As you may have noticed from the tortuousness of my trying to grind out my book over the last five years, or perhaps from the increasingly fervent language shifts I’ve been making, but I’ve been moving away, as quickly as my legs will carry me, from the traditional doctrines of DEI.

I have been eschewing them, indeed outright rejecting them, but not because I don’t believe in equality and fairness. Actually, I really do, but I have come to feel with ever more certainty that the equity field, for all its delicate poppies and wildflowers of anti-racism work and LGBTQ activism, for all of the daisies and dandelions of disability rights, has become so very much a part of the hegemony it seeks to dismantle.

DEI has become about managing practises and behaviours, and at best it tends to act like some kind of pressure relief valve, managing the horrific effects of the wider system. In the end, I’ve concluded that really DEI is there to attend to and manage inequity. It is absolutely not there to dismantle it, to build from the perspective of flourishing or well-being or wholeness, and for that reason it will always fail.

This field (the equity one), now grown as a vast monocrop, is an ecology with its own stories (its own dos and don’ts), relationships, power, climate, rituals, ways of reproducing itself, ways of feeding that which it is ultimately part of and I do not want to spend my professional, intellectual, or indeed my spiritual life in it.

I spent years believing that when organisations were getting it wrong, when harm was being caused, it was because something was missing. Perhaps there was some missing education that I could supply that would help them, would stop them from causing harm to the very people they said that they remained concerned about.

But time and time again when it got down to the nub of it with those places, with those leaders, that wasn’t really it. They were just (happily, perhaps) cultivating a monocrop, often one designed to support a particular species to thrive. The part they didn’t want to say out loud was that they were okay with that. These organisations are not starved of a particular approach. They do not need something. People are not failing to thrive because the ground they have planted in has not been nourished. On the contrary these organisations are deliberately cultivating for a particular outcome, they adding to soil in a way that will kill off a certain type of species and then (in a kinda gaslighting way) tipping their hat to any that managed to adapt to the environment and persevere anyway. Like any monocrop environment, they are being intensively fed and growing exactly what they were cultivated to grow.

On The Equity Field

For all the potential of the field of equity work, for all the obvious assertions that it exists to confront the existing hegemony, it feels to me to be quite clear that it can’t. It doesn’t, and I don’t think it too dramatic to say that though it should be the place of a rich and varied ecology, it has become a monocrop and I am sad to say but the dominant crop that the field produces is attention to harm.

Something terrible is planted in the field, a horrific injustice, heinous, abominable (for these are the seeds in our seed bank) an instance of inequity presents itself for planting, and it is cultivated through analysis of what went wrong and how and by whom. Through research it is fed, column inches strenghen the roots. Through commentary, the meetings that are held it gets watered and nourished. Solidarity becomes a form of cultivation. Lists of responses continue to cultivate this attention to harm until the crop grows stronger, truer, and more healthy, right out of the ground it was planted in - we have so carefully nourished it. It does so very well.

And it doesn’t stop there. That attention is immediately reused the next time that the cycle needs to begin again, so in a self-perpetuating cycle the environment orients itself back to itself with its outcomes fairly reliably achieved. Ever more sophisticated attention to harm and inequity become the only slight improvement, cycle after cycle.

The problem is of course, like with any ecology cultivated as a monocrop, attention to other species is not made possible. With all our focus on attention to harm we have little room to focus on the ordinary wildflowers of the lives of Black, Brown, queer, and disabled folk. We have little time to focus our attention on the saplings of kinship, the shoots of artistic work, on communal flourishing. Our back is bent against the sun and instead towards our one true harvest, attention to harm.

On Taking All Currencies.

I was in a workshop with the brilliant Dr. Kate Tomas last year, railing against the number of spiky interactions that had befallen me of late. She offered me a brilliant, brilliant tool: the tool of transmuting that energy, of taking all currencies and making them useful, metabolising them, even the malevolent ones, to nourish my own best outcomes.

It’s my strong belief, when I look at the equity field, that this cuts both ways.

I know that the field of equity work will receive all energies and use them towards its harvest. It will receive resistance to harm and cultivate using the energy of the four hours of research and the eight hours of essay writing you have spent. It will receive the energy of the six years you spent on a PhD researching it. It will receive the energy of the actual harm caused by institutions. It will receive the energy expended by cruel journalists tapping and spilling bile out on their computer screens. But it will also receive the energies of all our opposition to the cruelty of those same journalists. Wanna name the enemies, launch a counter strike. Get vengeance – it will utilise it all. It literally takes all energy forms: the meetings, the demonstrations, all of it.

Indeed, I wonder whether our resistance, our indignation, our fury, might not be the richest fertiliser of all.

For a field so caught up in the importance of reflexivity, it is more than a little concerning that, as practitioners, academics, consultants, DEI leads, organisations, and talking heads, we are not all taking more care.

In a field so clearly interested in positionality and power, liminality, and sovereignty, and a field defining its approach as almost uniquely reflexive, why is so little interest found in asking:

• What is my contribution to fertilising this monocrop?

• What is my focus watering. Really?

• How am I contributing to the harvest of attention to harm?

• Is that the contribution one I am intentionally choosing?

So many column inches thinking themselves analytically sound, thematically rigorous, morally justified, but to what end?

What is being nourished as an outcome?

Now, my PhD friends know that I am impressed by their scholarship but will remain cautious about reading their theses because I ask myself continually: what are the consequences of my orientation towards this? I know who my PhD doing friends are and know they will have asked that of themselves too, and I hope that all of us hanging out in the equity field are doing the same.

None of this is to say do nothing.

It is to say report it, report it all. But be direct, and hygienic and perfunctory in that reporting. Be diligent, but don’t spend too long wading in it all with them. Call it out, but don’t dwell in that field. Don’t hang out there professionally and personally. I mean, why would you do that?

While we’re on the topic of hygiene, one thing I have noticed with increasing distaste is that the equity field does not just nourish, nurture, and cultivate attention to harm. It actually encourages those who were not even looking at it to look at it even more.

In the things we invite people to, in the stance we invite people to take, I argue we just keep reproducing that same crop as outcome: a very vital, a very vigorous crop of attention to harm.

When we suggest that one and all sign the petition, attend the march, write to their MP about the outcome of X or Y outrageous, unfathomable abuse, harm or indignity, and when I say outrageous and unfathomable I really mean it. When we say, “Read my reflections on said outrageous indignity, no, read mine, no, mine. When we invite others to deepen their awareness of more harm, we may momentarily forget that these invitations have unequal costs.

Some of us can be in this field as researchers and analysts, as professional allies, and then pack up our camping chairs and unpeg our tent poles and go hang out somewhere else. Leaving others without cover, leaving them ill-resourced, no glowing campfire of fleeting interest just bodies ricocheting with a trauma stretching back for generations, leaving them contemplating the well-being and safety and professional futures of their children, their friends, their siblings, themselves around an ashy empty fire pit.

In the equity field we have become so accomplished at inviting others to contemplate, like carrion birds, the realities of the lives of others. This field is so successful at helping me find my latest episode of a racially motivated brutality and so woefully poor at inviting me to contemplate, to engage, to focus on where I can find my local Black gardening collective and where I can get tickets to next week’s South Asian poetry event, or on helping me understand the histories of the queer communal shared table event that has been running for the last five years.

We are constantly choosing which fields to invite each other to, and greater care might just be needed.

In the equity field, an environment where attention has turned relentlessly towards harm, we may all be more aware but the inhabitants of the field are not unscathed. The ecology has done its job well but so many are left depleted.

The inhabitants of this field and those who have been invited in are angry, they are grief-stricken they are frightened, terrorised, exhausted, worried, hyper alert, devastated, depressed, and hopeless.

Surely we can see that there, right there, the part this equity field plays in the broader ecology, the larger hegemony, is so successful.

Communities too exhausted to participate, to live well, to re-dream, to re-imagine, to mobilise around joy, is its own goal.

It is an own goal.

The reason I don’t want to hang out there is because of the ecological consequences for me but for my lineage. Prolonged habitation in this field has huge ramifications for us all, but those consequences are not evenly distributed. If I can’t wake up in the morning, replete, the consequences for me and my family, for the generations to come, are huge. If I can’t swim or smile or put my feet on the grass, walk, laugh, dance, talk with full hopeful heart to my ancestors, the consequences are grave.

I need to be replete.

I need to be able to imagine a world seven generations hence.

I need to be able to cultivate richer, stronger, more beautiful ecologies because our lives depend on it. The lives of those seven generations hence depend on it.

I’m not advocating for the elimination of one ecology in favour of another, rather, I am encouraging more intention about how we use our energies.

Perhaps the ecologies of academic institutions are no longer useful places to pour in our nourishing resources, our money, our debt, our deference. Perhaps letter after letter after our names feeds that ecology in none too helpful ways, keeps that hegemony alive in spite of us saying it’s all increasingly irrelevant.

Maybe the ecologies of publishing and mainstream media are not ecologies we feed anymore. They publish, but we circulate, we click, we share our outrage, we water, we nourish. My complaint to IPSO will feed the same thing; perhaps instead I could give it a perfunctory nod, then turn my investment, my attention, my nourishment towards alternative ways of understanding the world. Turn my face to the sun and away from that particular harvest.

Perhaps it’s time to ask how much time we want to spend oriented towards the languages, the stories, the relating ways that do not serve us, that are designed to deplete us.

Perhaps we want to turn away from that, towards Chineke! and music making. Perhaps we want to reorient towards Black Rootz growing folk. Perhaps we want to turn ourselves towards Sankofa, building intergenerational connection to deeper ways of knowing, to Black Girls Hike, walking our shared lands.

Let’s light candles for each other. Pour libations. Let’s smile for each other. Let’s remember those who have now passed and who, if we listen to them well enough, will help us to celebrate the full humanity of each other.

But let’s also make new tents – maybe colourful canvas ones, set up our camps around cosy and warm campfires and close to a stream, in communal campgrounds that are dignifying, in which song rises high over the heads of us all and our feet as they burrow into the grasses we sit on itch the spirits of our ancestors.

Let’s visit, perhaps for short and necessary moments only, all those lands that do not dignify us because we have work to do and the sun will soon be setting.

I was home for a week a couple of weeks ago, showing my new family around my old home. I moved to Denmark in 2019 and have just received my permanent residency. I have a Danish partner and a son deeply embedded in Danish island life, and I am almost as at home with pickled herring on rye bread as I am with a full English. Denmark really does feel like home.

But then, as I say, a couple of weeks ago I brought some family ‘home’. From the moment we flew over the southwest, skirting the edge of Bath as we made our descent to Bristol, I could feel the familiar, complicated emotion that I have about the place. A narrative literacy lens tells me so much about why the emotions I have at home are complex. You cannot help but be entangled in the narratives of the place in which you have lived, and my formative years are Bristol years.

For me, Bristol’s strong narratives as one of the major ports central to the continuation and perpetuation of the enslavement trade are inescapable. Over a 100-year-ish period, the city saw unparalleled growth, such were the riches being plundered the world over. Around 2,100 Bristol ships set out to chart the triangular route. They left the West Coast of Africa with textiles, alcohol, and copper, traded these for human beings, and returned with the fruits of enslaved people’s labour: sugar, tobacco, and cocoa.

Bristol rises up quite magnificently, unbelievably, at times, with the wealth of this trade. From the Corn Exchange to Queen Square, from the Cathedral windows to the stage at the Bristol Old Vic, the narratives of imperialism and the horrors of colonialism are written, heard, and built in beautiful sandstone large across the city.

As a British West Indian, the voices of my ancestors speak to me in my restless dreams. Bristol dreams haunted by a Black face - are we related? This is a city where I must be constantly on guard. A visit to the museum means a chance happening upon an image of a boat filled with human beings drawn in straight lines, their legs and feet shackled. Seeing them there will ricochet pain right through my body. In a city grappling with its history, and indeed at times inclined to apologise for the part it played in the enslavement of human beings and the resulting legacy on my ancestors, that can lead to more than frequent reminders of those horrors.

Relational literacy tells me that in the body of my white partner, this happening upon apology and slave trade reminder (remembrance) is experienced very differently from mine. In my body, that trauma lives on. My heart hurts, my eyes well, and I am racked with the guilt of needing to make my life count, of somehow repaying what those shackled human beings, my ancestors, sacrificed their lives for. I need somehow to do better.

As I said, my relationship with the city is complicated.

Bristol is so beautiful, so, so beautiful, and its wealth is obscene. We go with our cameras and take photos of the suspension bridge and the gorge, and it is beautiful. But I turn my gaze behind me to Clifton Village, and it is also obscene. It is jaw-dropping and grotesque. The plaques on the outside of the buildings tell great stories of the ‘great’ men and women who lived in these Georgian houses. In these plaques, we know how, and for how long, and how ingeniously Isambard Kingdom Brunel engineered the suspension bridge.

The breathtaking views of the city have us all in rapture. But liberatory literacy constantly reminds me of how this power has been dammed, and how poorly it has flowed in the city. It is the reason that I could no longer stay.

Eight years ago, on a walk with my young son when he was just four, I pushed him uphill from Easton, down on the east side of the city, to the Clifton Downs up high on the west, through the elegance of Redland and then Clifton Village, and then back down through the city. On our return to St Andrews, we walked miles of pavement, miles of people sleeping rough.

The ever-present gap between the rich and the poor in a city like Bristol is hard to navigate if you have any degree of relational literacy, any degree of liberatory literacy. Conservative figures put the number of families living in temporary accommodation in the city at around 1,800, and hundreds of people sleep rough every night, despite relatively low unemployment statistics. The indices of multiple deprivation rank 30% of Bristol’s wards among the most deprived in England. Child poverty is here in dense pockets, and as a teacher for 25 years in this city, that narrative is ever present, especially as I sip a seven-pound latte in Clifton Village.

Bristol is one of the most expensive cities to live in outside of London. Average prices here are £380,000, around ten times the average local wage, and private rents rose by double digits over the last few years. Social housing used to be one-third of Bristol’s housing stock, and now it is less than a fifth. Let that narrative sit alongside some of the palpable antipathy to the hundreds of people actually sleeping rough and asking if you could please spare some change. Power is dammed. Wealth is dammed. The stranglehold on property in London by the billionaires means downstream, downstream and west, the vulnerable line Bristol’s streets.

As I said, my relationship with Bristol is complicated.

When I was visiting, I of course spent time at the harbour, and when at the harbour, why not rekindle your relationship with some of the city’s best fish and chips? My relationship is complicated, but not that complicated. You just cannot get this stuff in Denmark.

As I sat waiting for my fish and chips at Salt & Malt, down at Wapping Wharf on the docks, I was really uplifted to see the use of the Billy Chip. I did not know anything about the Billy Chip before this visit. As I say, I moved to Denmark just over seven years ago, and so my experience of Bristol and homelessness, and how one might be able to support people, was very different back then.

I looked it up and was so happy with what I found. It was conceived in Bristol by Billy Abernethy-Hope, a 20-year-old ambulance driver who was stumped by the conundrum of trying to get the public to part with funds and give them to homeless people for fear of how those funds might be spent. He thought instead of a token that would allow people to show their support by purchasing it. He did not live to see his idea realised, but his sister Meg, with their dad Jon, got his initiative off the ground, one that allows people in need to exchange a token for items of food, drink, clothing, and pet food from participating shops and cafes. Seven years on, the Billy Chip has expanded from Bristol to areas right across the UK. If any initiative were to exemplify liberatory literacy for me, it might just be the Billy Chip.

At Being Luminary, we often talk to our clients about the places they might find everyday liberatory literacy, places like their reception areas. Do you, for example, have chairs that everybody’s body can fit into, or not? Do some bodies have to stand for fear that they might get stuck? Do some have to perch awkwardly on something that looks too spindly to bear their weight? Does a person with a buggy have to navigate the indignity of your narrow entranceway and, once in, have to keep apologising to people for being in the way? How does your organisation, your workplace, your culture contribute to the restoration of dignity? Do you even think that is your job?

The Billy Chip is, in the words of Billy’s sister, all about that. The token gives people their dignity back. People can pop into a coffee shop and choose what they want for themselves, like everybody else, and get treated like everybody else.

All of that, and then some, was what I felt when I watched a couple of young men come into Salt & Malt and exchange their Billy Chips that day. Yes, the token makes me feel good about the minds of young people who are orienting themselves to social good, initiatives that centre dignity. Yes, my spirit was lifted to know that thousands of shops across Bristol have said yes to participating and have wanted to be part of this initiative. But my heart was healed, and my eyes welled with tears, the kind that only spring in the presence of that thing that we are all really built for but just do not always do that well: unconditional positive regard, kindness, love of our fellow human.

When I watched the young woman serving the men with their Billy Chips in Salt & Malt on Bristol’s harbour, I did not know how to capture what she had or why she had it, and not everyone does. But the exchange between her and these men was extraordinary. As each tentatively and hopefully put forward their chips, she full-heartedly and even-handedly communicated, beyond words, that they were both in exactly the right place, that all was well, that she wished them well, that they were humans worthy of being dignified just like everyone else.

I do not know what is in that salt and vinegar down there, but my goodness, if we could all have a little of that, we would be getting somewhere.

I thanked her, of course, as I picked up my fish and chips, and we both welled up a little at all that can occur in these moments. I wished her so well, and her team also.

I bid you: get down to Salt & Malt at the harbour to see if they are dishing that out to all human beings, but also to get yourselves down to purchase a few Billy Chips.

Okay, I have officially wrapped up this academic year, and I want to reflect on something that has come up time and time again in my work.

Towards the end of my keynotes, whenever I am in a space with educators and I do any of my workshops, people will come up to me and ask questions about the use of the N-word, and I have a few things I want to say about it.

The first is that children, just like adults, know exactly how to code switch. How do we know this? Because they do it all the time.

If we have a group of Year 10 students and we tell them that next week we are going to be visiting an old people’s home because we are doing some intergenerational work, it would be very unlikely that any of them would walk in to said nursing home calling out, “Yo, what’s up, my N-word?” to each other, or to any Black or brown residents of that nursing home who happened to be seated in the reception area or communal space.

In the same way, when young people go to a friend’s grandmother’s birthday party or to a job interview in an relatively new space, they do not use the N-word right out of the gate. They don’t use the N-word when they go into any coded environment in which it is clear that it wouldn’t be welcome, because children know how to code switch.

The reason that they are using it in school is because schools have often become coded environments in which it is not clear that the word is not welcome. The codes, i.e. the culture, are too permeable. They are too flexible, and they allow for it to be the case that the usage is up for debate.

The use of the N-word is not just personal preference. It’s not just the reclamation of a word for Black people. It’s also the tolerance of an organisation to having it, to hearing it, to allowing it to be a word that can proliferate.

The other thing I want to say about it, and this is even more important, is that practitioners really need to learn how to apply a safeguarding lens to this word.

In the same way that I, as a teacher of secondary-age children, would not have Year 7 girls, Year 8 girls, Year 9 girls, Year 10 girls, Year 12 girls or Year 13 girls coming into any classroom I was in, any office I was in, or walking past me in any corridor saying, “Oh, you know me, Miss, I’m a right slag,” I will not tolerate young people referring to themselves as the N-word.

Do you know why?

Because I don’t think that a girl who is using the word “slag” to describe herself has a clear and healthy self-concept.

Do you know why I’m not allowing the use of the N-word near me?

Because I don’t think it’s helping young people who use it develop a clear and healthy self-concept.

We seem to imagine that young people, very young people, are old enough to determine how they use that word, when they use that word, who else is going to be given a pass to use that word if they have been given a pass to use that word, all before their brains are developed enough to really understand the implications of that word on their own psyche.

Before they are old enough to understand what it is to internalise racism or to use racism in a jocular form.

I don’t know that anyone who is school age is old enough to know that they are reclaiming a word.

I don’t know that they are old enough, or political enough, to understand the connotations of it.

I don’t believe that they are ready to repoliticise it.

I don’t believe any of these things are true of children, which is why I say: safeguard children against using language about themselves or others that they don’t yet truly understand and haven’t yet had the chance to conceptualise.

Keep them safe, just like you would any other child who was speaking about themselves in a way that might need further reflection when they are 18, 19 or 21.

And if that’s too challenging, then simply remind them that they know how to code switch, and have faith that you know that they know how to code switch.

And before anyone comes at me and tells me, “Yeah, but they listen to it in the music. Black children listen to music where Black people are saying this.”

Let’s think about Richard Pryor, who travelled to Kenya in 1979. This brilliant and incredibly talented comedian travelled with a comedy set that made frequent use of the N-word. Afterwards, he publicly renounced the word, saying that seeing Black people living with dignity made him realise that there were no people who would describe themselves using the N-word there, and that he regretted ever using the term.

His daughter, Rain Pryor, has a whole body of work on this. She has spoken and written extensively about the psychological, historical and intergenerational impact of the word, arguing that many people inherit and repeat it without fully understanding its weight.

So for me, this is about creating spaces where children don’t have to navigate certain realities, whether politicising or depoliticising anything.

Just give them enough time to work out the weight of the word. To work out whether that is something they really want to claim about themselves or use against others.

I, for one, do not want to claim that I am an N-word.

I never have.

I never will.

And I hope that all educators understand their responsibility in keeping everybody safe from its damaging intergenerational and cultural effects.

3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

‘Right relationship’ is not just being nice, nor is it conflict avoidance, but (and) (also) it is not hanging around when the situation threatens your dignity.

II.

There are boundaries. The question for me is: can everyone leave with their dignity intact? If safety is compromised, of course, I go. And when it’s safe, then naturally I stay. That’s the discipline.

III.
After rupture, people often want to rush to repair; they want to smooth things over, to get back to “normal.” But repair is about the time and honesty it takes to ask: What actually happened? What needs to be different? I think that the conversation after the rupture is usually more important than whatever caused it.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.
John Gottman:

“It’s not the presence of conflict that matters, but how you repair after it.”

II.
Esther Perel:

“Trust is built in very small moments.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, if there’s a small rupture you’ve been avoiding, consider whether it’s time to wade through it. Acknowledging it happened might be the start.

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S.. The ferries are getting busier with cyclists and day-trippers as schools edge towards breaking up here in Denmark. (This week).

Thanks for reading. Each week, I share 3 ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 microdose of enchantment. If this landed, subscribe to get Field Notes in your inbox every Thursday.

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3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

Temporal design is about understanding how time shapes experience — the rhythm of the day, the month, the season, and the period the organisation is in.

II.

When the nights draw in, are we bringing cosiness into our workplaces? When summer comes, are we opening up? These aren’t silly, soft questions. They’re design questions. And most organisations ignore them completely.

III.

I worked with a school once that had the same meeting schedule in December as in June. Same start times, same lighting, same format. It was as if bodies didn’t exist, as if seasons didn’t happen. Aesthetic intelligence asks us to notice that people are not machines. We have rhythms. And spaces that ignore those rhythms drain people without them knowing why.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Christopher Alexander:

“Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem.”

II.

Annie Dillard:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, notice how the season is affecting you. And ask: is there one small way your work could honour that?

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S. The birds are absolutely rowdy at 5 a.m. now, no actually at 3am. The mornings are already warm; this might be my favourite time of year.

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I.

When there’s a rupture around equity, survival responses arise in different bodies — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — and they arise differently, for different reasons.

II.

Our bodies carry history we didn’t choose. Depending on how we’ve been positioned in the world, certain patterns are passed down through ancestry. It’s not a metaphor. It’s physiology. And it shows up in meetings, in conflicts, in moments of tension.

III.

I’ve been in rooms where someone’s response to feedback seemed “disproportionate” — until you understood what that feedback activated. What the body remembered. The work isn’t to judge the reaction. It’s to understand that the body has reasons the mind may not be able to articulate yet.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Resmaa Menakem:

“Trauma in a person, decontextualised over time, looks like personality. Trauma in a family, decontextualised over time, looks like family traits. Trauma in a people, decontextualised over time, looks like culture.”

II.

Bessel van der Kolk:

“The body keeps the score.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, if someone’s reaction surprises you, pause before judging. Ask yourself: what might their body be remembering that mine isn’t?

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

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I let slip in this daring game of one-upmanship that mine was a life completely disordered, full of confusion, chaos, variety. You urged me to tell all, promised me you could hold galaxies, so I told you of my misshapen toes, asked if you’d noticed my earlobes, revealed that my chin was not naturally hairless.

Your eyes shone with wonder, and so I ploughed on, told you of an infinity of emotions, moving at light speed from heartbreak, and I mean sorrow, to ecstasies. On a meteoric roll now, I told you how, when the bills came in, they would lie in terrible piles, each slender unopened envelope testifying against me, that when the fear got too much, I would stuff them in a drawer, and that drawer was a black hole.

I was uncharted space; you should have stayed clear, but steer clear you would not.

So we were married. We went twice around the sun before you turned.

You returned by surprise from Norway. My upturned mouth sought your lips, your downturned eyes stared aghast at our kitchen cupboards, at the open packets, at the dried mushrooms spilling onto shelves, at the raisins and small desolate piles of oats, at the sugar, grain by grain, unsettling the smooth pine.

I began to dread your returns from abroad. You were THE classifier now, and once home you’d set to work on the fridge, claim you were helping. I’d come down to snack in the night, and find the cheeses ordered, your careful handwriting: “dairy / cheese / stilton”, the biscuits the same, pickle reduced to logic.

Soon, you’d moved into a separate bedroom. I went to ground in mine. One day I took the light bulbs out, made a constellation of candles on the floor. You came in and gagged, caught sight of my body, my breasts exposed, hands in the air, sniffing from pit to hairy pit, a raver on a high.

Our garden had been wilderness once, but by now you’d classified the lot, so I stayed on the fringes, watched you from a distance, feverishly cataloguing, arranging, displacing nature to soothe your anxiety, counting the stamens on flowers, deciding what was male and what was absolutely not.

I made a burrow down by the compost, out of the unclassifiable plants that you had rejected, secretly discarded down here. Now my skin was burnished with the red soil, and the coils of my hair had woven themselves around the burrs and the leaves, now that my flesh ran to folds and my middle-aged chin sprouted with hairs, now that I stank, you would come to make love to me in the darkness, spores of mould tangled in our nose hairs, our legs tangled in the muddle. And you’d whisper, “I shouldn’t be here, Papaver somniferum. This must stop.”

3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

What if we weren’t so connected to the dopamine of action that we just allowed other things in?

II.

I call it “chucking it up to Mike” (thanks G). That is to say, handing something over to a wisdom larger than my own. It might be prayer, or ancestors, or the universe, or just the recognition that I’m not the only intelligence working on this. The relief of that is enormous.

III.

There are things my grandparents knew about getting through hard seasons that I’ve had to relearn. They didn’t think they were supposed to solve everything. They had rhythms, rituals, ways of marking time that held them. I think we’ve lost a lot of that. Spiritual intelligence is partly about borrowing it back. With respect and with humility.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Alice Walker:

“In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect.”

II.

David Whyte:

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, try handing something over. Not abandoning it — but offering it up to something wiser than you. See if anything shifts.

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S. The lilacs. OMGoodness. THE LILACS.

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Caveat

I’m writing this with a big ‘ole caveat. I don’t live in the UK and, even though I’m British, and proudly so, I haven’t lived there for seven years. I know I’m not the one walking up and down streets that so many people I know have become fearful of walking up and down.

That being said, I am a brown person living in Europe in increasingly turbulent times. We are watching the rise of the far right across the world. We are also watching the horrific ramifications of allegedly liberal and left-leaning western governments on the rest of the world, and the effects of that constantly make me question what it means to bring up a brown boy in the West, in this society.

But this weekend’s far-right protests, and the level of fear and shock they have kicked up, have given me pause.

Narrative literacy

I have been writing from the perspectives of life, world, community, society and organisation as ecology for a while now. I am finding this approach increasingly grounding as I look around at the way institutions operate within society, and society operates within a wider global picture. When I take an ecological look at things, I try to bring as many of the literacies I have developed in my practice to bear all at once.

Sometimes I find that I only need one of them to feel immediately calmer, immediately put back into my right mind. And when I say my right mind, I mean the place from which I can be most effective and contributory to what is happening in the world.

There is no hierarchy of these literacies, but I tend towards narrative literacy as a grounding practice, particularly when my nervous system is saying, ‘it’s all gone to hell, it’s all gone to hell’. Narrative literacy immediately has me asking a number of questions. Do I know the whole story? Do I know the stories around the story? Do I know the contextual stories, the situating stories, about this particular moment? Is there data I’m missing? Do I know who the creatures are who have been involved in this story, and in stories like it? Do I know where these stories have typically taken place?

In the broadest possible sense, I might want to ask myself, in relation to the far-right marches at the weekend, whether I know the people (creatures) who have been active and participatory in protest movements before this. Whether I know the history of protest movements, and where those movements have taken place (habitats). Because one march is never just itself. It is nested in a story about how people have always taken action into the streets, and how states have always tried to manage those people or shut those streets down.

In London alone, answering the above it is to remember that the roads far-right protestors marched this weekend are roads that have historically held the etheric of people marching for hundreds of years for things they also believed in. All of these moments build one on another, and then on the next, and then on the next, creating a braided narrative of how we activate protest.

Now, I’m not minimising the experiences of people living in London and the UK right now. Not at all. But I do want to zoom out so that I don’t hand over my imagination and creativity to the far right.

History under the ‘Celestial Canopy’

It’s interesting that, as I use narrative literacy to help me and I begin to scratch the surface of what it means to protest, I quickly see that protest is part of a much longer history and it is instantly calming.

There has been, for hundreds of years now, a history of British anti-slavery mobilisation. From the late 1780s there were huge petition campaigns against the slave trade, with hundreds of thousands of signatures and public meetings held all over the country. Historians often describe abolitionism in Britain as one of the first modern social movements. Whatever we think about the different interests that formed part of that movement, it belongs to this braided history of social organising and protest that culminated in the 1807 abolition of the British slave trade and the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, processions and marches were a huge part of urban and political life. Various routes through London bear witness to a collective consciousness moving at mass through city centres. Katrina Navickas writes about the hundreds of individual processions that took place in London between the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the beginning of the First World War. In that period, mass meetings, banners and rehearsed routes became solidified as part of public political life.

On 21 June 1908, the suffragettes’ Women’s Sunday brought an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people to Hyde Park, one of the largest demonstrations London had seen at that point. In contrast, last weekend’s far right gathering perhaps drew around 50,000 people to central London.

In 1936, the Battle of Cable Street saw tens of thousands of mainly Jewish, Irish and anti-fascist East Enders block Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists from marching, forcing the police to reroute him. The event sits deep in the consciousness of Londoners as evidence of resistance to the rise of fascism and antisemitism before the Second World War. It is a reference point for how ordinary people refused fascism in the streets, right in the heart of London.

In India, mass civil disobedience campaigns in the 1920s, from the Non-Cooperation movement through to Quit India in 1942, used marches and strikes and boycotts to confront British imperial rule. Banners flew saying, “Help India to freedom, join the India League,” and these marches were part of a collective struggle against colonialism taking place all over South Asia. Across the Caribbean and Africa, anti-colonial protests, and later anti-apartheid movements, turned streets, plantations and town squares into sites of resistance. In many countries liberation was self-created. Haitians liberated themselves in 1804. In 1844 Dominicans rejected Haitian hegemony and declared their sovereignty. Cuba, in 1902, achieved independence. A long history of protest sits behind these social moments.

When I think about a history of protest, these are the people I claim as my kin under the celestial canopy, under a spiritual literacy that connects me to my lineage, to my forebears, to my ancestors.

And a contemporary lineage

But that lineage doesn’t stop when anti-imperialist protest history recedes from view.

Not at all.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s. I remember marching against rate capping with my mother in the 80s. I remember the anti-poll tax events that brought thousands of people into central London to protest whether taxation was fair. During the early months of 1990, more than 6,000 anti-poll tax actions were held nationwide. In London that year, around 200,000 people gathered against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax.

In 2002, the Countryside Alliance brought 400,000 people into central London to protest a ban on hunting with dogs. In 2018 and 2019, when the march towards Brexit felt inexorable, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in central London to demand a second referendum.

Even earlier this year, in March 2026, organisers estimated that around 500,000 people in London gathered for what has been called the largest ever anti-far-right demonstration. Recent pro-Palestinian marches have also reached into the hundreds of thousands. Set against this, this weekend’s tens of thousands of far-right marchers represent, while large, a historically smaller presence, especially for a movement I do not want to get behind anyway.

What I refuse to feed

Narrative literacy, and understanding that there are multiple stories within which the story of this weekend’s marches sits, helps ground me in a history of people in the UK and globally who have used streets, town squares and central meeting points as the only tools they had to be heard.

Abolitionists collecting signatures. Women demanding their rights. Poor people and working-class people saying we cannot afford to be governed in this way. People saying no to fascism. Colonised people risking their lives to march against empire.

The state will always try to say no. It will introduce public order laws, modern bills that restrict protest and criminalise disruption. We should all be worried about those things precisely because we share a history in which protest is valuable and necessary to us all.

And this gives me energy. I’m not interested in feeding the far-right fantasy that they are “the people,” or that they are the centre of the story. I’m interested in all the times when people in my lineage have gathered for our lives: against slavery, against fascism, against war, against racist immigration policies, against the far right itself.

I was listening to the wonderful astrologer Chani Nicholas this morning, and she said that democracy is voting and then holding the people you elected to account every day of their term. That means you march, you petition, you organise. We do not just post things on social media and despair. Our job starts when we get them elected. It does not end there.

Lineage and inheritance

I am connected, because lineage makes it so, to the 1831–32 Baptist War in Jamaica, one of the moments that helped push Britain towards abolition. I am connected to every general strike, every student protest, every urban uprising that has challenged colonial rule. I am connected to everybody who has died in the process of peaceful protest. I am connected to every working-class person who has said no to the conditions in the factory. I am connected to every woman who has stood in fear for her life against dogs and police officers. I am connected to every brave person who has got out on the street, who has got into their wheelchair, who has made a placard, who has walked quietly and silently, who has sat in a shop doorway, who has barricaded themselves on Greenham Common, who has wrapped their arms around a building, who has poured paint onto a painting in an art gallery.

I am connected to everybody who has chosen to say, I count, and I want you to hear my voice. And so are we all. That is the bigger history of protest.

Our fuel and our energy are finite. My feeling is that if we keep pouring them into obsessing about far-right numbers, we strengthen their gravitational pull. My longing is that we direct our intention, our imagination and our organising capacity toward the world we actually want: anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-imperialist, genuinely democratic.

If we can imagine a world in which democracy means we all get to say what we want, and in which safety for racialised and Muslim communities is non-negotiable, then we step into the stream that is our rightful inheritance. We step into a lineage of abolitionists and suffragettes and organisers who have been paving the way for us, whispering our names through the years.

I sincerely hope that everyone deeply affected by the events of this weekend finds some peace before finding organising. But I also trust that our imaginative capacity as human beings is much bigger than we think it is. We can imagine a world far more tender for everyone than this one, even now. I know we can.

I had a really good conversation today with a school that is thinking very hard about how they prepare young people for when they leave school and meet folks who hold different identities to those they have encountered before.

But it did make me wonder about what happens when we frame it in that way, because I think that we can subconsciously create a climate where children are being prepared for other people out there in the world, as though they are not the ones who are might identify as LGBTQ+, as though they’re not the ones who are disabled, as though they’re not the ones who hold racialised identities, as though misogyny or homophobia or racism or ableism somehow happen outside the school rather than in the school, which of course can’t be true because we’re human beings and all of these things happen as a consequence of human beings being together.

According to census data (I know problematic at best) around one in six people globally are disabled and around one in five people in England and Wales identify as being other than white British. Younger generations are also significantly more likely to identify as LGBTQ+ than generations before them and even though it doesn’t feel like it faith is (in some areas) on the rise.

Census data is scant and hugely conservative but when we talk about protected characteristics as though they are something children will encounter later, elsewhere, out there in society, we are shaping what they consider and understand themselves to be and whether it fits into a normativity of our imagination. When we do this we continue to reinforce who is imagined as central, who is imagined as other.

It bothers me and it’s one of the reasons that I’m holding these events in June to unpack some of what we are unconsciously coding into our cultures.

The Can | 10 June 2026
The conversations schools keep circling around: race, gender, misogyny, sexuality, identity, safeguarding, masculinity, religion, Palestine, inclusion and the fear of getting it wrong.

https://beingluminary-co-uk.zoom.us/j/85858110637?pwd=oq7T2ZIrqZwF2DnicDGKju0hggBsM.1

TLDR: Give Me The Tools
https://beingluminary.thinkific.com/bundles/whole-school-equity-bund

I think one of the reasons schools cling so desperately to the idea that they are a good school is because describing themselves otherwise feels unbelievably loaded.

If we were to say that a school wasn’t good, it might feel like we were making some enormous judgement about something people have been building for years and years and years. It feels like a judgement on the people in it, the values, the intention. *shudder*

And so people become incredibly defended around the possibility that things might not be as good as they hoped they were.

Earlier today I was talking to groups of leaders about the shame that creeps into equity work. That horrible shame-faced, “Oh crumbs, we’re really not doing very well at this,” or “We should be much further ahead than we are.”

There was so much judgement about what organisations should already be in the zoom room.

And I found myself wondering whether people would make the same judgements about themselves personally.

Would people be desperate to go around announcing that they are an outstanding parent? Would most people confidently wear an outstanding parent badge? Or an outstanding friend badge? Or an outstanding partner badge?

Honestly, most people I know probably require improvement in at least one area of their lives. Probably several.

And frankly, if you don’t require improvement as a parent, a friend, a pet owner, a daughter, a son, a sister, or somewhere then you may want unsubscribe as I have nothing for you…

But most people do (require improvement).

And because equity work is people work, organisations are going to require improvement too.

I actually think there needs to be a gentler way into this work. One that acknowledges that we will keep circling back to some of the same patterns of harm and discord, often without meaning to, and that this does not automatically make us bad.

My invitation is to stop trying so hard to insist that you are good.

Approach the work with a bit more levity and humility.

Be willing to say:
“We’re actually pretty terrible at some of this.”
“Here are the things we already know we need to get better at.”
“Here are the patterns we keep circling back to.”

Because why give yourself such a hard time and such a long way to fall from? Why create so much dissonance in your organisation when there might actually be an opportunity to create a bit more honesty, and therefore a bit more harmony?

over and out…

And / or

If you want to explore more of this with me, come along to The Can in June.

The Can | 10 June 2026
The conversations schools keep circling around: race, gender, misogyny, sexuality, identity, safeguarding, masculinity, religion, Palestine, inclusion and the fear of getting it wrong.

https://beingluminary-co-uk.zoom.us/j/85858110637?pwd=oq7T2ZIrqZwF2DnicDGKju0hggBsM.1

TLDR: Give Me The Tools
https://beingluminary.thinkific.com/bundles/whole-school-equity-bundle

Most often, those accusations centre around failures to respond properly to racism. But honestly, these situations almost always intersect with disability, gender, sexual orientation and wider questions of power, belonging and culture. There’s really no way around that.

And whether those investigations are very large or very small, I tend to use the same process every single time. It’s the process we set out in the Excellence in Equity Award.

Because, genuinely, I would so much rather schools work with what is upstream of complaints than try to work through things once they’ve already gone badly wrong.

That’s why I recommend the Whole School Equity Bundle so strongly. It’s designed to help schools build the kinds of structures, conversations, habits and reflective practices that stop equity work becoming purely reactive.

If you want to come and have a conversation with me about how we get upstream whilst still acknowledging the very real downstream effects, come along to The Rug on 9 June.

The Rug | 9 June 2026
What’s been swept under the surface in schools since 2020? Complaints, backlash, mistrust, polarisation and the changing relationship between schools and communities.

https://beingluminary-co-uk.zoom.us/j/88613198216?pwd=QIMjOKNf8GIl8jM5g50zbF56955A9i.1

TLDR: Give Me The Tools
https://beingluminary.thinkific.com/bundles/whole-school-equity-bundle

Have a great weekend, friends!

Angie

I.

Aesthetic intelligence is also about expanding what people are allowed to bring into a space.

II.

Prayer rooms. Nursing spaces. Quiet rooms for neurodivergent staff. These aren’t just accommodations — they’re statements about what we think a full human being needs. They say: You don’t have to leave parts of yourself at the door.

III.

I remember a school where the prayer room was a converted cupboard, barely signposted, slightly shameful. And another where it was central, beautiful, deliberately visible. The second school wasn’t more religious; it just understood that dignity isn’t about tolerating people, but rather it is about designing for them.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Peter Zumthor:

“Quality architecture is when a building manages to move me.”

II.

Ilse Crawford:

“Design is not just what it looks like. Design is how it makes you feel.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, think about what your space allows people to bring. And what it silently asks them to leave behind.

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

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3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

Don’t make the person who holds the missing perspective do all the work.

II.

Inter-relational humility means recognising that my reading of a situation is limited by my own position. Not just intellectually knowing this — but actively seeking out what I can’t see on my own. And asking well. With consent. Hoping for reciprocity.

III.

Something I’ve learned the hard way: if you’re the one who always has to explain — your race, your body, your identity — it’s exhausting. That labour is invisible to people who’ve never had to do it. So when I’m in the position of not understanding, I try to remember that the person I’m asking might have been asked a hundred times before. I try to do my own work first.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Audre Lorde:

“Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. The oppressors maintain their position and evade responsibility for their own actions.”

II.

Zadie Smith:

“The very reason I write is so that I might not sleepwalk through my entire life.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, before you ask someone to explain their experience, try doing ten minutes of your own research first. Then ask — if you still need to.

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S. I’m scanning the sky for swallows and house martins now; I feel like they come late here, but April brings the flicker of their wings.

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3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

Perspective-shifting means deliberately taking up another viewpoint — even and especially the unsettling one (eek)!

II.

What does the world look like through the eyes of the person you find most difficult? What’s their ‘why’? This isn’t precisely not about agreeing. It’s about hoisting yourself out of your own biases, hopes, and fears long enough to see them.

III.

One of the strategies I use is what Angus Fletcher calls “stoking narrative conflict” — refusing the comfort of the single story. It means sparking a battle in your head between different causes and theories, so that new possibilities can emerge. In equity work, this means naming tensions honestly: between fear and what the data says, between the safety of some and the freedom of expression of others.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

George Eliot:

“The best piety is to enjoy — when you can. You are doing the most to save the earth’s character as an agreeable planet.”

II.

Martin Buber:

“All real living is meeting.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, pick someone whose position frustrates you. Try spending five minutes imagining how they got there. Hang out there for a bit.

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S. The blackbirds and thrushes are so lively now in the mornings again; it’s as if they’ve remembered all the things they’d agreed to forget all winter.

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3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

“We are not machines. We have seasons, energy fluctuations, illness and wellness.”

II.

Temporal design matters — the rhythm of the day, the month, the season. When the nights draw in, how are we bringing cosiness into our workplaces? How do meetings acknowledge that we’re all drawing in? And in summer, how do we open up?

III.

I think about morning people and night people, and how institutions flatten all of that. We pretend everyone operates the same way at 9 am. But spiritual intelligence asks us to honour rhythm — not just the external calendar, but the seasons inside us. Some years are winters. Some weeks are. And that’s allowed.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Wendell Berry:

“The rhythm of work, the body’s awareness of its movement — these become their own reward.”

II.

Ursula K. Le Guin:

“The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty; not knowing what comes next.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, notice your own rhythm. When do you have the most energy? When do you need to draw in? Try honouring that once — even just for an hour.

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S. Crossing to the mainland is easier now that we’re not always leaving in the dark and arriving home in the dark; light on both sides feels like a luxury.

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But not my mother, not us, brown women it seemed, did not swim.

We: mother, me, sister; a trio of brown on the bank, must have cut a strangeness into the landscape. Menhirs waterward. Stock still in descending order of height, taliswomen for those afloat, protection for their watery journeys.

Amos went in feet first.

His head bobbed to the surface, then made a playful Ottery turn, lay on his back, sun raining down on his toes, now just breaking the surface.

Amos. Moss.

Allowing the easy current to pull him downstream.

I, meanwhile, all silence, fraught, broke the feminine line, edged nervously to the bank, through the stickiness of cow parsley, tacky on my shins, and watched as the river took him off toward the bend.

Saw what I was losing, witnessing him float down the river.

Me, so dry on the bank; him, so wet in all that green.

I’d never had a special appreciation of wildlife. I was not someone who picked up and cuddled shrews or took injured mice home, placed them carefully into a cosy shoebox and fed them droplets of milk, not at all.

I didn’t have a name for writing about nature either.

I was not an Amos - Moss, a Violet, a Lark or a Hen; I was an Angela.

Truthfully, though, I feared the mice and the rabbits and the hares and the shrews and their sudden movements, their quick eyes. I feared the cattle in the field, and even a gentle doe would have me jump in fright.

My fear shamed me. Hot, embarrassed cheeks as I made it through a rambunctious gang of bullocks to the safety of the stile. “They’re more scared of you than you are of them”, no consolation, just adding to the feeling that my desire to be in a relationship with the more-than-human realms must be a mistake, some kind of genetic error.

I mean, how can you pen a pastoral if you don’t find an easy comfort with wild things? How clearly can you sketch out the landscape of a nature book when all you have is a hankering after the light swording through rain clouds or an inexplicable glee, a rising triumphant laugh out loud at the spring green fields revealed after rainfall?

People like me were not seen in nature either. We were not found in fields, the first footfall on tall summer grass. We were not the campers discovered, turning in surprise with broad smiles in wood smoked forest clearing.

No, we were the people found in high streets, walking unevenly over cracked paving stones pushed up by the roots of the Plane Trees.

Brown women who stayed dry on the bank, looking pensive, while others swam wild, did not write about nature.

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But then I found running.

For many of my running years, I stuck to the road to keep time, to measure my distance, to give me a sense of safety and legitimacy. The road would congratulate me at 5k, at 10. Its markers were red ringed signs. Metallic and formalised.

Beyond the road, though, my attention was often drawn to a woodland or over to a cornfield. The compulsion away from the road became more intense the more I ran the same route.

On one particular route, I’d run past an old watering hole on the rise to the village of Labessonié and suddenly wanted to plunge my face into the green of it.

Not drink, just kneel at its side and experience the ecstasy of instant cooling, my sweat smashed against the still waters, a close encounter with its worms, its flies, its eggs.

I didn’t.

One day, I found my feet trotting me beyond the watering hole, down toward the leat and into a shaded, damp tangle of undergrowth. Each step took me further and further from what I had known as my markers.

A few days later, I found myself running with the growing excitement that today I would dare to leave the road.

I realised I wanted to leave and not know where I was going: to leave the road, to leave the track beyond the road, to leave the beaten path after the track and find myself unable to distinguish my way back.

Weeks later, I discovered that I had a nervous thrill at leaving the track now, turning to look behind me and save for fresh crushed bark, bright yellow and breadcrumbed, save for briars left dangling in the cotton of my clothes, realising I was completely unable to recognise the route I had taken.

Each run took me further away, my steps quiet and careful not to stir or shake that which I ran through.

One morning, I turned to witness the scene through which I had passed, apparently untouched by me. Where once I’d only seen the path I had so self consciously tried not to tread, now all I could see were the many criss crossing byways of others.

This view, this morning—so many beings marching routes and covering tracks, all in the one instant—was breathtaking.

Overhead, a goose made its creaking passage off to greet the day. A hollow through an archway of trees invited me back a way I did not know. An outreaching of ferns over there I recognised, or thought I did. Perhaps that had been my point of entry?

And then the morning light did that thing of gifting, for a moment, an unexpected dimension.

As the sun arched its way through the trees, the many ways were revealed to be connected by a bunting of octagonal patchwork, cotton spun, and densely strung, a canopy of gossamer, a frenzy of hovering web, shimmering that I was outnumbered, letting me know that we were this landscape together, bound in silk, as one.

Listen Here

3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

We are setting in motion our hopes for seven generations hence. And so as it’s not just hope, we are doing it with absolute commitment.

II.

In addition to drawing from seven generations back, we want to have a legacy consciousness. We work towards ourselves: if I want to see this in seven generations, what do I need to be doing now? What do I need to steward? What do I need to usher in? Action. Taking responsibility. Not waiting for permission - getting on with it.

III.

I want to think about who will be in this organisation, this community, this family, in seven generations — who will look back and ask, “Who were they? What did they leave us?” And I want to work towards that with inescapable, uncontainable optimism. A commitment to recognising the pessimism of the times with absolute optimism about what’s possible.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Haudenosaunee Great Law (paraphrased principle):

“In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation.”

II.

James Baldwin:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, make one decision — even a small one — as if someone seven generations from now would see it. What would you want them to know about who you were?

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S. Snowdrops pushing up from what felt like leaden soil, and now the crocuses and daffodils follow; every year it feels impossible until they’re suddenly here. Whoop!!!

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Thanks for reading. Each week, I share 3 ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 microdose of enchantment. If this landed, subscribe to get Field Notes in your inbox every Thursday.

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3 IDEAS FROM ME

I.

My first bodily tell under pressure is throat constriction. I have a history of literally not being able to speak.

II.

So I work with the body: unlock the throat before I walk in. Loud talking, a groan, a hum — opening the throat allowing my voice to arrive when it’s needed. In the room, I keep it simple: feet on the ground, slower exhale, lower register. Somatic awareness isn’t “calm down.” It’s try to name what’s happening and choose a response in your body, from your body. Without it, we end up arguing policy from an adrenalised state and calling that “principle”.

III.

Our bodies remember, and there’s a history we carry in it depending on how we’ve been positioned in the world. Those histories are passed on through our ancestry. When there’s a conflict around an issue of equity, you can see the survival responses arise in different bodies differently — fight, flight, freeze, fawn — they all arise quite differently in different bodies, for different reasons. Acknowledging that the body has history is powerful in these moments.

2 QUOTES FROM OTHERS

I.

Resmaa Menakem:

“The body is where we live. It’s where we fear, hope, and react. It’s where we constrict and relax. And what happens to the body happens to the mind.”

II.

Martha Graham:

“The body never lies.”

1 MICRODOSE OF ENCHANTMENT

This week, before you enter a difficult conversation or space, check in with your body. Where are you holding tension? Take a beat as the cool kids say. Breathe. Make one small adjustment. Then begin again.

Until next week,

Angie Browne

Author of Re-Enchanted: A Leader’s Field Guide to Tending People, Places and Culture (Coming in September 2026)

Founder of Being Luminary

P.S. The days are noticeably longer and on clear mornings the sea is starting to take on a little turquoise, even though the air still bites a little, well a lot.

JOIN ME

Thanks for reading. Each week, I share 3 ideas from me, 2 quotes from others, and 1 microdose of enchantment. If this landed, subscribe to get Field Notes in your inbox every Thursday.

[SUBSCRIBE]