This is not my everyday experience. It is a literal peak - and peaks stand out. They also have a particularly expansive function that can help us access different perspectives. Pathways are revealed that couldn’t be seen from the ground we walk on daily. New surroundings can unlock that, but also simple shifts, like turning a new corner on the way to the bakery. I see it as a practice: weaving peaks (and quiet valleys of rest) into ordinary life. Small experiments to cleanse the palate and keep presence awake amidst the daily noise. How to remain connected to awe inside the familiar?

The opposite of peaks are flatlines. And it is a feature of the current times - flatness. I notice it more and more around me, so much content is becoming the same. The writing, the music, the images created with more speed and less care. A tangible loss of depth. Everything feels blander, duller, smoothed into the same uniform texture. And it makes sense. When we move faster, we tend to leave something behind. Sometimes even our deepest roots. The songs, the tales, the voice of the land, the texture of local sound and our mother tongues.

Where collective practices once lived, we now have same-day delivery and the convenient illusion of self-reliance. And our intrinsic hunger for meaning and connection has led, naturally, to a flourishing of offerings in the spiritual space. I find that beautiful. An openness to unseen realms is returning to places that long ignored the sacred. And at the same time, I watch the spiritual take on the same habits and dynamics that haunt so many other spaces.

When we flatten the sacred, what was meant to be deep acquires a synthetic aftertaste. It becomes an artificial sweetener instead of a nutritious meal that can actually nourish our longings. If we strip ritual from its context, its tradition, its land and its relational practice, we turn it into a purchasable experience. A spectacle devoid of substance. Devoid of potency.

I write this from a place of question, of not knowing how to resolve a tension. I watch spiritual festivals mushroom everywhere. Cacao, breathwork, ecstatic dance - everywhere. I have loved these spaces for over a decade, they gave me a blueprint for a different type of being in the world. I wouldn’t be writing this piece had I not been steeping in them for a long time. And I also feel a deep sense of alienation around them. I see the spectacle and I don’t feel the essence. I watch groups of people covered in kimonos and glitter repeat words in languages no one actually speaks, offered as a way of reconnecting. Almost no local nuance to any of these events - a standardized industrial feel in the realm of human connection. It feels confusing and performative. More about the aesthetic than about the type of vulnerability connection really asks for.

It also feels unrooted. A collection of practices taken without ever developing a real relationship to them. And spirituality, to me, is about relationality. About cultivating a deep sense of care towards that which is larger than us.

And at the same time, these spaces might be the first - and for many of us, only - contact point with alternative ways of being. They might be the places where we first rediscover ceremony and ritual and singing together around a fire. Ways of coming together that might carry more meaning than going to a pub for a beer. So this isn’t about claiming these gatherings should cease to exist - the question is the how. If the care and reverence is lost in spaces that promise connection, clearly we are close to diluting the core.

Culture often evolves by borrowing and remixing. The logic of extraction is different; it takes without giving back, often without even noticing that it is taking at all. There are other ways of creating and being and I feel they are essential to these times. Reciprocity offers another way. It centers relationship and asks that all parties be honored, including the ones often overlooked. It invites us to invest time without expecting anything specific in return. To cultivate the patience required to know our own soil and to remember and reimagine our own ways.

𒀭

How might we hold what is
and live into what could be,
at the very same time?

𒀭

When even the sacred is commodified, one way of disrupting the pattern is to look at the roots. The Latin root of commodity is commoditas, convenience. And convenience is often the opposite of what a committed spiritual practice asks of us.

Because devotion always asks something of us. Like any real relationship, it needs a patient exchange of energy, attention and time to build genuine understanding. It implies friction. And friction, even though it can feel uncomfortable, is not the enemy of meaning but one of its sources: we assign more value to what we have worked for, what cost us something.

And currently, participating in those spaces often does cost us something - just that it’s mostly about money rather than devotion and daily practice. I understand that offering and holding beautiful containers for reconnection requires work. I believe that deserves to be recognized and honored, also financially. I just don’t believe spirituality is a luxury good that requires a five-figure investment or a premium location. When profit-maximizing logic enters the sacred, integrity is lost. And integrity is key. The promise of a glamourized, intense, exotic peak without the devotion, relational friction or sustained caring work that actually embeds meaning into our everyday experience is misleading at best.

Ultimately, the work happens within. We all know the dynamics that are likely to emerge when an institution or a charismatic figure claims to exclusively hold the key to the divine. To me, a stronger connection to Life, which is what a spiritual practice can help to cultivate, does not create dependency but sovereignty. That’s why I’m so drawn to mystic traditions - direct experience is available to all of us. Community, finding resonant spaces, aligned guidance - all can support us on our journey of reconnection. But it’s each of us, individually, who through a mix of work, trial and error, experimental exploration and pure grace, find our own ways to connect to that which is larger than ourselves.

And that’s my wish.
Spaces that can hold our nuanced complexity.
That question what is whilst living what could be into being.
Where we weave together our own culture instead of renting someone else’s.
Where practice is something we return to, not a peak we buy and leave behind.
Places for collective creation, for question tending, for daily wonder.

May we find them, become them, be them.

Laura
𒀭

I'd love to hear what questions you're sitting with, and which daily practices you are tending to.

Leave a comment

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If what you desire doesn’t exist - build it. Critique without attempting to build alternatives is unlikely to lead us somewhere inspiring. So here, my dear readers, are my experimental attempts in practicing otherwise:

• Mystic Salon
  An intimate monthly gathering weaving poetry, ritual and contemplative practice. This is a temple to curiosity - rooted in relational presence and focused on our direct connection to Life. A space to bring questions and play with them, in togetherness. These have been happening in person since May (Mystic Mondays) and I will host the first free live online gathering on August 30th, 18:00-19:00 UTC (11:00 Los Angeles · 14:00 New York · 19:00 London · 20:00 Zürich). They are included with a paid subscription but this inaugural edition will be free for all. So if you are curious or want to join the next edition, you can register here.
  

• Poetics of the Unknown
  A dedicated time to be with mystery. No agenda, no required outcome. Witnessing what blossoms in the empty space. I have been having these 1:1 sessions with my paid Substack subscribers and I have been so inspired, energized and moved by what has emerged. Actual connection in online spaces where anonymity is the norm.

• Life as Art

  The large majority of my month was spent rehearsing and performing in a new theater piece. It has been such an expansive experience. My relationship to art is different, deeper. I see the possibilities it provides as a mirror for how we move in the world, but also as a playground to rehearse new possibilities. A beautiful way of asking questions and playing with potential answers. It will certainly influence my work moving forward!
  

To my paid subscribers - a source of endless joy - thank you for being with me on this journey. ♥️

And if you are not a paid subscriber yet, maybe this is your time to consider becoming one. Stardust is literally raining down on us!

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*written under a sky full of Perseids 💫
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It’s also thanks to Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, that my beloved concept of ‘interiority’ is having a revival. The idea of a profound, rich, subjective inner life - I love that we are centering it in public discourse. I see it as a seed: the beginning of treating inner richness as something to strive towards. Culturally, we have long prioritized outer achievement over cultivating the kind of inner abundance that leads to a flourishing interiority - even though it is a better predictor of sustained wellbeing.

We might intuitively know, and researchers have shown, that money and status have a strict ceiling effect on human thriving, whereas a rich inner life acts as an independent, more resilient engine for long-term wellbeing. Especially once baseline financial needs are met, internal psychological traits become vastly more predictive of sustained life satisfaction than accumulating more wealth. To me, this is related to sensing when we have enough. To being able to appreciate what we have, to break out of the compulsion of endless maximization at all cost - a spell that we are currently often under as a culture.

What we see modeled as success is often an extravagant lifestyle in which the loudest voices hijack mass attention - not a rich inner life. This not only devalues the importance of interiority, it also flattens all possible paths of human flourishing into a single, linear image of ‘success’. One that, for me personally, is neither creative nor aspirational nor likely to lead to the kind of flourishing for all Life that I desire. Because flourishing was never individual.

What work are we here to do?

The encyclical names this flattening too - the reduction of the person to performance. And reducing our humanity to output machines does not only make us less human. It makes us replaceable. Particularly in the age of AI. What the Pope offers instead is a definition of work as a 'path toward maturity, development and personal fulfillment' - not primarily about efficiency, but about meaning and contribution.

I take this as an invitation. An invitation to consider what work means to us, what work we are here to do.

And we will undoubtedly have to reconsider what work means to us in the near future. Ideally we do that from an intentional place - not out of reactionary desperation, once roles are ‘restructured’ and we urgently need another way. So the time to do it is now.

Because even if we were to free ourselves of work as we currently conceive it - that doesn’t mean we would be freeing ourselves from the question of meaning. Quite the contrary. Who are we when the known ways to spend our time disappear? How do we contribute when what we once knew disappears?

𒀭

Sitting with these questions is what has shaped my own path. I left Spain when youth unemployment hit 49.9%, but not before traveling the country in a van, interviewing young people about meaning and turning it into a documentary. Later, during part of my nine years at Google, I worked on the future of work, on reskilling partnerships to prepare people for exactly the shifts AI is now accelerating, and on Life Design experiments applying design principles to how we shape our lives.

And I am also still figuring it out. Because there is no such thing as an end to this process. Only a constant practice of listening, experimenting and pivoting to remain in service to what matters to us.

So I agree with Leo XIV on this - work goes far beyond productivity, far beyond the generation of economic utility. In fact, work doesn’t need to be tied to money at all to classify as work. It can be the way we express our freedom, our creativity - in my words, how we contribute our weird - to the world. And that takes many different shapes.

Exploring the roots

Language always reveals hidden attitudes, even the ones we are not aware of. So let’s explore the etymology of the word ‘work’. It is juicier than you might think.

Start with the English word and its Germanic root - werk. This carries the sense of making something, of bringing a thing into existence. Creation, deed, act. This aligns with my personal definition of work as the way we contribute to what we want to create.

But with the Latin root it gets very interesting. Tripalium - the origin of the Spanish trabajo, the French travail - was an instrument used for torture and restraint. Seriously. The root of the Latin word for work is a specific torture device. What kind of attitude does that cultivate? And what kind of system are we likely to create when torture is at the root of our conception of work?

With that lens, it makes sense that we coined terms like ‘human resources’, possibly the least elegant (and most revealing) phrase we could have chosen for ‘people’. And it is certainly not the kind of vision I want to bring into existence, nor want to unconsciously contribute to. And it is clear to me that paradigms and cultural conceptions live within us until we consciously practice de-conditioning and rewriting those attitudes in ourselves.

Everything we dislike holds an invitation to reimagine it.

The Great Work

Maybe we can recuperate the notion of the Great Work.

The Great Work. The alchemists called it the Magnum Opus - the quest to transmute lead into gold. Later thinkers made our inner worlds the laboratory and the substance to be transformed became consciousness itself. In this light, the Great Work becomes a lifelong pursuit, the adventure of realizing our unique purpose.

This core idea echoes beautifully across traditions. There’s a reason the Oracle of Delphi said Know Thyself. Werde, wer du bist - become who you are - is Nietzsche’s version. Jung called it individuation, the beautiful and often messy integration of all that we are, conscious and unconscious, lights and shadows.

And the Great Work is sometimes also the simple work. A lot of unproductive humaning is required to reach that level of integration. The gardening and the simply being. The things we can’t outsource. The hours spent lying in the grass, of tasting fresh strawberries, of fully inhabiting our body and the earth with exquisite slowness and attention.

I understand that sensuality is an unconventional term in the current AI discourse. Most conversations about AI sound like: will it achieve AGI? By when? It is a debate dominated by disembodiment - and that is exactly part of the problem. When only one type of knowing, only one register is represented and respected in public discourse, we fail to protect the fullness of our humanity. We cherry-pick the intellectual parts that ironically machines can easily mimic, while ignoring the rest. Our embodiment. Our sensuality. Our ability to play, to enjoy, to simply be. Aliveness - which might actually be the exact thing that makes us irreplaceably human.

Our interiority, our felt sense, is uniquely ours. We cannot outsource, automate, or optimize presence. This is why I believe reclaiming sensuality is a vital act of resistance. I use that word intentionally, despite the modern halo of seduction that has narrowed and flattened its meaning. Originally, sensuality meant simply our capacity to use our senses to perceive and relate to the world around us. It is our original compass for being alive, the very way we belong to this earth.

(where we might end up when we take the unexpected path.)

We are here to live the path that is ours. To find the specific uniqueness we were given. And then to share it - abundantly, generously, truthfully, courageously, with Life.

And here is where I would extend Leo’s vision. Humanity is magnificent - but not only humanity is. All life forms are. Even though the language of ecosystems is present in the encyclical, it did not explicitly name the fact that we are just a part of the wider wonder of creation. Magnifica Vita would be more complete, in my view.

And it is not only a minor detail. Remembering that we are part of a wider network of life is essential, because it contextualizes what our work is. The Great Work was never just self-actualization in a vacuum - it is finding our place within something that was already magnificent before we arrived.

And that is my desire. May we all find ways of contributing that nourish. May Life be magnificent, all of it.

With love for this work,
Laura

𒀭

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird -
equal seekers of sweetness.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

- adapted from Mary Oliver, ‘Messenger’

I started hosting Mystic Monday, an intimate evening gathering where I combine things I love - poetry, ritual, contemplative practice. One of the participants brought this poem of Mary Oliver and we ended up spending an evening exploring how we, uniquely, love the world. Which is maybe another way of discovering what our work is or could be.

I love this format. I envisioned it as a temple to curiosity, a space to cultivate our unique relationship to the sacred. And with spaciousness to simply be, together.

These have been happening in person but I will start hosting them online too. They will always be free for my paid subscribers and if you are curious to be kept in the loop, you can register here.

Poetics of the Unknown is another seed I have been tending. It is a space of emergence, of practicing being with - well - the unknown. And witnessing the beauty and unexpectedness that can blossom when there is no agenda. Until now I have always hosted these in person and in groups - and I want to practice what I preach and actually jump into totally new territory. So I’m flipping the script and experimenting with online and 1:1 sessions. For you, my dear paid subscribers, should you have the desire to play in this mysterious way with me. If so, please reach out and we will find time. I look forward to it!

And if you are not a paid subscriber yet, maybe this is your time to consider becoming one.

Subscribe now

𒀭

Every Earth Day, the slogans return. They are well-meaning, they reveal care. And they are also, I think, my dear reader, worth reflecting upon.

To save. Consider what the verb assumes. A savior. Something that needs saving. Someone with the power, and someone waiting to be rescued. A parent and young child relationship.

Let's stop infantilizing Nature.

The natural world is not waiting to be rescued. And certainly not by us. Potentially, she is asking us to stop destroying every gift we receive from her endless generosity and grace. That is a different request entirely. But she clearly doesn’t need saving. And the belief that we could ‘save’ Earth reveals a deep lack of humility.

This savior narrative is in fact a reversal of our actual role. We are the vulnerable part of the equation. We are in no position of superiority. We are not the adult here.

As every encounter with raw natural forces makes clear, we are radically exposed. Even our most advanced creations are a humble speck in comparison to the larger forces of nature. A flood reorganizes a city overnight. A wildfire erases centuries in an afternoon. Volcanoes shape the very ground our homes are built upon, long before we arrive and long after we are gone.

We might have created an illusion of control through the deification of science and progress. And it is true that our creativity is awe-inspiring. We humans are capable of creating incredible beauty - and horror. And that ability co-exists with the fact that, ultimately, we can’t escape the truth - we are transient guests on a vastly mysterious planet. We are mortal. We are always subjugated to powers far greater than ours.

To be clear, we are not saving anyone other than, possibly, ourselves.

The belief that we are saving nature shares the same root with what created the problem in the first place: human exceptionalism. The idea that we stand outside and above the rest of life, rather than inside it.

Since the Anthropocene - the geological age defined by human activity as the dominant force shaping the planet - this exceptionalism has been obsessively centered. And it has led to the state of the world as it is now. One in which we lack humility, and we lack reverence.

Even the fact that we have an Earth Day is testament to the belief of separation. Something is obviously off balance if we need a designated day to remember the importance of that which allows life to exist. If it isn’t in the calendar, we might forget.

Notice what saving and extracting have in common. The logic of colonialism, the logic of capitalism. Both place the human at the center, in charge. One takes. The other rescues. Both assume we are the ones with the power, and the rest of life the passive recipients of our will. They are two parts of the same coin.

Maybe what we need to unlearn is the myth of heroism altogether.

The narrative we all have heard. The one that goes like this. Once upon a time, a unique and outstanding individual sets out on their metaphorical horse. They slay the dragon. They return triumphant to the village. They are celebrated into a happy-ever-after eternity.

This sounds like a fairy tale. And, like all fairy tales, it is something that has never happened and is happening all the time. Our contemporary version might be the founder, the self-made billionaire who still shapes the vision of what success looks like in mainstream narratives.

But a hero needs someone outside the danger to rescue someone inside it. There is no outside. We are all inside. No bunker is outside the living world. No private island is outside the sea.

The end of the hero narrative may also be the beginning of the village narrative. One in which community is centered, in which self-actualization is understood as service to the whole. Where connection and belonging are celebrated as much as individualistic self-sufficiency is now.

And where we stop seeing humans as separate from the larger, interconnected ecological and relational system we are part of.

Giving up on the savior narrative doesn’t mean giving up on action. It does not need to make us hopeless. Or passive. I do certainly believe that standing for the Rights of Nature, protecting life in all its forms, is maybe the most important task we currently have at hand. The most obvious.

But it isn’t really saving we are attempting to do. It’s taking responsibility for our actions. The centuries of destruction of the natural world, the delusions of superiority that have led to the death of thousands of species - we need to own that as a consequence of our choices. That is not heroic. That is maturity.

Taking responsibility for our actions is what mature adults do. So maybe, instead of seeing ourselves as heroes, that’s what we do - mature.
Ideally together, as the community we actually are.

With love,
Laura
𒀭

It has been a bit more quiet than usual in my writing here. That’s because I’m deep in the process of visioning and dreaming about what The Museion wants to be. I’m loving giving it enough space to evolve at its own rhythm - to really let it, again, mature.

What I’m envisioning is a living experiment at the intersection of philosophy, poetics, and embodied practice. Where questions are honored, explored with all senses. I imagine sonic rituals (some of which I’ve been sending, customized, to my paid subscribers), temples and salons. And lectures that center the somatic experience, a place to merge theory and practice. And more essays and poetry, too.

So if you feel resonance, now is a good moment to consider subscribing.

A special introductory discount is currently available, as the offer takes shape.

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And to my already paid subscribers - a source of endless joy - thank you. ♥️

*written from the coziness of my couch as I listen to my neighbor playing clarinet and observe my plants dancing in response.

So let's take the invitation that this moment offers. Let’s practice being with the medicine of paradox, of both/and.

There is a cognitive level to this skill, but there is also a physiological one. Differences - whether inside or outside ourselves - can feel like a threat to our belief systems. We see this in phenomena like confirmation bias and our decreased ability to listen to diverse opinions without immediate reactivity - our algorithmically fueled information bubbles only deepening our lack of skillfulness.

Just as we see polarization in the news feed, we experience it within our own psyche. From an inner Internal Family Systems (IFS) perspective, this is the most common reason for stuckness I see in my coaching practice. We frequently find ourselves caught in internal paradoxes. Paradoxes are capable of holding seemingly opposing facts and deeper levels of complexity which, in my experience, are often closer to reality. And yes, they can be uncomfortable, too. And even just naming that we hold these paradoxes can soften something inside. The idea of ‘wrongness’ can give way to more curiosity and compassion. For example:

• The Control vs. Trust Paradox: One part seeks the safety of a rigid plan to ‘ensure’ an outcome, while another craves the freedom to trust the unfolding of the process and surrender to the unknowability of life.

• The Visibility vs. Safety Paradox: One part yearns to share its voice and be seen, while another protects us by wanting to stay small and safe from criticism and risk taking.

Beliefs and patterns do not live in the mind alone - they are rooted in the body and the nervous system. When we cannot hold these opposing tensions, we are often operating outside our ‘Window of Tolerance’. This concept used in somatic psychology describes the optimal zone of arousal within which we can effectively process emotions. This range can be expanded over time - but it is intentional, and often relational work that takes time. Frequently longer than what we would prefer. It is definitely not a silver bullet of cathartic transformation (which I see having a strong pull right now - and understandably so; who isn't seduced by the promise of immediate transformation?).

Seasons dance to their own rhythm. Spring won't arrive earlier just because we desire it to. Internal processes, like societal processes of transformation, are often slower and less linear than our preferences.

And there are still actions we can take, ways to start engaging with the process, now. For that, I like questions. I find them to be helpful tools to deepen our awareness, track our state and patterns - and perhaps cultivating more spaciousness for choosing differently:

- How do I sense tension or inner contradiction in my body right now?
- How can I hold this discomfort without rushing to fix it?
- In which ways do I try to resolve tension? (e.g. rushing to an answer even if incomplete, postponing, numbing, dissociating, distracting - the options are as endless as we are.)

I would love to hear ways in which you are practicing being with paradox, deepening into the richness of the unresolved.

With love from the in-between,

Laura

𒀭

*written under a beautifully veiled full moon.

Being in relationship with the wider seasonal cycles means being invited to participate in them - to adapt our sense of speed, which can sometimes feel like a synthetic pulse of constant acceleration, to a relational rhythm, a beat of belonging. When the sun pauses, it is an opportunity for us to mirror her, to stop, reflect, look back at what was and simultaneously be with the seeds that want to be planted in the darkness. You don’t plant a seed in winter expecting it to sprout tomorrow. You place it in the dark so it can dream, rest, and gather potential energy until the light returns. This is a period of incubation, a womb-like space where life originates and where it also dies. The poetics of darkness.

Historically, the solstice was a time of ritual and communal celebration - and for us, humans of modernity, where community and ritual are often lost practices, it can also be a moment of reclamation and remembrance.​

So let’s remember. Let’s remember the beliefs that we still carry somewhere in our bones, those stories in which we had a role to play in the cosmos, the tales in which our actions could contribute to the sun’s return from darkness.

This is how ritual in many magick traditions works - through symbolic correspondence. The actions we perform through symbols in our microcosm, in our inner world, create a resonance that ripples out into the wider world. Lighting a candle becomes an act of creation - a miniature sun brought into being by our humble action. What we choose to do matters. What we enact in the microcosm mirrors itself in the macrocosm in mysterious ways beyond our limited perspective.

When we celebrate the shortest day, we are not only deepening our intimacy with the Earth and its cycles, we are also reweaving ourselves into a long lineage of others who have been in awe and deep relationship with the cosmos for millennia. It’s a communion with our roots, with the fact that we are a collection of stories past and present.

Let’s share some stories, have a taste of some traditions that have traveled across generations. I love the sensuality of the Persian celebration of Yalda, where poetry and pomegranate seeds are used to stay awake all night, a gathering of tales told with family and friends. And I also enjoy the transgressive qualities of Saturnalia, the Roman midwinter festival honouring Saturn, where roles were reversed, social hierarchies loosened. The custom of exchanging small gifts is in fact what helped seed some of our Christmas gift-giving traditions.​

And in the Alpine region, from where I am birthing these words, there is the tradition of Rauhnächte, a liminal time for protective rituals, dream incubation and the making of wishes for the year to come. During these twelve nights, it is said that the veil between worlds is thin and that visions tend to carry a special potency.

These solstitial traditions are ancient, pre-Christian ways of honouring the turning of light and dark, carried across many centuries, in some cases over two thousand years. Sometimes ritual and cultural memory survive millennia, carried in stories, songs, small acts of remembrance.

Honoring rituals across traditions and time is not necessarily about replicating them. They are keepers of wisdom, pointers toward beauty. They hold an invitation to consider what it would look like for us to use this time to pause, to connect to darkness, to deepen our relationship with the Earth in ways that feel authentic, relevant, meaningful to us.

We live into the stories we tell.
May ours be beautiful. May they nourish the soil.

Laura

𒀭

What is your way of honoring solstice?

Are there any practices that have been passed down to you, that you have recovered, reimagined, remembered?

I’d love to know.

Leave a comment

Darkness can also be a space for revelations. Revealing ourselves can sometimes be easier in the dark. Maybe that was the spontaneous spark I followed that led me to create my first ever reel, exploring the theme of the solstice. I had fun playing with this new format and being a complete amateur - and it simultaneously feels vulnerable to share something so far from polished, but perhaps that is exactly the point. So if you are curious to see my little attempt, voilà, here it is.

And if you are curious to follow my (slightly less random) experiments in writing:

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*written from my favourite corner of the couch, with copious amounts of chai

And this is why I love tracing back roots. They sometimes reveal what we have forgotten. And that can also inspire new possibilities - what could be again.

Earlier versions of museions, such as The Museion of Alexandria, were not galleries of dead objects, they were living sanctuaries of wisdom. Spaces where a community of philosophers, poets and scientists explored together. I love this vision. And I want it back.

So when the name came to me, it felt simply right.

And it’s also fitting with my personal biography, as I grew up in a literal museum. As a toddler, my mom was a puppeteer and art educator at the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid. That was my daycare. I remember the security guards smiling and the school classes yelling and the visceral pull of gravity in my belly as we descended multiple floors in the glass elevator - the closest thing to flying my little body had known. And my first love, el hombre con pipa by Joan Miró (which apparently also was one of my first words, ‘Miró’ - I have always been motivated by love).

What could a Museion - a sanctuary to the muses, to wisdom, to beauty - look like today?

What wisdom longs to be remembered at this particular time?

Wisdom tends to have a timeless quality. That’s why I can spend hours reading diaries and stanzas of philosophers dead for centuries and feel the aliveness of their words.

Yet, aliveness is not always the first association with philosophy. Nor museums. Dusty, rigid, elitist ghosts have haunted them both. And I desire to re-imagine otherwise.

I want a philosophy that is erotic, juicy and alive.

By erotic, I mean the fierce, vital, underlying energy of creation. The force that makes seeds grow miraculously out of dark, wet soil. The drive of Life, the exquisite feeling of being fully present in flesh, in our senses.

A philosophy that tastes like dark roots and rainforests,
that moves the flesh and sets fire to rigid notions of ‘should’.

A vulnerable philosophy, a loving one
that connects to the soft, tenderly receptive now,
a philosophy that remembers what loving wisdom feels like.

This philosophy blurs boundaries, breaks silos,
isn’t confined by mediums or prescriptions,
resists classifications and escapes expectations,
constantly slips from fingertips
swimming into new shapes.

A philosophy that knows that listening is active
presence and that stillness can be deep
reconfiguring, a philosophy that honors
the unseen.

A philosophy for the more than human, for the subtle, for the overlooked,
for this world in this body with these senses,
all dormant doorways to divine potentialities
A philosophy that kisses presence back to life.

A philosophy like river, like rain, like roots,
power felt, not screamed,
embodied, not a mindless trance of deified technologies,
A philosophy connected to Earth, centering Life and the sensuous beauty
inherent in now.

A philosophy that integrates, that can love divisions into wholeness
that can hold paradox without compulsion to simplify or chop it up
a philosophy that re-members.

A humble philosophy, a kitchen-table philosophy,
that smells like freshly baked bread and care,
rooted in the mundane.
No universal pretensions, no agendas of forcing one truth upon all,
rooted in a particular place, in particular bones,
a philosophy that invites individual uniqueness
to bloom forth.

A philosophy of neighbors, of friends, of lovers,
of poets and taxi drivers,
of speaking to cleaners and cooks and wise strangers on rainy streets,
a philosophy of the unexpected
connection, a philosophy that is willing to be
surprised.

Where the subtle and the deep can be perceived,
where presence can be practiced
and sensitivities caressed, not numbed out
by synthetic sugar spells.

A philosophy that can be soft and tender and fierce
that can move with unknowing
that doesn’t cling to performative certainty
to control.

Not a palace of abstraction
a temple to all that is alive.

Philosophy, after all, means philo-sophia: the love of wisdom.

With love,

Laura

𒀭

That is my philosophy. What is yours?

I would love to hear how you relate to it, and what wisdom tastes like to your particular palate.

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*written from a candle-lit coffee table, listening to the soft, steady spill of rain

In Old English, wyrd meant fate. To be “weird” once meant to be one who could shape destiny - which is a pretty desirable quality, if you ask me. Then, through Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it began to acquire a supernatural flavour; it started to mean something mysterious, eerie. I find it fascinating how art can sculpt language and meaning in such powerful and lasting ways. The coming centuries reshaped weird further into what it often means today: strange, odd, unusual.

What once spoke of destiny and mystery became a tool to squeeze us into sameness.

Words create worlds. They shape the worlds we live in. I want expansive wor(l)ds where uniqueness is celebrated. When weird equals wrong, we are encouraging a monochromatic reality in which conformity is rewarded. But when we reclaim its original roots and meanings, questions are allowed to emerge:

From - how must I contort myself to fit an idea of normality?
To - what am I here to contribute that only my shape can offer?

This is an ode to weird.

The Illusion of “Normal”

If weirdness was once a power, how did we lose it? Maybe the answer lies in the rise of a different spell: normality.

Normality is a powerful story. It promises safety but delivers sameness. We trade uniqueness for belonging, aliveness for approval. But the concept of “normal” was never neutral - it was constructed. Historically, it emerged as a way to describe the average, the statistical middle, and over time we have confused it with the standard of what is right or desirable. But averages are not truths. And if normality is merely an agreement, then we have the power to rewrite it - just like every other story.

Currently, entire systems reward the average and punish the unusual. This is tragic on many levels, for both the individual and the collective. When weirdness is suppressed, creativity can’t blossom. Our unique magic can’t unfold or mature, and everyone misses out on contributions, on nuance, on diversity and on beauty.

And if the price of belonging and acceptance is hiding who we truly are, is that really belonging?

Beyond Centering the Self

How do I optimize myself? seems to be an essential question in our times - such a tight, reductive one. Its myopic focus narrows evolution into self-improvement and doesn’t allow us to see beyond ourselves, beyond what already exists. A more generative question might be: How does my particular flavour enrich the whole? Reclaiming weird isn’t a rebellion against belonging but a widening of what is allowed to be. It moves us from extraction (How can I get the most?) to reciprocity (How can I serve the whole?). The question of purpose stops being a solo quest and becomes a living conversation, one attuned to the needs of the collective.

To reclaim weird is also to know what it isn’t. It is not a performative, desperate attempt to be different in order to forcefully grab attention. It is an attunement to authenticity - the art of discovering our own true texture and daring to share it. This is lifelong work. Work that takes time and space, trial and error, courage, curiosity, and community - people who witness, mirror, and hold us as we change. And it comes with real rewards. Research in psychology shows that authenticity - awareness and alignment with one’s true self - correlates with greater life satisfaction, stronger self-esteem and better mental health.

Reweirding as Cultural Ecology

I look to other life forms for intelligence. Forests are excellent teachers. In a forest, no species thrives alone. Trees share nutrients, fungi trade resources across roots. Resilience emerges from the wild, weird diversity that makes up the ecosystem. Monocultures that strip away that diversity deeply disrupt balance - and can even make systems collapse.

Reweirding isn’t (yet) a common concept, but I would love it to be. I really enjoy how it rolls on my tongue, how much it tastes like rewilding. Rewilding is the practice of letting landscapes heal by removing the artificial limitations humans imposed. The core insight of rewilding is that life doesn’t need us to control it - it needs space and time. Life remembers how to regenerate.

When interference ceases, harmony returns in weird and wonderful ways that we couldn’t have foreseen or planned for. Reweirding follows a similar impulse: loosening the grip of self-control and respectability so that our inner landscapes can reconfigure themselves and turn toward what’s been true all along.

When we stop manicuring ourselves to meet external expectations, we create conditions for the unexpected to thrive, for new forms of service, beauty, and harmony to emerge. Reclaiming weird is also a reclamation of the uniqueness of our paths. It is to recover a richer idea of progress - one that moves more like wild rivers than timelines. One that stops measuring worth against straight lines and accepts wilder, weirder shapes.

It is about permission - and who will grant it, if not you?

May we grow into the uniquely delicious shape of weird we already are.
And may the journey taste like aliveness.

Laura

I’d love to hear about how this idea of reweirding lands, how it moves you.

Leave a comment

🍋 freshly squeezed juice:

“The collapse of certainty is not a tragedy - it is the first condition of revelation.”
-Michael Mead

Other tastes of my world:

I’ve reopened my calendar for 1:1 IFS sessions for new clients. You might or might not know that I’m a certified practitioner in Internal Family Systems (L1 and L2 IFIO). This work is deeply meaningful to me and I’m excited to create more space to support others in exploring their inner landscapes.

Mythological Immersion in Greece. Myths are my new fascination (reason why Michael Mead, quoted above, keeps guiding my explorations). There is so much to say about the depths that I’m accessing via myths and the power of story that I will quite likely devote my next piece to it fully, but if you are also on a similar explorative path, I’d love to hear.

Berlin is calling me back - after a full year of abstinence. I will be there next week attending Occulture. If you are around, please howl.

And next week we host a grieving fire. These rituals are some of the most beautiful, transformative work that I have the privilege of experiencing and supporting. Applications are open until Thursday. Maybe you hear the call?

If this resonated and made you think of others who might enjoy this experiment, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries often taste sweeter.

Share What is alive?

*written from the coziness of my couch as I listen to raindrops dancing with my windowpane - autumn has officially arrived in me. 🍂

This inspired me to write him a letter, one that gathers fresh insights from my own experience - reminders that sustained me in moments of confusion. Almost three years later, I rediscovered the letter, and it still feels alive, as if waiting patiently to be heard once more. Perhaps, dear reader, it has something to whisper to you too.

Hermès. You have so much aliveness in you, so much to discover, to savour. So much delicious unknown to explore.

Time is one of those ungraspable mysteries that make life wonder-full. Time is also the dimension that I have been tasked to explore with you. I desire to share a taster of some of the gems that I have collected so far on my journey. They are invitations for you to play with. They helped me in times when my perspective was blurred  -  and maybe, they will speak to you, too.

Feeling lost is part of the process. In fact, everything is part of the process. There will be moments when you will feel like everyone knows something you don’t. And other times, you will feel like only you have peeked beyond the veil of reality and now know the secret/sacred revelations of life. Both are temporary illusions - as most things are. Knowing this can make it all feel lighter.

You will fall in and out of love with life, yourself and others. You will find everything pointless and dull and overwhelming at times. You will want to escape those feelings occasionally. Paradoxically, knowing unease is simultaneously what will enable you to experience beauty. Paradoxes hold the taste of deep truth. I wish you to savour the full range of aliveness, my dear Hermès. To delight in the contrasts, knowing that they enrich your range and add nuances to your palette. This is a lifelong practice - the art of being with what is. Cultivate it.

There will be times in which you will cry of beauty, Hermès. You will feel the explosive, ever-expanding brilliance that envelops everything. It will dissolve your doubts, limitations, fears. And a glorious insight will hit you  -  that you co-create this experience. Your presence, attention, your willingness to be here, now.

Trust. A verb and a noun  - play with both. It is a process of removing layers more than adding shiny adornments to yourself.

You will develop rigid ideas of how you ‘should’ be. How you should act, look and sound like in order to be successful, accepted and ultimately, loved. You will become attached to these ideas of who you are - and maybe, of how others are. A substantial part of the journey is to realize that behind these ideas and stories, there lies something deeper. Explore what that is with curiosity, with tenderness. Try on different versions of yourself. There are infinite choices always, way beyond what you can see in this particular moment. Allow the possible flavours to reveal themselves. Let them surprise you. Let them change you. And know that they will change too - everything in life does.

There will be moments of paralysis, of despair, of hopelessness. And they will pass. Our minds sometimes forget this fact. We can get so overwhelmed by the intensity of our experiences that our perspective shrinks. It requires trust in something beyond ourselves, beyond the visible, to transcend those black holes. Maybe that ‘something’ is time.

The only way out is through. Transformation happens through acceptance. Avoidance is a temptation that we frequently will want to dance with. That is ok. There is courage in choosing truth. It might burn. It will heal.

Nature is a fantastic teacher. Listen to its rhythm. Ask it about (in)significance, about effort, about flourishing. Let your value scale be recalibrated by sitting in a damp forest. Observe grass. Marvel at the symbiosis of species. When togetherness feels impossible, return to the trees. They have an intimate relationship with time, more developed than any word I could try to curate for you, my beloved Hermès.

You are as miraculous as everything that you see. There are no conditions to this. No requirements that need to be satisfied. This is a fact of life. You are endlessly worthy. And value can not be measured with any universal standard. Remember. Forget. Remember. Laugh about the forgetfulness/the process.

One day, you will write your own letter to future generations, Hermès. I am so excited to discover the unique perspective you will offer. I wish you to be present - that is the greatest gift of Time.

Laura

𒀭

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The more I sit with grief, the more I experience it as a catalyst for joy and radical vitality. Grief connects us with life force, with creative desire, with aliveness itself.

Grief is alchemical. It can transform disappointment, pain and numbness into acceptance. Or into something even larger still - a greater capacity for love. Sometimes grief transforms. Other times it remains, and it is we who shift, soften and expand in our capacity to be with sorrow.

Grief is also an excellent teacher. It arises when something is changing, guides us to update our inner maps. In that way, it prepares us to inhabit new realities. Mental well-being, at its essence, is the ability to relate to reality as it is.

This is not always easy. To accept what is, rather than what we wish to be, needs courage. Our ability to grieve, then, is a measure of health.

Grief is more than an emotion; it is a portal. A doorway leading us into a fuller relationship with the present.

Grief as Portal

To cultivate aliveness, we need to be grounded in what is here and now, even when it looks very different from what we wanted. It may taste like numbness, rage, confusion, regret, or sorrow. Both grieving and aliveness are about allowing, about letting what is, be.

And yet, many of us have been taught to meet grief with resistance, avoidance and suppression. When we block pain, we block joy. What we often fear will destroy us - letting grief in, letting it wash through - is in fact what creates space. And in that space, aliveness can flow. This broadens the ways we can engage with life - so beauty, sensuality, play and joy can return where before only grief resided.

Grief Begins with Love

We often imagine grief starts with loss, but really, it begins with love. It begins with the awareness that nothing is permanent, that this too will, in some way, end. Everything we love we will lose.

This makes grieving not just a response to death, but a practice for living. Grief is not something we get over. We build our lives around it. We practice being with it. We deepen our relationship to it.

“People don’t know how to be when grief enters a house. She came with me everywhere, like a daughter.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, The Chronology of Water

We Were Never Meant to Grieve Alone

As a culture, we often relegate grief to the private realm, treating it as something to be managed alone. Many of us learned to grieve in isolation and to carry shame about our tears.

Shame is closely related to grief. Shame whispers that there is something wrong with our sorrow, something to hide. And yet tears evolved for togetherness - they are social messengers, meant to bond us with one another.

Still, public tears often evoke discomfort. People turn away, freeze, or rush to comfort too quickly, interrupting their flow.

But when grief is witnessed - in community, in ritual, in a clear container of safety - something shifts. The shame lifts. Grief becomes a doorway into belonging. Shared mourning reminds us we were never meant to carry sorrow alone.

Grief is the forgotten door
to unspeakable beauty
waiting to be kissed into
Life.

*excerpt of a poem I wrote for one of the grieving fire rituals.

Creating Cultures of Care

You probably know the song to sing on someone’s birthday. But do you have words, songs or rituals to call on when grief arrives?

Grieving is a practice. And practices create culture. Culture is the sum of the ways we choose to be: the songs we sing, the rituals we tend, the stories we tell of who we are and were.

When I was first introduced to grief work and grieving fire rituals by my dear friend Janna more than five years ago, I thought of grief only in psychological terms - empathy, vulnerability, care. That is one layer, but grief is more.

When people hear I support grieving fires, they often assume a recent personal loss. But we grieve more than lives lost - we grieve relationships, ancestral stories that our bodies might still carry, lost visions, dreams, ecological destruction, parts of ourselves. What we are allowed to grieve, we are allowed to love. Having a regular space to grieve with explicit permission to mourn can also mean expanding our understanding of what grief can include.

The Dagara people of Burkina Faso carry a story that inspires me deeply. In their tradition, as shared by Sobonfu and Malidoma Somé, when someone dies, the entire village gathers to grieve - not only for comfort, but because tears are needed. They say it takes a river of tears to carry the dead to the land of the ancestors. Without sufficient tears, the soul cannot cross.

I love how this image honors grief as communal responsibility - an offering of love that sustains both, the living and the dead.

But myths are local, rooted in specific ecologies. Simply transplanting rituals from elsewhere will not fill the void for those of us raised in the West. We will need to create our own ways of grieving - experimenting, listening and developing practices grown from our own soil. This will demand imperfect experiments, small beginnings and collective remembering.

To carry the overwhelming size and speed of the tragedies that are unfolding, we need community. And perhaps, we also need to widen our sense of what community looks like beyond humans. Fire, water, earth, wind. Trees and rocks and rivers. These have always sustained life. Fire in particular has long been central to communal gatherings and in grieving fire rituals, it is also central to our support system. There is a powerful sense of belonging that can start to emerge when we learn to see the natural world and the elements as allies, available to sustain us through grief and life.

And it might be slower than what we would like it to be. Elements can’t be rushed. Forests grow at their own pace. Truly grieving - letting pain and tears move through us - often takes longer and looks different than we would want it to. There is also beauty to be found in this pace. Months before the grieving fire, we begin to gather resin from trees - the tears of the forest - and dry local herbs as offerings for the flames. A more intimate relationship with the local ecosystem emerges. One cultivated through attentiveness and presence. An important part of the ritual is in the reciprocity. We give and receive support in all directions.

Tenderness Takes Hard Work

Grief work is cultural work. It is also emotional labor that demands deep courage. And it is physical labor, too.

Having spent more than a decade in personal development and spiritual spaces - cacao ceremonies, ecstatic dance, singing circles - I see the ways in which grief work is different. It is not a retreat. It requires effort.

Supporting a grieving fire means chopping wood, tending flames at 3 a.m., sweeping floors. There is nothing glamorous about it. And yet, this simplicity is part of its potency. Grief work invites us to be with it whether we want to or not. Like doing dishes or sweeping floors, mundane actions can root grief work in daily life. The reality is that we are often accompanied by grief whether we want it or not. What matters is finding ways to show up in its presence, to know we are not alone in the work.

This is my hope:
That grieving is no longer hidden or shamed.
That we learn to be together in both sorrow and radiance.
That we unlearn ‘heroic’ individualism, and remember collective belonging.

May cultures of love and grief take root.

Laura

If this resonated and made you think of others who might enjoy this reflection, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries taste sweeter. 🫐

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Almost everything I know of communal grief I learned from Janna and from the fire at the grieving fire rituals. These rituals are some of the most beautiful, transformative work that I have been privileged to experience and support as part of the team. We hold another one in Switzerland at the end of October and if you feel the call of the grieving fire, this might be for you.

The rituals are in English and German (and I sometimes translate them into Spanish too). It would be delicious to see you there. For full transparency, I receive no payment - I support these spaces because they move me and maybe they move you too!

𒀭 Sonoric Threads of Culture.

Music is essential in grief work—it shapes the invisible and gives rhythm to the unspeakable. Like sorrow, song moves, needing breath, vibration, and release. Music expands the circle of belonging, inviting us to grieve with our whole body, not just our mind. At our grieving fires, we are deeply blessed by Saskia’s beautiful voice. She composed a song using a poem I wrote for the rituals, and her entire album Love and Grief is filled with touching beauty.

𒀭 Questions to Dance With:

What griefs do you carry?

Where do you turn to when grief arrives?

What cultures of grief would you like to birth into being?

Leave a comment

For those wishing to deepen their journey, my beloved paid subscribers receive additional content - the audio version, unedited poems written during recent rituals, a curated podcast playlist exploring grief and embodiment exercises inspired by these teachings. May this additional space bring you richer insight, aliveness. ✨

*this text was written in the house my great grandfather built, a building that has held generations worth of love and loss, life and death.

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For 30 years, they have cultivated alternative ways of loving, learning, and living. As one of the longest-lasting intentional communities of its kind, I was curious - what enables such a unique project to endure? In their view, one key element in building lasting communities is to resolve tension around often unspoken topics - love, sex, money and power. Taboos are where the deepest potential for evolution lies.

That’s the purpose of Love Schools: to consciously name and examine the dynamics and patterns that usually unfold unconsciously. At Tamera, love was explored not just as a private matter, but as a political issue. "There can't be peace on Earth as long as there's war in love." This resonates deeply with my experience. Relationships are often fertile ground for conflict, even when that's the opposite of what we intend to create. One of the most potent ways to create more harmony in our world is to practice living love in a nourishing, sustainable way. This requires deep work - a commitment to regenerating trust, balancing freedom with care, and practicing ways of being with fear and insecurity so that it can evolve into transparency.

What inspired me most about Tamera wasn't the ethical non-monogamy or the radical transparency. It was seeing how life was treated as an ongoing research project. Everyone carried a unique question that they explored over months, sometimes years.

How do I love freely, without losing myself, without fear?
What would it look like to learn from and with animals?

As part of this exploration, they coexist with wild boars and have even built temples to rats. During my time at Tamera, my own encounters with the boars shifted from fear to a relaxed, neighborly dynamic.

This immersion in living-as-research shifted something in me. Even the word itself, "research", suddenly felt alive again. Relevant, not dry. Rescued from the realm of white coats and sterile labs, returned to its original roots: to seek. Cultivating a private research practice is quite revolutionary. It means reclaiming power over what counts as knowledge. It's a declaration of sovereignty: I, too, can create knowledge.

It means honoring the legitimacy of insight born from our own lives. This feels radical in a world that tells us knowledge belongs to specialists. That real insights come from laboratories, not from the beautiful chaos of daily existence. For centuries, we've worshipped only one type of knowing: proven facts and scientific discoveries. This form of research has given us incredible gifts. And it has come with a price - we've forgotten and dismissed other ways of knowing.

The intelligence of the body.
The wisdom that emerges through relationships.
The knowing that comes from observing other life forms evolve, move, adapt.

I’m not suggesting we dismiss science - it's about expanding our definition of legitimate knowledge. To reclaim our sovereignty and strengthen our ability to pay attention - rather than outsourcing knowledge creation to a single source. To cultivate an ecology of ways of knowing, instead of a flattened monoculture.

Monocultures die, diversity is where resilience emerges. Diverse forms of knowing become even more crucial as AI reshapes our relationship with knowledge. Our unique perspective - how we make sense of this moment, in this body, with this history - is what can’t be automated, replaced.

Cultivating this attunement and diversity might require dissolving certain binaries that no longer serve us. Seeing science and mysticism as complementary, not opposites. In fact, scientific breakthroughs are often described as moments of intuitive insight, sudden knowing that transcends logical analysis. And contemplatives have been conducting extremely rigorous experiments in consciousness for millennia. Both ways are animated by the same impulse - wonder, curiosity, a deep longing for truth. Seeking understandings through measurement and analysis, through direct experience and inner exploration. Both are necessary for a richer picture of reality.

   Research, at its heart, isn't an academic discipline. 
   It’s a love affair with the unknown. 
   A willingness to be surprised by Life.  
   A practice of treating each day  
   as an opportunity to explore  
   the mystery of what it means
   to be alive, now.

Always with curiosity,
Laura

I'd love to hear about what you're exploring, researching. What questions are living through you right now?

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🍋 freshly squeezed juice:

Intelligence is not a possession but a resonance, emerging not within beings but between them. This shifts the question from “Who is wise?” to “What relationships cultivate wisdom?”

- Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, my current intellectual crush.

🍃 in other realms:

• I started a LinkedIn Newsletter. It is an experiment in bringing more aliveness to more ‘professional’ spaces - and letting my writing live in different realms. My vision is to share practical tools and poetic provocations for visionary leadership, ecological wisdom and embodied presence. Perhaps curiosity guides you there?

• Other experiments have included guiding an emergent ritual in Spain, sharing my poems on radio and spending a week in the desert dissolving into the surreal. I like things cryptic, but I leave a taster below:

  

• A pilgrimage across Dartmoor will be my next adventure. It will be my first time carrying my tent, food and water for over a week. I'm curious what stories the land will want to share, what I will learn about resilience and rest on the way. I will likely spend some more time in the UK - let me know if you are around, maybe our paths can cross.

• The book we wrote in April is now a tangible creation that I can hold in my hands! And I adore having ideas that once existed only within me now also living out in the world. I particularly enjoy being surprised by it, discovering little spells that I hid inside:

If this resonated and made you think of others who might enjoy this experiment, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries often taste sweeter. 🫐

Share What is alive?

*written on a deliciously hot summer night. 🌙

I’m here for a writer’s residency for a month. It feels like a clear invitation to, well, write. These words are for you, dear reader.

The past months have been full of invitations. Some arrived as intriguing synchronicities, some as gentle intuitive impulses, others as sudden, sharp slaps. Narratives shifted. Certainties melted. People exited my life in dramatic ways, making space for delicious new adventures.

A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to access this perspective - to see the blessing in apparent destruction. To see it as an opportunity to start again, to create on the fertile soil of collapse. And yet, here I am, spiraling again around the wisdom of paradoxes.

The deepest heartbreaks alongside the most miraculous openings. Desolation and destruction coexist with vibrant aliveness - seeds sprout after a forest fire. We are capable of breathtaking beauty and atrocious acts. We survive the unthinkable and create beauty with what remains.

𒀭 What would it mean to fully embrace (y)our own contradictions?

𒀭 How do you hold space for the messy wisdom of paradoxes?

Maybe these contrasts don’t take away from life’s beauty, but actually expand our capacity to be more present with what’s real. This is what makes us human. Our paradoxical nature is part of being alive. When we accept complexity and messiness - both in ourselves and in others - we begin to relate to life, rather than resist it. Nuance becomes possible. So does deep, lasting change.

Still, it’s tempting to wish for a simpler world. I see this impulse everywhere - the desire to make things neat and clear, to sort life into tidy divisions. It’s understandable - simplicity feels safe, coherent, controllable. But these divisions exist only in theory, in the fantasy of control. That’s why I see it as a radical act to celebrate contradictions, to stay with unresolved tension long enough for nuance to emerge, to bloom into something messy, unexpected, true.

Only dead things are certain.
Everything alive dances in varying degrees of uncertainty.

May we enjoy the dance.

With a sense of wild possibility,

Laura

I always love to receive your reflections and reactions. Please feel free to comment, share or reach out if anything resonated.

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🍃 in other realms:

• We wrote a book: Our book, the one I’m writing here in the Alps, is about cultivating flourishing neighborhoods. It is full of spells and beautiful illustrations. And it’s incredible to me that we, a group of 11 strangers, wrote it in less than a month. It will be published next month and I’m excited to hold it in my hands. A little birth.

• Artistic interventions: Apart from writing, I am using my creative juices to create artistic interventions in strangers' kitchens in May and June. If you are curious and based in Zurich, please reach out. I love art that can exist and appear in unconventional spaces - places outside of galleries and museums, where life actually unfolds. 🥘

• Eco-Village Life: I also spent five weeks living in an eco-village at Lake Constance, learning about how to design intentional land-based communities. I really enjoyed the particular type of intimacy that emerges when space is shared over prolonged periods of time - when we meet people in their pajamas and in all types of moods, unfiltered. My personal highlight was co-hosting a sensory initiation ritual, and cooking for 60 people with food that would have otherwise gone to waste.

• New Experiments: Since leaving Google, I’ve been experimenting with different formats and offerings, seeing what actually lights me up. Most of my time is currently spent on leadership coaching, but I have also hosted sweat lodges and various embodiment journeys, and am slowly cooking up something at the intersection of somatic awareness, nature connection, and inner exploration. I’ll share more about this soon.

• Upcoming Ritual: In June, I will be on the team for a Grieving Fire Ritual. These are some of the deepest, most transformative spaces I have had the pleasure to experience and contribute to. Who knows, maybe you feel the call to join us? Consider this an invitation. 🕯️

🍋 freshly squeezed poetics:

Swim in paradox
here poetry lives,
edges change,
boundaries blur.

- a little snippet from a poem I wrote for a multilingual poetry magazine

If this resonated with you and made you think of others who might enjoy this experiment, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries often taste sweeter.

Share What is alive?

*written as birds serenade my sunny balcony with their spring tunes (which you can hear below). 🪺

                 Which expressions of yourself 
                     are wanting to be conjured up into being?

                     Which possibilities are seducing you to play?

                                   How can we create space
                                       for these latent versions of ourselves to emerge?
     

It can be freeing to reinvent oneself over and over. It can also be disorienting, to spiral in and out of the possible, from one experiment to the next.

May whatever you are choosing to play with bring you a sense of wonder, of enchantment, of awe.

With love,
Laura

I always love to receive your reflections. Please feel free to comment, share or reach out if anything resonated.

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🍃 in other realms:

• During my artistic residency, I trained my own AI models and prompted them with mystical scriptures and my own poetic experiments. It still mystifies me, the experience of seeing the AI creatures you invoked ‘creating’ unexpected results. A taster below:

• During my time in Berlin, I also created my first ever public art installation, an interactive temple that invited participants to engage in a ritual turning freshly picked trash into a shrine. It was an invitation to reimagine our relationship with waste, question the boundary between the sacred and the profane, and expand our perception of what beauty can look like. I loved seeing children play with ritual-making and discovering how art can invite humans to interact differently with spaces, objects and with each other.
  

• End of August is my last day at Google. It feels quite big to close this chapter after 9 years of it being main professional home. 3 countries, 5 roles, countless opportunities for reinvention and growth. And still, the time is ripe for something new. You shall hear what I am envisioning soon - in the meantime my IFS practice continues to grow. Feel free to reach out if you are curious!

🍋 freshly squeezed poetics:

working with a paradox
defining the elusive
visualizing the invisible
communicating the incommunicable
seeing in new ways
seeing reality and still being able to dream

- from Manifesto, by Agnes Denes (1969)

If this resonated and made you think of other humans that might enjoy this experiment, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries often taste sweet.

Share What is alive?

*written on an incredibly hot day, as I successfully procrastinate packing. 🧳

Life has been a very abundant river these past weeks, guiding me from experience to experience, away from my screen, away from these words. It felt like an either/or choice - continuing being fully immersed in the exploration of the unfolding adventures, or temporarily stepping out of it, pausing the flow to share a small bite with you.

But here they are, words. I am writing them and you are savouring them and through that thread we are connected.

Words that got written at their own rhythm. Words that have ripened across weeks and continents and that carry a desire - I would love them to taste as delicious as Life has felt for me during this time.

       Can words carry awe?
              How can I pick words juicy enough to invoke a delicious,
                                  radiant sense of aliveness?            
                             

I would really love to make you part of the wonders I am living in. The big, obvious wonders, like scuba diving at night, with sharks, in bioluminescent water, seeing everything around me glow as I move. Stars deep underwater, stars on the sky above. And my little body dancing in the radiant darkness in between.

And the small, mundane wonders, available to us day to day, regardless of location. The ones we often overlook. The shadows dancing on walls, the reflections of light smoothly enchanting any liquid surface. They started to speak so loudly to me after my 10 days of silence. The combination of meditating for 10 hours a day, not using words and having a very rigid container of discipline allowed me to fully immerse myself in presence. With no distractions, I listened. I witnessed. I entered a completely different state of awareness.

On those mornings, I started to really see the miracles that happen day to day beyond my conscious awareness. The forest outside the meditation centre became my only conversation partner and teacher. I learned from closely observing every part of the ecosystem perform its fundamental role. And I got a full display - a sunburn, the last leaves changing colours, snowfall. I truly got to see, maybe for the first time with such clarity, how in the natural world everything has an essential part to play so the cycles of life can continue to unfold harmoniously. The seeds being carried in a sometimes delicate, other times quite violent, dance by the wind. The morning dew condensing on the edges of leaves, creating incredible geometric patterns. Everything relating to everything else in obvious and invisible ways. I would cry tears of joy, of beauty, at recognising so clearly the threads connecting all of Life. I felt such awe at being able to perceive so sharply that which I have so often been blind to.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear as it is, Infinite.1

-William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
(a poem written in 1790, on etched plates, which you can explore in full here.

                          What invisible wonders are wanting to be discovered in your world?
 
                                                     What beauty is currently being overlooked?


May it find you, may you see it.

In awe, with wonder,

Laura

I always love receiving your reactions and reflections - it makes me feel like these words are a dialogue, like they land on fertile ground. So please feel invited to comment, share or reach out if anything resonated. 🍃

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🍊 freshly squeezed travel tales

• The last three months I have lived very close to water. I have learned so much from being immersed in the ocean almost daily. Surfing teaches me humbleness, resilience. It is a playground in which I can choose to try again and again and again, even when progress is very non-linear. The waters would completely smash any sense of accomplishment by literally crashing me. The ocean can sometimes be a very strict teacher. I am learning to appreciate the beauty of clear, unwavering discipline. An invitation to keep practising having a beginners mindset.

• Diving has also become an important part of my days. I see how my instincts are evolving, how I react differently to fear. The first times I encountered sharks, 30 meters underwater, my body went into flight response. Everything in my nervous system wanting me to get away, urgently. Under water, the opposite reaction is significantly more helpful. Longer exhales, slower movement. And so, slowly, a new somatic response is becoming available and even default for me.

• Ceremonies were another essential element in my days, specially during my month in Sri Lanka. I attended daily Poojas, and even some all-night-long Pirith Ceremonies, where locals would gather and chant the entire night. I love the ease, the lightness with which these rituals are woven into the day to day. They don’t have the sense of formality they often have in Western cultures. And the aesthetics are also quite interesting - you can get a taster in the video below.

• I continue to roam without a clearly defined plan, but the Himalayas are calling me strongly. It is likely that I will spend the next couple of months in Bhutan, Nepal, Tibet. If you have been in these regions and desire to share tales or recommendations with me, they are so very welcome.

4 seconds out of the 12 hour long ceremony I attended in Midigama, Sri Lanka, to bless the land in which a new farm was started.

And like unknown. I have no idea of what will emerge in this time. No plan, no grand vision. What I know is that it is already working in me, the magic of Life being able to unfold as it wants. Synchronicities start to become more obvious, beauty more present. I open a magazine lying on my table in a restaurant and land on an article about the Raute people, one of the last remaining nomadic groups in Nepal. They live in forests and do not have a word for 'time'. In their language, there is also no word for tomorrow, or for yesterday, because they don’t use these concepts as units to measure and make sense of time. Time isn’t compartmentalised neatly into hours and days, weekends or years.

This does not mean that they are unaware of the passage of time. They just don't understand it to be the fixed, linear force we imagine it to be. Life is imagined to unfold, unsurprisingly, in alignment with movements of the natural world - in cycles, strongly influenced by the changing seasons and the evolution of light. They orient themselves by looking at the arrival of day and night, the evolution of colours and temperatures, by listening to the sounds of birds that migrate and leaves that fall.

No, I am not planning on becoming a nomadic hunter-gatherer during my sabbatical - although admittedly I did spend my weekend in the forest, making mushroom tinctures and in a general state of awe with the beauty and wisdom I start to sense more and more in the natural world. I am also not fantasising with a societal shift that has us all returning to a candle-lit, clock-free, carpe-diem kind of life (although it is an interesting thought experiment to wonder about).

What comes up in me and what I desire to share with you is a bubbling sense of possibility. When I contemplate this alternative way of living, it feels like gentle fireworks in my belly, as it reminds me how concepts that we so often perceive to be universal and unchangeable - as time - are in fact malleable. They are conventions of our culture, not facts of nature.

Which means that they can be shaped to our delight.

Remembering that we live embedded in conventions, collective agreements that we have opted into - consciously or unconsciously - is powerful. Why? Because it brings back awareness to the fact that we have a choice. We get to choose how we experience time, how we play with it as a creative force. Our dominant culture might continue to dance to the trance of the Great Acceleration, but nomadic tribes with literally no word for time co-exist with us in this reality, moving at a very different rhythm. We have a say and a personal choice to make. To me, this is probably one of the most powerful spells to break out of, the belief that 'we have no time'.

And it goes beyond time, our ability to create with our choices. There is so much potential in being aware that we can dream up different ways of knowing and being and moving in the world. For myself, during this time of spaciousness, I desire to play with slowing down, quieting the noise. Creating more and more space, decluttering. Shifting from forceful effort to organic unfolding, moving my attention from consumption to creation.

I imagine this to be a practice, an alive process. I imagine it to unfold in ways that resist all predictions, I imagine being surprised, over and over again, and humbled into remembering that the limited rules of logic are melted by the exquisitely mysterious unfolding of Life.

And you, what will we do with all this delicious unknown?

With excitement and curiosity,
Laura.

Please feel free to comment, share or reach out if anything resonated. I always love to receive your reflections.

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🍃 in other realms:

• I had a couple of first-time experiences since my last newsletter. I was on live TV. In Georgia (🇬🇪). It was quite unexpected and unexpectedly also very, very fun. A reminder of how much I actually enjoy these types of high-exposure experiences that push my edges of the known. A reliable pathway to growth.

• My desire to use my voice more, and in more creative ways, has found a new container - I started an experimental poetic channel and read out poetry to strangers. Let me know if this sparks your curiosity and you shall get a taster! 🪻
  

• There is one plan in my calendar and that is a 10 day silent Vipassana meditation retreat. I start in exactly one week. I have never been on such a long, and specially such a rigidly structured retreat, and I am curious to discover what it might bring up (specially for the parts of me that like freedom and flow). 🧘

🍊 freshly squeezed poetics

  Why do things break
                    us
      into open tender 
                space?
                           
 at the very edge of despair,
            grief holds the forgotten door   
                        to  unspeakable beauty
    waiting to be kissed into 
            Life.

Let it find you.
     Let trees whisper 
tales of consolation, of Love.
     Each exhale a poem
        to the world
     as it shapes you into being.

poem I wrote for the grieving fire ritual happening this week in Switzerland. There are still spaces available and if you feel the call, I can’t think of a better space to be in to digest and alchemize the current state of the world. 

If this resonated and made you think of other humans that might enjoy this experiment, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries often taste sweet. 🫐

Share What is alive?

🍂 written on a beautiful autumn afternoon.

What does your summer taste like now?

For me, it is fullness, ripeness. An abundance of experiences and insights have filled my weeks. Festivals and trainings, deserts and mountains, communities and deep 1:1 connections. I am grateful for this richness - and creating enough space for solitude and integration hasn’t always been smooth. I have occasionally danced close to the edge of too-muchness. Too much hopping from place to place, from one peak experience to the next. Too little time to simply be, to do nothing. And to write. But here I am, back in connection to myself - and to you through these words. I’m excited to be sharing this process with you.

An essential part of my summer has been my immersion into the Burning Man culture. Building temporary cities for thousands of people in the middle of the desert is really something to marvel at. Every part of the human experience covered, from ‘showers’ and kitchens to swimming pools and cathedral-like structures, built for a couple of days. In the heat, with your hands. And then you tear it all down. You leave no trace. There is no proof that the world you created ever existed - and still it is worth pouring yourself into it, fully.

I sense there is a lot that the ephemeral can teach us about purpose. Conversations around purpose sometimes turn into a dialogue around legacy - the desire to build creations that might outlive us. Established brands, robust architecture, children, works of art. In a way, I see this as a desire to transcend our (unavoidable) impermanence. To go beyond the confinement of time with our contributions and creations. To create value beyond the self, beyond the now.

The burning man principles of immediacy and leaving no trace challenge that notion. Meaning can and does exist in the ephemeral, in that which vanishes.

    What do we choose to create     

            when we build only for the immediate moment,         
  
                     only for the now? 

With no expectation that anything will lead to anything other than it is, right now. 

It is fascinating how agendas and expectations can diminish the magic and beauty of a moment. And it is really a practice, to learn to be with what is without trying to alter it, control it, rush it. I have experienced this from both ends of the spectrum.

1. Scenario: I sense that someone wants me to do something or be something different than what I am. I imagine they have a preconceived idea of how our interaction should unfold. A script. Sensing this agenda, the natural unfolding of the moment freezes. The beauty that was there collapses under the weight of the perceived expectation. Aliveness is lost.
   

2. Scenario: I dream up a wonderful fantasy script of how a situation is going to unfold. I try to ‘guide’ the encounter to fit into this desired vision that actually isn’t what is really (t)here. It rarely works. The beauty that is there isn’t celebrated, seen. Aliveness is lost. 🥀

And still, predefined scripts rule so many of our everyday encounters. Knowing what something is, being able to predict how it will go, can invoke a sense of safety. Uncertainty can be scary. And the unknown is also where the deliciously magic encounters are born from.

That is one of the reasons why I loved the burning man gatherings so much. There is so much unknown. The conventional, implicit rules of behaviour just aren’t present. Consensus reality doesn't apply. There are other creative principles at play and so every encounter is completely fresh, unexpected and unpredictable. You might officiate a wedding between two strangers and never see them again. You might walk out of your tent in search for coffee in the morning, and return the next morning, at sunrise, after being taken from one adventure to the next. Every situation is likely to transform into a musical, a ritual, or effortlessly shapeshift into a surreal version of itself. It is not possible to predict or foresee how any encounter will play out. No predefined script is followed, everything is improvised and created in the moment. It is a playground for different realities to emerge.

A temporary reality where there is no money - and still everything you need appears. Where planning doesn’t make sense because everything is constantly being reshaped, birthed. Where intense beauty flourishes for just an instant - and then it is gone.

                           'Love what is mortal

                                      hold it close against your bones

                              and when it is time to let it go

                                        Let it go.'                                                          

With love,
Laura.

poem adapted from Mary Oliver’s In Blackwater Woods.

Please feel free to comment, share or reach out if anything resonated. I always love to receive your reflections.

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🧵 following the thread:

• The particular conditions that burns are filled with (or devoid of) seem to be conducive to inspiration, innovative visions at scale. I recently discovered that Google’s Doodles emerged during Burning Man and also Circling, the mediation practice that I have been involved with and that I spent an entire week practicing last month, also originated in a Burn.

• I changed a lot of plans this summer. I let go of airplanes that I had booked, I didn't use tickets for festivals I once intended to go to. Plans that at some point felt right stopped feeling aligned. I could have decided to carry them out as originally imagined, but instead, I decided to follow the guiding principle of this newsletter - aliveness. And so, dear friend, if you are trying to plan something with me and it is not manifesting, know that it is not you, it is my new approach to life. Plans shall be minimized until further notice (or that’s the practice I’m experimenting with currently, let’s see what it leads to).

🍋 fresh questions that I’m holding:

when is solitude (re)generative and when does it lead to loneliness?

🍃 in other realms:

• I will be performing in September as part of the Zürcher Theater Spektakel. It is a show based on the principles of trance, unconscious memories and how slowness can expand time. It has been a while since I don’t participate in a larger public performance and I’m so curious to see what it will feel like and what will emerge. 🎭
  

• I finished my Diploma in Neurosomatic Integration and am now in the process of writing my thesis. This has enlivened my deep, nerdy part, and I have spent a substantial amount of time researching everything from classical Non-dual Shaiva Tantra scriptures to brainwaves and the impact of different kinds of sounds on the endocrine system. If you have interesting resources in this space, I’d love to receive them. Keywords: Kundalini, Embodied Ethics, Power. 🧠
  

• When synchronicities happen, I listen. This last week, 4 humans have commented in some capacity on my voice and on how I should record meditations or learn hypnotherapy, or basically use it more. I am curious to follow that thread and I’m envisioning adding an experimental audio part to this newsletter moving forward. I’m dreaming up an audio version of this (which is one of my favourite pieces of writing. I know it is an incredibly ugly website but the content is worth the aesthetic heart-break. Really). And so my ask to you is - do you have any question or topic you’d like to hear discussed? Send it my way! 🎤

• If you have been in this space before, you have heard me rave about Grieving Fire Rituals. Holding this these rituals is some of the most beautiful, transformative work that I have been privileged to experience and support. There is an upcoming ritual in October that my friend Janna is holding and if you feel the call, I can only recommend following it. ❤️‍🔥

• I will travel to Spain in September. I will be mostly in the North, in Navarra, at my dad’s farm, picking zucchinis and ridiculously delicious tomatoes and living very close to the soil (see below) and to my family. But I will also be shortly in the mountains in Granada and possibly also in Georgia (🇬🇪) in late September - if you happen to be in these locations, maybe our paths can cross.

  

If this resonated and made you think of other humans that might enjoy this experiment, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries often taste sweeter.

Share What is alive?

🌒 written on a waxing crescent moon, on a deliciously hot summer night.

I am currently remembering. Remembering to value these days of spaciousness, of resting, of devoting my full presence solely to paying attention to what is. Parts of me resist this. They hold the belief that holidays (and days in general) are meant for extraordinary adventures full of intensity and expansion. And a deeper part of me is irresistibly drawn to things, to experiences, that require time for nurturing and building. That can’t be rushed. There is an exquisite level of beauty and nourishment that can be tasted in that which was infused with time, with presence, with love.

The hand-carved wooden spoons and the slow-cooked meals. Handwritten letters, syrup made of carefully handpicked flowers. Plucking petal after petal. Trees that take years to grow and are burned in a bonfire within hours. I am learning so, so much from observing forests grow, from seeing the myriad of life-forms that co-exist and co-create the soil we stand on. It is expanding my understanding of what patience actually means: a slow, decade-long dance of creation, destruction and transformation.

And maybe I’m drawn to this particular type of beauty right now because I also inhabit another world. A world of technology, of multiple projects speeding in and out of my inbox, of different screens accompanying me as I hop from one meeting to the next, caffeine as the backbeat ensuring that my system follows the intensity of that rhythm. Speed can be seductive, lulling us into the illusion that we are making the most out of our time.

And of course, we can always choose and change the rhythm of our dance. Lying on damp moss for hours can not only be replenishing - it is radical. It stands in direct opposition to that which our culture frequently values and celebrates: optimisation, productivity, efficiency. The belief that more is more. There is nothing efficient about handwritten letters. They are a daring investment of our most precious resources, of our time and energy and presence. The non-renewables. And so currently I dance with the question of envisioning and invoking

          a life that centers beauty,  
               seeing, sharing, creating it.
                               a return to the simple
                                 where less is more
                       where space abounds
                                     nourishment flourishes
                          focus can expand and sharpen
               where the invisible can be sensed 
                      and the essential can be 
                                      touched.

What are you invoking?

With love and in paradox,
Laura.

Please feel free to comment, share or reach out if anything resonated. I always love to receive your reflections.

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🍃 in other realms:

• I turned 30 this week. I held a small ritual gathering and invited my close friends and the ingredients of magic, beauty and the unknown. There were songs, flowers, poetry and a co-created altar with seeds that contain wishes and now turned into a rattle that I can’t wait to play.

• Daring to ask for what I desire has been such a practice for me and my birthday was an opportunity to really deepen it. And I want to continue practicing it here, with you. So here is my invitation: If you feel called to share, I'd love to receive memories we share that you cherish, qualities you see in me that you appreciate, ways in which this letters have touched you - or anything else that you that you want to offer. For me, it is always touching to receive your words and to see you choosing to spend your time with me, in this space. 💌

• The short description of my picture was a taster - Grieving Fire Rituals have moved and inspired me so deeply. Last weekend I attended my second ritual and words are still emerging, slowly. I am sure they will take the shape of a longer letter to be shared one day. For now, this is an invitation for you to join us in one of our upcoming rituals in Norway or Switzerland. My friend Janna(li) who holds these spaces is such a source of inspiration in my life and I desire more people to experience what a culture of communal grieving is and can be. 🕯️

• I was invited to record a podcast on IFS (Internal Family Systems) with Andrina from Life Curation. It was a pleasure to dance with our inner paradoxes in this format. Voice notes are my natural habitat and podcasts are an easeful extension of that. Something is brewing in this space. ⚗️

• In my tech universe, conversations around AI abound. I am hosting a series of Google I/O events for communities and developers - the next big one is to blossom in Amsterdam on June 21st. Let me know if you will be there that week - maybe our paths can cross! 🌍

🌱 seeds to cultivate:

'Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all'

- Jarod K. Anderson

If this resonated and made you think of other humans that might enjoy this experiment, please invite them on this journey. Shared discoveries often taste sweeter.

Share What is alive?

🌒 written on a waxing crescent moon, on the grass. Literally.

The shaman-apprentice living in a yurt in the mountains, making flutes out of bamboo and a living out of nothing. My first ever cigar at a cigar bar, an entire category of places that I didn’t even know existed, but where people-watching is a delight. I like shapeshifting and there was a lot of that. Disguising as an investment banker with limited success, discovering a source of delicious vegetarian caviar, joining obscure Telegram groups leading to all sorts of fascinating gatherings. And there were also jazz concerts in basements and hidden keys to private churches and so, so many other tiny, beautiful universes that I was invited to explore for a little while.

This is my paradise. Life as a constant anthropological research, an ocean of wonderfully random experiences to be immersed in and learn from. It is also part of the reason why I love traveling so much - the perpetual exposure to radically different ways of being and living. Discovering new galaxies. But I did not travel at all and Zürich provided this exquisite buffet of experiences.

I didn’t believe this was possible, not here. This level of diversity, variety, unique beauty to feast on. And it has probably always been here - I just couldn’t see it. I had my routines, my preferred ways of spending time. There was no space for these encounters to come into my experience. Habitual structures need to become more fluid, more spacious, to allow the unexpected in.

This can happen anywhere. Of course, changing environments helps to melt away our usual ways of moving in the world, but being able to find the extraordinary in the mundane is an art that can be cultivated daily. Anywhere, here, now.

I see this as a practice in allowing. And I want to deepen it. To be open to receive what is on offer, even though it might not be what was expected or preferred.

     What lies in the realm beyond our preferences? 

                 How can we open to receive what is available 

                           here,   
                                         now?

I would not have been drawn to this question in the past. Why would I want to let go of my preferences? I like knowing what I want, and I also like ‘getting’ it. There is truth to that and there is also wisdom in bringing curiosity towards the limiting quality preferences might have.

Preferences assume we know the entire range of what is possible. Very frequently, we don’t. We don’t know what we don’t know. And we miss out on tasting so much delicious unknown by being too attached to what we *think* we prefer. The extraordinary is here, in the realm beyond preferences, waiting to be discovered.

Will you let it in?

With love,
Laura.

🍃 in other realms:

• After 2+ months of uncertainty around the mass layoffs, I discovered that I still have my job at Google (and mixed feelings around it all). What I do for sure still love is being inspired by my students and having a platform to give visibility to their amazing work.

• I finished the second module of the Diploma in Neuro-somatic Integration, which zoomed in on attachment patterns, CO2 tolerance, stress responses and the potential of trauma-sensitive breathwork for nervous system regulation. I’m still digesting the incredibly rich learnings and exploring ways of integrating them into my offerings.

• And I am spending *this* weekend learning about Hakomi - a body-centered practice that integrates Taoist and Buddhist principles to explore and transform patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior.

• Sometimes we cast spells unknowingly. After the break up and the break in, I really didn't want to live alone. I imagined friends moving into my guest room (which happened); I envisioned meeting impulsive lovers who would immediately make my kitchen their base (still pending). What I didn’t expect was my mother to move in. For three weeks. I got a taste of my own ‘beyond preferences’ medicine, but dear readers, it works! I love my mom and I adore living alone in my flat again.

What is coming next for me is a shift in focus, from exploring the external delights to my inner realms. I am attending a ceremony and week-long shamanic journey and I am curious to see what will emerge there.

🌱 seeds to cultivate:

'With freedom comes responsibility - an obligation to awaken, and at the same time, dream.'
-Terence McKenna

Please feel free to comment, share or reach out if anything resonated.

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🌚 written on a new moon.

Hospitals are peculiar places. Aesthetically cold but filled with intense emotions (and bad coffee). I see tears of joy, lives being transformed, repaired and also lost. And as I gather with other strangers navigating their particular taste of unknown - I notice how different this type of Love feels from what we were invited to celebrate on St. Valentines. Deeper, more nuanced. More real.

I have often thought that our collective imagination of Love feels way less expansive than it could be, often limited to romance. It excites me to change that. I'm inspired to create space to intentionally illuminate and (re)think what Love is to us individually and to explore what it can mean to us collectively.

And so I need your wonderful hearts and creative minds for that, dear readers. I'm looking to create alternative, crowdsourced definitions of Love. And I'd love to hear yours.

  Notice what comes up for you when you hear 'Love'. 

             Does it live somewhere in your body? 

                         What images, shapes, textures come to mind? 

What does Love mean to you?

This desire to re-define Love has been brewing in me for a while. I remember a group dinner with friends a few years ago. We are talking about Love. Everyone attempting to define what our experience of Love (and love) is. We look up the definition on our phones. I'm shocked to read that the official entry in the Spanish dictionary (RAE) says it's something 'we seek out because of our own insufficiency'.

It's of course not easy to define Love. It can feel like an attempt to bound the infinite, to name the unnamable. And yet, I am sure that ‘insufficiency’ can be replaced with juicier visions that recognize the power, beauty and endless nuance of the concept.

This is the result of my previous explorations of this question. I created a speculative dictionary entry based on past responses I received defining ‘Love’. I will be creating an updated version with all your juicy contributions and share the result in further iterations of these letters. And who knows, maybe one day our version of love will replace existing definitions ✍️.

With Love,
Laura.

𒀭

I’m curious to hear what practices you have around bringing more expansion and intentionality into your experience of Love? And of course, feel free to share with other humans (and beyond) whose input you would like to see reflected. The more voices the more colourful our visions of Love.

Share

🍃 more adventures:

• Recently, I have felt the desire to create more and to share my experiments along the way. These letters are part of that impulse. Another part has been putting together a portfolio with my artistic creations. I loved the process of looking back at projects created over the years and rediscovering some sparks to be revived.

• I’m turning 30 soon. I was warned that there is another rare astrological milestone to experience before then - my Saturn return. Apparently mine will happen next week. We shall see what adventures the cosmos has in store for me - you can calculate yours here. 🪐

• My dearest friend Joachim hosts wonderful weekly explorations on how we relate to ourselves through creativity. Sessions are free and in community. Maybe you feel the call to join?
  

🍋 other freshly-squeezed daily poetics:
handwritten postcards / broken in apartments / fresh-pressed pomegranate juice / spontaneous sleepovers / bringing offerings to tree-friends / devadasis / cushions on public benches / morning runs, midnight runs / yogurt-sauce on everything / hyphens-hyphens-hyphens / an incipient romance with acroyoga / throwing tantrums / flowers for self / telling my wonderful friends how much I love them. I do! I love you.

🌱 seeds to cultivate:

Collect rocks. That's all. But not just any rocks. You are an intelligent creature, so look for the unimaginable inside the ordinary. Let your imagination change what you know.
- The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch

Please feel free to comment or reach out if anything resonated with you. And if you were forwarded this letter and desire to receive future iterations, please join below. ✨

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🌖 written on a waning crescent moon

It is Sunday and the cozy coffee cave that I have been pilgriming to for the past week is closed. I am guided to change my routine. With a bit of resistance and a lot of amusement, I start to roam the streets.

       How do you react when the usual pathways fall away?           
                  What do you choose to create?                     
                             How do you orient yourself?

On the way to my uncertain destination I encounter cows, two ladies in pink robes and a man dancing, fully immersed in the world his headphones are creating. I love observing him. His ability to enjoy the simple and make it delightful. How he chooses to indulge in the pleasures available to him and prioritize that over social norms.

Eventually, my expedition led me to discover a rooftop with a throne-like cushion on the floor. I take out my laptop with the intention to start typing these exact words, but nothing wants to flow. No water and no words - but a stranger that appears and asks to sit next to me. I'm really set on my intention of writing and see this encounter as a potential distraction. And it was.

What unfolded was a fascinating conversation about the roots of flamenco, my natal chart being read in Northern Indian astrology and a renewed love for Jodorowsky's movies. What I originally considered to be an interruption ended up being the actual content and spark for this letter to take shape.

What a beautiful reminder. The juiciest experiences are frequently the ones that we don't plan and don't control. Those that we create by being open, by letting go of agendas and instead listening to what is and what wants to emerge.

This has been my practice these last week in India. I spent my days dancing Contact Improvisation, a free-form movement exploration where all is co-created and unknown. Every motion requires us to attune to our dance partner(s) to maintain the dance alive. Dance is a wonderful metaphor for life and so the insights I gained by moving on the dance floor are already permeating how I move through my days in other realms. There is a quality of receptivity, of deeper listening that is creating more space to engage with life in surprising ways, allowing little adventures to enter my experience more frequently and with ease. I am grateful and curious to see what more is to come.

                       What is alive for you?

I’d love to hear.

With love,
Laura.

🍋 freshly squeezed daily poetics:
petrified waterfalls / doctor paid with fresh flowers / hitchhiking in sign language / jungle expeditions in the dark / milky way showers / navigating the world in silence / daily horchatas / living in a laundries / dragonblood / ocean cave sirens / singing under mango trees / air-crew serenading passenger/ dolphins weaving with waves / DIY temazcales / triplets on motorbikes / sugarless masalas.

🍃 other adventures:

• My love for IFS (Internal Family Systems) keeps deepening - I finalized the IFS Level 2 (IFIO) training, focusing on dynamics in intimate relationships and am loving exploring this work in my practice.

• I also started an incredibly rich Diploma in Neuro-somatic Integration. The connection between the muscles, the nervous system and our behavioural patterns is a true mind-expansion.

• I joined an artist collective, Zookunft, and am excited to explore the intersections of AI, dance and other experiments in community.

• And yes, I do still work full time at Google. In fact, I recently started to manage the Women Techmakers program on top of our Leadership Development Program for STEM university students in Europe. Applications for our campaign in partnership with the UN are open now.

🌱 seeds to cultivate:

Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. 

-Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost.

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🌔 written on a waxing crescent moon.

I hear teal-haired women dream about potentially applying to art school. I listen to a young couple plan the very complex logistics of managing their children’s schedule — finding a recipe to balance English homework, Tuesday’s piano lessons and scarce lunch breaks. A quite large group is debating the political atmosphere of their respective countries. Ambivalence in their words and a sense of gravity in the air.

We are looking onto a graveyard.

Yes, my dear reader, this coffee place is located in the middle of a graveyard. What a wonderful, radical idea. A container for life and death to coexist. A space that invites us to experience graveyards — and maybe death — differently. We are surrounded by gravestones and we are alive, sipping cappuccinos and freshly pressed orange juices.

Suddenly, the conceptual division between life and death — between the mundane and the sacred — is blurred.

Was there ever a clear division to begin with?

It is a deeply human trait to divide and categorize. We adore creating beautiful, clean-cut models and use them to make sense of our complex, often messy and paradoxical realities. Frameworks are understandably seductive. They give us a sense of control. Our analytical brains value the precision that having clear conceptual demarcations enables us to exert. We can name and isolate stages of processes that we imagine we understand. Knowledge is power — we have learnt.

Yet death is maybe the ultimate challenge to our desire for clarity and control. It resists simplistic approaches and definitive answers. Instead, it invites us to sit with the wisdom and depth of uncertainty. Death poses questions. It invites us to a state of productive doubting.

Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

And maybe, as poet Rainer Maria Rilke perceptively suggested, loving and learning to live the questions themselves might paradoxically contain the answers we seek.

Death is a wonderful invitation to dance with uncertainty. Let’s dance?

You are writing an article about death? Eyebrows rise. A mix of surprise and worry appear on the facial expression of my conversation partner. Her feet start slowly rotating away from me. Death makes us uncomfortable.

Why? Our predominant cultural narrative in the West isolates death from our everyday experience. This is by design. Death is not part of our day-to-day conversation menu because we intentionally want to exclude it. It is tempting to believe that, if we push it deep enough into our unconscious, it might disappear from our awareness.

Death as the undesired Other. Death as Taboo.

In this view, we treat dying as an outlier - something that doesn’t happen frequently, that doesn’t usually affect us, that doesn’t belong to us, to our experience. Something extraordinary — and extraordinarily challenging to talk about. Distancing is a known coping mechanism.

And yet, the illusory nature of this thought is never as clearly revealed as in autumn. The fallen leafs mock our desire to escape the truth of our mortality. We can take this season as an invitation to consciously explore our relationship to death, to endings. An opportunity to develop a richer sensitivity for the beauty that lies in endings.

We don’t want beautiful endings, we don’t want endings — full stop. We want to constantly flourish, perpetually grow, never decay. Capitalism expects us to do so. In a context in which endings are often equated with failure, it is not surprising that we would want to avoid them at all cost. And yet we can choose to act differently.

This is why I was drawn to writing this piece. I believe in the power of awareness. Of illuminating what already is here, but isn’t seen or talked about. I believe something changes, loosens, by naming it clearly. Challenging our perceptions creates space. And it’s in these often unexplored corners of our personal and collective beliefs where space for different perspectives and ways of being can emerge. And so, intentional transformation can occur.

This is relevant not only for internal, personal changes — these are also the foundations of awareness-based social change. The individual and the collective are perpetually intertwined. Like life and death.

I am curious to collectively explore what a world in which death is reclaimed as a deeply human experience would look like. What would change if we accept — and even celebrate— endings as an integral part of every transformation process.

And I believe in the power of language as a tool for social change. I am interested in discovering if apparently subtle shifts, such as writing, reading about or openly speaking about death could lead to deeper transformations. What would happen if we removed ‘death’ from the box of taboos? If it were integrated it into our everyday vocabulary? Would our relationship to life also shift?

Our disconnection from death also hints at a deeper disconnection from our cyclical nature — and possibly nature altogether. I have an invitation for you, a question for you to dance with: What do you consider ‘nature’ to be? Do you include yourself as part of nature?

The way you answered these questions is probably influenced by the environment and set of ideas you have been exposed to. If you, like me, grew up in a Western cultural context, you might have familiarized yourself with the ‘nature/culture divide’, which is a widespread anthropological theory that clearly separates both concepts.

There are alternative perspectives that we can choose to access and embody, like the lens of Deep Ecological Awareness, as articulated by Fritjof Capra in his book The Web of Life, which recognizes the fundamental interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that, as individuals and societies, we are embedded in (and ultimately dependent on) the cyclical processes of nature. Because we are part of nature.

No matter which lens resonates more with you, observing how other species co-exist with each other and with death can be a great source of inspiration in the art of perspective shifting. I’m particularly inspired by fungi, who convert the organic matter of deceased organisms back into soil from which new life will spring. They create new life from death. This approach invites us to perceive death as a creative force — a perspective that enriches the frequent associations of death as an exclusively destructive phenomena.

Fungi also challenge our often linear perspective on death. They provide a helpful reminder to recognize all life-forms as processes not static things. The ‘you’ of five years ago was made from different stuff than the ‘you’ of today. Nature is an event that never stops — Merlin Sheldrake, states in his book Entangled Life.

Death becomes not a one time occurrence, but ‘only’ one stage of an endless process. Part of a cycle. Yet in order to access this perspective, an expansion of our perception of self is needed. Zooming out and seeing ourselves as part of a planetary collective, enlarging the meaning of ‘us’ to include more than the confined idea of the individual self.

This skill might lie at the core of creating meaningful attempts to engage with the multiple crisis we are currently facing — which undoubtedly will require us all to find creative ways to cooperate beyond existing boundaries and dualisms.

Beginnings and endings can not exist in separation.

When my flat white arrives, the waiter carefully rotates my cup so I can observe his foam-art creation upright. This tiny act of care moves me. It feels profoundly meaningful, a reminder that how we choose to invest our energy matters.

Meaningfulness is a more fluid and rich and variable concept than we tend to imagine. And so is death.

Would you agree?

I’m curious to hear how your relationship to death is now and how a you envision a society that fully accepts death to be.

In the spirit of completing the full cycle and including both consumption and creation, my invitation to you is to take time to sit with these questions — feel free to also share your answers in the comment section below.

For more invitations to dance with different perspectives and questions, you can join my newsletter here.