The ritual involved Neither/Nor practices, values exploration, and embodied reflection on the past year, the present moment — shared there, poetically, under the threshold of Time — and the future. Not the grand flavours of future like successful career or Meaningful Life™️ or life’s work. Rather, the “next honest step”, emerging from one’s whole sense and being; from the vein running through it all, shared with and witnessed by our group.

(Our next cohort begins with a Quest in Canada, Oct 19–24. Applications are open and scholarship places are available.)

Join a Quest

It happens every now and then, as a host or teacher, when you craft an exercise for your guests or students and then you do it and it pulls you in as participant and kicks your butt in all the ways you’d hoped… except it’s you getting the butt-kicking.

(These are lucky happenings. Even though we are explicit and intentional about this in our program design1, it still feels somewhat magical to me when this deep connection and co-arising occurs, this dissolution of student/teacher roles and expectations.)

“What is your next honest step?” was the ask. We were sat in a circle on the grass. We took 5 minutes to reflect, and then put it into words for the group. Myself, butt-kicked, surrendering to the vulnerability of being wholly seen, spoke I don’t know what exactly, because when you’re really speaking, you speak as much from and within body-feel and relational texture as from and within semantics and story.

It’s too intimate to share here and I couldn’t do it justice. It was about love. But I can share the collapsed version, which was the next step of the ritual — we were to put our next honest step into one word; into one value or attentional beacon. We’d write it on our Neither/Nor mission coin.

It happens every now and then, as a host or teacher, when you wanna break the exercise you crafted and that’s fine too. I needed two words.

And then we’d walk through Time, carrying our coin, sun kissing the bay, sky a muted amber and regal mauve, celebrated by the group.

Integrity and courage. More specifically, integrity in the sense of right action and health at each concentric layer of my relational life; with self, with son, with others, with works. And more specifically, courage enough to let love and beauty in. I experience the two as somewhat in tension. I also deeply know that yes, this is a good talisman. A privilege and responsibility to hold these values dear while on my path.

Next steps

My son starts primary school tomorrow. He is thriving and that breaks my heart in the best way. I continue to patiently embed myself in Berlin, putting together a life here as artfully as I can. I’m enthused and rallied by co-building Liminal Learning and the green shoots there. I’m content and motivated by my other strand of work with Superhuman. I’m tidying up what needs tidying, my health is coming back, my full vitality feels — dare I let it in? — not far behind.

Piece by piece. Step by step.

Sometimes I’m drawn to the marketplace — a bustle of trade and ideas somewhere in the inexhaustible thrum of human form. Synergy. An outward turn, a return to other and creation and earthly tethers. An arising.

I oscillate, mountain to marketplace, solitude to synergy, inwards to outwards. I’ve experienced this motion on all scales; from flickers in awareness, to inhales and exhales, to decades-long sagas from and back to Ithaca.

These are the tides of my soul. They are tide-like because when I move with them I don’t notice them — I simply walk to the marketplace or to the mountain. And when I move against them I understand the illusion — no, one never simply walks, one is carried.

Are you with me? I’m getting at the pull and push of life, not of discernible events or people but of the dance of form and formlessness. Sometimes it pulls you inward, as though there’s a magnetic alloy in your bones and gut. Sometimes it pushes you outward, into strange lands, relations, adventures1.

Some tides are small. Some are not. We know how the big ones go when we’ve felt life turn inside-out or upside-down… And we know that’s how they’ve always gone by our myths: one must let go to really know, leave in order to return, die to be reborn. Anyone who resists the big tides can expect psychospiritual pyrotechnics.2

And?

I think living in communion with your soul-tides is a worthy aim3. This is often difficult terrain to travel4 let alone attempt to map, but I have found this metaphor useful at all scales of “social fabric stuff” — for individuals in their wayfinding, nascent groups, proto-communities, space operators, and experience/education designers.

Assertions, I have a few:

1. You can learn to know the tides, feel them in your body, understand through experience their scale and direction.

2. You can learn how to navigate by and with other travellers you meet along the way.

3. If you’re in the business of supporting travellers — community, human flourishing, social fabric stuff, inner work, social work — you can serve better by understanding how and why people come and go.

Knowing by experience: the soul-tides

I’ll focus on the big tides because they are most illustrative.

When you’re going to the mountain…

You behave like deviant — removing yourself from social groups, commitments, narratives, mind. Moving countries, going “monk mode”, joining an actual monastery, getting swole or spiritual or stoned.

What to others looks like an erratic, sudden departure, you experience as a shedding then a culmination, a homecoming. Especially when the tide has just turned, the shift of environment is often drastic; an intelligent choice we make, I suspect, moving into the negative space of not-this, not-me, understanding something of thresholds and behavioural activation.

Totem expressions: finding yourself, breaking free, ego death, seeking purpose, undoing knots, letting go.

When you’re going to the marketplace…

You behave like a torchbearer — deliberately embedding yourself in social groups and commitments, with intention and direction. You gather to deepen around place, people, and practice. You don’t equivocate on relationships, promises, ventures.

What to others can look like sudden, idealistic brazenness or naivety, you experience as a consolidation then a culmination, a homecoming. A confluence of understanding that evaporates complexity and feels right, in the right action sense. Especially when the tide has just turned, the shifts can be drastic; this is intelligent in the same way.5

Totem expressions: finding the others, high agency, living authentically, passion/calling, world-building, devotion.

Knowing by others: the in-between

Consider the in-between: the liminal space between mountain and marketplace. And consider the social milieu and patterns that emerge there.

The first step to finding the others is finding yourself.
The first step to finding yourself is finding the others.

Both sound true and neither is; we’re in the territory of paradox, enantiodromia6, and other synthetic cosmic things. A fractal eddy of self and other and self-other macro- and micro-tides.

What I want to emphasise: it’s all relational, and that’s where a particular magic is. Consider Paola, 29 years old, who has felt the primary motion of her life as going to the mountain ever since her brother died two years ago. Yes, grief has come and gone “in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions”7, but it is still the same tide that hasn’t reached its ebb. The tide feels like the most personal, “truly her” experience of her life, irreducibly individual, often lonely, terrifying and beautiful. As she gave in to the pull she grokked that there was indeed a path in the world that no one could walk but her8. And yet, she’s been going for a few months to a grief circle that meets every Sunday in someone’s living room, and being there, witnessing others who seem mountain-bound too (and one or two who seem to be returning), has been invaluable in knowing and walking her path.

Consider that while Paola couldn’t tell you when she’ll arrive at the mountain, her sense of orientation and relational attunement is strong and nuanced. She knows her ebb is not yet, but inevitable. She could confidently plot each member of the grief circle on a mountain-marketplace spectrum. She has come to accept synchronicity and serendipity, that pivotal strangers appear in her life, that sometimes she’ll feel overwhelmed with the thoughtless comprehension that each moment and interaction of her existence up until now, down to that missed bus, that Freudian slip, that way her brother smiled at her, was an incontrovertible and perfect domino. What strikes her is not so much that fate is reasonable, it’s that it’s astonishingly beautiful.

For Paola, the in-between has been a place of growth, aliveness, confusion, solidarity, trial, soulfulness, connectedness, spirit, becoming, and belonging. It is not easy but it is real. She doesn’t want to be here forever but she’s glad she’s here now.9

Aside: The King Tides aka the Muddle Ages

I’ve written before about the lockdowns offering a collective reckoning — “a giant shake of the snow globe” that afforded us a synchrony of meeting the unknown.

Another way to put it: a lot of us are going somewhere. A giant exodus, to the mountain. A fertile diaspora, milling about in the in-between. And in pockets, the inklings of a pilgrimage, to a new marketplace.10

(I’ve taken the knowing/unknowing lifecycle from my post Resistance, revolution, and reclaiming the unknown and layered in the mountain ←→ marketplace metaphor. With a societal lens, I think these concepts cohere — a people, with confusion, abandon the marketplace; with insight, arrive at the mountain; with resonance, galvanise a return; and with lore, trade in new culture.)

Knowing by design: the inns in-between

Those who wish to support tidal travellers can consider themselves innkeepers.

An innkeeper makes and maintains the inn11 — a space for those consciously navigating the soul-tides. Inns consist of people and/or place and/or protocol; can be digital or physical; temporary or semi-permanent. For metaphorical continuity, consider the Ryokan12; inns in Japan, with a storied history of providing refuge for travellers on spiritual pilgrimage.

Suffice it to say, I am pro-inn. More inns please. They are the infrastructure for collective re-attunement.

So, for the innkeepers: here’s how the soul-tides might inform inn design. Innkeepers all know that magic group feel, when you hit the sweet spot of similarity and difference. I’ve come to think that if you can respect and support each of the participants to understand their own soul-tides, and design mostly for one or the other, most other factors can be mixed however you like: different disciplines, ages, cultural backgrounds, morning vs. night people, and so on.

Maxim:

• A group of some people in big mountain-tide and some in big marketplace-tide might find connection, but won’t find coherence.

Discovery questions:

• Do we want to serve people going to the mountain, to the marketplace, or both?

• In what proportion, and on what time scales?

• Is our inn temporary or semi-permanent? What will be fixed vs. loose, regarding people, place, and protocol?

• Do we innkeepers want to live in the in-between? In what ways are we, too, travelling?

The answers to which might inform:

• Who are we for, and who are we not for?

• How do we expect our inn (communal) to interact with groupings over time (community)?13

• How do we welcome someone who joins?

• How do we support someone who leaves?

• When and how do we remove someone?

• How long do we expect people to stay? If this varies, how, why?

• How do we set our values, norms, rhythms?

• How do we help people crystallise and totemise their experiences, to take with them?

Pulse check — if this frame makes sense, it should now be obvious why these statements are obvious:

• A 10-day meditation retreat in the wilderness with exotic methods will attract people going to the mountain.

• A 4-day unconference and demo day held in collaboration with a downtown university’s mechatronics lab will attract people going to the marketplace.

• A therapist’s chair is typically closer to the mountain. A life coach’s chair is typically closer to the marketplace.

• Healing communities are usually inns filled with people going to the mountain. People ready for the marketplace leave the inn (and often, community) to do so.

• Any community that forms in the in-between is likely to have high turnover and/or soon dissolve or split into subgroups.

• A dearth of in-between spaces creates whiplash to the soul.

And?

I’d love to hear from other innkeepers. Does this ring true? If yes, how do you design for the soul-tides?

9

A note on etiquette for the in-between. Above all, kindness and humility. We are human and tribal; it is seductive to feel good among your new-found mountaineering friends, and be so relieved you’re free from marketeering for a while, that you subtly or quite surreptitiously denounce the marketplace. This isn’t much of a stretch, in some scenes…

Vice versa, of course.

Yet with kindness and humility in place, perhaps it is possible to grok that “we’re all just walking each other home”, even with someone who’s going the other way.

Twice in the history of the West—in ancient Greece and then in Rome—a civilization started out with a fruitful harmony of left and right, but as it overreached itself, it moved toward the left hemisphere’s take on the world and then collapsed. The same trajectory is now being pursued for a third time. After the miraculous outpouring of creativity in the arts, science, society, and philosophy that we call the Renaissance, our civilization has, since the Enlightenment, moved further and further to the left, drunk on the belief that it knows everything and can fix everything. We are like sleepwalkers ambling toward the abyss.

Iain McGilchrist, Resist the Machine Apocalypse

And maybe it’s true, too, that our culture is waking up: a compassionate revolution of community-feeling, a rejection of geopolitical tropes, and a swell of attention and energy directed toward the interdependent, relational, and IRL.

There are some things that should not be for sale. Beyond global politics and business, beyond our personal insults, beyond the place where "you are wrong, and I am right".... the revolution now is to honor a more alive world of relationships, and in doing so to honor life. Communication matters, both verbal and non-verbal.  Sit by a fire side by side, sing, hold babies, walk slowly as you assist the elders, grow, cook, and eat beautiful food together. 

The need to create time for analog human to human communication cannot be underestimated now. There will be no community without first communing.

Nora Bateson, Communication is Sacred

I’m about to suggest there is reason for hope; that a Resistance and a Revolution there may well be.

Those are big claims so before I go on, a fair-handed disclaimer: I have a vested interest in humanity, and in hope. I prefer to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the possible, not probable. My preference is part cope and part worldview1. In other words I am a zealous neo-romantic, in a season of practice not scholarship, writing a selective publication on “a beautiful re-bundling — the chance to put the pieces of our lives and societies back together in more artful, soulful, humane ways”.

And before I go on, a prod the other way: what if the desire to make accurate predictions about The World — to be not-wrong — is precisely what prevents you being carried into life, into being right in unforeseen ways?

Hope

I see a will to know by experience. A willingness to experiment with sincerity, curiosity, and openness. I see a vibrant milieu that has earnestly adopted ‘touching grass’. That encourages freeing your ass so your mind will follow, daring to let love be the answer, fucking around and finding out, sabbaticals, experiments in somatics and healing, meeting mutuals.

I see a will to know in relation. A fertile lab of social fabric experiments — summer camps for grown-ups, community living rooms, praxis hubs filled with pragmatic utopians, a culture that shares gathering tips, guilds and pods and squads, neo-villages, non-denominational churches, a boon of residencies and festivals.

And I not only see this, I feel this — I know by experience and in relation. As a participant in this subculture, I’ve come alive, with my own mid-pandemic awakening to the collective2.

Is this not a communal revolution, in honoring a more alive world of relationships, per Bateson?

Is this not a right hemisphere pendulum swing resistance, infant as it might be, akin to what McGilchrist calls for?

What makes life worth living is what can only be called resonance: the encounter with other living beings, with the natural world, and with the greatest products of the human soul—some would say, with the cosmos at large, or with God. Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive. The resonance we enjoy in a real relationship with a sentient other is not possible where there is no freedom, no spontaneity, no life.

Iain McGilchrist, Resist the Machine Apocalypse

Knowing by getting lost

“Only in encountering the uncontrollable do we experience the world in its depth and complexity and come fully alive” — yes, and it’s worth spending time with this. The cradle of resonance is the unknown.

What would a culture look like that generated and supported such encounters? One that reclaimed a relationship with the unknown?

We’d hear a lot about letting go, loss, and rest. We’d see social rituals for grieving, wintering, and surrender. We’d see a sophistication for confusion, an understanding of solitary and inner experience as an ebb to a flow within shared experience, rather than as an alienation and isolation from communal feeling.

We’d see nested, interdependent, ineffable cycles of a process like3:

What would it feel like, to find resonance in such a burgeoning culture?

CONFUSION

There's a moment when you realise you're lost.

Proper lost — not the slight confusion of misplacing your keys or being so sure, wrongly, that you’ve met a stranger before, but the desperate falling akimbo into the maw of the unknown.

"Chicken or fish?" the waiter asks you, and you invent a preference you suppose you had, once. Maybe you don't know who you are anymore, and doubt you ever really knew. Perhaps there's a quivering static where gut instinct once was. Maybe the world has revealed itself, as suddenly and unequivocally as a landscape lit-up by lightning, fundamentally absurd and arbitrary. It makes no sense.

Lost. Out of space and time. Tumbling under roiling surf, hoping for a rasp of sand or a brighter side, to know what's down or up. Tumbling inside, into memory and fear, where your senses and stories cavort, confabulating, fabulating.

INSIGHT

There’s a moment when confusion collapses into insight.

Sometimes this insight is eureka!, the Vision, the crystalline flash of future-present. But what’s required is usually aha, the Letting Go4, the serene bath of illusion, futures, and suffering dissolved.

Eureka or Aha, you've shifted from unknown unknown to known unknown — there's a thing-ness, a shape, to your confusion (even if only as an object in negation; not that.)

What do you know, really, at this point? Perhaps not much. Probably not what to do, exactly. But you’ve shifted between two distinct points, and one can begin to navigate with two points. Two points is validation enough that you’re not crazy (anymore). Two points is spatial enough that you might know pretty well how you ended up here. Maybe your mind eases up on the restless scavenger hunts into the past.

You’re lost, still. But you've snapped into it — back into time and space, into something what it’s like to be you. Fear makes way for anxiety, fascination, or even excitement.

RESONANCE

There's a moment when you realise you're not alone.

There are others who've felt a confusion like yours, who have had insights which echo yours in felt-sense if not form. They get you and they’re patient. Though hodgepodge and fringe, the collection of these others and insights starts making sense. This is still the known unknown, but the knowledge is shared — relational, branching, contextual, memetic, harmonic. So too is the unknown, and it turns out that not knowing, together, ain’t so bad.

You stop talking about flukes and coincidences and start talking about confluence and serendipity, and it's not just a semantic turn — it’s something you’ve understood in your bones and being as much as your mind. You’ve directly experienced the pull of collective effervescence or the sacred, as surely as you’ve felt the pull of a river current. You can recognise without exchanging many words the others who’ve felt it too.

LORE

There’s a moment when you know you’re onto something.

You’re on a sure path to the resolution of your original confusion5. The ways by which you and your group navigate become sophisticated and patterned; a logic is apparent. There’s skill and beauty in your wayfinding.

You’re alive. There’s a fertile culture of ideas, stories, and memes. Your group attracts other groups, of similar vibe but independent origin. People say things like magnetic and mycelium and emergence, and it's not just a vernacular turn, it’s an attempt to describe the phenomena of collective and transcendent experience.

The known becomes known.

Is this wisdom?

No, this is just a framework.

And yes, in that it tells the story of systemic individual and collective transformation, through the unknown, with right hemisphere intelligence, towards togetherness.

In a context of extreme individualism and isolation, the wise direction must be towards togetherness. In a context of left-hemisphere-dominant systems, environments, and tropes, the wise direction must be towards right-hemispheric knowing.

Is this enlightenment?

Tyler asked a good question.

Taking ‘waking up” broadly: yes, sort of. Again, it’s relative and directional: the cultivation of awareness seated in togetherness, compassion, the greater-than, the numinous, seems the right direction, at least. I think this process describes well the spiral dynamic of encounters with the unknown giving birth to a rich web of encounters with one another.

Taking enlightenment technically: I’m not sure? I do see a higher than average rate of individual wakings up, and I suppose that creates a supportive environment for more waking up. I can see the argument that a shift in consciousness from individual-egoic to group-egoic could be steps on the right path, or rather steps toward grippy mob or clique identity.

Is this the answer?

I want to emphasise what I’m not saying. I am not saying this diagram is a winning prescription, that there’s an evident code of belief and behaviour to commit to and decontextualise and replicate. I’m not saying twitter subculture is pointed in the right direction, or that the civilisational odds are good.

I suppose that picking the right bandwagon to jump on matters, though not as much as fostering a culture that makes a lot of bandwagons. I suppose that coherent stories and structures matter, though not as much as avoiding dogma contra dogma brinkmanship, as much as returning to direct experience, to the earth, babies, breath, fireside. I suppose that the consolidation of power and politic in collective structures can be transformative, though not at the expense the irreducible process of individual transformation via relation.

Is this moment in time a fluke?

Maybe.

There’s a chance that a confluence of environmental factors, with the pandemic lockdowns as the climax, was the giant shake of the snow globe that afforded us a glut of shared experience.

With global synchrony and the internet communication layer, we’ve shared the confusion of living in lockdown, shared the insights about how we are living and what’s broken, and shared a resonance in how we might like to re-bundle our lives now. In pockets, there’s a lore of optimistic experimentation. And yet, maybe it’ll just be one trip around my quadrants: the snow will settle, the globe will return to its status quo.

But what if?

The telltale sign of a waking up culture, of a Resistance or Revolution worth its salt, then, would be witnessed in its rich and sustained relation with the unknown — in its seasonality and rhythm of known/unknown, self/other. (The well-trodden alternative is Lore → dogma.6)

I witness, gratefully, at this moment, a beautiful Resonance and Lore, a sense of independently originated subcultures, of nested groupings of vibe-simpatico organisms. I am alive and it is spring. I hope it is the first of many.

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6

via River

Specifically, I wrote, to:

• experiment with shifting the locus of care/obligation/meaning.

• adopt a faith — that if each collective is seen, loved, supported, that my individual fate will be carried and good.

• when in doubt, return to being with tightest circle.

• expand from the centre out, when the energy is there. And when the energy is not, withdraw from the larger circles first. (Without feeling bad, this is called breathing.)

• default to embodied, environment-informed decisions when at a crossroads.

Now, a year or so on, I review. A potpourri of sentiments. Gratitude, that I trusted my felt-sense and followed it to a coming home, of rediscovered life-force and authenticity. Awe, at the amount I gave and did. Pride, at how showed up for and returned to almost-centre, to my son, supporting his transition to separate parents and households. Sorrow, at the destruction of Family former. Serenity, at the fragile peace of Family new.

Amusement, at my naivety (that naivety we can always find in our younger selves, no matter how old we get). Oh boy. The sheer volume of life, of discovery and rediscovery. The ever-widening gyre.

Thus, now, a chronicle of reckoning. Of weighing and accounting, checks and balances.

So, here goes:

experiment with shifting the locus of care/obligation/meaning.

Vocationally, what felt true is now known truth. I am reborn, here. I can trace a withdrawal and reemergence of soul through my leaving my first career in advertising, to self-isolated writing, to Laneway Learning, to the Pancake books and now Bloom and Medley.

(Otherwise, see more under the ‘breathing’ section below. )

adopt a faith — that if each collective is seen, loved, supported, that my individual fate will be carried and good.

Appropriate to call this faith! I would like this to be true. It feels good believing this true. But it puts my fate in the hands of either god or ‘the collective’ as god.

I am unclear how but I suspect this is wrong or incomplete. My individual fate and my individual hands probably need to chat.

when in doubt, return to being with tightest circle.

yes, good. Specifically in the body, soma, not the mind. And next layer, in presence with my son. Keep going.

expand from the centre out, when the energy is there. And when the energy is not, withdraw from the larger circles first. (Without feeling bad, this is called breathing.)

Dynamically, directionally, spot on. But in fact, breathing can be hard when you’re living collectively, because we are an “inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”1 What I mean is this whole relational web of compassion, trust, responsibility, autonomy, accountability, mudita, love... I feel it. I'm in it. Much of my year has had a moral tone; of real compromise between competing values. Exhaling is hard. Not showing up for people you love is fucking hard.2

I suspect the way here is to aspire to fluid collective breath, with honesty, self-knowledge, respect and dignity. And my lesson might be prudence in trust. 3 4

default to embodied, environment-informed decisions when at a crossroads.

sounds good. At crossroads am I, indeed, but truly too ‘in it’ to discern or plan it, and anyhow, I will sense the way:

As for declarations? None yet. I’ll return to center.

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Duh, of course, but I’m getting old, and getting older means learning ever simpler lessons. And real learning isn’t a headsport anyway.

The first gong on the soul was starting a family. There was before my son, and there is after. (If you’re new to this list, here’s my New Dad series.)

The second was the pandemic. The isolation and alienation have hurt, of course, a skulking compounding ache, migraine-like. More impressing has been the collective experience of the same: being alone together. A trading of hardship stories that fomented communion in loss, a collective imagination of post-COVID times. How obvious it becomes that we are social creatures when we’re prevented from being social. How obvious that we’re all in this together.

The third was Bloom. This group is in fact a daydream realised: about 6 months before our meeting, I posted this incantation on my homepage:

I daydream about never retiring. Of a lifetime of creative partnership, friendship, and misadventure with soul-on-the-sleeve explorers who argue for decades about Helvetica and Beyoncé and Wittgenstein, who celebrate the little triumphs and sit shiva over halcyon neverworks. Brothers and sisters in the possibility of art and life.

Three gong strikes. I cannot unhear or unfeel them. And so what I’m impelled to do now, how I want to be, is consciously and fundamentally relational. The locus of meaning, of creative drive, has shifted towards Us away from I.

In the more compelling imagery of Benjamin Zander, it’s something like caring about how many shining eyes I have around me.

So, what now? I will:

• experiment with shifting the locus of care/obligation/meaning.

• adopt a faith — that if each collective is seen, loved, supported, that my individual fate will be carried and good.

• when in doubt, return to being with tightest circle.

• expand from the centre out, when the energy is there. And when the energy is not, withdraw from the larger circles first. (Without feeling bad, this is called breathing.)

• default to embodied, environment-informed decisions when at a crossroads.