic of narcissism and a global financial crisis that might have been avoided if the adults in the room hadn't all been sacked for negativity when they tried to warn of impending disaster.

Another way to put it is in Star Wars terms: there is indeed a Force that flows from all living things and binds them, but as soon as you gather a Jedi Council, a bunch of light sabres and a training program based on child abuse, the whole galaxy is pretty much fucked. So magic doesn't scale, but is there any way the life forces of nature could inspire greater efficiency in industrial systems while we work out how to transition to a post-industrial world?

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There is magic in the world, but it doesn't scale or generalize, and anybody claiming they can work it beyond local, small-scale practice is full of shit.

The magic is in the world, and you can't manipulate it, but merely move with it in ways that direct you towards systems health. Through ceremony and ritual practice that aligns us with reality, we can supplement magic. Magic can't supplement us. As with healthy economic, social and other systems, your physical wellbeing can only be sustained through a life of communication with human and non-human others in a sentient landscape that will show you, if you pay attention, how to live in health and balance. Bush medicine works wonders, sure, but only in the bush. A plant can cure a condition when harvested in a particular place and season, especially when complemented with all the foods that are seasonal in its habitat, but it can't help you if it's plucked, crushed and sent halfway round the world for you to gobble up anytime you like.

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Our ancestors, our gods, our prophets, our country, our spirit, our cosmos--however we want to see the community of entities beyond our waking sight . . . All they can do is nudge us-all towards the pattern of creation to find our symbiotic roles within it, in annoyingly vague and non-linear ways that can only be perceived through constant connection with the land and collective processing of that relation.

Work, with others, to find your symbiotic role in the pattern of creation.

This recently came across my feed.

The inner life has its soft and gentle beauty; an abstract formlessness as well as a subtle charm. I often consider myself as a figure in a foggy painting: faltering lines, insecure distances, and a merging of greys and blacks. An emotion or a mood—a mere wisp of color—is shaded off and made to spread until it becomes one with all that surrounds it.

― Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897-1909

There are no hard boundaries between us, defining us; at the edges we shade off and spread until we become one with all that surround us.

A poem that speaks to locatedness and relatedness.

Assemay

Where I Come From—

and I come from many places,

like I used to come home

from kindergarten,

and then elementary school

and then middle school

and then high school,

and then in college

I actually stopped coming

home and started coming

to a dorm

I shared with

my best friend turned

my high school best friend turned

a friend from home turned

a friend turned

hey everyone, meet my roommate turned

can you believe that

crazy person just told me that

I change my clothes too loudly, and at that

point I started coming from

part-time jobs and

cocktail Wednesdays and

pre-final all-nighters turned to post-final all-nighters, and

the things I said shifted from coming

from a place of ignorance to coming

from a place of a little less ignorance,

and sometimes

I would even lie that

what I am saying is coming

from a place of concern,

but to be honest it was coming

from a place of wanting to be polite,

and naturally I come from nasty places,

like my mom’s soon-to-be-infertile womb

and my dad’s poor attempts at fatherhood

because how good of a father can one be

when all he saw growing up

was his mother bruised

abandoned

soon-to-be-schizophrenic

from that time his stepdad got so jealous

he cut her hair when she was asleep

and hit her with a steel rebar

but I guess knowing where my dad was coming from

allowed me to see that he made some progress

because don’t worry he never hit us

with rebars,

only shoes, belts,

a horsewhip,

fists, but never feet,

because kicking women is very low,

choking though—

and moreover he stayed

except for that one time

but don’t worry he came back!

and then she left

but don’t worry they made up!

and then I left

to study in the States,

and then he left again

to go to jail

but anyways,

I guess I can’t change that

I am still coming from that dynamic

will they won’t they

sort of thing

bad

but could’ve been worse,

sad

but never turned tragic—

anyways, where I come from

we eat horses.

from #91 – Spring 2026

I come from many places. We all do.

Belonging and ownership means something completely different from possession in our world. It means being in relation to family and community and place. Your belongings are not your property, but your connections.

From the entry for "Freedom" in the book Consolations II: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte.

Freedom is desire, but felt in reverse; the sense of being wanted by the world and then the ability to respond fully to that invitation without impediment, interference or self sabotage; the sense that I am being invited by the world beyond any present boundary I have made for myself. Freedom's birthplace is a deep, spacious sense of interior silence in which I can hear invitations being made to me that will extend the outer boundaries of my sense of self. . . . 

Freedom arises from seeing and hearing the essence of creation, of birdsong, of the heartfelt origin of another's speech and then allowing that essence to speak back to us with its own particular form of invitation and in its very own voice. Freedom is a radical sense of letting be and being let be. . . . Freedom is found in granting life to people and things other than ourselves that creates a mutually nourishing sense of seeing and being seen.

Our sense of freedom is always magnified by mutual allowing: a continual and surprising meeting of others and a release of all the ways we hold the world or our loved ones to ransom; freedom arises from a true meeting: the meeting that occurs when what is between what I think is me and what I think is other than me, come together in a conversation, an intimacy, a joining, intellectually, physically and imaginatively. . . . Freedom is self become other; become no self at all. In a real conversation, both sides find new freedoms, both sides are let loose and freed from any sense of self they have previously known.

Freedom is mutual.

It's so easy to feel sorry for yourself, so easy not to care.

If you think the universe is useless, then it's useless.

You are almost always carrying a quiet prediction.

Your expectation of being accepted or rejected subtly shapes your behavior,

which in turn influences whether others actually accept or reject you.

Be the welcoming one; share a small vulnerability; expect to be liked;

show warmth signals.

Across these different ways of assessing character, we found the same pattern:

moral people were happier.

People with stronger moral character tend to experience greater

meaning in life and happiness.

It could be partly because moral people have better relationships

and are more liked and respected by others.

This ancient pattern-recognition system is what we access every time

we open a book.

This process shifts your entire nervous system into a different state.

Toward the parasympathetic “rest-and-digest” state.

In Greek, a hypokrites was an actor.

Jesus is saying: if your spiritual life is a performance, you are

in the wrong profession. Actors belong on a stage.

The kingdom of God is somewhere else.

There is certainly magic in the world, but it only works when you don't try

to control and scale it.

We can supplement magic.

All they can do is nudge us-all towards the pattern of creation

to find our symbiotic roles within it.

There are no hard boundaries between us, defining us; at the edges

we shade off and spread until we become one with all that surround us.

The sense of being wanted by the world and then the ability to

respond fully to that invitation 

without impediment, interference, or self sabotage.

Freedom arises from seeing and hearing the essence of creation,

of birdsong, of the heartfelt origin of another's speech

and then allowing that essence to speak back to us with

its own particular form of invitation and in its very own voice.

The meeting that occurs when what is between what I think is me and

what I think is other than me come together in a conversation,

an intimacy, a joining, intellectually, physically and imaginatively.

Consider the possibility that you're nothing without your relations.