The mountain, the marketplace, & the inn in-between

On the places we go to find ourselves and the others.

Sometimes I’m drawn to the mountain — a silence somewhere in the uncontainable roar of the wilderness. Solitude. An inward turn, a departure from quotidian things and commitments. Listening. A falling away.

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, 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?

1. Surely, you say, the substrate is both always pulling and always pulling, and the felt sense of a push or pull must imply a focal point, a personal self. That you only create East by facing West. I think this is a true and useful point.

2. I’ll offer Jesus, Zarathustra, Persephone, as examples but am rather more curious: what great myths of becoming don’t speak of departure and return?

3. yes, I think of this as tantamount to wu-wei (here’s a nice primer by Bryan Kam, to which I’d add something like: living in communion with the soul-tides means expressing soul without expression; listening to (or adhering to) soul without listening (or adhering).

4. It’s possible to ignore or dissociate from the tides’ pull and push, instead gripping, digging one’s heels into the sand where a marketplace has long since packed up and moved on. It’s possible to get stuck in the mountains, perpetually untangling knots and forgetting how to weave thread together again, misunderstanding or hiding behind ‘letting go’ as a complete philosophy instead of an especially useful door. I’m reminded of this poem:

Manchmal steht einer auf beim Abendbrot
und geht hinaus und geht und geht und geht, –
weil eine Kirche wo im Osten steht.

Und seine Kinder segnen ihn wie tot.

Und einer, welcher stirbt in seinem Haus,
bleibt drinnen wohnen, bleibt in Tisch und Glas,
so dass die Kinder in die Welt hinaus
zu jener Kirche ziehn, die er vergaß.

— Das Stundenbuch, 1918, Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far out into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

— translation by Robert Bly

5. There’s an intelligent naivety both ways. If you focused on what losses and chaos you might meet going to the mountain, you’d never go. If you focused on what it takes to actually launch a startup or community service you’d just browse the marketplace, not set up a stall.

ps. I think it’s simply a fad, that we consider marketplace experiments in meaning, community, social fabric, especially “naive”. They seem naive to me in the equivalent way that entrepreneurship and pair-bonding are naive.

6. I am partial to David Myatt’s read of Heraclitus.

7. Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005.

8. “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 1873. Daniel Pellerin translation.

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…

Mountain and marketplace maxis. Riff on the original by Tom Gauld

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.

10. Daniel Thorson shares a particularly compelling account of something like a marketplace pilgrimage.

11. One can consider these “holding spaces” in Winnicot’s sense; in which a transformation in being, mediated by some self-other process, is nourished. Other interesting conceptions are Deliberately Developmental Spaces (inspired by Robert Kegan’s DDOs), third places, the concept of the Temenos, digital Oases, the liminal web, and temporary autonomous zones.

12. Ryokan, a brief history.

13. I use communal to mean a thing for common use (e.g. a commons), and a community as a grouping of people with a set of common characteristics and behaviours. The distinction is relevant to the extent that they are not in fixed relation; one commons can serve and instantiate more than one community. (Indeed the goods ones do.)