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This is a Say Why interview, a series from Rubinstein Productions: I talk to people about who they are, what they’re up to, and why it matters. The conversations are long-form, organized from presence and relationship. We opened with a few minutes of silence, feet on the floor, before rolling. The transcript has been condensed and edited for readability. The full conversation is on YouTube.

Note: To offer a more focused reading experience, we have decided to share an abridged version of this conversation, beginning partway through our dialogue. While this text captures the core threads of our exchange, we invite those interested in the full breadth of our discussion—including the opening reflections—to watch the complete video on YouTube.

Of the Earth

Isaac: It’s easy to see the symptoms of this decline. People run around with a finger pointed at the world: “That’s wrong, that’s bad.” But what I hear you saying is that something more structural and causal is happening. Not at the level of symptoms but at the level of root cause.

Justin: Definitely. We’re made of materials found on the earth. We are of the earth at some level. When we die we decompose and go back to it. I’m not saying we’re only physical forms, but my physical body is of the earth.

We age and get old. When we’re babies we’re bright, green, fresh, like spring. But earth has seasons. Periods of abundance and decline. Even mountains erode. It’s natural for something to not be what it was forever.

I’m not saying ignore climate change because it’s inevitable. There’s a lot of unnecessary suffering across the world, and we could have a much better experience if we made better choices. But there’s also an innate sense that what we’re doing, while destructive, may not be amoralistic or mechanistic. There’s a way it could be done a lot more skillfully and carefully. And the earth may also be in its own period of transformation.

Look at the universe. It’s not like ours. To imagine we would never look like that at some point is an interesting thought. The framing that everything we have is all our choice, all our fault, is intense. That’s a little bit of hubris. It makes some kind of sense that we would become more like the rest of the universe, and not stay in this green pristine thing we have been. This is a cycle the earth has been in, and that thing is shifting.

One more, kind of tangential thing: we think about technology as unnatural, but most technology is built from earthen material too. We’re not making stuff up. What comes into form may be anti-human, not the best for Homo sapiens to thrive on the earth the way we once have. But that doesn’t make it unnatural. Probably a hot take. But it’s worthwhile as a contemplation: what really are these things, and how do we relate to them?

Intermediaries

Isaac: For the years I’ve known you, I’ve noticed the balance of those two things: responsibility on one hand, and a relatively mechanistic, amoral process on the other. That understanding grounds how you move and speak in the world. How did you come to it?

Justin: What comes up first is a series of what I’d call awakenings. Moments where what I couldn’t see, I can see now. It’s a bigger picture and it makes things different. And it usually comes through another person.

A good example. I was in San Francisco at a transformational technology conference around 2017. Everyone was “consciousness hacking.” Wearables were just becoming a thing: “You’re crazy, you’re not going to wear a watch that tracks your heart.” You could sit down with a DMT machine, put on goggles, have an immersive experience. Now it’s all mainstream.

There was this guy named Gino Yu, a professor at Hong Kong Polytechnic. He spoke about Maslow’s hierarchy, but as levels of awakening, not just needs. He’s a strong scientist but also spiritual.

I came up to him the next day and said, “Man, that spoke to me.” We were in the front lobby and he goes, “Let me show you something. You and I lock eyes. Don’t break contact. If you can keep eye contact, you’re not going into your mind. If you try to think about something, your eyes will go this way, so you’ll know you’re not staying present.”

He locks in with me. Then he starts pointing out little things: “Can you hear that sound? Notice how this thing is responding to these things.” My awareness started to open.

Then he took it up an octave. He started to show me orbits in a room. How certain people have certain gravities, and you can watch how people are attracted to them. When the meeting let out and everyone flooded the room, he was showing me how people move around each other. It feels like everyone’s just walking around, but you start to see order in the chaos.

I sat there for five hours. Completely sober. I just watched the room happen. It blew my mind. I had never noticed the mechanics of a social environment that way. You see people have gravity, but you don’t think of it as actual weight, a magnetic pull that brings people into orbit based on the quality of their being.

He’s a funny guy. His gift was waking up middle-aged men who were millionaires or billionaires. He’d bring this caravan of weirdos, scientists, healers, business leaders, into these billionaire mansions, and the billionaires would open the door: “Hey, come on in.” Because something was happening. They were awakening. They’d had all the success in their lives, reached a pinnacle, and lost their wives and kids to how much success they’d had. Always a similar story. Big old houses with no one in them. They were looking for community, connection, purpose, and he was bringing that into their lives. I traveled with him off and on over the course of years.

So to answer your question: I continue to have the opportunity to wake up to a greater sense of reality than I’ve had before. It usually comes through intermediaries. Through others.

Again and again, I can’t help but notice, even in the language of science, that there are forces at play beyond my cognitive understanding. My biology, my psychology, my somatic reality. Those forces are in my body, but also in relationship, in systems, and greater than that: biospheric, universal. Saturn in relationship to sun in relationship to earth, holding us in this orbit. A dynamic relationship happening at all times.

The best thing I’ve done is recognize: how can I find the right scale of focus based on the awareness that’s come to me, and still find my own groundedness and bodily responsiveness to whatever is arising? The more I recognize how much I can try to force or control, and how insignificant that is within the larger systems I’m part of, what felt like oppression can become liberation. What felt like chaos can feel like a more whole order. The oppression and chaos are still there. But the way I relate to them, through this embodied grounding, is more whole.

The 4 Scales

Nature, Nurture, and Ness

Isaac: I’ve noticed that most acutely when you’re facilitating or reading a social environment. How have you taken that out into the world?

Justin: Nature and nurture are always there. And then there’s something else, all the things you happen to choose along the way that become a “ness.” Nature, nurture, and ness.

There’s some innate capacity in me to track what’s happening in spaces. I also have trauma responses: hypervigilance, make sure the environment’s safe, what’s changing, what’s going on here. I know some of the reasons why. I have a tendency to listen to what’s being said and not being said, to sense what will be needed before it’s requested. My brain logs the gist of a lot of material and recalls it when asked. I’m always gathering data, and it’s stored in me. Partly to keep things from going a bad way, partly to make the most of good things.

A good example: moving between schools growing up. I went to four different high schools. My response was, “I need to understand how social hierarchy works.” I learned who to be friends with first. Usually the nerdy kids were the most open to new people. Then I’d climb. Join a sports team, do a certain humorous thing, be in an honors class. In a short period of time I’d find my way to social leadership, you could say. Over and over again.

These skills weren’t always healthy. I learned them initially as a safety mechanism. I got feedback along the way and saw the shadow sides, the impact on others of not recognizing I was using these skills toward my own means, which was safety. That’s not what I choose to do today.

And because I believe I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum, I often struggled to understand what people were experiencing. “Why are people in relationship? How can someone be with someone else for so long? How can someone be so happy doing that?” It blew my mind. I was so confused by people, honestly, that I started to study them deeply, in order to find ways to be more human in myself. For over 21 years of my life it was almost a foreign concept: not feeling human, not feeling a part of.

It’s funny, because on the outside people thought I was really good at it. I was actually super disconnected, very alone. But I was good at it. I had learned to do the thing. It was very exhausting. It led to burnout, a lot of pain inside.

That’s nature, nurture, and then the ness: being able to use all of that to grow into my strengths, my purpose. A lot of grit and grind in those earlier years.

Individuals, Relationships, Organizations, Fields

Isaac: You’ve started to touch on organizations. What are organizations, if not just the humans that make them up?

Justin: Each individual is unique. I can be what I am and they can be what they are. Not even in conflict, innately. The way people relate is also unique, and there are patterns. Patterns in me, patterns in you, patterns between us. I can honor the uniqueness and also learn the pattern language.

That scales up to organizations: individuals in relationship, working toward a higher goal. Could be a community, could be a corporation. Every organization has a culture, a spirit, a ness to it. At some level it’s the relationships and individuals that make it up. But at the organizational level it’s also kind of agnostic to them. It’s a greater whole.

If I focus only on the individual, that’s powerful but incomplete, because they’re in relationships. If I focus on relationships but miss the individual, I may homogenize, or miss the actual needs of the people involved. Organizations, also good, also incomplete. The fourth level, which we can call systemic or biospheric, is the most whole: the field. It encompasses even the systems of organizations in the world. That’s where impact really scales.

I approach almost everything through that lens: the individual, the relational, the organizational, and the field.

The Sign of Collapse

Isaac: I keep hearing this word metacrisis, a crisis of crises, which points at that biospheric level. In the public health world I see it as systemic injustice. How do you approach those conversations?

Justin: Metacrisis, polycrisis: there are different scopes. I care about higher education, so take higher ed: higher rates of depression, student dropout, degrees worth less while still required, budget cuts, a generation whose ways of communicating don’t match the workplaces they’re entering. You can look at one small institution and see a polycrisis in microcosm. Or look at your own life: “I can’t really buy a house, but I’m supposed to find stability and possibly a family.” The same crisis is alive at the individual, relational, institutional, and global scale.

The symptom is, “It’s hot.” The structure is, “It’s hot because the earth is heating up, for these bigger reasons.” Then it’s paradigmatic: the climate itself is shifting, the poles, the cloud patterns. And beneath that there’s a source-level something at the core that’s hard to even name. No matter if I work on symptoms, fix structures, or understand the paradigm, that source remains, and it can feel impossible. That’s actually a beautiful thing to come into relationship with.

The image I think of: a lit candle has limited wax. Fossil fuels, coal, drinkable water. There are things that are limited, and we’re burning them out. The things we do to address it can be more detrimental: electric cars demand electricity that drives you back toward nuclear or coal. We’re not able to get at the thing itself. That’s why it’s a polycrisis. It’s beyond any single problem and any single solution.

How I hold it: we’re looking at the best of the best and the worst of the worst, happening at the same time. That’s not a sign of two different directions. That’s the sign of collapse. When things run to the extremes like this, the system as a whole is breaking down. And the breakdown is global.

People use COVID as the example, because it was one of the first times something swept across us as a species. The black plague, Ebola, bird flu happened in regional isolation. COVID was the first imminent collective threat in the context of a globalized society. And for the first time we saw the interconnectedness of our systems. Hospitals flooded, so schools shut down, so parents had to change how they worked. “All these things we thought were separate, education and health, they’re not separate.” People gained a systems-thinking perspective because they’d never had to have one before.

That level of awareness is what’s continually required as things break down. It may keep coming through shocks like COVID. That’s one of the only ways collective humanity gets the thing it needs to respond to. Through growing pains. Which is not ideal.

But if I accept that as the possibility of reality, then I ask: what is mine to do here? That’s what my work is anchored into. If this is the way things are, polycrisis, metacrisis, civilizational collapse, how does that impact me, my family, my community, the people I’m in service to? How can I respond, not in a fantasy, but in the grounded nature of our current reality, and not go beyond myself, but grow into myself more fully? That’s the only thing I can see to do at this level of complexity.

Data-Driven Storytelling

Isaac: We spent the first three quarters of this call on the problem. In the last five minutes I watched you move from problem-finding into role. So, two threads: you’re deep in a data analytics course, and you’re building a venture studio. Start where you want.

Justin: This will sound cheeky, but if you give someone some facts, they’re a lot more likely to listen to what you have to say. Give someone numbers and figures and they go, “That sounds trustworthy. That guy has numbers.”

Obviously you can go deeper. I have this natural sense of walking into a space, taking in mass amounts of data, sense-making in my own way. But when I go to articulate it, I’ve traveled such a journey of comprehension inside myself that bringing someone else to where I’ve arrived is a far cry from where they are. I can articulate it, but it sounds like my opinion, a feeling I have. And I’m saying, “No, this is what I’m literally calculating, looking at the world, gathering data.” It doesn’t always land.

I’m a storyteller. Storytelling gets people to feel and understand. But data analytics takes what seems subjective and objectifies it in a good way. Ask big questions, collect what you need, look at it as objectively as you can, then offer it to others so they can see it too. Then they decide what they want to do. That feels like such a valuable skill set right now.

And I actually find joy in cleaning data. I like to see what it is, where it is, what’s going on with it, and begin to organize it. I enjoy the parts that normally seem tedious.

Samara Sanctuary Studios

Isaac: And the venture studio?

Justin: Over the last few years I’ve been testing a model: that I can help people come more deeply into connection with who they are. I use a lot of systems for that. Myers-Briggs, DISC, human design, gene keys, StrengthsFinder. That’s good data about who the individual is.

But we don’t want them just to be the best version of themselves. We want them to be the best version of themselves in relationship. So we set up contexts that put people into relationship and track that. In the era of Zoom, you can track conversation patterns, relationship patterns, buddy pairings. With the individual data, I can watch how it interacts in real time. I can see where the breakdowns are and support people in relating more effectively.

Even that’s not enough, because we want to organize and do something. So go to the organizational level: what are we trying to do, and how do we measure whether we’re accomplishing it, individually, in relationship, as an organization? Those are outcome metrics, impact metrics. And the last layer is how other people access and relate to all of that information, the greater story. I call this the every-person context: individual, relational, institutional, and the layer of impact in the larger field.

I don’t want to just build businesses. I want to help people develop into who they are, in right relationship with themselves and each other, inside organizations designed for that group of people to operate in their genius, in a way so coherent that it generates more into the world rather than extracting from it. When I don’t have enough, I need to pull in and take more. It’s a lower-level instinct, fighting for survival. But when those needs are recognized and met, and I’m in community, in an organization that’s a milieu of goodness, I’m able to give more and do more without it taking from me.

Then you have this hum of human capacity thriving, in itself, in relationship, in organization, in its ecosystemic context, doing good work. Because we’re here for that, as human beings. We love working, in our right way. We love learning something, getting into it. But we have systems and processes that fracture and fragment us. And we have a polycrisis going on.

So I’m trying to build ventures that sustain themselves because they sustain the people in them and their relationships, in the right context. And not just through goodwill or esoteric systems or belief, but through a data-driven process. We have the capacity now to measure, analyze, and give feedback to the system itself through all the layers. You can have a really intelligent organization and a really intelligent ecosystem in a way you couldn’t years ago. Enterprises like Google already do this. Amazon does what Amazon does because it has so much intelligence, though it also extracts from its people. I’m not saying anything crazy. What I want is to bring that capacity to a startup, at early-stage venture scale.

From the get-go, the venture grows from that place, versus trying to install it on the back end and transform a whole organization. Other people are doing that work. I want to grow things where the DNA at the outset is already this way, so that when it goes out into the world, that’s its best chance of sustaining its capacity to operate from a more whole place.

That’s what we’re building at Samara Sanctuary Studios. Samara is a seed, the winged seeds that twirl like helicopters in the air. We’re trying to genetically engineer these ventures like little seeds. We see this big world tree, and all these little winged nuts flying out into the world. These are living systems, alive, with people, nourishing, connected to the earthen-ness in all of us. They go where they need to go and survive in ways unique to them, but they carry that genetic context. We think that kind of DNA is worth replicating. I think it’s going to do good work.

Let It All In

Isaac: I know we have just a few more minutes. Is there anything you didn’t get to say today?

Justin: If I had to name a takeaway: all of this can be really heavy. I’m trying not to put on rose-colored glasses. “It’s so hopeful, it’s all going to work out, we’re going to make it.” Honestly, I think it’s going to be really tough.

That doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do. It doesn’t mean what we do doesn’t matter. It deeply does.

My call to action is: it’s okay to let it all in. As much as you can, in the right times, in ways by which you can let it in. It’s okay to feel like you don’t know what to do, because it’s so hard to know what to do in the context of all these things. The ability to allow it, accept it as you’re able, bring it close, and go, “Okay, now what.” It can be very painful, very scary, but it’s deeply empowering.

My encouragement is to make the hard choice: to see things as they are, so you can come into right relationship with them. That’s one of the most liberating moves you can make. That feels like freedom to me. And it’s something I’m learning and practicing.

Isaac: One thing I heard that I want to end with: you’ve been on a journey of becoming more yourself, and crossing these developmental thresholds has been liberating. And it is heavy.

We’ve known each other four years, and it strikes me as very true that you’ve become more yourself. And you’re talking about the same things you were talking about when I met you. There’s a deep consistency I really appreciate. You beating the drum of how you see things has been very freeing for me.

As you said, these awakenings happen through relationship. With these earthen bodies, human and more-than-human, or through an idea that has the capacity to change your mind and your material world.

Next time I want to talk about the move from the enterprise scale, where there’s money, time, and institutional knowledge, down to organizing small groups of people and seed-stage startups. In my mind it’s almost an economic justice question: how do you keep passing things in the right directions? Thank you, Justin. I really appreciate hearing you.

Justin: Glad to be here. It’s good. It’s always good.

Before Jaron Lanier took the stage on April 22, 2026, five speakers thanked each other. Vesna Mitrović thanked Jim Russell for agreeing to introduce the introducer. Jim Russell thanked Leon Cooper, who shared the 1972 Nobel Prize for the BCS theory of superconductivity and taught at Brown for half a century, his name sponsoring the talk. Stephon Alexander thanked Cooper for his mentorship, Barrett Hazeltine for taking a 22-year-old version of him seriously, and Lanier for describing him correctly in 1999 at a loft on Duane Street as a complete weirdo. Lanier thanked Brown for not being the other Ivy (I didn’t get it). The Brown Center for Theoretical Physics and Innovation sponsored the evening. The center is named for a Nobel laureate who mentored the man who invited the speaker. The speaker never went to graduate school. The “chain of custody” in operation (Lanier, 2026).

My friend Matthew and I filmed it. I loved every second. The evening was complete, a beautiful event, witnessing and working in tandem. Lanier shared his thinking about AI and theory and then played music alongside Stephon, Donnie Aikins on bass, and Jesús Andujar on percussion. The music and the thought came from the same inimitable consciousness.

I stood behind a precarious tripod. Most of the time I looked at the camera, but I also looked at Lanier, and the whole thing became a bit surreal. I was capturing information about a man talking about how information gets captured. The camera extracted audiovisual data from a speaker arguing that extraction is the problem.

What Lanier proposed

Lanier’s main claim is a reframe. “AI” is not a kind of software. It is a collection of people. A large language model is a giant Wikipedia with statistics on it, with one difference: the writers are there involuntarily. Every prompt-and-output is an act of erasure. The specific humans whose words got interpolated to produce a given sentence are nameless.

His proposed fix is a parallel channel that surfaces the training-data clusters most responsible for each response. He calls it counterfactual cluster estimation. During Q&A he mentioned he had money for one extra summer intern on the problem.

His larger point: we need stories. We need experiences that change our relationship to these tools, and to the collections of people they inscribe. He told a student who asked whether AGI was bullshit that the student had “not asked him a question”. The definition of the problem defines the scope of the answer. Lanier follows Bergson and Deleuze in naming the primacy of the question. Real power is in the formulation.

He also debunked the Turing test. He argued that the test works to make humans stupider, more capable of being deceived, lowering the bar until a machine can clear it. The original imitation game came from a 1940s British parlor game where a man and a woman sat behind a screen and a third person had to guess which was which. Pass for the other gender. The grammar of passing was the evidence of intellect. Turing himself, gay and chemically castrated by the same government that devoured his code-breaking, knew what passing cost. Lanier argues that this is the wrong model for intelligence.

Three kinds of information

Lanier is right that the word “information” carries two incompatible meanings and that the confusion between them has broken computer science. Shannon information is observer-independent, entropic, measured in bits, physical. Semantic information is observer-dependent and context-bound. You can think of Shannon information as inherent to the object it describes, and semantic information as the context of that being.

But what I have found is that information is not two things. It is three.

Shannon is the first. Semantic is the second. James Gibson named the third: an affordance. Information that exists only in the relation between a body and an environment, and only while the body is acting. A chair affords sitting to something built to sit. The affordance does not live in the chair or the sitter. It lives in the relation.

Affordance is information that cannot be extracted because there is no object to extract from. It is event, not substance. It lasts only as long as the relation.

Most of what we call AI runs on Shannon and reaches for semantic. None of it touches affordance, because affordance is not an asset that can be extracted. The grammar of objectification and contextualization has nothing to grab.

I am reading Deleuze’s Bergsonism with my friend Paul, and Bergson’s intuition lands differently after hearing Lanier. Bergson’s central argument is that the intellect spatializes duration: it takes continuous, irreversible process and cuts it into discrete, reversible units. That cutting makes measurement possible and extraction possible in the same stroke. You cannot capture what you cannot cut, and what you capture by cutting is never the thing you cut it from. Gibson’s affordance is the part that resists the cut, because it exists only while the relation is active. Stop the action and the affordance disappears.

Lanier follows this line without naming it. His counterfactual cluster estimation tries to reconstruct the relational history that the model erased. Bergson would push back: you cannot reconstruct duration from its spatial trace. The trace remains after the cutting, but the relation was what the cutting destroyed. Either Lanier’s parallel channel can do something Bergson thought impossible, or it is an honest admission that the loss is permanent and the best anyone can do is mark where it happened.

The mirror and the camera

The camera in my hands was Shannon and semantic at once. It captured bits. It also captured a man whose argument was that the bits were a kind of theft. What it could not capture was the affordance: my looking and his speaking, the room agreeing to be there together.

What the camera does, the machine learning model does at scale. Shannon plus semantic, both running, a quasi-independent operation with the relationship beyond the limit of the sensible. The third kind of information, relation, collapses into the first two and disappears.

I asked myself, behind the lens, what it costs to look at oneself or another human being through a mirror. Whether it is different from seeing yourself or another on camera, capturing audiovisual data, then manipulating that material into a stream of content that takes from the subject, objectifies it, and circulates it.

AI will never have an experience. The model can describe a relationship but cannot enter one. Affordance is the part of information that requires you, the we, the sense of “I” that is rooted in relation.

Why I care, twice

Around this time last year I had a brief hiatus of unfortunate internet fame. A man pushed me to the ground and called me a f*****. I had my phone, started filming. I was not hurt. I did not press hate-crime charges. A Jewish white man became the face of hate-crime victims in 2025. I gave an interview to the local news, hosted a few run clubs that spring and summer, got a lot of DMs from men who wanted to flirt. It was fun, and equally odd. I felt important. I tried to make content about running and the increasing authoritarianism in our individual souls and collective political life.

Then the content made content of me.

The footage was Shannon. The interview was semantic. The affordance was the actual moment with the man on the sidewalk, the choice (non-choice) to film as reflex. None of that lived experience traveled through the digital textures that surrounded me. What traveled was the part that could be made object, made context, not the relationship that produced it.

I think I care about this. I also think I think I care, which is the horseshit that makes me suspicious of every thought that passes through. Caring that travels well on a feed is the kind of caring that has already lost its affordance, some unlocalized part of our being. The second-order caring is the only place the relation might still live. Caring whether my caring is real.

Filming Lanier was a privilege because the doubled mirror asked me to attend to both operations at once. Extracting and relating.

Chain of custody

You are reading prose that passed through many people. The captions came from an automated speech-to-text model trained on recordings whose speakers I cannot name. I cleaned those captions using Claude, a product of Anthropic, a company Lanier cited by name in his talk. Claude’s weights almost certainly include Lanier’s past essays, which means when I asked the model to clean the transcript, it interpolated his prior voice back into his current words. I corrected “Jaren” to “Jaron” and “Entropic” to “Anthropic” and “Jesus Anunda” to Jesús Andujar, the Providence-based percussionist confirmed through Brown’s coverage. Donnie Aikins gave me his number after the concert.

The full corrected transcript is here.

None of this is hidden. All of it is here in the prose, visible. This essay is a working prototype of what Lanier proposed.

Thanks to: Jaron Lanier, Stephon Alexander, Vesna Mitrović, Jim Russell, Leon Cooper (posthumously), Donnie Aikins, Jesús Andujar, Anthropic, every writer whose text shaped Claude’s weights, every speaker whose voice shaped the captioning model, Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, James Gibson, Paul Aste, Matthew Osubor, Barrett Hazeltine, and Brown University for the chair in the room.

the architect sits at his desk,

planning an overpass effect

trying to engineer solitude

& common movement — together

the mason mixes her glue

& sets to work, many hands

reaching to the sky, aching

to set a keystone

an engineer’s theories dictate

& delineate & reify

old strength & divides

while the mason places

her body underneath the

stones to be placed, bruised

by foot traffic

both are masters of their

craft, yet the engineer sees

the mason as elementary &

the mason, the engineer as

irredeemably guilty, as

positively foolish

the bridge exists between

the railroad tracks and

connects it to itself

while an undercurrent below

screams silent

Breathe Till I Evaporate

Breathe till I evaporate

composites decompose

water, my body turns

& returns to air

a breathless voice

emanates from bodies

ripples beneath a pond

a magic, whole

& composite dances

& leaps over time

in memorial, the funeral

buried in ground

suspended in air

an empty chaos

projects onto an

already always full

canvas.

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Jacques Lacan, the famous french Psychoanalyst defined the Real as “outside of language and inassimilable to symbolisation”1. I am, and I would argue, we are, experiencing the absencing of our meaning-making faculties. The primary human venture - to make meaning out of experience is being whisked away from our reach, alleviating itself from our grasp, evacuating itself from our collective consciousness.

Of course, we are still left with our opinions, our beliefs, our casual quotidian registers. We are not aphasics quite yet. There is still nots of human noise - “speech” occurring despite this impossibility.

What is occurring now is a space of pure action and reaction, a spontaneous confrontation with the Real. The Real is terrifying, not only because it involves pain and suffering, even cruelty and injustice, but because it is beyond our ability to assimilate it into our experience. The Real is terrifying because it resists sense - while it is potentially analyzeable at an abstract level, by understanding the levers of the political economy, collective psychosis, and greed, hatred and delusion, it resists capture by the immediate meaning-making of our narrativization hardware.

A year ago, I encouraged readers to go outside, to yoke oneself to the world, despite the terrifying insanity of the present. What has a year of this administration brought us? More suffering? More clarity of purpose?

Although it is becoming harder and harder to speak, impossible even, to put into words the suffering, callousness and cruelty of The State, we must try. We must try to communicate with ourselves and each other how we are feeling, what we believe the next right step is, what there is left to do. In this way we will survive, and resist the tide of ominous silence that accompanies the theft of our common liberty.

And, getting off my high horse - I must also admit a coincidental truth - that thoughts are thoughts and nothing more.

“All your thoughts are garbage. You may think that some of them are good but you should consider the possibility that all your thoughts are garbage.” ~Ajahn Sumedho

This gesture gives me tremendous relief because it allows me to let go of my attachment to thoughts, even to ones as beautiful as justice or ethics. This is not to say that these things don’t matter, that we shouldn’t strive towards our ideals, whatever they may be, but that we consider our ideals within a broader sense of what is. What that broader sense is, is up to us.

Since the beginning of October, I’ve been reading Attuned by Thomas Hübl. This work of experimental psychology, which bridges conceptions of Soul, polyvagal theory, and collective trauma, is a short & sweet primer on awareness based systems change, from a practitioner’s lens. When approaching complex multi-system issues like climate catastrophe, or unparalleled economic inequality, Hübl is working with subtlety in the Body/Mind, as well as Spirit, or Consciousness.

Attuned is an accessible 150-ish page text on the necessary path ahead for Global Social Healing. One of his fundamental theses, is that we are relational beings, and our wellbeing is contingent on our ability to be present for our relationships: our relationships to ourselves, our family and friends, our more-than-human contexts, and our personal and collective history. He argues that the complex social, political, economic, cultural and historical ills we face are the expression of an un-integrated collective shadow or trauma.

Mediated connections

Hubl makes an acute observation in the last chapter about Trauma Informed Media. Hubl wonders what it might look like to live in a world in which our information ecosystem was not tuned to increasing our consumption loops, but instead, honored the need for access to information, while balancing our sometimes fragile nervous systems. He advocates for a transition to an information ecosystem that acknowledges that we are often apathetic, disembodied, overwhelmed or outraged by the system we have built.

I appreciate the hopefulness of this turn. Only a few days ago, in an On The Media from Friday the 28th of November, Micah and his guest had a similar wish - for the humans of the internet to become humans again, disconnected from the hall of mirrors of our devices in favor of wellbeing and true connection.

The research bears out a truth of our present condition: our information ecosystem is not working to connect us to the information that lives within us - many of the platforms that were built with the promise to connect us with the world have disconnected us from our bodies, from our ability to process information holistically, and instead relied upon our base-est instincts, trapping us in cycles of outrage, burnout or disembodied apathy.

In a study published this year, researchers found, unsurprisingly, that “AI-driven social media algorithms are designed solely to capture our attention for profit without prioritizing ethical concerns... The interplay between altered brain physiology and AI-driven content optimization creates a feedback loop that promotes social media addiction.”

And when we have constant novelty at our fingertips, the more subtle fields of awareness become uninteresting. Human development becomes uninteresting when a flash of outrage inducing media is just a click away. You don’t even have to enter a password, your face functions like a gateway into this hall of mirrors.

Conclusion

Although his work is not entirely novel, it represents a vision for what it is to be on a developmental path that necessarily involves biopsychosocial healing. For anyone that is interested in integrating social change with psychological wellbeing, I would recommend you give it a read.

Writing this piece is less about spreading a gospel that “less-is-more”, although that’s still true when it comes to pulls on our attention, but more so a self-regulating practice for me to integrate that which I’m consuming into that which I am, making sure that I can actually still process information, rather than outsourcing that faculty as well.

Delivered in Turin and Other Italian Cities, November 1967

It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe.

Men were already exchanging articulate sounds, referring to the practical needs of their daily lives. Dialogue was already in existence, and so were the rules that it was forced to follow.

This was the life of the tribe—a very complex set of rules on which every action and every situation had to be based. The number of words was limited, and faced with the multiform world and its countless things, men defended themselves by inventing a finite number of sounds combined in various ways.

Modes of behavior, customs, and gestures too—what they were and none other—constantly repeated while harvesting coconuts or scavenging for wild roots, while hunting lions or buffalo, marrying in order to create new bonds of relationship outside the clan, or at the first moments of life or at death. And the more limited the choices of phrase or behavior, the more complex the rules of language or custom were forced to become in order to master an ever-increasing variety of situations.

The extreme poverty of ideas about the world then available to man was matched by a detailed, all-embracing code of rules.

The storyteller began to put forth words, not because he thought others might reply with other predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another and could give birth to one another—in order to extract an explanation of the world from the thread of every possible spoken narrative and from the arabesque that nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates performed as they unfolded from one another.

The figures available to the storyteller were very few: the jaguar, the coyote, the toucan, the piranha—or else father and son, brother-in-law and uncle, wife and mother and sister and mother-in-law. The actions these figures could perform were likewise rather limited. They could be born, die, copulate, sleep, fish, hunt, climb trees, dig burrows, eat and defecate, smoke vegetable fibers, make prohibitions, transgress them, steal or give away fruit or other things—things that were also classified in a limited catalog.

The storyteller explored the possibilities implied in his own language by combining and changing the permutations of the figures and the actions and of the objects on which these actions could be brought to bear.

What emerged were stories—straightforward constructions that always contained correspondences or contraries: the sky and the earth, fire and water, animals that flew and those that dug burrows. And each term had its array of attributes and a repertoire of its own. The telling of stories allowed certain relationships among the various elements and not others, and things could happen in a certain order and not in others.

Prohibition had to come before transgression. Punishment after transgression. The gift of magic objects before the trial of courage.

The immobile world that surrounded tribal man, strewn with signs of the fleeting correspondences between words and things, came to life in the voice of the storyteller, spun out into the flow of a spoken narrative within which each word acquired new values and transmitted them to the ideas and images they defined.

Every animal, every object, every relationship took on beneficial or malign powers that came to be called magical powers—but should rather have been called narrative powers, potentialities contained in the word in its ability to link itself to other words on the plane of discourse.

Primitive oral narrative, like the folktale that has been handed down almost to the present day, is modeled on fixed structures—on, we might almost say, prefabricated elements, elements, however, that allow of an enormous number of combinations.

Vladimir Propp, in the course of his studies of Russian folktales, came to the conclusion that all such tales were like variants of a single tale and could be broken down into a limited number of narrative functions.

Forty years later, Claude Lévi-Strauss, working on the myths of the Indians of Brazil, saw these as a system of logical operations between permutable terms, so that they could be studied according to the mathematical processes of combinatorial analysis.

Even if the folk imagination is therefore not boundless like the ocean, there is no reason to think of it as being like a water tank of small capacity. On an equal level of civilization, the operations of narrative, like those of mathematics, cannot differ all that much from one people to another. But what can be constructed on the basis of these elementary processes can present unlimited combinations, permutations, and transformations.

Is this true only of oral narrative traditions, or can it be maintained in all its variety of forms and complexities?

As early as the 1920s, the Russian formalists began to make modern stories and novels the object of their analysis, breaking down their complex structures into functional segments.

In France today, the semiological school of Roland Barthes, having sharpened its knives on the structures of advertising or of women’s fashion magazines, is at last turning its attention to literature.

The eighth issue of the magazine Communications was devoted to the structural analysis of the short story. Naturally enough, the material that lends itself best to this kind of treatment is still to be found in the various forms of popular fiction. If the Russians studied the Sherlock Holmes stories, today it is James Bond who provides the structuralists with their most apt exemplars.

But this is merely the first step in the grammar and syntax of narrative fiction. The combinatorial play of narrative possibilities soon passes beyond the level of content to touch upon the relationship of the narrator to the material related and to the reader. And this brings us to the toughest set of problems facing contemporary fiction.

It is no coincidence that the researches of the French structuralists go hand in hand—and sometimes coexist in the same person—with the creative work of the Tel Quel group. For the latter (and here I am paraphrasing statements by one of their authorized interpreters), writing consists no longer in narrating, but in saying that one is narrating. And what one says becomes identified with the very act of saying. The psychological person is replaced by a linguistic or even a grammatical person, defined solely by his place in the discourse.

These formal repercussions of a literature as the second or third degree, such as occurred in France with the Nouveau Roman of ten years ago—for which another of its exponents suggested the word “scripturalism”—can be traced back to combinations of a certain number of logical, linguistic (or better, syntactical), rhetorical operations in such a way as to be reducible to formulas that are more general as they become less complex.

I will not go into technical details on which I could only be an unauthorized and rather unreliable commentator. My intention here is merely to sum up the situation, to make connections between a number of books I have recently read, and to put these in the context of a few general reflections.

In the particular way today’s culture looks at the world, one tendency is emerging from several directions at once: The world, in its various aspects, is increasingly looked upon as discrete rather than continuous.

I am using the term “discrete” in the sense it bears in mathematics—a discrete quantity being one made up of separate parts. Thought, which until the other day appeared to us as something fluid, evoking linear images such as a flowing river or an unwinding thread, or else gaseous images such as a kind of vaporous cloud (to the point where it was sometimes called “spirit” in the sense of breath)—we now tend to think of as a series of discontinuous states, of combinations of impulses acting on a finite (though enormous) number of sensory and motor organs.

Electronic brains, even if they are still far from producing all the functions of a human brain, are nonetheless capable of providing us with a convincing theoretical model for the most complex processes of our memory, our mental associations, our imagination, our conscience.

Shannon, Wiener, Von Neumann, and Turing have radically altered our image of our mental processes. In the place of the ever-changing cloud that we carried in our heads until the other day—the condensing and dispersal of which we attempted to understand by describing the impalpable psychological states and shadowy landscapes of the soul—in the place of all this, we now feel the rapid passage of signals on the intricate circuits that connect the relays, the diodes, the transistors with which our skulls are crammed.

Just as no chess player will ever live long enough to exhaust all the combinations of possible moves for the 32 pieces on the chessboard, so we know (given the fact that our minds are chessboards with hundreds of billions of pieces) that not even a lifetime lasting as long as the universe would one ever manage to make all possible plays.

But we also know that all these are implicit in the overall code of mental plays, according to the rules by which each of us, from one moment to the next, formulates his thoughts—swift or sluggish, cloudy or crystalline as they may be.

I might also say that what is finite and numerically calculable is superseding the indeterminateness of ideas that cannot be subjected to measurement or delimitation.

But this formulation runs the risk of giving an oversimplified notion of how things stand. In fact, the very opposite is true: every analytical process, every division into parts, tends to provide an image of the world that is ever more complicated. Just as Zeno of Elea, by refusing to accept space as continuous, ended up by separating Achilles from the tortoise by an infinite number of indeterminate points.

But mathematical complexity can be digested instantly by electronic brains. Their abacus of only two numerals permits them to make instantaneous calculations of a complexity unthinkable for human brains. They have only to count on two fingers to bring into play incredibly rapid matrices of astronomical sums.

One of the most arduous intellectual efforts of the Middle Ages has only now become entirely real. I refer to the Catalan monk Raymond Lull and his Ars Combinatoria.

The process going on today is the triumph of discontinuity, divisibility, and combination over all that is flux or a series of minute nuances following one upon the other.

The nineteenth century—from Hegel to Darwin—saw the triumph of historical continuity and biological continuity as they healed all the fractures of dialectical antithesis and genetic mutations.

Today, this perspective is radically altered. In history, we no longer follow the course of a spirit immanent in the events of the world, but the curves of statistical diagrams. Historical research is leaning more and more towards mathematics.

As for biology, Watson and Crick have shown us how the transmission of the characteristics of the species consists in the duplication of a certain number of spiral-shaped molecules formed from a certain number of acids and bases. In other words, the endless variety of living forms can be reduced to the combination of certain finite quantities. Here again, it is information theory that imposes its patterns. The processes that appear most resistant to a formulation in terms of number, to a quantitative description, are now translated into mathematical patterns.

Born and raised on quite different terrain, structural linguistics tends to appear in terms of a play of contraries, every bit as simple as information theory. And linguists too have begun to talk in terms of codes and messages, to attempt to establish the entropy of language on all levels, including that of literature.

Mankind is beginning to understand how to dismantle and reassemble the most complex and unpredictable of all its machines: language.

Today’s world is far richer in words and concepts and signs than the world that surrounded primitive man, and the uses of the complex levels of language are a great deal more complex.

Using transformational mathematical patterns, the American school led by Chomsky is exploring the deep structure of language lying at the roots of the logical processes that may constitute no longer a historical characteristic of man, but a biological one.

An extreme simplification of logical formulas, on the other hand, is used by the French school of structural semantics headed by A.J. Greimas. This school analyzes the narrative quality of all discourse, which may be reduced to a ratio between what they call “actants.”

After a gap of almost thirty years, a neo-formalist school has been reborn in the Soviet Union, employing the results of cybernetic research and structural semiology for the analysis of literature. Headed by a mathematician, Kolmogorov, this school carries out studies of a highly academic, scientific nature based on the calculation of probabilities and the quantity of information contained in poems.

A further encounter between mathematics and literature is taking place in France under the banner of hoaxing and practical joking.

To be continued.

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Opening Thoughts

Some days I really just feel the urge to talk and often I’m quiet for days, weeks, months at a time and then it comes all at once. I try not to force it but when it does come I try to get my ass out there and see what I can do, see what I can say, see what comes through.

It is middle of November here in Providence and afternoons are getting a little bit darker, a little bit chillier.

On Process and Consciousness

Yeah I wanted to come out here and talk about, a little bit about my process because I’ve been trying to respect it more and more. I’ve been trying to respect myself more and more, trying to take care of myself, trying to not operate from unconsciousness and it is a pretty tough thing to do given that the rest of the world and I operate from an unconscious place most of the time.

So this is an attempt at not only doing the right thing for me but also trying to find a new way.

Running: A Changing Relationship

And beside this beautiful stream, the Woonasquatucket, I figured that this would be a good time to talk about my running as well. So over the last five years running has been a huge part of my life. It has been a home for me, a place that I can go to when I need support.

Running has also been a tool that I’ve used to push myself, to bring a certain amount of drive and energy into my life.

But recently I’ve lost touch with it. So it went from being the biggest part of my life to something that I don’t really need to do every day. Running is a really beautiful sport. It is a simple, heartfelt thing and recently I’ve not been feeling the heart of it. It’s been feeling pretty forced and I’m struggling with that a little bit.

I’ve learned a lot about my body, I’ve learned a lot about my mind, I’ve learned a lot about my spirit through running. Moving across the land and pushing effort is not something that everyone has the privilege to be able to do. So it’s something that I do not take for granted.

The Body Remembers

Just the other day I was out on a run in my hometown of Seattle and was really recognizing all the ways that my body had been sort of forcing certain movements. I was all locked up in my back out of tension and all sort of dumped out in my front and my hips were not under me.

And when I think about what that means—when my back is all tensed up I’m protecting. I’m protecting the back of my heart. I am holding tension in my back as a way of making sure folks don’t get in.

It’s really important for me to try to loosen that up and try to relax my back and sort of lean into the motion of running.

Why Keep Running?

And I wonder why would I give up on this thing that’s given me so much? Why would I stop running when running has been just like an essential source of life and well-being for me?

And it’s not so much that I want to stop running. It’s really that I want to change my relationship to it. I really have no desire to get faster. Being fast is nice. It really is pretty fun to run fast and run hard and push your limits and to get better week over week and month over month and year over year. But I just don’t have any desire to do so.

Tomorrow’s Race

Yeah I’m gonna likely race tomorrow. I last raced around six months ago in June. And I just didn’t have it. Of course I was still using then so hard to trust a mind that is clouded by drugs and alcohol.

But yeah we’ll see what tomorrow is like. I feel like I can’t race with anything less than 100 percent. My coach told me to give my best shot but also go out conservative such that you can pick people off in the end. I think he wants me to experience this as something that is confidence building.

But I don’t know if I need confidence to run hard. I think I need confidence to speak my truth. I need confidence to open my heart. I need confidence to stay upright in a world that wants me to fold.

What Folding Means

Folding looks like a lot different things to different people. And so just understanding that we all have different paths to take. I feel very lucky about the path I’ve been able to take. Moving out to Providence with my partner. Committing to being true to myself, expressing myself. Being of service to my community. Being of service to the world that I live in. And ultimately to surrender to the path that life takes for me.

Gratitude and Struggle

I feel so blessed to live the life that I do. And sometimes it feels like utter nothingness. I can’t imagine what folks are feeling that are dealing with a lot more survival stresses than I am.

I have a big support system. Lots of people that care about me and would go to bat for me and have supported me financially, emotionally, intellectually—even though I’ve not always been at my best.

Permission to Withdraw

I want to make this video to remind myself that it’s okay to be in withdrawal. It’s okay to be experiencing periods of challenge. There’s nothing wrong about taking a step back and just protecting what little life force I have.

Today though I felt that life force return. Partly due to having completed step five in AA for the first time. I’ll likely do it again and again.

Below the Surface

I realize that a lot of my hurt, emotional pain and physical pain really sits below the surface of my conscious mind. I am not always aware of the things that are going on within me. And it’s only through interacting with other people and being in containers and processes that I can really come into awareness about what’s going on with me.

And through sharing with a camera, sharing with the world, sharing with God—whatever comes to mind—I can really shed some tears and let go of some things that I don’t need to hold on to. And when that process comes through me and I’m able to share with another human being, that’s when the energy flows. That’s when I can have the inspiration to share.

Because it’s not easy. It’s not easy to be a human being. It’s not easy living here in 2025 even with all the privileges that I have.

Who Will We Be?

And I just wonder—what can we do here? And is doing even the right thing to ask? I feel like maybe the right thing to ask is: who will we be? Who can we be now?

With all that’s going on I can’t narrow my perspective to just take care of myself. That would be the wrong thing to do. I have to broaden my perspective to not only include what’s going on with the socio-political landscape but also to include what’s going on with me. What’s going on with the world around me and what exists outside of what I can see.

Trusting the Process

Because it’s a pretty crazy world out here and I think I need to remind myself that a lot more is going on than I can see and that I really need to trust the process.

Because I have no idea what’s going to happen. I can only really have faith that just by doing the next right thing and trying to take care of myself and the people around me and my community, reaching out to folks when I think of them—that’s all I can do. And showing up for my community when it matters.

This is the work.

Closing: Thanking the Land

So I’m getting cold. It’s chilly. I’m going to show you all the scene that I’ve been filming in so you can take it in. But yeah just going to upload this, do a quick grade on it. Do a quick transcription. And post it because there’s really nothing left for me to do here.

As I’m walking home, I just want to thank this place, the place that I live, for taking care of me and just want to thank it for the time that we’ve spent together. And I hope that I’ll see you again soon.

Leaving any place—it’s just so important to thank it because it held you. And land and place is so important because it really is the bedrock of the world that we live in.

So next time you’re out somewhere talking to yourself, talking to a camera, make sure to thank the place that you’re in. I swear it’ll make a difference.

1. Who are you?

2. What have your been working on?

3. What has the Genesis Design Challenge been like for you?

This process created a container in which each person was prompted to speak to their work in an external-facing context, within the context of a “Wayfinding Interview”. This was a departure from our process during the GDC, where we had spent most of our time working with each-other.

Natalie (tagged above) co-interviewed the participants with me, helping to offset the potential challenges of a 1-1 interview format, and offered supportive critique with the editing process.

Sitting with another person, with presence of body, mind and spirit, is a wonderful gift to give. When doing interviews, or conducting conversation, I am able to bring my multitudes to bear witness. Seeing this through to its conclusion was a deeply satisfying process. Editing this video was a labor of love and makes the final product even sweeter to behold.

I am grateful to all who participated in the process, and all who have taken the time to view this post. The following is an narrative that weaves our individual stories.

Wayfinding: A Collective Story

Who We Are

We are human beings. We are sons and daughters, sisters and friends, partners and parents. We are counselors and coaches, researchers and statisticians, artists and athletes, builders and dreamers. We are ecosystemic leaders striving to be part of things greater than ourselves, learning to grow and be nurtured by supporting others in doing the same.

We stand on the ancient, traditional lands of the Nungar, the Cree, the Narragansett, and the druids—in Australia, in Canada, in the United States, and in the United Kingdom. We are a globally distributed cohort, yet we have become a village. We are a people who, after a long journey, now see each other as brothers and sisters.

Our journey together has been an exploration of a shared Theory of Change: that self-love in collective resonance can harmonically organize prosperous work. We have come to see that our most potent offering is not a product we can build, but a way we have learned to be together—a way that feels more alive, more well, more creative, and more authentic than the cultures we often find ourselves in. We are a living experiment in what becomes possible when we have the courage to say no to the things that deplete us and yes to the things that bring us alive, carrying forward the pieces of our traditions that are worth saving and composting the rest.

We have learned that our coherence itself is the prototype. We are the people we have been waiting for.

What We Are Working On & Why Now

Our work is animated by a single, driving inquiry: How do we make the invisible, relational value of our lives and work visible, tangible, and sustainable? We are wrestling with a core question of our time: in a world that demands constant productivity and performance, how do we create the space to simply be?

We see that our current systems are not fully harnessing our talents in a generative way. We see a culture where people are performing a role they think they are supposed to play, creating a powerful cascading delusion. We see the deep emotional toll of a world where value is tied to financial metrics, and we are searching for another way—a way that leaves us feeling replenished, not drained. The “why now” is clear: we need a cultural shift before the technology can be any good.

Our work, therefore, is to tend to this cultural shift. We are building the social technology for a more human future. This takes many forms:

• We are weaving a mycelium network of connection, exchanging nutrients and information between different ways of knowing to create a system that is greater than the sum of its parts.

• We are designing pathways for renewal, creating programs that can improve mental and relational capacity, and foster a sense of belonging and connection.

• We are prototyping new economic models that can provide alternative sources of income for communities, freeing them from a total reliance on extractive systems.

• We are building navigational tools to help individuals and groups better understand where they are, where they want to go, and how to get there.

• We are stewarding the healing work of our time, using modalities like family constellations to help us witness our past selves and find new ways to relate to old problems.

Ultimately, we are tending to a garden, planting seeds without knowing exactly what they will grow into, but trusting that the garden will be blooming.

What This Journey Has Meant For Us

This Genesis Design Challenge has been more than a project; it has been a path. It represents an alternative to the ways we have engaged with work and with sharing stories in the past. We have learned that work can be a part of a spiritual path, not something divorced from it.

Through this process, our big, fantasy dreams of a better world have become a little bit more real—grounded in shared documents, in conversations, and in the tangible connections we have made. We have learned to let go of our expectations and to trust the process, recognizing that growth is not always linear; we make progress and sometimes fall back, and that is the nature of wayfinding.

We have learned about the core meta-skills of a more aligned life—the arts of listening, learning, letting, leading, and living. We are seeing how these skills allow us to find our way through life with more compassion for ourselves and for others, recognizing that we are all, in our own way, wayfinding too.

This journey has been a space to crystallize our creative purpose, to process long-held personal challenges, and to find security in ourselves. It has shown us that our greatest gift to our communities can be the opportunity to develop as people. The constellation is shifting for us. We have been reminded that we have a story, and our story matters.

We now see that the world we are dreaming of is not something that will be given to us. It is something we must build ourselves. This journey has been the first, tangible act of that building.

Thank you for your support, and attention. For taking the time to hear me. If any of this resonated, please take a moment to contemplate what is true and beautiful to you, and what you can do today to bring that beauty into the world.

Opening Meditation/Grounding Exercise

Natalie: So I was going to maybe, now that you’re comfortably seated, there’s this one exercise. I’ll run it by you first, and you can be ready to do something seated. But this one is the idea of locating your center of gravity, so you start with gentle rocking side to side. Front to back. You can do it on your seat, too. And then the idea is, with that center of gravity, once grounded, can be from your sacrum, maybe your sacral, or your root. Or maybe just below. Once that kind of becomes anchored with your awareness to the earth. And the lands—we can just acknowledge the lands that you’re on, wherever you are. I’m taking that moment to just recognize all that it took for you to arrive here. Your ancestors and the traditional ancestors of the land.

Natalie: Nice, deep exhale. And once that’s kind of grounded, it begins swaying. In the currents, kind of from your lower anchored system, so it’s a seaweed. You have your grounding into the bed of the ocean, and then the top just kind of flows. So you can feel yourself move.

Natalie: And if you’re seated, you can just allow your upper body to move. I’m standing, so I’m gonna even just slightly step around in the space.

Natalie: You’re just a seaweed in the current of life.

Isaac Rubinstein: Soaking up all that carbon.

Natalie: Yes, exactly. And the tides that come and go, but you remain anchored.

Natalie: The giving and receiving—the anchored and the flow. It’s the juxtaposition of the season and the reality of being human.

Natalie: Maybe some of those nerves can float up and out of the surface, and some maybe can reroute into just the safety. You’re safe enough for now. In this moment.

Natalie: And let’s clear anything that is not generative or required, that is blocking us from showing up fully for you. For us, in this interview journey today. And we’ll close up any circuits that are not generative or required, so just pulling the shades on any busy mental activity, external stuff coming in, and reclaiming your energy from anything outsourced. So that we can be present for you and for us in whatever ways we can facilitate this meeting that is generative. Activate change. Generate healing immediately.

Natalie: Welcome. Hello!

Isaac Rubinstein: Hello.

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“How can I use my ability to witness beauty within and without to develop the necessary infrastructure and inspiration to facilitate my own and other’s relationship to beauty, self expression, & reverence …

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A breath of fresh air

Can you feel the sensation of your breath on your upper lip, or in your nostrils?

1. Initially a coaching business, now a gestating co-op

Six months ago, I started coaching fellow runners, using sports science, deep listening, and my own experience, to achieve their goals. I wanted to share what I was learning with those around me. Today, the same is still true, but instead of just talking about running, the world is our creative playground.

2. Stillness is always available

The primary assumption that I am making in the creation of this venture is that people desire peace. And yet, they would like to continue working demanding jobs, connect with friends and family, have hobbies, travel, build organizations, advocate for social change, and often the two of these goals seem in contrast.

To my deficit, I have always believed that in some abstract way, one could have one’s cake, and eat it too. This is the impossible ambition that I wake up with, to both have the attitude of a monk, and the energy of a child, and the foresight of a realist.

This space is primarily a playground for me. I will be, in real time, exploring the ways in which I am either meeting the demands of my desire for stillness, or failing to do so.

3. Cooperative? Like a grocery store?

Instead of becoming a running coach, as a solitary dude, in an individualistic society, I thought it was appropriate to invite people in, to share learning, and share dividends. I hope that likeminded individuals will find the sense in cooperation while building their own brands, and sharing their own wisdom, and we can work together to strengthen our drive, and hold each other accountable to our goals, and listen with deep care for the wellbeing of the other.

Our mind/body is constantly reading our environment for threat. We even read our internal environment for threat. And this is even without a trauma response, or structural barriers to environmental, social and emotional safety.

Today I vow to try to bridge our realities, and step beyond my own concerns, to the thoughts, feelings and experiences of others.

When you take a step towards god, god takes 100 steps towards you. I believe we must take a moment, today especially, to move towards our truest selves & the people around us, the body of the earth, and our future ancestors. I vow to traverse these territories, these fertile in-between spaces, and this land that supports us.

Go for a walk, get outside, bind yourself to the world you live in. Do so with love. Yoke yourself to the world, while disentangling who you are from how you are perceived.

The rhythm goes like this - opening, allowing, discerning, contemplating, iterating, failing, rejoicing, befriending, grieving.

What happens when we settle back into the moment, bridging our minds with our bodies, our bodies to the environment we are in?

We are at a collective precipice. It is how we walk, how we move, how we think, how we speak to ourselves and each other, how we collectivize that will make a difference in the coming days.

In revolutionary times, it is important to meet people’s basic needs, one of which, is social belonging, safety, and identity.

Neither victimhood nor willfulness is inscribed on the invisible body of the unseen

Maybe my shadow, or shade

Parts yearning for integration

And in this evolutionary process of playing with our own shit, of life feeding on life, we move towards the unseen

Emptiness. Fullness. Suchness.

And by welcoming the shadow, befriending them, being willing to be uncomfortable

The invisible ground of your being

Appears beneath you and

There is nothing to do, but allow yourself to walk your path without haste

“The eternal is present. The doorway between worlds is ajar. Listen.” - Krans

I’ll post once a month for a year. I am doing so to create artifacts for my future ancestors. A note between now, and January. First of all - I’m hosting a new moon listening circle on January 28th at 5:30 - 7 PM EST. Join me for some participant led storytelling. I will supply a prompt on the topic “sensitivity”.

And secondly,

The passing of the winter equinox, and energetically passing into the new year, all that 2025 brings, we are immediately confronted with the unseen. There is a vast unpredictability in our future. Even though they have told us their plans, the future is still fundamentally uncertain. If we see politics as a mirror for our collective consciousness, the change of administrations will come with it a whole host of opportunities for courting shadow, navigating systems collapse. The authoritarian shadow of democracy lives within us each day, and it is how we engage in this moment, completely, as the multiplicities that we are, that will define our future. How will our sense of the eternal shape our navigation of this terrain?

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