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.

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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.

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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'.

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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.

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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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.

-----

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.