These online, on-page ‘unpsychological’ dialogues have been a staple format for Unpsychology Voices for a number of years. We’ve used them here in our online publications, and in our magazines too. It’s a time of trouble for the world at the moment (hasn’t it always been so?) and this plays out in our bodies, our minds and our everyday lives… Here’s the latest exchange between Steve (Unpsychology editor) and friend and fellow unpsychologist, Emily Wilkinson, that criss-crosses their concerns and considerations, and ways of being – in mind and body – in our current social, ecological and political climate.

A conversation between and

Introduction by

is the author of Wild Margins here on Substack, and also hosts the Desire Lines podcast. She is a writer, walking artist, slow media maker, PhD candidate, wanderer and dreamer. She is often found in quiet places, the spaces between and roaming the Welsh hills.

I had the pleasure of appearing on Desire Lines in February last year, talking with Emily about Unpsychology Magazine with the title, ‘Indie Publishing as Desire Line’ and since then she’s hosted a number of podcast episodes with guests with whom she discusses themes of creative practice, wild mind and neurodivergence – among others.

However, Emily is also a great friend; someone I’ve worked, walked and talked with since meeting her at a Dark Mountain gathering in West Sussex a decade and half ago. She’s written for Unpsychology, and worked with me on my Soulmaking project and we share a love of poetry, art and the ideas and themes in ‘unpsychology’.

Since our conversation on Desire Lines, I’ve wanted to continue our dialogue, and this time around leaning a little more into some of the themes that Unpsychology is here to explore. As you might know, if you’re an Unpsychology regular, one of the creative ‘practices’ we use in and around the magazine and Substack is a ‘relational conversation’ in written dialogue form. It allows for a diverse and exploratory way of getting into the meanings and contexts of ‘human’ mind – in the contexts of the world and the wider ecologies that embed and surround us. We don’t rely on individual ‘wisdom’ or ‘big ideas’, but we do learn from individual experiences and collective interactions.

Below, then, is my conversation with Emily Meredith Wilkinson…

Our conversation

Steve

Hello Emily, and thanks for joining me here. As you’ll know, on this publication, we love to hold conversations with a variety of practitioners and friends around the themes and ideas of ‘unpsychology’. As a starter, I wonder whether you could say something about what ‘unpsychology’ means to you, and what connections you might see between the work this magazine and publication explores, and what you’ve been doing in your practice and studies over the past decade or so?

Emily

Greetings Steve, and thank you for initiating this dialogue. Having followed Unpsychology since from the beginning, it is very interesting to unpick what the concept might mean to me at this point. I suppose I see it as a kind of unravelling, in that ‘psychology’ evolved as a very head-centric field.

For me, ‘unpsychology’ represents an undoing of that; teasing out the threads from that very mind-focused location back into the body, earth and culture. Even just writing that immediately prompts a connection to ‘desire lines’, the guiding metaphor behind my PhD and podcast. Creating new pathways is a theme I work with a lot, and I feel you are doing something similar in unpsychology publications and podcasts.

From a purely etymological interpretation, I guess ‘unpsychology’ as a term points to undoing elements of logic-based approaches, leaving room for creative ways of knowing. There is a sense of redirecting; back towards the original meaning of ‘psyche’, from the Greek, meaning spirit or soul. Your focus on poetry speaks to that for me, a form of writing which is a constant in my practice. How does all that land with you?

Steve

It lands well! I am so intrigued by the experiential aspects of all this. I read a lot but it’s very rare that I read something that hits me with logic! So, I like it when authors (and practitioners) seem to absorb (is that the right word?) ideas and experiences into their bodies and minds. It’s a difficult dilemma, because I am certainly not saying that ‘anything goes’ – the kind of thinking that says, “I believe this and feel this, so it must be true”. In one way, I guess there’s a subjective truth in a statement like that, but only one that applies in the singular, and humans are decidedly not singular beings! We can enjoy our own company or find other people wearying, but we are still always relational.

When I look at or read about your work, I get a sense that you are always working at the cusp of this contradiction. Your solitary practices emphasise the importance of ‘personhood’, perhaps, but you always seem eager to keep relating and connecting.

I guess that the ‘soulmaking’ work we explored together a while back was like that too – regarding the ‘soul’ as a manifestation of individual originality, but always embedded in and interdependent with a myriad of ecologies and multiple contexts. As you say, psychology has been locked into the head and, I might add, onto individual norms and expectations. Taking more exploratory and divergent paths provide very different kinds of journey.

So, how does your journey relate to all this, do you think?

Emily

In reading this I am reminded and heart-lifted whilst remembering the depth of our creative exchanges and friendship over the past 12 years or so! It is someone who knows you quite well (I think) who can pinpoint the type of ‘cusps’ you speak of, and I am absolutely always walking those edges between my tendencies to get overwhelmed socially and my love of relational states of being.

There is an inherent amount of isolation and time alone needed for any creative, which is at times a difficult balance. I find so much magic in the exchange of relationships of all kinds, and at the same time I am someone who only really ‘resets’ when alone. I suppose these are also ‘desire lines’ – constantly finding and exploring new pathways of how to be with each other and be with ourselves.

(Neuro)divergent pathways are very much part of my interest and study – personally and as a researcher. I was diagnosed on the autism spectrum in 2023, and there is a lot I can say about that from a multiplicity of perspectives. Some of those involve identifying with things, and some involve a more philosophical point of view

What I can say is that a lot of ‘autistic’ tendencies relate to these social edges we speak about, and soul-type personalities who find much of their nourishment within, preferring certain types of social interaction. Autistic people can also be great communicators and good at relationships! However, this is not the dominant stereotype that we hold culturally. What and who do we perceive as ‘a good communicator’? Is it someone who speaks confidently and says a lot, with many things to talk about, or is it someone who says less and chooses their words? How do you think Unpsychology as a magazine and movement feels out these kinds of edges?

Steve

Two really important strands there, Emily, for me. The first is about who gets to communicate and get listened to. The second is about the place of neurodivergent ‘styles’ and ‘tendencies’ (I like that word in this context). They’re linked of course, and I think it’s as much about the styles that are culturally normalised, as a ‘this’ or ‘that’ polarity. I imagine that university departments have their fair share of individuals with autistic styles of communication, learning and functioning! However, the point might be that it’s the diversity of inquiry and communication that might be lacking – the absence of the different ‘voices’ of those who don’t fit into the stereotypes of ‘academic in an office’ or ‘researcher in a lab’, or – and this might be just as important – politicians or leaders in whatever context.

I’m not sure I’ve expressed that as clearly as I’d like to (maybe we can tease it out a bit further down) but whilst this is about diversity and equality and all those things, it’s also about what is regarded as the norm. Even those of us who see ourselves as progressives can be drawn into following influential ‘thinkers’ or ’gurus’ who seem to offer something novel, coherent and whole. I remember when I was reading quite a lot of ‘Integral’ theory, and got into the whole world around Ken Wilber’s particular version of a ‘theory of everything’. It’s very tempting to fall for the confidence, certainty and insight that minds like Wilber’s and others undoubtedly exude. However, I think it’s easy to fall into a kind of ‘cult-like’ mentality around such folk. At best, of course, we can draw on their ideas and practices and integrate them with others we have gathered from along the way. Maybe ‘unpsychology’ is for those of us who are doing this humble gathering – magpies, maybe – rather than giant thought-leaders who gather followers around them?

I’ve personally found this a difficult cusp to sit with at times. The loudest, grandest voices seem to get heard, whilst others (those of us who are more curiously concerned with ‘ordinary life’, perhaps), hold back a little. I think ‘unpsychology’ has always been for these quieter voices whispering from the edges, from the pathways and desire lines, speaking in poetic cadences with necessary uncertainty. I sometimes wonder if we’re constantly trying to find a momentary way to be authentic – to glimpse something essential – and to communicate these small wisdoms to the world, or at least the parts that are open to creative beauty.

Such a small wisdom or ‘poetic image’ emerges, as Gaston Bachelard put it, as “a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche”. This is not subject to a “cause” or “inner thrust”, he tells us, rather it is through its “reverberation” that we find “the real measure of the being of a poetic image”. This feels like the shape of a very ordinary, original and unrecognised piece of collective wisdom, which I think might be almost revolutionary as a piece of experiential ‘psychology’ – ‘unpsychology’, as we are framing it! It is interesting to me that, despite the fact that so much has been written since Bachelard wrote his small book in 1958 (by ‘big ideas’ writers like Wilber, McGilchrist and others), his insight still feels like it contains a small and essential truth.

In fact, I think it was when I first read this passage in the introduction to Bachelard’s book, The Poetics Of Space, that the shape of ‘unpsychology’ started to form. My sense is that it’s not that logic is an ‘either-or’ to be accepted or rejected, rather that it is simply insufficient without the imaginative counterbalance of the poetic image…

What do you think?

Emily

I think I would rather be a magpie than a giant thought leader, which sounds incredibly stressful. All that attention! Perhaps empowering the magpie role is part of our work. The other day I was feeling very resistant to my solitary, academic work so decided to make some soup. The idea came to me that a thing I would really love to do is write a recipe book about soup. Why is that idea any less valid than writing my PhD thesis? Bachelard’s idea of ‘reverberations’ makes me think about how we are all vibrational, and our reverberations feed into the world in different ways. Perhaps subtle is more powerful? I loved Susan Cain’s book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, which came out before a lot of the mainstream neurodivergence stuff of recent years.

Shall we adopt the magpie as mascot, perhaps two for joy?

Steve

Yes to the mascot, Emily! So what are we to collect and curate, we magpies? Because, on reflection, curation is, for me, as important as creation. So, bear with me and see what your response is to this next stream of thought!

When we quote an author, or an idea or a theory - or even a way of seeing, as both of us have done here (me, with Bachelard, you with Susan Cain) we are automatically entering their curational world – their world view. I think that’s fine. Bachelard’s perspective changed things enormously for me in how I regard human experience and poetics, and I also love Susan Cain’s work, and the way she champions the quiet, the thoughtful, the creative, and the way she has undoubtedly opened up a space for other important conversations.

However, magpies build their own nests. They gather what is there and make something unique from the stuff they collect. It’s not going to be like any other collection or weaving of objects and materials, but it always has some sense, some shape and function to it. It’s a home that suits and reflects its creators, but is also built from its contexts and environment.

I’ll extend the corvid analogy. A farm near us was bought recently and the new owner took down a row of mature trees that had been home to a large colony of crows. It felt, at the time, like an act of ecological desecration. These trees and crows were creatures, sentient in their own other-than-human way, and definitely worthy of rights and respect. I was angry on their behalf; on mine too, I suppose. However, what happened was that the crows quickly adapted, moving to other trees in the hamlet and building new nests. The act of destruction was real, and the crows’ world (and ours) had changed, but not necessarily in the way that I, with my anthropomorphic, ecological values, might have expected, feared or desired. The crows are still here – they’re on their evening flypast as I write this. The magpies are still here too. It’s another season and another evolution for this independent little hamlet community.

What am I wrangling with here? Perhaps something around noticing, collecting and being able – in as authentic a way as might be possible for a human – to frame and contextualise these phenomena and experiences within the widest possible psychological and ecological interrelationships. To unpick the idea of ‘ideas’. To expect the unexpected. To be certain about uncertainty. To inquire into the ordinary. Bachelard does all this with his meditation on the physical space of ‘home’.

Oh, and what about your ‘soup’? Nora Bateson (another author I’ve gathered shiny objects from) has also written eloquently about soup, and food more generally, and how we can’t reduce our meal – however simple or delectable it might be – to its individual ingredients, nor to one function or context. Her new book ‘Belly’ starts with a focus on food and everything it might mean: “a cookbook with almost no recipes” as the publicity blurb puts it!

All this tells us that we can’t deconstruct our lives and cultures from the outside, only experience them, in all their complexity and interdependence, from within. Each meal is a complex set of relationships with all its layers and subtle flavours, as well as being a simple human act of necessity and community. I’d love to read your collection – your magpie’s curation – of soup recipes! I imagine a delicious and unique volume of tastes, experiences and evoked images and, yes, ideas too…

Emily

I find the analogy of meals and food fascinating, in that each meal comes together with a certain set of ingredients to create something unique – something ‘more’ than the individual parts. The quality of these ingredients really matters, but what is also added (and perhaps what is more mysterious) is the personality and ‘signature’ of the cook. We can take this into the magpie way of being also; as you point out, curation is important too and perhaps there are both conscious and unconscious forces at play when we bring all our trinkets together. In the case of the clever crows, it could simply be that they are far more intelligent and adaptable than us. I listened to a podcast recently and learnt that bees have been around 119 million years before the very first humans walked the planet. Their way of living makes a lot more sense than ours and it is expanding to think (if only for a few seconds) that they are the ones in charge.

What if collecting trinkets and quietly curating is actually adaptation in action, energised by the divine creativity which imprints all that we do with our energetic signature? This could apply to a collection of shells thoughtfully arranged on a windowsill, an artist book project, an online magazine, a podcast. Maybe there are messages for survival and adaptation in these things. I really like this way of looking at things because it allows for individual creativity without being individualistic in the way that so much of social media is now. I read a lot about the attention economy and really enjoyed Jenny Odell’s book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. Odell talks a lot about creative practice and curation, and activities like bird watching. She writes: “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos.”.

This thread connects to the field of Slow Media, an area and movement I am researching at the moment (and seem to have attached myself to). Jennifer Raunch is one of the main people to have picked up on the emergence of Slow Media, alongside movements like Slow Food and Slow Travel. All of that seems to have gone a bit quiet in the last few years, after the initial popularity of the slow movement, I think that’s a shame. I’ve actually adopted ‘slow media’ as a way of describing my creative practice and how I work, which involves a lot of slow curating, collecting and magpie-like behaviours. There was also a Slow Media manifesto written a few years ago, which I think speaks a lot to the conversation we are having.2

What do you think of the Slow Media ethos Steve? Perhaps our earlier podcast conversation (find it HERE) about indie publishing as a desire line is relevant here?

Steve

I like the idea of slow living (which might include all of these ‘movements’: Slow Media, Slow Food, Slow Travel etc.), and at this time in my life I’m also all in favour of ‘Quiet’ and ‘Small’ things too! One of the first books that I read that impacted me politically and spiritually was Schumaker’s Small is Beautiful (published in 1973) and despite all the time that has passed since then, I still have a sense that a slow, quiet, and small life is good for individuals and communities alike in the ways that he suggested back then.

In response to your question: though I love the idea and the practice that artists like yourself are embodying, I found that the Slow Media manifesto didn’t move me. There’s a lot in there I agree with, of course, but it felt a little preachy. Maybe I’m just over manifestos these days? I’ve read and written my share, but I’m finding anything that states so definitively what a human practice is or should be a bit off-putting.

I know that’s not at all what you are about, Emily, and I’m guessing that you’re doing what we all do when we’re embarked on a creative journey: we look for where we might belong, or how our work might relate to the world – to find our allies, communities or ‘tribes’. I’m also beginning to be suspicious, or at least skeptical of cultural ‘belonging’ of any kind and, though this is something that has only recently occurred to me, I think that some of the things that are meant to bring us together – manifestos, rituals, theories, movements and the like – may serve to channel us down pathways we don’t always want or need to take, and bind us to ideologies that might not always serve us.

Your simple, powerful idea of a ‘Desire Line’ has a very different feel to it. It feels liberating and more creative somehow. It’s an animating energy that offers an individual artist or creator space to explore, whilst leaving the option still to connect and relate to the world and other humans. Another way of thinking about this might come from the metaphor of food we were talking about above. Cooking can be a collaborative activity of course, but the best meals are often ones a cook creates themself. Sometimes a recipe will help but, when I’m cooking, often I’ll go out on a limb and add an ingredient or some seasoning of my own. It’s intuitive, and far from a perfect art, but in that moment what emerges is a unique creation. At that point, it can help create and contextualise connection and relationship in the people who eat it with me – unless it’s a complete disaster, of course, although even then there’s something deeply relational in the communal response!

I don’t know how much sense I’m making (though that’s not necessarily an imperative here) but I do wish there were more people fascinated by and curious about the interdependent world as it is. Not just the human bits of it, but maybe the wonderful intelligence of crows and bees and dolphins; taking time to watch and study them, then creating something new and insightful from our observations. As Jenny Odell might say, to give ourselves permission to “agree to attend to” whatever catches our attention, and stay with it as long as we desire.

Emily

That feels like a good landing place! I am glad to hear that desire lines speak to you in that way, it seems to be a powerful metaphor for a lot of people, and one that is different for everyone. The slow media material feels for me like it’s highlighting those elements of choice and permission, rather than a set of rules and so on but that might just be my tendency to re-interpret and sidestep ‘rules’ and ideologies!

I have just upcycled a vintage writing bureau which feels like a helpful image here – there are all these little compartments for envelopes, pens, physical things to engage with. It’s one of the fold-down top types of writing desk, so there is a lovely physical motion of choosing to engage with the contents, to sit down and attend to what I would like to read or write, whether that is analogue or digital. What I am taking away from this conversation are themes of collecting/curating, magpie-like gathering, real cooking and writing desks, as physical touchpoints for the broader philosophical themes we’ve been talking about.

Thanks for the opportunity to wander Steve, I hope we get to do it in real life soon.

Notes

Introduction

Recently, on her Mad Culture UK substack, (also a co-editor here on Unpsychology), published a short piece called ‘reckoning’, that we’ve linked to below and which was cross-posted to unpsychology earlier this week:

Mad Culture UK

reckoning

Sixteen years ago, I became involved with an arts community (the Dark Mountain Project, or DMP) which was freely and confidently naming our unravelling social order as a civilisation in collapse. At the time collapse-talk was still fringe and people engaging in it were commonly met with discomfort or derision, mostly regarded as doomers or end-timers. T…

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2 months ago · 12 likes · 7 comments · Julia Macintosh

As well as a call for submissions to a new book, her piece is a moving reflection on a time when Julia “stepped into a transformative madness” (to use her words). This was also a period in which the seeds of Unpsychology were being sown, in part within the Dark Mountain Project (DMP) – a creative community set up to respond to issues of ‘collapse’, ‘peak oil’ and ‘climate breakdown’. Julia and I first met at those DMP gatherings, and our subsequent work together continues to respond to how ‘civilisational collapse’ manifests in our world, but particularly in the domains of mind and culture through what we’ve come to refer to as ‘unpsychology’.

This following post is a response to Julia’s ‘reckoning’, but is also a meditation on the Zoom conversations we hold as Unpsychology editors - along with – and the space they offer that goes beyond the tasks of ‘editing’ and ‘curating’ the magazine and substack that carry the Unpsychology name.

Three people talking…

The other evening, three people got talking. We three are erstwhile and current editors of Unpsychology magazine and substack, and we meet regularly on Zoom to discuss our project – the ‘business’ of ‘unpsychology’, as we might think of it.

These Zoom calls connect the three of us: Lesley in Christchurch (New Zealand), Julia in Edinburgh (Scotland), and me (Steve) in Pembrokeshire (Wales). Julia and I met initially at the Dark Mountain Project (DMP) gatherings, and have subsequently worked together around the developing ‘unpsychology’ project. A little further down the road, Steve and Lesley both trained as Warm Data ‘hosts’ with Nora Bateson’s community, and Lesley came on board as Unpsychology’s design editor in 2018. Neither Julia or I have met Lesley face-to-face, though we feel like we have – and she’s definitely a friend, someone we’d hug if we met her – and one day, we might.

Though these meetings are sometimes practical, really we just talk… These conversations, facilitated by a technology that would have been unimaginable a short couple of decades ago, have evolved into an intense and intimate human activity – shared, mutual learning between three living systems (in a symmathesy - as Nora Bateson might term it). These relational contexts are important. They weave through all the noise and content that is constantly with us in these troubled, disintegrating times – they are conversations in, about and around collapse…

In her recent post, reckoning, Julia was writing about how the concerns the denizens of DMP were responding to a decade and a half ago were relatively ‘niche’ at that time. Collapse, peak oil and the challenges of a world in climate crisis were the starting points for the art, writing, gatherings and conversations that emerged from that community. Now the themes are ubiquitous and obvious to all who are not in complete denial (those, unfortunately, whose despairing certainties nevertheless seem to be gaining in influence).

The DMP community, as Julia indicates, had “its own shortcoming and hypocrisies” and itself collapsed under its own expectations and hopes (though Dark Mountain continues to operate as a publisher of curated book anthologies in this ‘collapse space’). Like many such movements and collectives along the way, however, it did bring together people who have remained connected, many of whom still think, write and work for ‘change’ – whatever than might mean.

That’s the dilemma, of course. We DMP folk, with all our hopes for change and the fears and hypocrisies from those gatherings and conversations, have ‘dispersed’ to all points on the political and spiritual spectrum, and this might resemble a kind of ‘collapse’ of its own. Meanwhile, some of us – as Julia described – experienced our own personal transformative – often terrifying – psychological ‘collapse’ and ‘crises’ that carried and still carry echoes and reflections of these wider, intractable ‘polycrises’ of our time.

How do humans respond to crisis? Often it’s seen as being somewhere along a moral (or political) measuring stick. At one polarity, there is blame, destruction and cruelty, at the other hope, solidarity and community. However, in reality, these are not opposites and can sit side-by-side in any human community, group or culture. Kindness and empathy can coexist with unthinking, offhand exclusion, coercive power and chosen words and actions that have destructive consequences – in the same group or community. Sometimes, as Julia points out, the worst behaviours and consequences can be seen in spaces that are supposed to be ‘communities of care’, such as mental health services, or even in gatherings of like-minded creatives and well-meaning activists.

Ideology – indeed, belief and ideas systems of any kind – can gather people together in hope, before these communities sometimes crumble away, falling apart into madness, discrimination, control and, eventually, lose their efficacy and influence. Even communities that are formed to respond to such ‘collapse’ and ostensibly claim to tend to the consequences of destruction are not excluded from such a disintegration. Becoming bound up in their ‘right-ness’ and the ideas and ideologies they have adopted (often in opposition to what are seen as ‘mainstream; narratives) means that cultural and personal shadows get pushed away (as they always do), projected and, as such, inevitably play out in the group’s dynamic. It was ever thus…

Crucially, those who have been pushed to the edges – to the shadowlands, we might say – or have always felt that this was where they were expected to reside, become the lost souls of our times, those whose internal ‘collapse’ mirrors a wider civilisation and cultural crumbling. And these are folks who are then often castigated for reflecting back the ugly projection of the consequences of humankind’s worst traits and actions.

We three (Steve, Julia and Lesley) live with these shadows, projections and gaslit consequences in our own ways, as we could say all humans do. Having a space to put words to the feelings and thoughts that swirl around for each of us might be a thing that we need right now. Sometimes talking with one another in a Zoom-room somewhere in the virtual ‘out-there’ can seem the safest and most connected context to be. That’s not to say that our ‘ordinary’ lives are not safe, connected and important, but however we grapple with love and belonging, cruelty and collapse, sometimes we might all need a small space to make sense of it all.

I find I need this ‘small space’ more and more these days. All those zealous gatherings, conferences, campaign groups, protests, meetings and activist communities might have seemed necessary and galvanising – even essential – but they became overwhelming, psychologically flattening and then, often, inevitably disappointing.

Zeal is an exciting thing, and I’ve had my share of it, but to be honest, these days other people’s zeal can sometimes seem frightening and inexplicable. I’m reminded at these times that, as Alice Walker put it, we might all need “the most faithful, self-generated enthusiasm (enthusiasm: to be filled with god) in order to survive in human fashion”, and that this might be as unique to each of us as is each living organism. Such an ‘enthusiasm’ might become part of a collective human sharing, but I want a say in what might be assumed to be a ‘universal’ idea, thank you very much, and I extend that right to every other person too!

My own take on what we are calling ‘unpsychology’ is that it’s a place where a sharing of ‘language’ can take place: a kind of language that goes beyond the rhetorical, the analytical, the poetic, the spiritual – even the verbal. A way of communicating and connecting that is both far more and far less than the words we use. A way of sliding between the layers of both our objective world and its subjective meaning. Of placing the human ‘mind (in this case, my own) within and between the multiple contexts and ecologies of the material planet we evolved to live upon.

What I know is that, for me in this time in my own life, the small conversation is the only space that will do. That may have been different and may change in time, but for now it’s where I can make some sense of the stories, ideas and circumstances I read about or come across that seem to endlessly swirl through my body and mind. The small space is where I can say, ‘this is how it feels’ (‘collapse’ being one of the ‘its’ alongside many others) and know that there are two other people in that particular moment who will be open to letting these swirling body-and-mind-things of mine cloud and settle. They accept my language, with all its clumsiness, creativity and ‘thinking out loud’, and reflect back something intangibly mindful, validating and affectionate. They allow me to negotiate (or re-negotiate) my place in the world, and help me find a place for my ‘enthusiasms’…

It occurs to me that this might be why some people get so much out of ‘therapy’, ‘counselling’ or ‘coaching’, and others do not. This might be because the ‘un-psychotherapy’ of the minutia and meanings of the small conversation is not the psychotherapy of the clinician who is concerned with the ‘symptoms’ of madness, dysfunction, disregulation or neurodivergence. The ‘un-psychotherapist’ (who might be any of us, it turns out) is concerned with contexts and how they fit with each other: with the ins-and-outs, the ups-and-downs and the circumstances that connect our ordinary lives to an extraordinary universe.

We ‘un-psychologists’, therefore, are small conversationalists; people in dialogue (or ‘trialogue’) who are, crucially, prepared to go deep and travel somewhere that might be unknown or often frightening with our comrades. We are not bound up in ideology, it seems to me, nor even in ‘community’ – if community becomes more about the rules and conditions of ‘belonging’ than the ways we accept and are accepted in our ‘being’.

Three people talking. And three more people. And two more here, and four more there. Small spaces. Just conversations about a world in collapse. Just ways of sharing of how it feels to be human in these times. Just small evolutionary steps into the unknown – imbued with the curious, creative, endlessly diverse acceptance of human ‘being’…

…just people talking…

Series introduction

This new series of prose poems began at the end of March 2026. I hadn’t written a new poem for a couple of years at least and was beginning to imagine that ‘being a poet’ was something in my past. That’s OK. I am comfortable with moving on and there are poets aplenty out there. However, poetry has been one way of me making sense of the world, and it returned suddenly, with some surprise on my part, as if a tap had been turned on full. Having said that, after 68 years on this earth, it’s clear that the world often makes little sense (or at least not the human bit of it), so perhaps all I can do is to let my thoughts and feelings about what I see pour out. I do have an inkling that these pieces have something to do with ‘unpsychology’ (whatever that means) and that’s why I’m posting them here. All these prose poems appear in the original form in which they were written, though they’ve had some light editing along the way.

Context #3: Something ANOHNI sang…

This piece was written on 1st April 2026.

On the song ‘Drone Bomb Me’ from her 2016 album, Hopelessness, ANOHNI sings: “Drone bomb me
Blow me from the mountains, and into the sea”

In her words: “It’s a love song from the perspective of a girl in Afghanistan, say a 9-year-old girl whose family’s been killed by a drone bomb. She is kind of looking up at the sky and she’s gotten herself to a place where she just wants to be killed by a drone bomb too.”:

Drone warfare is just a lethal value-free extension of gaming, it seems to me. All the colour is on the screen, but only once the drone has hit and killed or destroyed its target. And the targets are often ordinary people, going about their daily lives – lives that have colour, poetry and music in them, as a matter of course; snuffed out in unthinking game-play. We know where this girl will be living right now…

3. Game play…

It’s a cool grey, a colour from the middle of 
the world, a backdrop to a scatter-gun of hues,
all the hot shades, exploding in the city. The
last red salvo took out a hospital, the orange
one before, a school. But that’s OK, the drone
operator beat his top score and he's celebrating
down the whisky bar. The broadcasts are full
of snide triumph and you-can’t-touch-me.
The bars are full of drone operators and
influencers celebrating another hit. Here I am
standing in front of a Ferrari. Here I am with
my joystick sending the love of Jesus to fry a
barbarian. Here I am starting up a start-up.
Shades on. Suit sharp. Face chiselled.
Muscles honed. Here am I looking down on
the city from a room in the clouds. Here
I am shovelling unwanted opinions into a
a desktop folder and pressing DELETE.
Here I am obliterating the Matrix. Then...

...the sounds of music loop softly skyward,
patterns that don’t submit to algorithms,
created by people – down there somewhere –
who do not know or care about the ‘narrative'.
In a township somewhere, a rhythm escapes,
sounds a little like gunshot, but when it falls
on our ears, we can hear the subtle whisper
underneath; a warm sound, like pink blossom
with a touch of green, and it's a contrast with
the original grey, creating something like a
a song, a picture, a poem, a home. People 
hum a tune, are startled by an artful painting; 
are moved to tears by a poem; or they sit 
calmly in this space – proportions just right – 
in the courtyard of their dreams. The sky 
clears of noise and we hear birds again, 
whose songs were there all along, the ones 
we always joined in with. Beneath their melodies, 
the Earth is rhythmic and vast, and we catch 
its beats with drums and samplers. So then 
we can dance and the world is dancing. 
The gamers can press DELETE all they like, 
and gamble their bitcoin till the cows come home, 
but those cows will be dancing, and we’ll sing 
for their freedom too. As evening spreads, cool 
grey shifts to star-studded, moonlit, midnight 
blue, and another day turns its way into new life.

Introduction

A short while ago, we put out a call for submissions to be published here on Unpsychology Substack, and on our equivalent publication on Medium. We wanted our friends and supporters to explore what ‘unpsychology’ might mean to them – or what it might inspire in them. Unpsychology, if it is anything, is rooted in our world’s contexts, and in our personal and shared creativity.

We are delighted to offer the first of our guest pieces by . Weston has worked with us a couple of times. We published a conversation between him and Julia in our 10th edition, Edges, and then a follow-up between the two on Substack in January 2026.

You can find both of these pieces via the links below.

As he describes it, this piece “is a reflection on that creative journey—on music as
psyche, art as process, and the need for multiple mediums to express the
nuance and complexity of being human.”

It circles around a musical EP that Weston produced in 2024:

This EP emerged during a season of inner turmoil, existential longing,
grief, becoming, and creative necessity. What I came to realize during that
period was that writing alone could not hold everything I was trying to
say. Some experiences required language, but others needed sound, image,
atmosphere, voice, silence. I found myself moving between essay, visual
art, and music as different expressions of the same unfolding process.

You can find the EP on Spotify (link below) and there are further music videos embedded here to further enrich and document Weston’s creative process.

- editor, Unpsychology

Kentucky Moonchild by Weston J, 2024

Friends with My Ghosts

Notes on Music, Multiplicity & Becoming

I can’t remember exactly when I first fell in love with music. Maybe that’s because it has always felt older than memory. As if it lived in me before I knew language. Before theory. Before identity.

Something floating in and around me – beyond time.

A divine spirit. A current. A hum beneath everything.

Always there. Waiting.

My parents bought me my first red electric guitar when I was nine years old. My dad took me to my first concert when I was around twelve—the Rolling Stones.

My parents’ house was full of sound. Herbie Hancock. Weather Report. Mahavishnu Orchestra. Miles. Coltrane. Mingus.

The Four Tops. Patsy Cline. Linda Ronstadt. Dolly Parton.

Soul. Jazz. Country. Rock and roll.

Music coming through the walls and under doors and into my bloodstream before I knew what any of it meant. Only that it moved me. Only that it felt like home.

Later, from the ages of sixteen through twenty-five, I worked in record stores and spent entire days wandering through sound.

Digging. Listening. Searching. Discovering.

Björk. Peter Gabriel. Tom Yorke. Nino Moschella.

José González. Jim White. Sean Hayes. Dustan Louque.

Dub reggae. Trip-hop. Ambient. Folk. Jazz.

The obscure and the sacred.

Music became less like entertainment and more like atmosphere and soul exploration. A place to disappear into. A place to find myself in. A place where parts of me I couldn’t explain somehow felt recognized.

And music has saved me many times. That much I know.

Years passed. Life unfolded. I became a therapist. A writer. A teacher. A husband. A father. I gave the better part of my adult life to the world of psychology and youth work—to building spaces where others could feel seen, known, accompanied.

Beautiful work. Soul work. Necessary work.

And still— music stayed near me. Like a river running underneath everything.

Then, about a year ago, in the middle of one of the most overwhelming seasons of my life – emotionally, professionally, existentially – I picked up my Takamine nylon-string guitar every day.

And I mean every day.

It became ritual. Meditation. Prayer. Spiritual self-care.

Whenever fear rose in me. Whenever my nervous system flooded. Whenever sadness or stress felt too large for words –I would sit with that guitar. And play.

Sometimes for ten minutes. Sometimes for hours.

Until the edge softened. Until my breathing changed. Until something in me unclenched. Until sound became release.

And eventually— I started singing. Really singing. For the first time in my life without judgment. Without trying to sound like anyone. Without hating my voice. Without critique. Just singing.

Letting whatever was there move through me.

Emotion into melody. Pain into vibration. Memory into lyric.

Music became my devotion to God and to the universe. Letting it flow through me.

I tried to align with something larger than myself – and sing the melodies and words I was hearing. Music was saving my soul again.

Out of that season, Friends with My Ghosts emerged. Not as a project. More as a prayer. Or a longing. Or weather moving through the body. Something asking not to be understood— but expressed.

Ghosts Lyric Teaser by Weston J, 2023

The lyric came first: “going to make friends with my ghosts maybe they love me the most”.

And when those words arrived, I knew they were telling me something before I could fully understand them.

Maybe healing is not the elimination of ghosts. Maybe healing is not transcendence. Maybe it isn’t conquering grief or moving beyond pain. Maybe healing is radical acceptance. A willingness to sit beside what haunts us long enough to hear what it came to say.

To stop exiling memory. To stop pathologizing sorrow. To stop treating pain as something broken. And instead – to make room for it. To invite it closer. To become friends with it.

I remember an old fable of a man sitting in a cave trying to meditate and three ghosts coming to haunt him, fear, anxiety and insecurity. At first he asks them politely to leave, but they refuse. So then he becomes angry and begins to shout and scream for them to leave him in peace, they still refuse. Finally he breaks down, falls to his knees and cries begging and pleading them to leave him alone, however, they still haunt him. Lastly, in complete exhaustion and despair, he invites them in for a cup of tea, they sit, drink and then leave one by one, leaving him in stillness and peace.

And so it is with pain, only when we invite it in and allow it to sit at the table with us will it ever eventually pass on and move forward in its travels.

Another lyric came later: “your darkness carves a space in you divine with holy grace”

That line has stayed with me. Because darkness does carve us. Loss carves. Longing carves. Grief carves. Silence carves. Love carves. Time carves. And though we often fear that hollowing – I’m not sure it is the tragedy we think it is.

Khalil Gibran wrote: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”

I’ve carried that line with me for years. Because perhaps sorrow creates capacity. Perhaps heartbreak hollows the vessel. And in doing so – makes more room for tenderness, for compassion, for beauty, for joy, for God. The wound and the opening may sometimes be the same place.

A Course in Miracles says:

“What is real cannot be threatened.
What is unreal does not exist.
Herein lies the peace of God.

There is something in that I feel through music.A peace not found in escape – but in staying. Listening. Softening. Allowing. Remaining with what feels unbearable until it reveals another shape.

One of the songs on this record, Angels, was written in the wake of losing my Aunt Melodie. Her death left an ache in me that felt both intimate and impossible to articulate. And so music carried what words couldn’t.

The refrain became: “angels sing the melody/angels bring the harmony”

It felt less written than received. Like grief moving into sound. Like love echoing beyond the visible. Like someone gone – but not gone. Still singing somewhere.

Another song, Rebel Lion, carries a different kind of grief. And a different kind of love.

It lives in honor of my dear friend Jason – who unexpectedly lost his seventeen-year-old son Siah to an enlarged heart. There are losses for which language simply does not exist. And maybe friendship learns to kneel there together. Jason and I grew up with rebellion in our blood.

Music. Fire. Intensity. Wildness. Searching. Questioning. Trying to become ourselves inside a world that often asks us not to.

Rebel Lion became, for me, a tribute to that shared fire.

A source of strength. A remembering. A song about survival and spirit and continuing to walk through the unimaginable while carrying what can never be put down.

“I’m a Lion… a Rebel Lion…”

A roar. A prayer. A lament. A brotherhood.

Then there is the improbable beauty of how this record came into being at all.1

Almost on a whim – or maybe a prayer – I reached out to a few musicians I deeply loved and respected. One of them was . An artist whose work had shaped me for years. I sent him some demos. Quietly. With little expectation.

To my surprise, he wrote back. Then we talked. Deeply. About music. Life. Psychology. Healing. The universe. Spirit. Art.

Something clicked immediately.

Over the months we kept talking until eventually we found time to get in the same room together. Four days. Recording. Writing. Dreaming. Experimenting. Creating.

And what became Friends with My Ghosts was born there.

This record would not exist without that generosity. Without Dustan saying yes. Without my wife Alison singing with me. Without Danny Blume’s mixing and mastering. Without the incredible musicians who brought their spirit into these songs. Without family. Without friendship. Without loss. Without grace.

And maybe that is what I’ve come to understand through all of this – that artistic expression is not decoration. It is not secondary. It is not extra. It is not indulgence. It is medicine. It is integration. It is healing.

It is how the soul metabolizes experience.

How grief becomes song. How memory becomes image. How heartbreak becomes melody. How longing becomes prayer. How the unspeakable finds form.

Writing has given me so much. But writing alone could not hold this. I had to sing it. I had to paint it.I had to film it. I had to let it become an auditory/ visual mosaic kaleidoscope of expression.

Embodied. Textured. Alive.

Because the human psyche has never spoken in only one language. Deleuze and Guattari might call it becoming. Nora Bateson might call it transcontextual.

I simply know that sometimes expression must move through multiple forms to become whole. And when it does— something opens. Something integrates. Something heals.

Friends with My Ghosts became more than an EP. It became a ritual. A conversation with memory. A grief document. A prayer. A psychospiritual field recording. A small archive of becoming.

And perhaps this piece is simply an extension of that same gesture – an offering of music, artwork, writing, video, memory, loss, love, and gratitude – placed gently into the hands of a space like Unpsychology – which has always seemed to understand that human life, human grief, human healing, and human creativity have never belonged to only one medium…

…but move between them all.

Growing Strong/ Growing Strange (Demo Version) by Weston J, 2024

1

Friends with My Ghosts – For more background on the history of the EP, here’s the ‘sleeve notes’, as written and laid out by Weston J Robins:

Introduction

Unpsychology has gone through a number of iterations over the 12 years we’ve been publishing. Ten PDF and seven print editions of the magazine covering themes from Climate Minds to Edges, Childhood to Warm Data, Other Than Human to Imaginings. We’ve also been publishing online here on Substack and on Medium (at https://medium.com/unpsychologymag), and this year we’ve issued a pair of pamphlets – the first two in a new short forms series, which you can find via the links below.

Our invitation to contribute…

As editors, we’ve been talking about where we go next. The pamphlets gave us a hint of how these collaborative imaginings might emerge. We are considering another issue of the magazine, of course, as well as a book that might contain reflections from the last decade and descriptions and narratives of unpsychological imagination and practice. These projects might form themselves over coming months.

In the meantime, however, we’ve decided to focus here for a while – in our online space(s) on Substack and Medium. We’d like to invite you to contribute to this rekindled Unpsychological online project with your stories, reflections, artwork, poetry, music, video and any combinations of these. We’ve outlined some contexts and guidelines for submissions below – and you can download a PDF version of this invitation HERE.

Download Submissions Guidelines Here

There is no single theme, as such, but if you read this introduction and are touched or inspired by it in some way, you may have an idea of what you’d like to submit. If you’d like more background information or are looking for further inspiration, you can trawl back through this Substack and the magazines themselves, all available as PDFs, free to download from HERE.

FREE PDF back copies of Unpsychology Mag

Some context…

So where to now for Unpsychology? The thing is that the ‘information ecosystem’ in 2026 is very different from how it was in 2013, when the seeds of Unpsychology were sown. Nowadays, the slick amoral immediacy of social media, the growth of platforms like Substack, and the explosion of the podcast economy mean that the space for ‘ideas’ is more crowded than ever. To get noticed in this marketplace, you have to jostle, hustle and sell – and the loudest voices often take the prize…

Where might Unpsychology fit in this new world? We’re not gamers or commercial creatures; nor was this project a direct ‘alternative’ to ‘mainstream’ psychological views and practises (whatever they are), or envisaged a place where so-called renegade or rebel pseudo-science or integral spirituality would find a home. The space itself was created, under a sun-dappled tree canopy, one morning at a Dark Mountain gathering back in 2012. It was considered as a conversational place in which the wisdoms and practices of psychology might become more deeply embedded and adapted to context. A forum in which straight line assumptions about where distress and dysfunction emerge from might be examined and challenged (though not necessarily discarded) with a curious and integrative mindset.

Note: In 2023 I tried to write something succinct about what Unpsychology might be. Maybe it still stands…? Have a look and see what you think!

Just as we value diversity in human individuals, communities and cultures, so we recognise the diversity inherent in the human mind. The frames of ‘mind’ that contextualise and inform indigenous life sit alongside those developed as scientific, industrial and extractive cultures spread. These – and other perspectives – are not mutually exclusive, but exist as phenomenological realities in a complex and interdependent world. They are not polarities, necessarily, nor intellectual flags to be fought over in some civilisational or academic struggle. They are simply human ways of imagining the world – often deeply humanistic and ecological – and how we as a species can live upon it.

Too often, however, other forces are in play, and these more integrative, interdependent psychological (or unpsychological) wisdoms are forgotten or put aside – through deliberate cruelty or avoidant expediency, the effect is often the same – and values that have little of humanistic or ecological thinking in them come to the fore. Worse, these dominating ideas and beliefs skew the cultural assumptions of our societies, so that political and economic actions that many of us oppose in principle are accepted (reluctantly, perhaps) as the ‘price of freedom’ or as inevitable ways of preserving some kind of patriotic or civilisational fantasy, to which there is no alternative.

Unpsychology, therefore, was and is a small counterpoint to the assumptions and certainties that lead to the crises that we humans find ourselves living in right now. We have no big ideas to counteract what some call the ‘meta-crisis’, nor do we offer mega-models or definitive stories of human development that would explain and solve it all. However, we are about asserting the truth that there are alternative ways for human beings to live and relate to the world that have been and will be imagined. Simply put, we see human life as inherently ordinary: meaningful in the everyday; finding fulfilment within the relational patterns we weave; experiencing joy in the way our creativity and calling emerge into the world.

A Creative prompt

If you want a creative prompt – try these few words and phrases. Perhaps pick one or two or more as a combination and see what emerges…:

Submissions guidelines

Our submissions guidelines are intended to show potential contributors some possibilities, without saying “do it like this”. Below are some creative reflections that might be helpful and some practical aspects to bear in mind…

Creative reflections

• FEELING YOUR WAY: The best way of getting a feel for Unpsychology and its contributors is trawling through our Substack and Medium publications and particularly our magazines. As well as being (we think!) excellent publications to explore, they are full of all the kinds of creativity that we are about. If you have a deeper dive, you’ll notice that there is a real mix of established authors and artists whose names you might recognise, alongside new and otherwise unpublished contributors, and we often say that the pieces produced by these first-time authors and artists are the ones we enjoy the most when they appear. So, if and when you submit, and your creative idea is accepted, our job as editors is to work alongside contributors to help you get your work into a publishable form that you will be happy with – whether that is a set of poems, a photo essay or a story… or something else…

• BEING UNPSYCHOLOGICAL: We’ve come to think of the Unpsychology project as being about the processes by which we create, collaborate with our writing and art and respond to the world around us. This might be something about the human (or other-than-human) mind in the world, or a response to something that is going on right now that needs responding to. There are plenty of circumstances in our world that can elicit despair and anger (genocide, climate crisis, exclusion and discrimination and so on), but we also think that hope can arise from the imagination, and from the sharing of perspectives and ideas in forums and communities like Unpsychology.

• EXPERIENTIAL LIFE: Maybe what makes Unpsychology a little bit different from other socially and ecologically informed creative platforms is the emphasis we put on experience – lived experience – and the ways our particular and very different ordinary lives interweave. At the heart of the project is a commitment to diversity and equality – not simply as a set of labels and cultural defences against discrimination (important as that is) – but at an experiential level. What does it feel like and look like to be you/us/them/me right now. What kind of stories can be told about what happens at the intersections of these experiences. And whose experiences are the ones that dominate – and whose are seldom heard, recognised or validated?

• CONFLUENCES AND COLLABORATIONS: Over the years we’ve been publishing Unpsychology, it is the collaborations and conversations that have been the most rewarding. We don’t have a ‘system of practice’ for these (like, for example, the excellent Warm Data Labs created by Nora Bateson), rather our ‘togethers’ are informal, conversational and often temporary. We meet, we talk, share and create together – and then we might move on. That’s life, isn’t it? It’s what relationships are about, but in these meetings and shared projects – however short-term they might turn out to be – we might unearth some real wisdoms and insights that can be experienced (that word again) at a whole range of levels, from the embodied, to the sense of collective solidarity, to the creative act, to our experiences of love. These can’t be forced, of course, or even predicted, but we can bear in mind the deep potential in this work for new relationships to emerge and new stories to be told.

  ---

Practical aspects

• WORDS: Substack and Medium are designed for long-form written content but, in practice, we find that ‘medium form’ (in terms of length) is often a sweet spot… Some of our conversation pieces have been 4000 words or so, and essays and stories could be up to or around that length too, but sometimes ‘small is beautiful’ so do bear that in mind! In the past, we have taken longer pieces and split them over two posts – though we’d probably ask you to justify a long piece anyway. We’re not an academic publisher, so though references are needed if you’re quoting other writers or using their ideas, we also like it best when people are crafting their own “clear, clean line”, as Ursula LeGuin put it. Your own unpsychological experience is what we’re interested in, above all! Poetry is, of course, welcome, and we’re also interested in combinations of stories, essays and poetry (and art) from collaborating contributors…

• IMAGES AND VIDEO: Visual art is something that Unpsychology has always woven into our magazines and postings. Even when we’re using online images to head up our online posts, we chose these carefully and acknowledge the artists and photographers. We prefer human produced art - that might seem obvious, but we are aware that some artists see AI as being a tool that can enhance their own creativity. However, if you’re going to submit anything using AI in any form, then we will ask you to justify it, and please bear in mind that our strong preference is for art that is created directly by individual humans or people in relationship with each other and the world. Other than that, any visual art form is welcome – and video too – we can post videos directly to these platforms.

• MUSIC AND MULTIMEDIA: Music has been an integral part of our curation for a while. In 2019 we published a special issue entitled Earthsongs, and our more recent magazine publications have also had linked playlists and specially produced music and recorded sound (including poetry), so we would really welcome musical contributions. And again, perhaps obviously, we’d welcome multimedia contributions too.

• HOW TO SUBMIT: If you’re used to writing and submitting on Substack or Medium, you can check out the platform guidelines for submitting to a publication. Unpsychology Voices exists on Substack HERE and on Medium HERE: https://medium.com/unpsychologymag. If you haven’t used either platform then you can send your submission (or submission proposal) to submissions@unpsychology.org. You’ll need to join one or both of the platforms to have an author’s ‘byline’, but we can talk you through the process of this. Note that there is no deadline for this. This is what I think is called a ‘rolling call’… What it means is that you can contact us in the short or longer term and we’ll consider your work. We’ll also put out reminders from time to time…

• FINAL PRACTICAL NOTE: Depending on how many submissions we get at any one time, we may not be able to publish everything we receive. We will consider everything however and, where possible, get back to you with queries, suggestions and reflections about what you’ve sent us. If you’d like to check out a potential submission with us, please get in touch with us at submissions@unpsychology.org - in fact we’d encourage it for longer, more ambitious pieces. Note also that we’re looking for work that has been inspired and sparked by Unpsychology, rather than pieces that are already written and looking for a publishing home. We’re not that sort of publication. Finally, note that we see this as a collaborative and emergent project and don’t offer fees for contributions. Our publications, too, are free to access through subscription on both Substack and Medium. We do have a few paid subscriptions and these go towards running expenses and the occasional launch event or gathering.

  ---

And finally…

We look forward to hearing from you, and receiving your ideas and submissions. As we’ve said, we may not be able to use everything we receive, but we always try to curate this project with a sense of respect, recognising the privilege we have had in experiencing so much wonderful artistic and creative work over the years. This is a new phase in the life on Unpsychology, and so we invite you to join us on the journey.

Contact us through this platform, or directly at submissions@unpsychology.org

Series introduction

This new series of prose poems began at the end of March 2026. I hadn’t written a new poem for a couple of years at least and was beginning to imagine that ‘being a poet’ was something in my past. That’s OK. I am comfortable with moving on and there are poets aplenty out there. However, poetry has been one way of me making sense of the world, and it returned suddenly, with some surprise on my part, as if a tap had been turned on full. Having said that, after 68 years on this earth, it’s clear that the world often makes little sense (or at least not the human bit of it), so perhaps all I can do is to let my thoughts and feelings about what I see pour out. I do have an inkling that these pieces have something to do with ‘unpsychology’ (whatever that means) and that’s why I’m posting them here. All these prose poems appear in the original form in which they were written, though they’ve had some light editing along the way.

Context #2: Books…

This second piece was written on 31st March 2026.

‘One day everyone will have always been against this’ is the title of a book by Omar El Akkad, that I read, and was profoundly affected by, last year. See here for a longer treatment of the themes in the book:

The other context for this piece came from Yanis Varoufakis’ book: ‘Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance,’ his memoir/personal history and effects of fascism and colonialism across the region sometimes referred to as the Middle East, through the lives and activism of five women in his life. Find it HERE.

2. Olive oil…

Olive oiled, something avoidable slides into
view, cannot be unseen now, the gag reflex
triggered as red hands and fingers appear –
teasing a question. Meanwhile olive trees
are uprooted in the homelands, bulldozers
unearthing centuries of gnarled existence,
and identities are exploded – otherwise 
eroded – the effect is the same in the long term. 

I have a vision of gun-toting rebels staggering
under an unrelenting sun. Hunted, as ever,
by fascists, the refusal to accede is a passport
to some humid stinking cell, somewhere deep
in a Mediterranean labyrinth. Escape to a 
mythical isle is temporarily possible, a place 
where existential schooling takes place, and 
the exiled are reunited with their sacred tree, 
tasting sweet and salted fruit, a reminder of
what freedom is like when it slides across your
lips and tongue. Though, if you’ve come to this 
place, you’ve permitted the world to implode
upon you. Everything is tied up here, in this
fertile heart, and now everything is burning.

The pretence of civilisation is generations
old, now almost never noticed. Even in the
face of mass murder the flip is automatic.
Good guy. Bad guy. Terrorist. Bang, bang,
you’re dead, and your children too. One day 
everyone will have always been against this,* 
but for now there’s nine circles of  Hell 
to pay, and all kinds of oil to dig for. 

In the olive grove lives a family. You'd
know them from anywhere, you’ve seen 
their faces. Weathered. Lined. Smiling. 
Children with serious mischief in their 
fingertips. Uncles with magic in theirs. 
Kitchens catalyse alchemical transformation. 
Olives. Tomatoes. Bread. Cheeses of all kinds. 
The sound of goat-bells through the crags. 
You’ve seen these places and the gods they 
harbour, but you may have missed the insidious 
stories; tales that sway this way and that. 
Sea tales swept out by storms on the water. 
Fierce songs carried in on the names of desert 
winds. These stories always have death in them –  
that’s the thing – and there’s no escaping the 
downward draughts and spirals of destruction 
when the drones are flying out to play.

*Note: ‘One day everyone will have always been against this’ is the title of a book by Omar El Akkad. See context above.

Series introduction

This new series of ‘unpsychology prose poems’ began at the end of March 2026. I hadn't written a new poem for a couple of years and I was beginning to imagine that ‘being a poet’ was something in my past. That would have been OK. I am comfortable with moving on and there are poets aplenty out there. However, it has been my way of making sense of the world, and it returned to me suddenly – with some surprise on my part – as if a tap had been turned on full. Having said that, after 68 years on this earth, it’s clear to me that the world often makes little sense (or at least the human bit of it), so perhaps all I can do is to let my thoughts and feelings about what I see pour out. I do have an inkling that these pieces have something to do with ‘unpsychology’ (whatever that means) and so that’s why I’m posting them here. All these prose poems appear here in their original form, though they have had some light editing along the way.

Context #1: Crow warning…

This first piece was written on the 30th March 2026.

A warning. In quite a bit of my writing, there are a lot of crows flying around – as there were on the day I wrote this piece. These prose poems are not about the crows, exactly, though they’re in my life practically and figuratively, and I’m guessing that’s not going to change. Nor are these crows ‘metaphors’ – more crows as waking-us-up-each-morning, flying-around-the-hamlet and building-their-nests-in-the-trees-in-the-garden, so providing me with endless fascination, engagement and a backdrop of familiar noise. The other context is war…

1. Out to play…

Something – an image – flickers on a screen.
Outside, the crows gather for a final fly past
before darkness falls heavy on the lives we'd 
scrabbled together with hopeful guesswork 
and a modicum of fortune. The unfortunate 
ones, in contrast, are falling under hulking
shadows of history, contrived by boys with 
bully vibes, stones, snarling violence and 
hatred that is palpable and inexplicable to 
most of us, which is why they get away with
it time after time, and why they accumulate 
horrors and give them theological weight, 
so that even the gods join in with the target 
practice. Sepulchral eyes are raised to the 
place where heaven should be, and firestorms
flash as their pitiless gaze returns to earth.

Along the way, everything got plundered as 
pleasantly tyrannical, prayerful, piratical,
forever-smiling people went genociding. 
Like ten year olds out to play with sticks and
fishing hooks, thrashing an innocent landscape
and its denizens, hiding in scrub, then bursting 
out to claim a country as their own with
whatever violence their wrath has gifted them.

Back then, nobody filmed a revolution; now
everyone films each other. No hiding, no more.
Killing in plain sight. Killing in the name of.
Killing the crow people and the stick people
and the scrabbling, babbling, breaking 
under-people who live in tents (if they’re
lucky) and dank hotels (if they’re privileged); 
and anyroad they shouldn’t be here, these 
under-people, other people, brown people.
They shouldn’t be anywhere with their 
accusations from history, and revengeful faces.
With any luck they’ll be spat out, thrown out, 
bombed out. With any luck they’ll be back 
out to sea or, even better, back where they
came from. 

And this is where we’re strong: we’re the 
bully boys and alpha males, in charge now
with clipboards, lists and flags and, above 
all, our certainty. Along the way we’ll go 
plundering again. It’ll feel familiar: the 
scratchy texture of a rough uniform against
our skin and, if we’re lucky, a heavy gun nestled 
at our hip, to make the genocidal itch official.

Introduction: a stirring in the burrow…

This post has been a while in the making, and it’s also been a couple of months since we posted here on Unpsychology Substack. Sometimes that happens in life, and I’ve found that this ‘punctuated’ or ‘intermittent’ rhythm to our creativity sometimes feels a lot more natural (to me) than trying always to go for the relentless goal of a weekly ‘edition’. And ‘unpsychology’ – if it is anything – might be a way of tracking the ebbs and flows of our relationships, being and doing. An alternative, perhaps, from the relentless push, push, respond, respond, that seems to characterise much of our online discourse in these times.

Anyway, this post heralds a shift. A stirring of life in the Unpsychology burrow. Here we are launching the second of our pamphlets in the Small Forms series that emerged from a number of conversations and collaborations over the past year or so. The first, Journey to the Lush Isle was launched in February, followed by this second pamphlet, From Here to Somewhere: An unpsychological conversation for breaking times. The digital versions of both pieces are available as free PDF downloads, and we are hoping to publish print versions of both pamphlets at some stage in the future.

As well as these pamphlets, we’ve also been working on some other ‘nubs’ and collaborations. We’ll be reflecting on these in the coming weeks and months: both Lesley’s global Lattice of Letters, and Julia’s Writers’ Playgroup were intriguing and absorbing processes. There’ll also be the usual essays and longer form pieces, with a couple of guest posts lined up for this, and we’re launching a series of prose-poems, by Steve, in our Fabulations section.

At some stage this year, we might be sufficiently stirred and ready to embark on our next edition of Unpsychology Magazine, which would be issue 11. Iff and when that happens we’ll be launching our submissions invitations. And there might be other things afoot too. Watch this space is what people usually write!

, , - Unpsychology editors

Small forms pamphlet downloads

The Small Forms pamphlet project has resulted in two titles by members of the Unpsychology ‘community’, and both with beautiful cover illustrations by Mary Thorp from Unpsychology’s publisher, Raw Mixture.

Download the first, Journey to the Lush Isle via the button below:

Journey to the Lush isle FREE download

…and you can find out more about that project at:

Download the second, From Here To Somewhere via the button below:

From Here To Somewhere FREE download

…and you can find the Substack versions of the dialogues from this pamphlet via the links at the end of this post.

From Here To Somewhere:

An unpsychological conversation for breaking times

This pamphlet was created as part of a Small Forms project initiated by Unpsychology Magazine’s editorial team. After our latest magazine issue – Edges in 2024 – we decided to take a break from publishing what had been, since 2014, an annual themed magazine. For 2025, we set up a number of ‘nubs’ – including this one, Small Forms, using the traditional pamphlet format to explore particular themes and inquiries under the general umbrella of what we might understand as ‘unpsychology’.

This is the second Small Forms publication in this short series. It’s entitled From Here to Somewhere - an unpsychology for breaking times, and consists of a series of linked written dialogues, contextualised by world events and life circumstances as experienced by five protagonists.

In these times – as in other times – there are troubles, challenges and contexts to live within. When we started this pamphlet project in 2025, the geo-political world was in flux, with Ukraine, Gaza and the ever-present realities of climate breakdown. Now, as we add other challenges and contexts, it is clear that the world is at a transition point. What will come next is not foreseeable. That something else will come along is undeniable.

When Unpsychology Magazine began in 2013 or thereabouts, we had in mind the contextual and transcontextual dimensions of ‘psychology’. We sensed the need for an inversion of sorts; an approach that recognised that the patterns and contexts that the human world imposes upon all of us have a lot to do with what we might call ‘pathology’ or ‘personality’.

Our approach regards two inherently human traits – conversation and creativity – as having to do with all this. Simply put: when we are in dialogue the world is experienced and learned from differently; it is seen through multiple lenses. When we are creative – such as in our artistic responses – we have a chance of responding to the world in ways that are formative and imaginative rather than destructively carrying on down the same paths.

This conversation between the five of us – a series of spokes on a wheel – allowed us to loop forward and back to capture the creative interactions between us. Unpsychology held the centre, with each of the other contributors sharing an online conversation with Steve. The series started with a dialogue with co-editor, , who also contributed a brief reflective epilogue. In between , and took up the baton. The cover artwork was created by Mary Thorp (of Raw Mixture, Unpsychology’s publisher).

We began with the paradoxes of grief and reality in a complex world, then into the practical activism of creative practice in response to the Gaza genocide and the Global Sumud Flotilla that set out in 2025 with activists and politicians, including Greta Thunberg, on board. From there we contemplated the simplicity and complexity of life, self and existence – with a hazelnut as a symbol. The fourth dialogue addressed the cyclical nature of life and of nature, and the “anger that is burning a hole in the world” as Catherine so eloquently puts it.

This particular short form might only be a beginning of our contemplations of ‘unpsychology’ – the transcontextual, phenomenological integration of world, body and mind. We’re hoping, therefore, that this conversation will continue and we’d welcome and appreciate your own responses to our beginnings here...

Download the free PDF version of the pamphlet to read the full text below:

From Here To Somewhere FREE download

A couple of extracts

Extract 1. From Conversation four, by

Steve and I are sitting in his garden, absorbed, bathed in and at one with the flora and fauna of this space. Grief is already here, as a trio we are. Later, when we are back in precession, we will think about what to do, if anything.

Julie and I are listening to that song. I am searching her energy to understand how she feels this song. When I hear it, I feel immense grief, that there is a place somewhere that is better than where I am and I can’t get to it. Can anyone get to it? That someone can sing so pitch perfectly about heaven but, reading between the lines, face existential hell.

Anger is burning a hole in our world as I sit with Erifily and I invite grief to sit with us and wait for the flames to subside, until we are ready to mourn the fragility and sacred nature of all life along with the paucity of kindness, the refusal of those who wreck life with anger to be still and mourn with us. I remind myself that anger motivates all manner of good and bad actions.

I am speechless as Susan holds a hazelnut in the palm of her hand. The spirit of grief whispers to us on the wind, here it is, all of it – what came before you over millenia, what may come after you. Tears roll down my cheeks as I process that the chain of events that code for the entirety of existence since time began is contained in this small brown seed. That story may stop here if the seed is eaten, rots or does not germinate. I too am a hazelnut. Grief reminds me that the enormity of my realisation is as small as the hazelnut.

In individual moments of stillness, if there is the desire to do something other than process the movement that preceded it, perhaps this is the time to stop to map out the plan, the strategy, the resolutions and handrails of what we will do when we are back in motion, filtering, feeling and contributing to the collective emotional landscape.

There’s as much individual work to be done here as there is communal. It’s not all outward; sometimes the pendulum appears not to swing, especially at the equator! As we are all on the timing of our individual rhythms, can we observe each other and plan across states of stillness? Can we come together in community and discover what that sounds and feels like when we honour the flux of our existence – the overwhelming grief that now permeates it – as we process some tough shit? Is that what we are doing right now?

Extract 2. From the Epilogue, by

I offer this epilogue some months down the line, across the space of time, on a day when the sky is blue and the sun is out, casting its glorious light across the trees and shrubs of my garden. Magpies cavort. Squirrels leap and forage. A gentle breeze rustles the branches. A good day: for me, here in the pocket of safety and prosperity which has been carved out for me by both social privilege and personal circumstance.

I am sitting still, absorbing all the words shared by myself, Steve, Erifily, Susan and Catherine. Allowing the grief to disturb me, and the anger to ignite me, and the wonder to inspire me.

It seems to me that what unpsychology does best lies not in finding answers, but in forming questions. We live to learn, yes – and learning only happens when we open ourselves to inquiry. Learning arises - not from knowing - but from not-knowing, and by embracing the humility to not-know. Unpsychology offers us the not-knowing which baffles us with despair and tickles us with hope. The world around us and within us is changing – it always has, and it always will. We taste the grief of loss, but also the joy of discovery.

We take a step at a time, a word at a time, a breath at a time, from here to somewhere. And all shall be well.

Download the free PDF version of the pamphlet to read the full text below:

From Here To Somewhere FREE download

The From Here to Somewhere dialogues on Substack

The first dialogue – between and is linked below, we’d recommend you read it first:

This one follows on – a second exchange between and

Then and continue the conversation here:

And the final dialogue between and is here:

A final note:

My thanks to all the contributors who have worked with me on these rich and beautiful dialogues on grief and anger and the state of things: my co-editor, and ‘unpsychologists’, , and . All we can know is that there may be more to say and have conversations about into the future. Unpsychology will continue to curate and facilitate and host such dialogues and gatherings, and we hope that you might join us.

, Co-editor, & Unpsychology Magazine

The catalogue

A tentative kind of weird manifesto for the possibility of a future unpsychology

The life of world and mind is multifaceted, evolving, ever-changing, flowing, poetic, discoverable, mysterious, personal, collective, ecological, connected, disconnected, uncontainable, free, constrained, creative, loving, violent, gentle – and always contextual.

The world of mind and life we live with is one in which the uncontainable is contained, boxed within language-bound boundaries, their scope restrained by limitations of human imagination – and a fear of that which tries to fly free. Pinned down to be understood within frames of meaning and belief.

Our mind is catalogued. All our minds are…

The mind of world and life is constrained by the cultural predilections of human communities, societies and civilisations. The mind is held in time and place by the expectations, assumptions and intuitions of humans whose own minds require boxes and certainties and particular words in particular orders, in order for their institutions, organisations and nations to be sustained.

The words hold the key – are seminal. The words in the mind, are spells that conjure meaning and action; turning to mayhem, or else to relationship and belonging.

Boxes and boundaries give the semblance of belonging. They pretend to connect. They play at ecology. The words and thoughts are channeled down well-worn pathways, ending up in familiar, dangerous places.

The metaphors matter. Our minds and worlds are not machines, but living landscapes. We are not broken down, brain-divided, trauma-inflicted inevitabilities. Rather we are emerging, changing, mutually learning pieces of consciousness. We, and our cultures, are not lines of development and advancement, but waves and clouds and forests and burgeoning, interconnected, interdependent cities, technologies and ecologies.

When we are digging in the garden, or crafting pots, or writing poems, or surfing waves, our minds and bodies (extraordinary things that they are) respond to the tiny adjustments and requirements of the lives we are living. When we are in relationship, we are tender, and loving, or sometimes hateful or cruel – and each of these states is worth paying attention to. The wider, systemic contexts matter too. How can we carry on living our own ordinary lives – touched by privilege and/or inequality – when the patterns that are supposed to connect… well, don’t?

We can ask: what are the acorns that hold our potential. What are the ghosts and alter-egos that mirror our self-hood. What are the minds that flow, and grow, and connect, and relate, and grieve, and learn? Where do the collective winds come from, that blow our humanity this way and that? How do we – together – shelter from the storms that face us? Where is mind and world and life in all this?

These words and questions, stories and metaphors are at the heart of what we have come to call unpsychology. In systems, organisations and cultures – families too – the category, the label, the box, the development, the direction, has become the thing. Meaning made easy by constraining, measuring and targeting it. Relationships made linear by pathologising and policing our bodies and behaviours – the ways we ‘function’, or not - in this demanding, conflicting world of ours.

Madness. Gender. Sexuality. Neurodiversity. Class. Colour. Ethnicity. Disability. Illness. Belief. How would it be imagine minds without the categories and boxes we are given – that we give ourselves? How could a world emerge that was layered so finely that everybody’s experiential life was brought to life – and mind?

What could we imagine from the inside-out and the outside-in that might keep our world learning, our souls full, our minds flowing freely, out in all directions? Through the layers. Deep in Time. Humble and horizontal, with nowhere to go except out to meet with and learn from each other – and the world.

Curious. Playful. Uncontainable. Free.

Introduction

This post introduces the first pamphlet created as part of the Small Forms project initiated by Unpsychology Magazine’s editorial team. After our latest magazine issue – Edges in 2024 – we decided to take a break from publishing what had been an annual themed magazine since 2014. Instead, we set up a number of ‘nubs’ – including this one, ‘Small Forms’, which uses a pamphlet format to explore themes and inquiries under the general umbrella of what we might understand as ‘unpsychology’.

Click below to read Steve Thorp’s introduction to the project back in February last year:

This first ‘Small Forms’ publication in this short series – entitled ‘Journey to the Lush Isle’ – was created by Unpsychology contributors, , and .1 A fourth member of the team, Jo Regan, left the group early in the conversation, but Jo’s influence lingered in the words the group came up with as an important form of connection and relational context for this piece. In addition to these words, the cover illustrations were created by .2

The pamphlet itself is a mix of conversation, commentary, imagination and story. Sometimes it seems like a tale from the future – to paraphrase Ursula LeGuin’s first lines from her book, Always Coming Home: “The people in this story might be going to have lived a long, long time from now…”. At other times it might seem like a warning in the here-and-now.

Regardless, it has grief and grounded hope and beauty in it…

The Small Forms pamphlets will be, like Unpsychology Magazine, FREE to download. In coming weeks, they’ll also be available as traditional printed pamphlets, in the tradition of short form political, cultural and/or philosophical manifestos.

The full text of the first pamphlet, Journey to the Lush Isle, follows in this post – and you can also download the piece as a FREE PDF pamphlet by clicking the button below. In the near future, you will also be able to purchase Journey to the Lush Isle as printed booklet – look out for that in a coming post…

DOWNLOAD Journey to the Lush Isle HERE

Journey to the Lush Isle

Introduction

by , &

We have come to this room because we share some concerns. It has been a slow process, understanding each other, crawling towards the message we must write before we can leave the room. One of us has already left, and she placed with us a yearning, a warm concern, a direction.

We want to be in tune with the other-than-human, to hear those voices, to speak them if possible. We feel the loss of connection. We have imagined human life beyond the coming collapse. We fear that many survivors will have spent generations after longing to return to an illusory greatness. They will be a danger (again) to those who have learned to reconnect in the generations after the collapse.

Can we help them?

We have imagined at least one voice from the post-collapse because past, present and future coexist in our ‘now’. A figure born into a society that inherited the ways of being in the world that led us to the collapse – hierarchical and extractive. In this future, a paradise remains, far to the south of the blighted tropical regions, where nothing can live now. This figure, ‘The Diplomat’, seeks those who have walked away from paradise to the wild regions. In between, he is changing...

Let’s gather some scattered papers; we want to share what is in the room with you. Maybe we can leave together?

Beginnings

Lain:

Gregory Bateson famously wrote: “The major problems in the world are the results of the difference between how nature works and how people think”. That was in the last century, when ecology was a baby.3

Chris:

But, this year, you can find this in The Age of Carbon: “They thought they were refining the system. But the system was refining them. Turning them into agents of the very logic they once called oppressive”.4

How to read the signs of cultural unravelling as part of a necessary and vital change?

How we moderns presently understand being human is completely entangled in our culture and the stories we tell each other about this life. What sort of story are we actors within? Is it a tragedy, like that of Oedipus, in which we moderns unknowingly follow a curse into a deathly embrace? What if we imagine this story differently, like Philip Pullman has Lyra and Will in ‘His Dark Materials’? What might be on the other side of our destructive exploitation of the planet? This is not a matter of escapist hope or positive thinking but of freeing ourselves from the tame domestication of our malignant normality.

Tali:

The linear movement our species knows and admires can be convenient. In general, I have come to favour what is outside of the linear, or in between the lines. This is my zone of being, from which I can observe, listen, and understand, since it does not bind me to a specific view or idea. At the same time, the circle would allow us to see each other, be aware of each other. I think we would remain aware of each other, whether we adopt this metaphor or not, because I sense a strong camaraderie and mutual respect here.

Lain:

The overlap I see with the paragraph in the paper you shared is that I also propose reviewing the stories and ways of people who have managed to survive, even when surrounded by groups that were alien to them.5 What are the lessons there? What can we learn? How would we phrase our learnings for our grandchildren’s grandchildren so that one day we may flourish on Earth?

I think all of us in this group are aware of the liminality of the moment. I think we are also aware that we must have a way to resonate with the other- than-human, to sing that song, as it were, so that our learnings are phrased properly.

Tali:

In telling stories, perhaps I may be able to offer the viewpoint of one who cannot look at the other-than-human but may experience it in various ways. Perhaps the other-than-human can be fully appreciated through all senses, become an ally, and a lifeline.

Lain:

The stories that go around in my head don’t make sense.

Here’s one: “A house, people inside are happy, doing warm things. A knock on thedoor. More harshly again. There is a slow-motion dismantling of the props of fun. Options float between people. But there are no options. All sounds are ominous now.The door is under attack. The house goes dark.”

And here is another one: “Someone made this path before us. We must continue. Safe? Who knows? Nothing is safe. What did he say? No, don’t tell me, he was a crazy man, and he’s gone now. I know, I know, you’ve told me: he kept saying ‘there’s been a flood, and there’s nothing left. The papers in the stone basement are ruined.’ Now you are going crazy, telling me the same thing over and over again. And what in the name of tall flames are ‘papers’, by the way?”

Chris:

I remember a time out on Dartmoor in a storm, being drenched and seeking shelter in some rocks. I found a crevice just deep enough to slide into. It was a tight squeeze – intimate, despite the initial sharpness of the rock. It was strangely warm. In seeking shelter from the storm, I seemed to have been welcomed into a rock womb. I relaxed into her holding, breathing her earthy presence.

When asked later to describe my experience, no words sufficed. Instead, strange sounds came out of my mouth, halfway between growls and howls. In retrospect, I can say that they had a timbre of gratitude, but Anglo-Saxon would not do to express this.

Between the experience and the language is this gap; a space filled with luminous absence, a space between the worlds, between the human and the other-than-human. When I abstract from the experience to the name, I extract and deaden – like pinning a butterfly. How then to be in this liminal space, knowing that much will be lost in translation? The liminal is also an imaginal space – one between the mental world and that of the spirit; a space alive with dreams, images, stories and incantations. Here, the other-than-human can find voice and be heard. Just as the rock crevice invited me to shelter from the storm.

Lain:

I remember a scene that hasn’t happened yet:

Walking towards the hill that waits for the setting sun, the whole group is on the move. Rhythmic walking. The sun sets behind the hilltop. Pace quickens. The grassland gives way to bushes and trees. Walking quickly, they head for a ravine that leads to a small valley, still bathed in evening light as the sun falls towards a lower hill in the west. A small lake glistens at the bottom of the small valley.

The elders guide the children to a clearing in the forest, up from the lake. Preparations for food and sleep. Stories begin to flow. The rest of the group has hastened to the shore. The musicians find a place to settle and begin, engaging in a call-and-response, settling into a complex interplay. Everyone else is a dancer now. They sense each other; they are one. There is a crescendo, abandoning themselves to something greater. The sun has set.

The fire glows. Further up the hill, the children sleep. Slowly, hungrily, there is communion; the music ebbs and flows. In warmth, they walk slowly up the hill. Quiet, intense warmth, glowing eyes, they settle down to sleep. The sentries tend the embers all night.

Tali:

It would be interesting to try to connect to the energy, sound waves, and vibrational fields of the things around me.

Stories

Diplomat:

I was struggling to see. The path flickered and merged with the brush and pebbles of the hillside. The sun had set, leaving behind magnificent reds, yellows, textured greys, and touches of dark blue across the western sky.

I wiped the sweat, soaking my sleeve. It was becoming harder to see, and my cough disturbed the mount. The world seemed to recede. Only breath and sweat remained, man and mount as one. There was a destination, but it was just a feeling, not a memory. Fever. Fever. Keep going.

The mount stopped by some fresh grass. I slid off the saddle more than dismounted. I took a few steps, and my foot twisted in the shallow brook running through the meadow where we had halted. The air was warm as I fell face-first, but I felt a rush of cold sweep over me before I passed out.

The first dream appeared; I dreamt that I lived within it, then it ceased.

With great effort, I rolled onto my back. The stars. No point, couldn’t see properly. The Southern Cross resembled an exploded tesseract.

The second dream appeared; I dreamt that I lived within it, then it ceased.

Insects covered me. Had it rained? My skin burned and chilled simultaneously. My hands felt enormous; their size seemed affected by the movements of a tongue that appeared larger than my head. So many smells—the soil, the plants, the insects. Did I feel a wet snout probing my legs and back? There was a taste in my mouth, like a lively herb.

The third dream appeared; I dreamt that I lived within it, then it ceased.

Then came a fear so profound it felt like a void, a warm embrace. The fear of losing words. Dwelling within the fever, I felt certain that all was as it should be, that if anything was too much, my mother would appear: soothing, all-powerful, a shield. The brook began to make sense. The water: protean, liminal, maternal. The sheltering meadow made sense; the brook spoke without words, and the story was the meadow. The water: all-powerful. A shield.

Chris:

Watery worlds, things mutate, and are not stable. It can let me float, both floating off and floating in. Floating into a direct, unmediated connection. Water is me. I am being watered. My fluids and your fluids mix. I may feel in danger of drowning, of dissolving, of losing my separate identity. Or of relaxing, loosening my boundaries, my distinctness.

Water is empathic. She knows the dissolving process when her crystalline ice structures melt. She knows it as a transformation, another way to express her nature. And if the going gets hot, then she can do steam – a steamy conversing on the way to total immersion.

Tali:

As a constant questioner, I wonder: Do we know what nature needs? Who are we to decide? And, if we cannot sometimes agree to disagree with each other, how can we agree to disagree with nature? Would we be able to stop our self-centred preoccupation for long enough, to consider whether we can stay away from certain parts of nature and simply allow it to exist?

Diplomat:

This dream has turned salty; my father, long dead, walks towards me. Tears. Who opened the door to the labyrinth? He always walked like someone who’s been stabbed in the back and is being stoic about it. I hear myself plead, voiceless: “I need the information, father, please tell me, I may have no time left”. He smiles but doesn’t touch me. Then he starts to tell me the same story he used to tell me at bedtime, so many regrets ago:

“She lives in the cracks and seems to move via cracks as well. She appears in places as if having taken a shortcut unavailable to others. Her way of thinking seems to stumble sideways and turn up ahead, where you want to get to but were blocked from.

The Cracked One appears content; refuses the invitations to companionship and comfort. Too often, she appears terrified or deeply sad. She looks like someone who is about to burst into song but has never been heard singing or never joined in.

She speaks as someone who has learned the language later in life, although everyone agrees that she is part of the tribe, while being unclear about their kinship.

She lives in a cave, on a hill, stranded among treacherous cliffs carved by the legendary earthquakes of old. A few adventurous people have reached the cave and returned. Many have died or been crippled by falls trying to reach it. Those returning are infected by a silence that occasionally erupts. They are also deeply respectful of the Cracked One. The story goes that getting there was challenging, but the return was beyond terrifying, even with the help of the Cracked One. The cave contains at least one tesseract.”

I feel the sunrise approaching. “Rose-fingered Io”, my father used to say. But now it’s time to close the door to the labyrinth. I tell myself that I’m now The Diplomat, and not what my father had made me into. I need to remind myself of that more often these days. To keep the terror at bay. The sun makes the meadow bright.

Tali:

I think it’s out of the need to survive, to remain in the fight-it-through mode, which allows me to thrive as a blind person. I am not trying to avoid knowing about the possible calamities we have brought upon ourselves. Still, I need to minimise my concentration and focus on the here and now to see tomorrow.

Lain:

I’m sorry to be so distracted, my friends; it’s just that the voices in my head are disagreeing quite loudly. That’s OK, though; it’s only really boring people that don’t have voices arguing in their heads, right? I’ve got two competing voices: one sounds like a wild geek, and the other like Captain Sensible. I don’t know.

Wild Geek:

“Let’s talk about the Hohmann transfer orbit. The spacecraft must target where Mars will be at the time of arrival. You have to wait for the right launch window - it happens every 26 months, when we are 44° behind Mars in its orbit. Then you travel along an elliptical orbit targeting an arrival location in Mars’ orbit 180° around the Sun from the launch position at Earth’s orbit. It’s genius: the spacecraft makes maximal use of the Earth’s orbital speed in allowing Mars to catch up to the spacecraft’s location. You need just two engine burns to reach Mars’ orbit at the intercept location: Result? Massive fuel savings. This is how we get to Mars.”

Captain Sensible:

“Why are you talking about going to Mars? It’s a complete distraction from all the work that we have to do here to keep the only planet we can live on, livable.”

What do you mean, I need more voices in my head?

Tali:

For an infinite length of time, they have climbed down into her embrace. They came to seek shelter, to discover treasures, to explore creatures and earth, to leave marks upon her skin.

The water blessed her with its presence, its calm murmur. She welcomed their cool fingers upon her essence, carving and shaping, gentle but insistent. All was for the best, for she never doubted the water’s care.

Every sound that was uttered within her, every bone that remained within her grasp, ashes of lives, feathers, hair - she respected and stored with love. Near one corner, between two beams of frost, a web she wove to hold human dreams. The Diplomat’s visions folded into it, nestling in the comfort of not being judged. Safety comes from a place of compassion, and she was an emissary of this potent drug. For she is what you wish her to be, and all you could never dream of. She is a cave.

Lain:

I think that The Diplomat used to be an employee of the Cab’Hornos Corporation. He probably has the interlocked C’s tattoo on his right shoulder blade. He was a Scout, and he did some damage to the people he’s trying to get close to now.

I see him more clearly now: a lone figure, trembling, far up the mountain pass. The Diplomat guides his mount very carefully, hooves dislodging pebbles at every hairpin bend. From a distance, he is a tremor behind a veil of dust.

Chris:

Amitav Ghosh maintains that entities in the world, such as forests, are fully capable of entering into our processes of thought. Things are changing fast, and we may be starting to perceive the intelligence and agency of other beings on earth.6

James Bridle goes a step further, cautioning against feeling helpless in the face of unknowing. According to him: “To exist in a state of unknowing is not to give in to helplessness. Rather, it demands a kind of trust in ourselves and in the world to be able to function in a complex, ever-shifting landscape over which we do not, and cannot, have control. This is a basic imperative of being human in a more-than-human world and has always been acknowledged by traditional cosmologies, through their observance of ritual and their practical entreaties to the intercession of the non-human beings – plants, animals, spirits and weather systems – which enable our survival.”7

Diplomat:

I stopped and reassured my skittish mount with a sense of calm I did not feel. I stroked the mane of the great beast, as I felt the sun finally clearing the mountaintops behind me and lighting up the horizon of the valley of the Speechless People. I was exhausted and overcome with sadness, and maybe that’s why I sat still for a long time. I must have been oblivious to everything but the line of light on the floor of the valley, slowly drawing towards me.

I headed for the crossroads that I call Persephone. The Speechless People didn’t call it that, or anything else for that matter. I guess that I associated the way I felt about the crossroads with something in my early studies, but I don’t know why it felt appropriate.

I dismounted and waited. I was pleased to find some water for my mount, letting it munch the tough grass, a treat after days on that mountain pass. I sat there for a long time. The sun was setting when I finally felt my mind emptying of names and categories. I started to hear the melodies of all the consciousness gathered at the crossroads: human, non-human and more-than-human. I moved in and out of sleep, borne by some imagined current.

I was not surprised when Two Braids appeared. Of course, that wasn’t her name. As far as I knew, the Speechless People had no names, but perhaps each one had a vast, alive, webbing of a name, but all that was way beyond me. I pushed down the thoughts my corporate self worried about, such as where to safely spend the night, whether my mission was still unknown to the Speechless People, and where my allegiances lay, etc.

Two Braids stood and signalled to the children who had been invisible up to now, to come and take my mount away. My great beast seemed to remember past encounters and looked pleased. Two Braids led me a little way from the crossroads to where the land dipped slightly. A small group was sharing a meal. We joined them. As darkness fell, I was offered the cloak that soothes, and I made my way to a corner under the rocky overhang. I slept very well.

Chris:

(The Diplomat dreams)

I flowed down to where the land dipped as a storm gathered. The rain felt at first like a blessing, a sprinkle of holy water. Heavenly water met the water within me. Then, with an almighty thunder clap, the sky lit up with electricity, and a torrent of water fell, carrying me down the slope. I surrendered to its power with trepidation. Two Braids now became a thousand braids, threading her watery tendrils to guide me.

I felt the thunder as shock waves rippled through the water and saw cracks in the rocks opening. The earth was cracking open, reflecting my own cracked state. The braided tendrils drew attention to the vast, alive murmuring of the speechless, the unseen, hardly imagined sentients of potential futures. Would I listen? Would I understand? What responsibilities would befall me if I did comprehend?

And then ‘I’ was gone. Not scattered or fragmented but lost; gone with the water; washed away like a species without roots, like an inverted homoeopathic treatment.

Tali:

The oak has known it all — decades of sun and stars, wind and rain, the growing unease in the air that brushed through its leaves. Small animals came and went. Some stayed longer, finding shelter and rest in its canopy. But the ones who never felt quite right were the people.

To the oak, some seemed kind and humble, with their roots firmly grounded in everyday existence. They appreciated its shade, its lovely colours, and its sturdy hold on the soil. Others walked by with the confidence of those who know not their place, who believe their power is beyond all others. They, it realised, could easily harm it, without any pang of conscience.

Farewell to the Room

“I can’t see very well”. This thought went round and round in the Diplomat’s head. The rest of his thoughts were jumbled. It took so much effort to remember, from one moment to the next, what he needed to think about. It would be clear, and then gone again.

The climb was getting steeper now. Cold. Colder than he had ever been. A gust brought him the smell of the heart of the Earth. Then it was gone again. Some hailstones pelted him without much interest, then a clear sky, a clear view of the summit, the wide rim of Heart Mountain.

“I can’t breathe very well”. He had to sit down. He rummaged through his satchel for food. None left. Feet aching. He grabbed some snow and put it in his mouth. The burning-wet sensation was good.

He must have slept. He couldn’t see very well, but the sun was clearly heading for the horizon. “I can’t move very well”. He got up with great clumsiness and started to run to the top. Well, he imagined he was running, the stumbles, the laboured breathing while bent over his knees, it all hurt as much as running uphill would have. Same difference.

Finally, at the rim, his heart pounded as he beheld the Heart of the Earth, bubbling, breathing. The tears came out of nowhere. He shouted: “Arne, Arne, where are you?”

The sun was setting. What was it that he needed to do? His thoughts, beads from a broken necklace, rattled around his brain. He knew he shouldn’t go back down the mountain in the dark; it is rare that anybody survives that level of stupidity. He knew he wasn’t likely to survive once the sun set, if he stayed at the rim, waiting for light, without water, let alone food or shelter.

The bubbling cauldron held his gaze. He saw the impossible colours that people talked about. He heard words that were not spoken. His legs wouldn’t hold him. He sat down. The sun set.

Notes and references

Introduction

It is impossible for me to untangle my relationship with unpsychology from my experience with madness. Both were born out of the messy terrain of the Dark Mountain Project and its Uncivilisation gatherings between 2009 and 2013. They both explore questions regarding mind, existence and the human condition in the context of societal collapse. And both have gifted me with communities which nourish and delight me.

Over the past decade and more, as I’ve participated in the creation of Unpsychology Magazine as one of its core editorial team, I’ve also been learning from and growing within the mad movement as an activist-scholar. The mad movement and unpsychology have much in common, as both resist definition, reductionism and polarisation - and both embrace inquiry, plurality and paradox.

Ultimately I understand madness to be a signal in the noise, inextricably entwined with what some refer to as the collapse of Western civilisation, and what Vanessa Machado de Oliveira describes as the dying of modernity. I explored this train of thought in my essay Climate Mind, Climate Madness in the fourth issue of Unpsychology and my understanding has only ripened in the years since I wrote that piece (which we have reproduced below to give context to this reflection and request).

Which brings me to the present. I have recently set up the Centre for Mad Culture UK. For readers who are unfamiliar with this project:

The Centre for Mad Culture UK provides a hub of information, creative engagement and community building for people with lived experience of madness and/or psychiatric services, as well as their family, friends and allies. Madfolk may include those who identify as mad, mentally ill, survivors of psychiatry, mental health service users, patients and/or neurodivergent.

Madness is commonly perceived as distressing, fearful and contentious. We aim to subvert this by encouraging mad pride and transforming madness into a source of community, activism and solidarity.

We envision the mad voice to be welcomed and cherished. In this vision:

• the mainstream biomedical and deficit models of mental health make way for a new paradigm: madness as a valuable aspect of human culture and intersectional identity, bringing gifts of knowledge and insight to the greater society;

• community responds to madness with justice, tolerance, kindness, recognition of human dignity and learning from what is offered.

My request and invitation to you…

And this brings me to my final point: a request and an invitation. We have commissioned a survey to gather the views of as many people as possible, in order to inform our work. You needn’t be familiar with the Centre for Mad Culture UK or with the mad movement – we are seeking a well-rounded understanding of who we might reach and what may be possible for us as we move forward. Therefore:

Wherever you are in the world, and however you relate to madness – we’d like to know what the Centre for Mad Culture UK can do for you. I would be so grateful if you could take the time to participate in this survey.

It will take 5-10 minutes and there is the option to include your name for a prize draw £30 book voucher.

The survey closes on Monday 23 February.

---

ESSAY

Climate Minds, Climate Madness by

Note: This piece first appeared in the Climate Minds edition of Unpsychology Magazine (#4) in 2018. You can download a FREE pdf version of the full magazine from the button below:

Unpsychology 4 Climate Minds

I noticed him immediately when he entered the room. He had wandered in off the street during ‘Doors Open Day’, an annual festival celebrating local architecture and historic properties. Buildings normally closed to the general public throw open their doors to show off their interiors. I was helping out for the day at my workplace, an 18th century terraced block in the heart of Edinburgh. You wouldn’t consider it anything special from the street, where you see just another grey stone facade with lines of windows and an imposing dull portico. But step inside this Georgian terrace and you will find a sweeping grand carved wooden staircase, a columned great hall displaying marble statuary and antique oil paintings, and a magnificent wood-panelled library, its glass-covered bookcases filled with gilded leather-bound volumes. Normally these spaces are reserved for special guests and formal events, but on 'Doors Open Day’ there are hundreds of visitors ambling from room to room while we answer questions and point out notable features.

So then: he wandered in off the street, just one of many random strangers passing by, but my eyes were drawn to where he stood; there was something out of place about him. He was chatting enthusiastically to other people in his vicinity, people who looked baffled, perhaps even a bit wary. Soon he moved on to another room. It wasn’t until later that one of my colleagues arrived and asked in a voice pitched to intrigue if I had seen the man or spoken to him. Apparently, my colleague shared with relish, apparently this man was claiming to have discovered the cure for Multiple Sclerosis.

Multiple Sclerosis! Completely batty! Right off his trolley. What a fizzing up of excitement the man’s unexpected words inspired. A crazy person! Here, among us! Insanity is the ultimate otherness, with its abject refusal to follow the invisible, unprovable rules holding us all in place. And if we’re not in place, then we are out of place.

I’ve been out of place myself. Completely batty. For example: six years ago I was walking along the High Street in Edinburgh on a mild January morning, the sky a foreboding cloud-cover, and I was dead. The world had become for me a grey unalive wasteland of Hell, and people passing by me on the pavement, going about their usual daily business, were at the same time damned souls like myself. I was there and yet also not there, they could see me but not see me, because it was Hell, and I was therefore disconnected from everyone, even my most dearest. My daughter’s father followed close behind me, on his phone to the NHS, working out a plan to get me to hospital. I was aware of this but entirely indifferent; why should it matter, if I was dead? Why should any of it matter if, as they say, life is just to die?

This snapshot is as vivid to me as any other memory I call up from the past, and equally as logical. It happened to me. I can recall particular details, like the moment when I dropped my keys into a bin I passed (because I wouldn’t need them if I was dead, now would I?) or the point when I crossed over the cobbled street to St Giles Cathedral and stepped into its dark, cool interior in order to sit on a worn wooden pew and reflect upon my predicament (what does one do next, when one is dead?)

Later the same day, I fled from the reception area of the psychiatric hospital where I’d been taken. Filled with terror, and convinced now that my daughter was in danger of dying just as I had (in fact, with nightmarish logic, because of me) I ran out into the hospital grounds with the intention of reaching her school to find her, to do all I could to protect her. Mother Tiger fury drove me, even as a hospital warden tackled me to the ground, where I screamed and kicked and bit and hissed into his face like a wild animal in a frenzied agony of helplessness. I didn’t care what happened to me, but the thought of death claiming my child – knowing that I could not prevent it – that fuelled me with a ferocity unlike any I’d felt before. What a spectacle I made.

Even now, from the sober vantage point of six years and suitable medication, I still believe that I was dead. I believe it because it was true for me, it felt real to me and it continues to hold meaning for me. I was dead, and I was also in a state of psychosis – both true, both real. Hovering between one place and another, sensing them simultaneously. Right off my trolley.

The memory I’ve just shared, that fills only one page in the fat book of my life, but even one short page yields a multitude of aspects; I can tell the same story in any number of ways, depending on where I’m standing in relation to that one experience. In one sense I’m a bipolar patient with a hospital record. In another sense I’m an explorer in the land of dreams and visions. In yet another sense – and make no mistake, this is all about the senses – I’m a field researcher in panpsychism. And another: a rebellious woman kicking off at the patriarchy. A midlife crisis writ large. A wise woman of the folktale, dealing in riddles and prophesies. A true heart, seeking out The Beloved.

In each of these senses, I dwell in a different place - hospital, dreamland, folktale – with my role, my identity, shaped and coloured accordingly. Just because others don’t sense what I am sensing, doesn’t mean it isn’t real – even if it is only real to me. A dog hearing a pitch inaudible to the human ear isn’t insane. A bat navigating the darkness with echolocation isn’t insane. Indigenous healers who speak with the ancestors for guidance and context aren’t insane. They all fit in their place, whether or not anyone else shares it with them.

When I was dead, that was real. Take a step back and you may catch a glimpse: in a sense we are all dead. None of us is getting out of here alive. In a sense, my daughter will die because of me, in that she is now alive to a certain extent because of me, and that gift comes with the price tag of mortality.Take another step back, tilt your head and squint. What we call reality is no more than the result of making sense out of nonsense. We create meaning for ourselves using the raw material gathered up by what we notice and how we feel – yet what we notice and how we feel depends on the meaning we have created for ourselves. We are living and breathing feedback loops. As Margaret Wheatley writes:

“The physicist John Archibald Wheeler has been an eloquent proponent of the participative universe, a place where the act of looking for certain information evokes the information we went looking for – and simultaneously eliminates our opportunity to observe other information.... We all construct the world through lenses of our own making and use these to filter and select. We each actively participate in creating our worlds”.1

So this participative observation establishes a relationship between our self and our surroundings – you might call it finding our place – each with our own unique perspective, very specific to our own tiny point in the infinite space-time continuum. Think of the vast number of variables contributing to who you are, right at this moment: your genetic ancestry, your upbringing, your culture, your relationships, right down to which t-shirt you’re wearing today and what you had for breakfast. And think of all the diverse realities that linger in the background, ready to emerge with the change of even just a single variable:

“ROCKFORD, IL—Retired post office branch manager Nancy Hollander, 97, died at her home of natural causes Tuesday, after spending her life completely unaware that she was one of the most talented musicians of the past century and possessed the untapped ability to become a world-class violin virtuoso. She is survived by two daughters, a son, six grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren, all of whom will forever remain oblivious to the national treasure Hollander would have become had she just picked up a violin even once”.2

What if insanity is just a taste of those vast untapped potentials, a sensing and experiencing of reality from a step or two back?

Try this thought experiment. Imagine you are able to travel backwards in time, hundreds of thousands of years, to a time before the use of language. There is no consensus among linguists on how language developed – whether it occurred as a gradual process or a quantum leap – but for the sake of argument let’s allow as given that there was a stage in the prehistoric past which involved our ancestors existing without complex language.

So imagine, then, that you have travelled back to this pre-language time with the following task: to convey information about our present human culture to those primitive ancestors. Is it possible? Could you communicate the concept of a skyscraper, for instance, without using language? If you tried speaking, or writing down words, or even drawing representational pictures, would they understand? Or would you be put into the prehistoric version of a straitjacket?

Now imagine you are visited by a person from hundreds of thousands of years in the future, a person no longer Homo Sapien – a person in a future state of evolution. Might they not live in a reality with its own equivalent of ‘skyscraper’ – unimaginable to us in our current state of mind and degree of experience? How would this individual communicate their understanding of reality to us here and now?

The minds of our prehistoric ancestors held the potential for language, such that it gradually came into fulfilment over the long and incremental process of evolution. Might our minds now be just as likely to hold the potential for evolving into something else? We can only speculate but what fun it is to boggle our wits with the paradox. Words cannot reach or contain a reality that has been shaped by a consciousness evolved beyond language.

What exactly is language anyway? Jay Griffith has called it “the greatest artwork ever made, created over thousands of years with the signatures of millions.”3 We tend to think of language as something we possess and use like a tool – but this metaphor arises from a view of ourselves as being in control of our surroundings. We could just as well say that language uses us to express itself, confining us to its definitions and its grammatical rules. The cold, wet splashing of W-A-T-E-R reached Helen Keller in her deaf and blind prison, that and the insistent fingers of Annie Sullivan shaping sign-language letters into her palm. Language reached out to her through the sense of touch, but before she grasped hold of it she had lived in her own mental place, her own version of reality unshared by others. Did this mean she was insane?

Words open the doors of our imagination, out of nothing they create pictures, inspire dreams and forge connections. Just as easily they sow division, refuse to budge, evade precision. We discuss the shape of reality as though it can be captured by words, but no matter what we declare, we will always bump up against the limits of language. Language tries with all its might to capture reality but it never can and never will. It will only ever describe it.

Let me tell you about the book I’ve been reading: ‘If This Is a Woman’ by Sarah Helm. During the Second World War, Ravensbrück concentration camp imprisoned around 130,000 women, where of course many of them perished. In the decades following the war, Ravensbrück lay behind the Iron Curtain, and only in the 1990s did Western historians gain access to its remaining archives and survivors’ testimonies. Helm’s book reveals the history of Ravensbrück in painstaking detail, from the cold cruelty and barbaric violence of the SS wardens to the awful misery and acute suffering of the camp inmates.

From this book I learned an appalling fact: many of the prisoners turned on each another in bigoted enmity. Labelled according to their identifying offense (Jew, communist, Gypsy, social deviant eg prostitute or petty criminal) these subgroups were housed separately and encouraged to compete with one another for survival. Even in the most perilous of circumstances, being imprisoned and starved and tortured by their Nazi jailers, many of these women still found it possible to judge and hate and bully one another based on whichever identifying symbol had been sewn onto their striped prison uniform. It isn’t lost on me either – me with my bipolar black triangle – that people who were mentally impaired or physically disabled were gassed to death in their asylums before even making it as far as a concentration camp.

Those symbols pinned people down like insects in a museum display case, and reinforced the idea that reality is singular and categorical, there to be contained and manipulated. Elie Wiesel observed of Auschwitz that “In the concentration camps, we discovered this whole universe where everyone had his place. The killer came to kill, and the victims came to die.”

No doubt many people during that time felt themselves to be living in Hell on Earth, and witnessing the certain end of humankind. But then, so probably too did the young men who died in the Battle of the Somme; the victims of the Khmer Rouge; the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Chernobyl and Bhopal; the Cherokee Nations tribal people on the Trail of Tears; the so-called heretics slaughtered in the Spanish Inquisition; the children shot in Dunblane, Columbine, Sandy Hook, Utøya, Parkland.... and these are just off the top of my head, a few examples among countless instances of human-crafted atrocity. There is no shortage of examples of how obscenely vicious we humans can be, driven as we are by pure unholy terror. Yet none of it – none of it – is inevitable. Even Ravensbrück had a hospital wing where some prisoners were offered treatment and respite (and yet still others were murdered by doctors and nurses.) Madness!

Ah now here’s where we get to it: just what exactly counts as actual madness? We can have a perfectly rational – albeit sadistic – Nazi doctor who kicks a woman to death as she lies prostrate on the ground. How do we reconcile the out-of-place contradiction of a healer inflicting injury? Let’s go one further: we can have a mesmerising – albeit sociopathic – Führer who manipulates an entire nation full of people to pursue his implausible scheme of an Aryan Master Race. But was Hitler insane? If so, why was he not in the queue to be gassed with the other black triangles? Insanity has more to do with consensus than with any provable lack of reality. In hindsight, out of context, we see Hitler as a madman. At the time, he was voted into power, supported by a host of minions, humoured in his whims, obeyed in his orders, cheered by millions.

Our fear of insanity belies the suffering it could actually inflict. We are far more likely to be injured by an aggressive drunk than by The Crazy Person. Women are far more likely to be assaulted by a current or ex-partner than by The Crazy Person. Children are far more likely to be molested by a priest than by The Crazy Person. Americans are far more likely to be shot by an angry young man who can’t get a date than by The Crazy Person. And believe me, you are far more likely to die a long slow death of accumulated poison from household cleaning products than by any sudden attack by a knife- wielding out-of-control Crazy Person!

Here we near the start of the 21st century, with some appallingly gruesome human-made tragedies filling our history, and some truly daunting human-made tragedies ahead of us. Global warming altering our coastlines and disrupting our ecosystems, mass extinction wiping out whole swathes of our biosphere, plastic and chemical pollution damaging the food-chain, overpopulation and urbanisation breeding social disorder and disease, volatile nuclear power facilities and mismanaged nuclear waste deposits threatening calamity for the next however many hundreds of thousands of years... the bountiful garden we inherited at the dawn of time is already well on the way to being trashed beyond repair. Who can save us from ourselves?

May I suggest: The Crazy Person.

Return with me to the man with the cure for Multiple Sclerosis. Recall my attention drawn from across the room and snagged upon his otherness, recall the cheap-thrill voyeurism insinuated by my colleague. What is it about insanity that intrigues and horrifies us in such a particular way? Is it the idea of losing control? We dread the thought of becoming helpless and vulnerable and, heaven help us, embarrassing. Our social norms keep us safely sequestered in place and of course, they’ve evolved for a very good reason: all the better to stay warm, dry, well-fed and not-eaten, when we can arrange and predict our surroundings. But what if we were to turn that voyeuristic focus onto our so-called reality, would it really be any less weird or illogical than a psychotic spell? Just because we operate within a consensus, doesn’t mean it’s fixed in place. Insanity intimidates us because it forces us to look in a mirror which we usually turn to the wall. It demonstrates the flimsy fragility of the bars on our cage and reveals the breadth and depth of our power to shape what we call reality.

Insanity goes by another name: breakdown. It’s what happens when familiar mental structures and invisible boundaries come apart, when the mutually-reinforced reality holding us in place dissolves into an open sea of disparate information with clumps of meaning floating past like buoys. Language, symbols, beliefs, expectation and self-regulation all dance to a tune played at a pitch beyond our usual range. We call this ‘chaos’, yet any physicist can tell you that even a system in chaos follows its own ‘rules’: “within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, self-organization, and reliance on programming at the initial point known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” 4

That could just as easily be a definition of psychosis. So what can we learn from insanity? Instead of dismissing it as pathology, instead of dreading it as an affliction, instead of viewing it as a perverse curiosity – what can we learn from it as a natural variation of human experience that is as valid as any other? What if the insane person offers humanity a taste of its potential, rather than an aberration from which to recoil? What if insanity is actual magic – no less than the key to our divine potential as everyday miracle-workers? And yes, I’m dead serious.

Let me share another page from my book: I was alone one night in my flat, as my daughter was spending the night at her dad’s. I took myself to bed as normal, and at about half past one I woke up filled with the certainty that I was not alone in the room. I sensed a divine presence, around me but also within me, a layer of consciousness brimming with intelligence and benevolence. It hadn’t newly arrived, it was intrinsic to everything around and inside me; it had always been there, I just hadn’t ever noticed it, not like this. Think of a background of wallpaper that suddenly shifts from an abstract blur to a discernible pattern; again, we gather up information with our senses and our mind arranges it with meaning. Divinity had always been there and at the same time it only sprang into being when it was perceived.

Without any logical context, I felt compelled to get up and leave home. I didn’t know where or why I must leave, but that was irrelevant. I was being invited to partake in something beyond rational. There was no plot or plan, nothing so specific or agenda-driven as a destination or desired outcome. It was simply there: an invitation to respond. And respond I did: my senses led me out of my flat, eventually to the airport, and from there to Amsterdam where I spent several days undertaking a mission (successfully, I might add) that eluded all ordinary sense. I don’t have the space here to describe everything that happened to me but I can tell you this: it was like picking up a violin for the first time and playing beautiful music. Meaning lay simultaneously within me, around me and beyond me. Like a single violinist in an orchestra, like a solitary member in a secret cell of organised resistance, I only knew my own piece of the puzzle and contributed to the whole by playing out my one small part.

What I experienced was real but entirely personal and completely unprovable, and yes, very much insane. In the flow of a divine awakening, I felt boundless, expansive and buzzing with awareness. At the very same time, in a classic episode of manic psychosis, I followed perverse threads of logic and took risks at which an ordinary state of mind would have balked. It felt sacred, magical, and at the same time utterly normal; both real and unreal; as though unknown possibilities hovered around me in thin air, just waiting to be plucked into existence. I can only describe what is was like – and of course it sounds crazy, because it was crazy. It’s like trying to explain ‘skyscraper’ to you.

A common feature of the mystical experience is its ineffability. As John Horgan writes in his 2003 book, Rational Mysticism, “Over time, mystical knowledge came to be defined as that which transcends language and so cannot be revealed.” Now what if this became our shared reality? Would it be any crazier than the reality we share now, with its mass shootings and chemical warfare and human trafficking? We shrug when our beautiful world becomes clogged with plastic litter and the insidious silent noise of mass advertising, while we cringe at the offensive discord of someone talking to themselves on a street corner. Why on earth is this?

Climate chaos, system collapse, and the death of our modern ways of thinking give us clues: we live in end times. In another sense, ending means beginning – and on the other side of the breakdown I see magic, wholeness and human divinity. I only see this because of what I have experienced: in the crudest way, I have died and resurrected; I have walked through Hell in total isolation, and danced in Heaven in the arms of the divine. I was as crazy as they come, and at the same time as grounded as I’ve ever been. It was extraordinary, and at the very same time just another experience in a life full of experiences. I assure you it was composed of the same material we all work with – what made it different was that I let go. I let go. I relinquished my grip and allowed myself to drop into the W-A-T-E-R, to be swept along in its current, and to trust that I would be held. I was held. You are held. We are held, even in this darkest of times, when our foolishness and greed, our viciousness and complacency are coalescing and reaching a crescendo of damage, danger and despair.

This reality we have built together, with its horrific episodes of human-authored tragedy, needs something from us: it needs breakdown. It needs us to let go and be held. And what is needed is what happens.

The cracks are already showing Developments in quantum physics and cognitive science are overhauling our traditions about what constitutes fundamental reality and how it functions. Some researchers, for example, propose that our brains are always hallucinating – that hallucination is the actual process by which our brains navigate our surroundings.6 Please stop a moment and take in the repercussions of this theory: if our minds operate through hallucination, then how can we say that one hallucinatory experience represents reality more than another? We must take it on faith. We operate in a mutually-constructed web of symbols and relationships formed from a million simultaneous assumptions, like a castle built of matchsticks. Who’s to say if the insane mind might not just be the healthy one, a flint showering sparks of light which could take down the whole edifice? Einstein said it best: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one...”6 and Helen Keller said it even better: “I proclaim the world good, and facts range themselves to prove my proclamation overwhelmingly true. To what is good I open the doors of my being.... Doubt and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination, which the steadfast heart will conquer, and the large mind transcend.”6

So gather up your courage, dear heart, and approach that dull imposing portico of reality that sits so stubbornly in your path, its words woven and meshed into barbed wire fences. Cross its threshhold and witness the exquisite interior of the outlandish and the speculative, with its vivid colours and rich textures concealed behind an everyday facade. I am waiting for you, here, in my pyjamas and slippers, as nurses behind me hand out prescription tablets and paper cups of water. And I greet you from the other side, saying welcome to ‘Doors Open Day’.

Introduction

As editors of Unpsychology Magazine, we decided to take a pause from publishing a magazine this year. This would have been our 11th issue since we began back in 2014. Instead we conjured up some small projects that each of us would facilitate and encourage – A Lattice of Letters, coordinated by Lesley. A Writers’ Playgroup, hosted by Julia. A Small Forms pamphlet project, facilitated by Steve. These are all ongoing, and the results of some or all of these may (or may not!) appear here on Substack in due course.

This is the fourth and final piece in a series of conversations between members of the Unpsychology community with editor, Steve Thorp, entitled From Here To Somewhere – A Conversation for Breaking Times. Here, responds to the conversations so far, and completes this current cycle of exploration. For the time being…

, , - Unpsychology editors

The first dialogue – between and is linked below, we’d recommend you read it first:

This one follows on – a second exchange between and

Then and continue the conversation here:

From Here to Somewhere 4:

&

Catherine

Dear Steve and Julie, Erifily, Susan…

I have been waiting for this moment, the one where everything is exactly where and as it should be and I too am still. We are cyclical creatures in a world we have made sense of by delineating along the measure of time. Our entire rationalised existence is one of oscillation and yet we yearn for linear stability and certainty or predictable change. Like a pendulum at rest, when the gravitational forces are balanced out by the tension in the string, there is no movement. In practice, we seem to aim for this... We believe that we have the agency to stop and start our individual oscillatory motion – the sine waves of our life paths – of our own volition. Isn’t this one of our greatest demonstrations of conceptual hubris?

We are misshapen donuts of particles, on a planet made of particles, suspended in nothing and hurtling through space often in denial that it’s more chaos than order. If we acknowledge that we’re always moving – internally, externally, in space – why do we crave stillness, quiet, peace unless it is the chaos of our choosing?

Back to motion… a better analogy is Foucault’s pendulum, which appears to stop moving at the equator. There, the earth’s rotation doesn’t cause its swing to precess. The earth is still rotating, the planet is still in orbit around the sun, the universe is, as ever, in an infinite state of unimaginable creation and destruction but the pendulum appears motionless. Still, balanced, equilibrated…. It is apparently unmoving but the workings of the universe continue even if the effects can’t be seen or felt.

Let’s imagine that this apparent stasis is the emotional stillness I began with, where I am as I write. Imagine we can access the equator of our individual and collective emotional worlds. Some people can’t imagine; some won’t and some have never thought to try. In this place I no longer have the impetus or desire to struggle for movement, to fight the moment of apparent stillness. Situations push us out of this place, like the change in invisible gravitational forces that cause the pendulum to precess.

Everyone here has a psychological background of some description. Please be patient with me as I unfold on the page, I’m not trying to teach you about psychology, I am just, literally, unfolding my response to you.

So what has this got to do with our small forms?

As we form our spokes around the centre of the wheel (Steve), I read the anger and the grief. From this vantage point of stillness, anger is a compound emotion, it lends itself to force and by that I mean, it lends itself to movement, we feel it and are motivated to do something; cry, shout, build, destroy, tend, abandon… Actions motivated by anger are more self-soothing than they are long-term problem resolution unless we are addressing the root cause. When confronted with the injustice of collective wrongdoing – violence – we are trapped in the space between taking action that we know is simply not enough and self-soothing which doesn’t always solve the problem. We hope that enough of us are doing the former to make a difference, and become angrier, disenfranchised, and grief stricken at the latter. Working with anger is working with fire. Consider; what is the fuel, where did it come from, which extinguisher is appropriate, what do we need to do now and in the future to protect [insert], how do we let it burn out safely? Have we learnt nothing from a century of making fire with crude oil?

Faced with the consequences of collective wrongdoing – environmental crises – the magnitude of the realisation that we are our own existential threat and yet each individual, regardless of level of consciousness, singularly powerless to stop it…however it will come. This reflection, feeling, knowing pushes the pendulum out from rest. This is where we will do everything possible to keep moving - living, shopping, scrolling, laughing, eat/pray/loving – distract ourselves, do something, ANYTHING just NOT SLOW DOWN and be still with this knowing!

The intensity here is grief. It’s grief on the way up, it’s grief on the way down but it is grief and it will not be ignored. We run from grief. I’ve stopped running from grief. I’ve also stopped viewing grief as a compound emotion. To me it’s not fuel, it’s the exact opposite – a flame retardant. Grief asks us to go inwards, acknowledge what we love, have loved, will love and what we will never have the chance to love - what we will never hold in our two hands… it asks us to be still and accept, acknowledge. Grief is a leveller, a consistent caller to everything that lives. Grief even survives death to become the spirit of grief, which invites intergenerational grief; constant and agile grief that often becomes detached from its source.

Back to Foucault’s pendulum… I write to you all from a place of stillness. In this moment all these things are true and I can hold them to say; grief gets a bad wrap. It is a strange bedfellow for a civilisation chasing YOLO (You Are Not Alone). Yet, grief is a faithful companion to us, gently showing us our place, revealing our desires, comforting our existence.

Steve and I are sitting in his garden, absorbed, bathed in and at one with the flora and fauna of this space. Grief is already here, as a trio we are. Later, when we are back in precession, we will think about what to do, if anything.

Julie and I are listening to that song. I am searching her energy to understand how she feels this song. When I hear it, I feel immense grief, that there is a place somewhere that is better than where I am and I can’t get to it. Can anyone get to it? That someone can sing so pitch perfectly about heaven but, reading between the lines, face existential hell.

Anger is burning a hole in our world as I sit with Erifily and I invite grief to sit with us and wait for the flames to subside, until we are ready to mourn the fragility and sacred nature of all life along with the paucity of kindness, the refusal of those who wreck life with anger to be still and mourn with us. I remind myself that anger motivates all manner of good and bad actions.

I am speechless as Susan holds a hazelnut in the palm of her hand. The spirit of grief whispers to us on the wind, here it is, all of it – what came before you over millenia, what may come after you. Tears roll down my cheeks as I process that the chain of events that code for the entirety of existence since time began is contained in this small brown seed. That story may stop here if the seed is eaten, rots or does not germinate. I too am a hazelnut. Grief reminds me that the enormity of my realisation is as small as the hazelnut.

In individual moments of stillness, if there is the desire to do something other than process the movement that preceded it, perhaps this is the time to stop to map out the plan, the strategy, the resolutions and handrails of what we will do when we are back in motion, filtering, feeling and contributing to the collective emotional landscape. There’s as much individual work to be done here as there is communal. It’s not all outward; sometimes the pendulum appears not to swing, especially at the equator!

As we are all on the timing of our individual rhythms, can we observe each other and plan across states of stillness? Can we come together in community and discover what that sounds and feels like when we honour the flux of our existence – the overwhelming grief that now permeates it – as we process some tough shit?

Is that what we are doing right now?

Steve

Oh my…. Catherine, this response from you has taken my breath away, taken me apart and put things back together – somehow in a different order. At first I wasn’t sure I could reply at all – it is such a wise, encompassing piece. However, I realised that you’ve made sense of something that was threatening to overwhelm me. All these experiences and ideas encapsulated by you from the previous dialogues and returned for us to a place of stillness and community.

I think perhaps that this is always where ‘unpsychology’ is trying to get back to. It’s a constant process – a pendulum in perpetual motion (to borrow your startling image) – and the way, perhaps, that the world keeps counterbalancing itself. Is this what we mean by homeostasis? Is this what Nora means when she writes about ‘symmathesy’, her word for ‘mutual learning in living systems’?

This mutual learning is a constantly changing and evolving thing. It does not take us ‘up’ necessarily, but it does take us ‘on’ and ‘in’ – deeper into the systems and communities we are living and learning within and from. And I’m thinking (as I’m writing right here and now) that this might be the only process that really matters – the only way of returning to stillness – before moving on again into disequilibrium. Then again into learning. And community. And returning to stillness too.

Nora posed and answered two questions in her original Symmathesy paper, written in 2015:

“What is the difference between learning and life? None.

When is something living NOT learning? Never.”1

This might say everything that needs to be said about what is going on – constantly – in the living mind and the living world (the two are not the same, I don’t think). There is a cycle (as you say) that takes us from the disequilibrium of crisis, through symmathesy to the brief equilibrium of stillness, and then on again and again. This is happening in each one of us, individually and simultaneously. Our personal cycles – if this is a way of putting it – are constantly overlapping, are in permanent states of interdependence with each other’s. This might be what we mean by ‘community’.

Each of us in this conversation so far have captured a piece of the process, I think, and you, Catherine have seen it all for us. Thank you for that…

For my own part, sitting with experience as I try to do these days, I am aware of excitement and anticipation. There is something in the wind. Something in the mind. Something waiting to happen… Do you feel it too?

Catherine

Steve – I think of homeostasis as a failsafe mechanism; too many functions are too important to be left to volition. For example, we are a carefully temperature calibrated organism; I wouldn’t trust me to remember to raise or lower my own body temperature across the course of the day. I often forget whether I have turned the heating boost off… get all the way across town and wonder if I will have earned the shareholders of the utility company their quarterly dividend by the time I get home in the evening! The trick with negative feedback loops is that they are self-moderating, automatic, autonomic, so you don’t have to remember to sweat when you’re hot and when you’ve cooled down you don’t have to remember to stop.

There is something here to explore around the idea that we think we can recalibrate emotionally, and that the equilibration might coincide with stillness. Homeostatic functions are automatic, read: unconscious. So much of how I experience unpsychology is conscious at the borderland of subconsciousness in pursuit of… well for me, it’s the pursuit of knowings. We can be in equilibrium and in comfort at a place of stillness that is unknowing and to both the benefit and detriment of our (as you said) living mind and living world.

Can we approach Nora’s answered questions, ‘What is the difference between learning and life? None. When is something living NOT learning? Never” with a knowledge of homeostasis and an acknowledgement that nature isn’t perfect? That evolutionary success is (a lot of the time) just the least most efficient way to get the job done long enough to perpetuate the next cycle. There is no difference between learning and life but there is both conscious and unconscious learning and life. Something Nora touches on in relation to the spatiotemporal complexity of movement – proprioception – that when understood through the principles of neuroscience or physics or mathematics is unimaginably complicated for us to consciously process.

There is a lot of mileage in the analogy of how homeostasis could map onto emotional precession, symmathesy and stillness on both an individual and collective level. I don’t know how long it would take me to spell that out and then write about it. It’s a can of worms or an endless gift of a way to approach how we could work towards understanding and altering our established negative feedback loops or establish positive ones. Would there be any utility or merit in that? Would that just be an exercise in exercising our mappings skills?

Since I first wrote to you, grief, ushered in by anger, has come to me in a number of ways – in print, by voice note, in internal epiphanies. One that is lingering is a message sent to me by a friend in Colorado. We exchange messages about the climate in real time and I feel so held and led by the wisdom that comes from them. They are one of those people who are walking paths that require self-integration with not just the beauty but the demise of what we recognise as our natural world. I am always so touched at how they embrace grief as part of, not a part of, or, apart of living. Perhaps this is because I am on a journey with grief myself, as we are collectively, at various levels. Anyway, the voice note was about witnessing minutes old deer in the wild and watching birds build nests; things that are happening twelve to sixteen weeks earlier than they have done for as long as we’ve known how to monitor them. Colorado is experiencing unusually high winds, tearing branches from the pine trees. Fallen from the canopy to the litter, the pine needles are being eaten by the deer. Even though fawns are being born early – born at the wrong time – and probably not going to survive the cold snap that comes in February, they are able to sustain themselves just for now.

I recognised at the moment of listening to the voice note that when I was writing to you, I thought that I had the ability to carry the stillness with me for days. That grief and I had shaken hands in the scribing of words, and that grief would spare me the turbulence, and yet it was grief who crafted my knowing of what is happening in the deer community in the woods of Colorado. It’s an unspeakable grief, in hearing the story, you can tell what kind of grief that is and it doesn’t need to be delineated. It doesn’t need to be named specifically or explicitly because if you know what that grief feels like, you’ll know something of what I’m feeling and if you don’t, there’s no way I can express it to aid your understanding. Whether the pendulum precesses or reaches a still point, symmathesy permeates, but what of homeostasis? The conscious and unconscious shifting of emotional feedback and its effect on the precession or equilibrium point…

You ask, is something larger happening? It is Steve, I can feel it too and I have no urge to rush to calculate its potential impact on me individually. When I was thinking about the newborn fawns in January, I was on the way to the beach for a walk; it was a dry, sunny day. As I extrapolated the impact of this observational data and projected a few cycles ahead (all things remaining equal), that was the moment grief reminded me that it was still here and capable of shaking me. The first thing that popped into my head was, how many good days do we have left? which is a phrase I associate with people whose bodies are giving up, who have seen better days, who are experiencing hardships. It was a very clear thought and my automatic response was, I don’t know, maybe not many. But today is one, so let’s go.

Off I went to sit on a cliff, directly in front of the sun as it set. The only sound I could hear was the roar of the sea crashing against the Silurian volcanic Welsh coastline; pyramidal, jagged, ancient reminders of the violence of the making of worlds. A conscious juxtaposition of this sound of nature and the roar of city traffic I had left behind. The universe is, as ever, in an infinite state of unimaginable creation and destruction and in coming to a place that speaks to my imagination and knowing of such processes, I will my pendulum to stop swinging. I try to capture this moment in me to come back to, to retrieve, the next time I am experiencing the kind of embodied emotion that requires this exact memory. Grief seems to approve, because in that moment, I know it doesn’t matter – well, it matters on some level but – I don’t have to grieve or worry about how many good days are left because this day is one.

Steve

Hi Catherine, I want to start where you ended your deeply eloquent response. With experience. And with Grief.

It’s where this conversation began when Julia and I were setting out our first few paragraphs, and you have brought it full circle. The coastline you are sitting beside is very familiar to me, but your own experience of it makes me think of how everything we have talked about – context, birthright, biology, trauma, history, soul, physiological and neurological patterning, relationships, learning – is working subtly on each individual human being all of the time. What emerges – the words, the creativity, the conversations, the identity – are part of this glorious intimate diversity.

The problem is, as you point out, that the interconnectedness and interdependence of all the life systems that sustain all of us and our planet are subject to all the big changes knocking on all the way through the wider, global systems, so that the outcome is utterly unpredictable. We know that there may not be many good days to come – or there may be many more. I guess that’s where hope, as well as grief, lies too!

(Un)psychologically, I think I am drawn to the way in which ‘stillness’ – which we might interpret as an optimal state, albeit a temporary one – might be experienced in each of us. What are the conditions for your experience of stillness? For mine? And for Julia, Erifily, Susan and all the others who have considered and created their own versions of this in our magazine and online? We’re all exploring something, aren’t we? Maybe searching for something? For you, you say, it might be the ‘pursuit of knowings’ (such a lovely, humble phrase) which, given the autonomous, unconscious nature of much of our biological regulation you drew attention to in your previous response, might be a deeply conscious seeking – and possibly, therefore, a paradox…

I think, for me, it’s always finding a kind of ‘sweet spot’ – maybe like those magic pictures that emerge from patterns on a page – where unconscious and autonomous processes are working in a directional, intentional and relational frame – albeit held lightly – and I can find myself sitting on my equivalent of that cliff top feeling stillness in a way that delights and regulates me, but feels strangely unsurprising. It’s a struggle though, because I’m always ‘trying’ – or used to be – and this meant that the stillness was tainted somehow, spoilt even, until I was able to let go and just ‘be’ in my body-mind for a moment or two. Sometimes that’s all it takes…

These days (perhaps, in any period of human history) there’s a particular shape of grief that we all have to come to terms with. The contexts for this shift, of course, are now that we’re faced with these great global waves of digitally interconnected shit that threaten at any minute to overwhelm us (sorry for the unsavoury image!). At the same time, we can’t know where any of this is heading, though I guess we can understand more about how we – as individuals and communities – respond to all these shifting, towering, flowing, fluid forces, and manoeuvre ourselves into positions of resilience, resistance, empathy and solidarity. I guess that’s where ‘self-awareness’ – if that’s the right phrase – comes in.

There’s also something else in your words that tugged me back to one of my own starting points for this conversation, which was Omar El Akkad’s book, One day, everyone will have always been against this. In it, he’s excoriating about Western ‘Civilisation’ and its double standards around colonialism and genocide, but he ends with a strangely hopeful note, inviting us to ‘walk away’ from the assumptions behind it all. It reminded me of Ursula LeGuin’s strange and haunting short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in which the happiness of the people in a seemingly utopian city is dependent on the endless suffering of a single wretched child, who everyone knows about and whose plight is accepted as a necessary price.2

In that story, some people – a few – walk silently away from Omelas. It’s a morality tale and carries a simple ethical question about our own world. However, the difficulty is that most of the time we don’t know what to walk away from, or walk away to, or even how to walk away.

If we walk away, are we escaping? Giving up? Selling out? Regrouping? Starting out? Going to sit on a cliff top to grieve? All of these, perhaps.

I suppose that Unpsychology might be a ‘place’ to talk about these questions now and into the future. To see what emerges between us, we ‘living systems’ who are constantly learning together. As we watch the ocean from a cliff top, birds flying around us in our gardens, young fawns snuffling for food as their ecosystem inexorably shifts. As we meditate on a grain of sand, a hazelnut, or an acorn. As we sing and dance together and put our minds and bodies in the service of peace. As we cry and wail. As we sit in silence.

A final note:

This is the last piece in this series. My thanks to all the contributors who have worked with me on these rich and beautiful dialogues on grief and anger and the state of things: my co-editor, and ‘unpsychologists’, , and . All we can know is that there is more to say and have conversations about into the future. Unpsychology will continue to curate and facilitate and host these dialogues and gatherings, and hope you might join us. And as this post is part of a Short Forms project, it, along with the previous three contributions, will be edited and published as a pamphlet available to download free in pdf form, and to purchase as a printed booklet for a small cost. Watch out for these in the near future.

, Co-editor, & Unpsychology Magazine

Notes

Introduction

We kick off the new year with an exchange between Julia Macintosh and Wes Robins, together with an invitation to share…

Julia is co-editor of Unpsychology Magazine, as well as the Director for the Centre for Mad Culture (https://centreformadculture.uk). Wes Robins is, among other things, a Critical & Anti-authoritarian Psychologist and Humanistic practitioner, as well as a contributor to Unpsychology Magazine himself. They’ve shared a dialogue before, in the pages of the magazine and here on Substack (see below). This new post is a postscript to that earlier conversation: a reflection on the frames, organisations and communities that hold our work in this space, and a moving description of an ending and a beginning in Wes’s life and work.

Endings and beginnings - an exchange

Julia:

Hello Wes. I’d suggested a dialogue when I learned that your project, ‘Eternal Strength community youth center’, had come to an end. It felt poignant to me, because my own project, the ‘Centre for Mad Culture UK’, is just beginning. I wondered if we might explore together the unique energies that belong to both beginnings and endings?

Just writing that makes me think of the incredibly emotional and deeply meaningful rituals embedded in both birth and death in the human experience. We rejoice in births, and we mourn deaths. Yet we seldom offer the same care and attention to ritual when we are birthing and mourning less tangible entities, such as the projects I’ve mentioned.

Having said that, I’ve just enjoyed the successful and immensely cathartic launch event of the ‘Centre for Mad Culture UK’. It entailed months of planning and preparation, a dedicated weekend to run it, and I’m only now feeling recovered from the exertions it demanded. I wonder: have you performed any rituals around the winding up of ‘Eternal Strength’?

These beginnings and endings of projects are inevitable, especially in the volatile and troubled world in which we live – particularly in the care sector, which is so stretched beyond its means. Resources are funnelled to established institutions, structures which support the status quo and refrain from critiquing systems in any meaningful way. Smaller, grassroots, more radical projects must make their way in the world with much less to support themselves. They also enjoy a greater freedom and agility, as they are not tied down to the establishment – but it is inevitable that this type of organisation will have pressures on it which more conventional organisations do not.

I wonder what your thoughts are about beginnings and endings?

Wes:

Julia, ah yes, beginnings and endings seem to be a continual flux and flow in all of our lives which, if we are conscious, are happening continually all around us. Creation, destruction, birth, death, day and night, sun and moon, coming and going, even in each breath we take we are inhaling and exhaling in every moment. Closing ‘Eternal Strength’ (ES) was such a wild mourning and letting go, one of the most intense I have experienced in this life thus far. I had not imagined a world in which I would close the doors, therefore my narrative had become restricted to a myopic view that had me walking the path of keeping ES open until I passed away.

Because of this narrative, my identity and attachment to ES was so strong, and just beginning to explore the idea of closing it, truly caused me a shattering of ego, personality, identity and narrative structure. I was Dr. Wes, the founder of ES and that had encapsulated my view of myself to a very unhealthy capacity. After a really challenging last two years and running on fumes, managing staff, assuring payroll, building out an IOP (Intensive Outpatient) in order to work with insurance and reconstructing so much, I was truly exhausted in my heart, soul and body on every level. I kept telling myself “I can’t let go”, if I close the doors of ES “I have failed”.

When last summer hit I was a shell of myself, spending multiple days at home and moving as much of my work to virtual as possible and I would try to bounce back. However, when I would try to come up to ES, I would begin having rushes of panic and anxiety and my mind would become overwhelmed, leading to panic and anxiety attacks that engrossed me and left me feeling emotionally depleted and even shameful on deep levels. I knew something had to change, but was unwilling to entertain the ending of something I had worked so hard to build, curate and continue. I remember vividly putting on an Eckhart Tolle YouTube video called ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ and he began talking in depth about attachment, ego, identity and narrative. Through his words and meditation I was able to see that I had become swallowed whole by my mission and curation of ‘Eternal Strength’.

I decided to go to Arizona and do a 3 day spirit walk and work with the sacred plant medicine Mescalito, aka, Peyote. I had not worked with any plant medicines since 2016, nearly ten years ago, when I journeyed to Iquitos, Peru and worked with Ayahuasca. My work with Ayahuasca was profound and offered me so much insight, wisdom and strength. I felt strongly pulled and even called by Mescalito to go work with the medicine. So in early August 2025, I drove for two days from Atlanta to Arizona, to work with the sacred medicine. The journey was profound, a 24hr hour fast, sitting in silence and then taking the medicine solo out to a single campsite and sitting with myself overnight. I cried, laughed, broke down and felt my body shake and release so much. The insights and teaching were profound and divine. I am truly unable to put into words what this experience and journey was like and how beautiful the teachings were. I knew at this moment, I had to LET GO and allow spirit to lead and recognized that over the last several years, I had been doing quite the opposite, i.e. forcing my hand to steer the wheel of life where I thought it should go. Now, I recognized nothing was more important that my health and wellbeing –psychologically, physiologically, emotionally, spiritually!

I returned to Atlanta and began the work of closing ‘Eternal Strength’, a center and mission I had poured my life into for the last five and a half years. The memories, mourning and letting go were real, difficult but beautiful. I found myself beginning to heal and care for myself, truly being in alignment again with myself, able to speak truth and not feeling fear and anxiety at all consuming levels.

I officially closed the doors of ‘Eternal Strength’ on September 12^th, 2025. Since this time, I have realigned with myself and most importantly been flowing and following spirit. My days are comprised of self care, flow, i.e. yoga, breathwork, my study of ACIM (A Course In Miracles) and spending time with family. I reopened my private practice full time, found a cool little 1960’s house and am seeing clients: youth, young adults, adults and families, 3-4 days a week (https://www.docwes.com). In addition, I am making music, which is sacred to me, writing, recording and playing regularly

Closing ES was truly an ending that gave birth to a new beginning. As one of my favorite artists states: “beginnings always hide themselves in ends”—Mike Posner.1 The ending of physical site of ES and that time period may be gone, but the spirit of ES lives on in many ways. In addition, my rebirth into self, life, and spirit led living has gifted me the insight to recognize that I will never stray again from my self care, my heart and my truth and rather know that flowing with the divine is always the path.

Ego, identity and attachment are so persistent in all of our lives, and it truly takes honesty and humility to see them at work and question whether or not they are serving you in truth or misguiding you in fear. I am deeply thankful for all the years of service we provided community and the community support we received and for each mentor, therapist and healer that ever poured their energy into ES. I am also deeply humbled and grateful for the wisdom and lessons I have received on every level.

Julia

What a beautiful account of a transition: the hard work of letting go, and all the learning you reaped from this experience. Thank you, Wes, for sharing this.

I had expected to continue this exchange, but I’m thinking now that it deserves to be shared with the Unpsychology community sooner rather than later. I was swept along by the holiday season, and now it’s the first week of January; the Gregorian year has turned and we look ahead to all that will unfold in 2026. You’ve offered here an example of what it takes to tread an honest path: listening, discernment, and the courage to let go of what is, in order to open oneself to what is next.

Let’s open this exchange to the Unpsychology readership. Let this be an invitation, to share in the comments below, any thoughts and responses which pick up the thread started by myself and Wes, about endings and beginnings.

What does 2026 hold in store?

Notes

Another Year - a reflection

It’s a little strange, I sometimes think, that humans are so often reaching for ‘meaning’ in life, or searching for some path to ultimate ‘authenticity’ or redemption. I’m not talking here about the the thirst for knowledge as such – the hours painstakingly examining phenomena in labs or dig sites or ecosystems – nor the urge to create and imagine beautiful and moving art and music, but the need, it sometimes seems, to be saved.

It’s understandable, I suppose, in relation to the troubled, broken times we live in to think we need ‘saving’, but it’s easy to mistake difficult times for ‘end times’, and past times for ‘golden ages’, and then reach for some admittedly cleverly worded metaphors, formulations, theories, paradigms and belief systems that are purported to take us there.

It has always been so, I guess, but now the digital ecosphere is full to the brim with essays and podcasts and publications (yes, alright, like Unpsychology), in which writers and thinkers set out their philosophical wares – and yes, we’re supposed to pay for them. Platforms like Substack are literally set up to make this transaction – “an economic engine for culture” was how it first described itself, though it has softened its marketing a little since (https://substack.com/about). Ideas, therefore, are now officially at the heart of capitalism.

The title of this piece is Another Year, and how this relates to the paragraphs above might not seem immediately obvious. I suppose that what I am thinking about right now is that time passes and life turns, and we humans find ourselves in new places – or even in the same places geographically – and the very ordinariness of this can take the edge off the ‘big ideas’ and debates that are happening out there on the ‘web waves’ and the increasing doomscrolling spirals of social media.

Then, of course, many of us could find ourselves in circumstances we never imagined ourselves to be in. There might be personal tragedies, or atrocities and emergencies on a massive scale – like the genocide in Gaza; but just as some people are living with this disconnection and loss – sometimes for decades – others are opining, finding polarities, digging around for the information/disinformation that will justify this position or that.

The place that Unpsychology (the idea and the publication) was born out of was that there is truth (as in there are things that happen and occur that can be shown to be true with evidence), and there is context (as in how the things that are true emerge, and are then prioritised, analysed, framed and experienced). Truth and context are related, and the ways they are in conversation with each other revolve around the metaphors and assumptions dominant in cultures.

Such a dynamic exerts its pull on both individual and collective experience. So there are no polarities as such, but there are cores of truth and ecologies of communication. This isn’t a contradiction, but it is a conundrum, because belief (based on those cultural metaphors and assumptions) can blow the whole relational shebang out of the water.

My context for this end-of-year set of musings is that both last year and this have ended with the reality and experience of personal loss and change. My Dad died last year and there was, of course, all the practical and emotional stuff that goes with the loss of a loved one, within the boundaries of my own cultural understandings and assumptions, of course. Around the same time, I also retired from my main job last December and have been finding new ways of living and working since then – good ways, mostly, it has to be said. Then a couple of weeks ago an old friend of mine, Karl Statton, died suddenly: not an old Dad at the natural end of a long life, but a contemporary the same age as me, who was vibrant and loving; a fierce but gentle humanist and music lover.

Everything that this carries brings me closer to experience. That’s what I am trying to say in this piece, I think. What worries me about the tendency for some (not all) writers, thinkers, academics and politicians to be constantly opining - about the state of things and how the ‘machine’, or the ‘divided brain’, or the ‘deep state’ or some kind of retreat from a kind of indigenous ‘grace’ or some kind of ‘spiritual crisis’ are at the heart of the ‘meta-crisis’ or ‘poly-crisis’ – is that there’s never a time when sitting down and touching the real and simple complexity of reality seems to enter in.

Or otherwise, when reality is touched – through meditation or some other (ordinary) practice – it seems to require some kind of complicated interpretation, framing or model-making. The experience itself, it seems, is never enough.

At a meta level, this means, tragically, that experience can be ignored and set aside – even denied. Why, otherwise, would the deaths of tens of thousands in Gaza (and in other genocides in the world and over time) be allowed to continue? Why would the climate crisis still be the subject of to-and-fro transactional bartering – or even denial – as the reality of its effects become ever more stark and clear? Why, given the evidence at the time, and even stronger evidence emerging now, that vaccines are among the most effective ways of controlling and preventing a virus like COVID, did some of those who are and have been most eloquently opinionated about the state of the world, fall for the conspiracy myths? Why would queer and neurodivergent children (and adults) still be denied and marginalised – their psychological and educational needs unmet – in the name of some ignorant, throw-back belief systems?

I haven’t got a clear understanding of all this. That is to say, I can’t get why intelligent, articulate people whose academic credentials give them cultural credibility and kudos, opt for such non-rational sets of frames. I can only surmise that they value above all else their own voice and opinions (‘freedom of speech’, it’s now often called), believing, perhaps, that their personal genius or spiritual insight will lead them to discover the one thing, the one connection, the one theory or belief system that will bring us humans to salvation.

Yet, another year passes, and there is no sign of the meta (or poly) crisis abating. No sign of there being some kind of glorious developmental path that humans can individually or collectively follow to reach a place of insight and enlightenment.

Another year, though, and human beings – other life forms too – are living their ordinary lives in line with the ebbs and flows of their biology, psychology, culture and community. And at its best, humanity in these times is a great thing. Not a better thing, necessarily, than other communities and ecosystems of lifeforms, but we have better health, knowledge and potential now than at any time in our history. The truth is that we don’t need to return anywhere to rediscover our ‘nature’ or ‘spirit’. That path is itself an ‘untruth’ – a fallacy of some golden age that never was. Unpsychology, therefore, doesn’t take us ‘back there’, but tries to stay – always – in the here and now.

Learning, always learning, and leading ordinary grounded lives.

When we live our ordinary lives and, crucially, are allowed to live them ordinarily by those who hold power and make and have made the decisions that have led us here, we have the potential to be… well OK. And that’s enough – or should be. Yet, in the world today, there are too many people who live with the pain of meaningless loss and losing. Free from oppression, brutality and discrimination, we might simply be able to have love and hold solidarity for each other, living out our beautifully diverse and creative lives. And that might mean something…

At the end of the day, when we lose someone we love or we approach our own personal ending, wouldn’t it be great if we were able to face this with a sense of thankfulness and gentleness, alongside the pain and grief? With community and loved ones around us, bringing us soul and solace for these deeply human, very ordinary changes and transitions? We don’t need big words and ideas, but we might need to stay close to the ground and to each other in order to traverse these difficult times.

In truth, there’ll be another year, and another and another, and none of us will see them all. So, this one’s for my Dad, Ian Thorp, who saw ninety-one of them, and my friend, Karl Statton, who saw sixty-eight, and who were among the best of us…

Introduction

As editors of Unpsychology Magazine, we decided to take a pause from publishing a magazine this year. This would have been our 11th issue since we began back in 2014. Instead we conjured up some small projects that each of us would facilitate and encourage – A Lattice of Letters, coordinated by Lesley. A Writers’ Playgroup, hosted by Julia. A Small Forms pamphlet project, facilitated by Steve. These are all ongoing, and the results of some or all of these may (or may not!) appear here on Substack in due course.

This is the third in a series of conversations between members of the Unpsychology community with editor, Steve Thorp, entitled From Here To Somewhere – A Conversation for Breaking Times. Here, takes up the baton of dialogue with and this will be followed by others over coming weeks, which we will also publish here. An edited version of the whole thing may, in time, be published as a printed pamphlet and/or digital download. We’d welcome your comments and feedback, and hope that this will contribute something other than the wider conversation around ‘world’ and ‘mind’ in these troubled times.

, , - Unpsychology editors

Note

The first dialogue – between and is linked below, we’d recommend you read it first:

This one follows on – a second exchange between and

From Here to Somewhere - conversation 3: Susan and Steve

and

Susan

Dear Steve, Julia and Erifily…

Where to start? You have already woven such a rich context of experience, feeling and response. I’m aware of a number of common threads running through your exchanges (chief amongst them perhaps, grief) and also of individual strands of emphasis and care. Choosing which thread to pick up now is in itself a defining gesture, one which will shape the fabric of the conversation going forward.

And this, the significance for ‘the world’ of small everyday choices, of intimate gestures and slight changes of direction, is where my head and heart are drawn at the moment.

As an edge-dweller, I often find myself pulled in the opposite direction to the main current. Right now ‘the world’ is conceived as a theatre for the play of vast, distant, and tectonic forces. The vocabulary we use to portray the human condition is one of scale and quantity: numbers of people starving, numbers of bombs dropped, numbers of trees felled. The only people who seem to matter ‘in the end’ are the titans. I find myself longing for those aspects of human experience that arise out of closeness, smallness, and particularity.

Erifily, your account of the impact of a single image of a Palestinian father holding his dead son touches me deeply. Likewise, the story you share of your grandpa Ilias, and his simple act of kindness to the girl on the stairs. Perhaps what I’m touched by here is the value of individual ‘response-ability’, the ability (he and you demonstrate), to respond to the immediate needs which lie directly in front of us. To care about the small stuff.

As chance would have it (?) this weekend I found myself stepping into the tiny church dedicated to Julian of Norwich, the fourteenth century ‘mystic’ Julia mentions in our first dialogue. Tucked away in a quiet backwater of Norfolk, this young woman wrote an account of ‘revelations’ she experienced during a life-threatening illness. It is the first known book (the first ‘small form pamphlet’) written in English by a woman. As I stepped into her ‘cell’, I noticed that someone had left a bowl filled with hazelnuts and strips of paper containing another frequently quoted extract of her text:

He showed me a little thing the size of a hazelnut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and I thought, ‘What can this be?’

And the answer came, ‘It is all that is made’.1

It has taken 600 years for these words to reach me. The arc of consequence has a very long reach. None of us know how the small gestures we make today will land ‘in the end’.

As I write, I’m aware of a rising tide of scorn which mocks me, telling me that ‘the world’, with its enormity of trouble, has little need for small acts of kindness, close encounters, and time taken to experience each other in our particularity. And yet, I dare to suggest that it is the erosion (and sometimes trashing) of these more intimate dimensions of experience which creates the conditions for the inhumanity we are currently witnessing.

If there is one image from recent conflicts which chills me to the bone, it is the cold, calculated distance of drones dropping bombs on homes, schools and hospitals (on this man, this woman and this child). It is our distance from living bodies, and most especially from eyes, which creates the conditions for brutality on an epic scale. Nearer to home it is this same distance which allows us to ‘drop bombs’ on strangers in the comments we leave on social media feeds, or hurl insults at one another across the distance of large protest gatherings.

Picking up on Nora Bateson’s question, ‘What are the conditions that allow someone to NOT be caught in seductive, destructive hoops of false sense of belonging?’,2 I wonder if the root of the compulsion to ‘pick a side’ and identify with the groupthink of that side, lies in the deep wound (‘the grief at the heart of it all’) which is the lived experience of not mattering in our ‘smallness’. If everything around me reinforces the narrative that what I imagine, feel, think and long for is of little importance in the ‘grand scheme of things’, if what I choose to do doesn’t really matter ‘in the end’, then I will look for significance through being part of something bigger, brighter, and louder than my ‘puny’ existence. I will go chasing glamour and celebrity; drama, novelty and news. Shorn of the sense of aliveness that comes from mattering, I may also be seduced by the intensity created through conflict.

In the quiet backwater of my psychotherapy practice, I encounter another person face to face, eye to eye.3 I dare hope they come to realise that what they imagine, feel, think and do matters. I have no idea how this cherishing of intimate encounter will affect the tectonic forces at play, but I do believe that caring about the small stuff matters. I find myself wondering what might happen if we stayed with our smallness, cherished it even (like Julian’s hazelnut). Maybe we’d find that our smallness is not just an insignificant detail. It is our own unique way into ‘all that is made’. Not a ‘part’ but a ‘portal’...

Steve

Susan, the careful attention you give to your words gives me hope. Let me say why. You champion smallness and the sustaining of human contact, keeping the distance between us psychologically close. For me this is encapsulated simply in the Golden Rule – the ‘ethic of reciprocity’. It’s not enough practiced in real life, I think and, if it was, the world might be a more intimate, quieter and – dare I say – better place.

Obviously I think this would be a good thing!

I have taken to imagining a more ordinary world lately. It seems to me that the need to make meaning, to worship, to grow and be ambitious – always human tendencies – have over time become unchallenged assumptions which play out without counterbalance.

Ordinariness, acceptance, smallness, modesty, humility. All of these have cultural implications from religious practice – I’m guessing Julian of Norwich might have recognised and understood them. However, I’m not locating them in this realm – placing them more within an imaginative context in which to ask, what might it be like if our cultural lives were more accepting, small, modest and carried humility? What would they be like if there weren’t imaginary mountains to climb of success, riches and, more damagingly, control and power?

What would it be like if the worlds we created were more horizontal, ecological and intimate – and less about always wanting to move on up and make an impact?

It’s quite hard to articulate this, I think. Our language is one of ‘power’ and ‘empowerment’ (in both cultural and personal dimensions) and the world we have inherited means that this often seems necessary. Earlier, I asked about the place of anger in the mix of emotions and psychological diversity, and I think this is an important strand not to be missed.

Having said that, my mind turns – as it often does – to the worlds imagined by science fiction and fantasy writers, and those in particular whose work imagines extraordinary worlds in which ordinary people do ordinary things. Ursula K LeGuin is my go to for these stories and she (and others) tell us that the ‘titans’ and their ‘theatre for the play of vast, distant, and tectonic forces’ (as you put it) might appear to force history to their will, but in the wider view, seldom do in reality. They are often, in retrospect, seen as oddities and anomalies, and people recognise them for who they are and, more importantly, what they have done.

Powerful historical figures (and contemporary ones too) are often seen as cruel, sociopathic and beyond the pale. They may force ordinary people to their will, or persuade us to follow them but, as time moves on, we return to our smaller lives and, perhaps, these are the cultural habits that are embedded more deeply? The words of small people like Julian of Norwich, the music of folk in their cities and communities that become unexpectedly universal, and the art and the science that accumulates to give us grounded knowledge to take us into the future.

Like you, I wonder whether I will be seen as naive in writing this. However, we all live short lives – the ‘titans’ and the rest of us alike – and I’d rather have lived with a curious, muddled and imperfect mind that may have stumbled across a metaphor of a hazel nut ‘that is all that is made’, or an acorn that holds a person’s essence,4 and to have loved openly and without expectation, than achieved something for my own glory – or even for the glory of a nation or god or set of human values. And, of course I will have done these things imperfectly, but that’s OK…

Back to you Susan – see what you have evoked? I love what your words have brought out in me… though, I must admit, I’m still contemplating the place of anger in the unpsychological puzzle…

Susan

Thank you for your heartfelt response Steve – as you say, I pay ‘careful attention’ to words. I trust in a kind of somatic response to language. The body seems to include what the mind tries to exclude (the missing pieces and blind spots, the inconvenient truths). Right now what my mind seems determined to exclude is the very thing you bring back into our conversation – anger. I can relate to anxiety, grief and helplessness, but anger is rarely foreground. You’ve got me wondering how this can be (given there’s plenty to be angry about at the moment) and what this missing piece may be costing me.

As a way into this wondering, I want to pick out your word ‘counterbalance’. It seems that the minute we lean towards a singular analysis or solution (in this case my emphasis on the value of ‘smallness, closeness and intimacy’), a counterpoint will assert itself. You ask what our lives would be like if they were ‘more accepting, small, modest and carried humility’. I would sign up for this tomorrow, but without some counterbalance, ‘acceptance’ could morph into indifference, ‘smallness’ into timidity, and ‘humility’ into self-negation. It occurs to me that anger could be an essential counterpoint to indifference, timidity and self-negation. Anger is rousing, stirring and energising. It keeps us up at night. It takes us out of our comfort zone. Anger is hot, and this warmth can be life-giving, life-sustaining, and sometimes life-saving. The real enemy, I suspect, is not anger, but hatred and indifference, both of which are cold.

Hatred is perhaps the absence of love, whereas anger can often be an expression of love, a visceral reminder of the people, places and things we care about most deeply. A few years ago I returned home from work to find that my neighbour had butchered an old oak tree which overlooked our gardens (he was annoyed by the ‘leaf litter’ he had to deal with every autumn). It stood truncated like a violated torso, a two hundred year old veteran reduced to a stump. I still remember the terrifying power of the rage which inflamed me. It’s a small example (given all we have to be angry about in the world right now), but it makes the point: my anger was in direct proportion to the love I had for my old friend, the tree.

Of course, like any fire, anger can both warm the pot and burn the house down. As I stood witness to this act of casual carnage, what frightened me was that my anger felt like it could burn the house down. As Marianne Williamson reminds us ‘Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.’5 Perhaps the reason anger is generally not foreground for me is that I fear its power?

So what are we to ‘do’ with the power of our anger? The first thing must surely be to recognise and include it (note to self); to sit down with it and get to know it; to ask who is angry and why. Am I angry because someone or something has harmed me or others I care about? Or am I angry because I’ve not got ‘my way’ (what I value has been buried under someone else’s values)? Am I angry because this state masks other more vulnerable feelings (grief, lostness, impotence, shame) and what would happen if I invited these to the table too? Or am I angry because I feel trapped in a rotten system which is not (yet) ready to take the leap of faith that will usher in a new way of being (am I a caterpillar bound tight in the chrysalis?) Perhaps anger is always a combination of many elements.

Nora Bateson6 reminds us that ‘Natural processes are never singular. Ever.’ Yet we tend to view ‘anger’ as we might a monocrop of Rapeseed – all one colour. I have a passionate dislike for the monolithic labels we increasingly use to describe intricate ecologies of feeling (‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ being the chief culprits)7. What if we were to consider ‘anger’ as a collective noun like ‘forest’ or ‘meadow’. In this sense, each person’s anger is a unique correlation of constituent feelings. And this is where I loop back to the value of ‘staying close’ and of ‘intimacy’, because what anger may be asking of us is to come into relationship with its particularity, to be curious. If I could understand my own anger in the context of a wider ecology of feeling, perhaps I might come to know ‘what to do with it’?

Of course, before I can get to know my anger, I need to learn how to contain it. And that’s a lifetime’s work in itself. Maybe holding an intention to acknowledge, contain, and come into relationship with anger is the work of our time.

In her exploration of systemic change, Nora Bateson writes about a stage prior to change that allows organisms and living systems to become ready to respond in new ways. This process of ‘ready-ing’, she suggests, may be what makes the subsequent change possible. ‘We must move’, she writes, ‘from change as an outcome of particular actions to change as a consequence of systemic ready-ing’. Perhaps anger is part of this ‘ready-ing’ because it stops us falling asleep, falling into indifference, or falling into defeat and despair. Anger keeps us connected to what (and who) we care about, and it reminds us that we have ‘power beyond measure’.

So, as with many of our present felt responses to the world’s casual carnage, it seems that we must bear our anger, neither denying it nor giving it free reign. I confess I have a long way to go before I achieve this counterbalance. But I am willing to aim for it. Which brings us full circle, to the value of patience and humility. Only now (thanks to you Steve) the circle is wider and richer because it includes anger ...

Steve

I am lucky in this conversation to be able to follow and respond to the words, ideas and experiences of all the ‘minds’ in our small ecosystem; those of us who have chosen to engage with this exchange about an ‘unpsychology’ for breaking times. All of us, so far, Julia, Erifily, you - Susan and I, have come to this with our own subjectivity and complexity – and that is exciting; and we have others to come in the conversations to follow…

What’s also interesting is that, though there are touchstones that some of us share (Nora Bateson’s ideas, for example, and the words of the young mediaeval anchoress, Julian of Norwich that you and Julia quoted), what comes through is the specificity – the individuality of our mental and somatic experiences.

These days, I like to brush against ideas, I think, and let their texture and form do their work with me – as they percolate and enter the complexity of what we are talking about here – the ‘mind in the world’. What we have agreed to recognise as a kind of ‘unpsychology’, could be an upending, an ‘alternative’ or a counterbalance to something we might call ‘psychology’. Or it might be something that places that discipline (with all its wisdom and insights) within the multiple contexts that Nora Bateson wishes us to look for and recognise: “the small arcs of larger circles”, as the title of her first book has it.

Having said all that, I keep bringing my own conversation with myself back to experience. The alternative is to go out and try to make all this somehow universal. To construct a ‘theory of everything’ as writers like Ken Wilber and, I might venture, Ian McGilchrist might have attempted to do. It’s not that I think these projects have no value – I’ve brushed up against them and learned from them, myself – it’s more that my intuition is that their scope and ambition is just too big – eventually they move away from the relational intimacy that makes personal ‘self’ and collective ‘culture’ so interesting and interdependent.

The emotions you write about – and their counterbalances, which might include anger – are, after all, familiar things to all of us. Kind of small and ordinary. Though they become all-encompassing and dangerous when they are passed through the filters of power, belief and assumptions about culture.

Anger is, as you imply, complex, and I love the way you’ve addressed it, which carries real potential for this wider conversation. Anger – the feeling – is a spontaneous, sometimes even righteous thing. Your tree deserved your anger, because the magnitude of that anger reflected the size of the love you held for it. But what then? Do we become hateful and indifferent towards the person who chopped it down. Do we, like Erifily, start to dance in response to our despair? Do we learn to contain anger, or could we also learn to let it flow like lava?

I don’t know the answers to these questions or what they might look like in practice. Yet, I know I’ve struggled with anger in my life, sometimes out of fear, but also as a kind of ‘wrestling’, (which is an image that Stephen Jenkinson also evokes in relation to facing death and ‘wrestling our angel’).8 The implication of some kind of disciplined practice – a martial art, perhaps, with rules and limits – could give us a clue about one direction our approach to anger could take. However, this might still also need its own counterbalance – the recognition that the efficacy of such a psychological ‘wrestling’ rests on a recognition of mutuality. So, this isn’t about ‘me’ wrestling ‘my’ anger, but all of us allowing, enabling and encouraging this process and practice in everyone.

Crucially, for me, this rests on the assumption, acceptance and fundamental valuing of 1) equality, 2) diversity and 3) interdependent relationality. Otherwise, anger becomes just a weapon in a power struggle in which the strongest impose their own contained and repressed anger on the rest of us.

A final image, Susan. Many of us have been taken by the recent pictures and videos of the protesters in cartoon and animal suits confronting highly militarised police in American cities. What kind of anger is that, do you think? Provocative, certainly, and it certainly seems to have caught the authoritarians off guard. A giant plastic frog or yellow duck is difficult to see as an enemy and, psychologically, it might give our own playful inner frog and duck a kind of boost, or offer a shield (which is another image entirely!). In a similar way, perhaps, 3rifily’s dance workshops tap into another somatic aspect of anger – and all the other emotions we are trying to live with at the moment…

Susan

So here I am with my third and final contribution to our multi-layered and many-linked onward flowing conversation. I want to speak as best I can from the messy, still-forming, often contradictory seedbed of my own lived experience. Truth is that something in your last communication, Steve, unsettled me. On first reading your words, I felt a little exposed and vulnerable. This was quickly followed by a protective-deflective turning away. Fortunately I care enough about this process that a part of me managed to stay with and begin to track (wrestle with) my inner reaction. What has emerged feels important for me personally, but also perhaps for the complex weave we are threading together in the context of an unpsychology for breaking times.

The pinch point in your communication was your insight that ‘anger – the feeling – is a spontaneous sometimes righteous thing’. With this word ‘righteous’ you rumbled me, exposing a blind spot in my testimony around the incident with the oak tree. Yes I felt heartbroken and angry, but I also felt righteous. I felt sure of standing on higher ground than my neighbour who chopped down the oak because he didn’t want to rake up leaves. And this mote in my eye turns out to be no small thing. Because the shadow of righteousness is disdain, or at its worst, contempt. Since the tree incident, following which I expressed my anger to my neighbour, he and I have regarded each other with a degree of contempt.

Righteousness is the perfect cover for closet contempt. Perhaps this is why contempt is particularly invisible to well-meaning, tree-loving, liberal-leaning, generally caring people like me. It is one thing to have a critical dislike for the values someone else holds, but when this slips into disdain for the person holding them, something shifts which is chilling and dehumanising.

In a bid to understand the nature of my contempt, I dug around until I stumbled on an old Greek word for contempt (bear with me, I’m a bit of an etymology geek). Used in the New Testament, Eexoutheneō (ἐξουθενέω) combines the prefix ek- (meaning ‘out from’) and the root oudenóō, (which relates to the word for ‘nothing’). Understood in this root sense, ‘contempt’ literally means to ‘cast out as nothing’. If the violence in the middle east (and on our own streets) has taught us anything, it is that once we regard a people (or a person) as worth-less (ie of less value than me), or worst still as ‘worthless’ (ie of no value at all), it becomes possible to perpetrate all manner of injuries and atrocities.

The more I acknowledge my own pocket of contempt around the incident of the tree, the more strongly I find myself wondering if this (contempt) rather than anger, could be the real undoing of us. If one of the propositions of unpsychology is that we cannot consider the health of an individual psyche without taking into account the psychological health of the whole (‘the mind in the world’) – and vice versa - then anything which leads to parts being ‘cast out as nothing’ blocks all prospect of genuine psychological ‘health’ (internally and externally) at micro and macro levels.

This brings me back to more familiar ground, explored in my first response, around the vital importance of intimacy, of close-up, unmediated meeting of each other face to face. Put simply it is much harder to feel contemptuous when we look each other in the eye. Beholding each other at close quarters, we encounter in the face, not only the person’s vulnerability but also something of their distinction, their sovereign incomparable worth.

This, my emphasis on the importance of looking each other (and ourselves) ‘in the eye’, may go some way to explain why I am not altogether comfortable with the recent pictures and videos of protesters in cartoon and animal suits confronting highly militarised police in American cities. Yes, I can see how wearing a frog costume is disarming. At the fundamental level of us as creatures, confronting a cartoon animal (with its association of childhood) is far less likely to set off the Amygdala’s threat alarm and instigate the ‘fight’ response. And yes, I am all for play and dancing, and colour and joy as essential binding agents in our collective experience of being human. A smiling frog signals ‘innocence’. But, as you opened with Steve, are any of us wholly ‘innocent’? When does a costume become just another mask, so I don’t meet you eye to eye?

When I cannot see ‘the eyes that look at me’ (your subjective truth in the moment) I cannot know your intention. I cannot know if you are indeed innocent, or if you are masking some contempt behind the cartoon green smile. In the absence of direct experience of your subjective intention, I may find myself projecting all manner of fantasy, prejudice and bias onto you. In this moment the thread which binds us in our shared humanity is severed (interestingly, our word ‘contempt’ comes from the PIE root *tmn(e)- which means ‘to cut’).

So what might all this mean in the context of our exploration of unpsychology? Well, for me, a couple of threads stand out from my experience of being part of this conversation. The first is that we need each other to uncover the blindspots which obscure our view of the whole into which we are all woven (thank you Steve). This inclusion of what lies in the margins of our line of sight matters. Unpsychology is interested in the relationship of the ‘individual’ to the whole. What I fail to see in the micro moment of my own lived experience mirrors, is implicated in, and affects the health of the whole. Conversely, the mote in the collective eye affects my ability to experience personal wholeness and health. If we are to stand any chance of seeing more completely, we need to keep turning the telescope from one aspect to the other.

It seems clear, as William Blake famously encapsulated in his poem ‘Auguries of Innocence’, that we can ‘see the world in a grain of sand’. The micro and macro are constantly informing each other. They are not two separate realms. And this brings me to the second thread which seems to be woven into the context of an unpsychology for breaking times - the intention to wrestle with the paradox of ‘both-and’.

So I’ll bow out now. Engaging in this dialogue has taken me to some unexpected places (which is surely one of the gifts of unpsychology). I think one of the learnings that will stay with me, is that it takes time, a good deal of to and fro, and a commitment to wrestling, for what is most vital (in both senses of the word) to surface from the field. With thanks to you Steve, to Julia and Erifily, I hand the space over to you, Catherine...

The next part of this conversation will follow soon… when it’s ready… In the meantime, please let us know what you think about this question. What does From Here To Somewhere mean to you in these breaking times?

Notes and references

Introduction

As editors of Unpsychology Magazine, we decided to take a pause, this year, from publishing a magazine. This would have been our 11th issue since we began back in 2014. Instead of a magazine we conjured up some ‘nubs’ – small projects that each of us would facilitate and encourage – A Lattice of Letters, coordinated by Lesley. A Writers’ Playgroup, hosted by Julia. A Small Forms pamphlet project, facilitated by Steve. These are all ongoing, and the results of some or all of these may (or may not!) appear here on Substack in due course.

This post is the second in a series around one of the pamphlet themes – a conversation between members of the Unpsychology community entitled From Here To Somewhere – A Conversation for Breaking Times. This is a series of ongoing online dialogues; a way, perhaps, of resetting our unpsychological inquiry after a decade of curation and practice, and setting out some tentative directions for the future. The first dialogue – between Steve and Julia is linked below, we’d recommend you read it first:

This one follows on – an exchange between and – These will be followed by others over coming weeks, which will also be published here. An edited version of the whole thing may, in time, be published as a printed pamphlet and/or digital download. We’d welcome your comments and feedback, and hope that this will contribute something other than the wider conversation around ‘world’ and ‘mind’ in these troubled times.

, , - Unpsychology editors

From Here to Somewhere - conversation 2: Erifily and Steve

&

Introductory note

Unpsychology is concerned with ‘mind in context’ – our conversations always take place within a particular, ever-changing slice of time and place. This one, between Erifily Nikola and Steve Thorp, has been going on against the backdrop of the war in Gaza and the events that surround it – the declaration of the IDF military campaign as genocide, the sailing of the Global Sumud Flotilla to try to break the aid blockade, and the wider implications of this and other historical and looming conflicts in our breaking world. How do we, as individuals and communities respond to all this? How do we get from Here to Somewhere…?

Erifily

Dear Steve and Julie. Since we are all working in a project that is uncharted territory for us all, I decided to experiment.

My usual response for any email, would be to read it, see what comes up, reply spontaneously and with next day delivery. This time I decided to sit with it. A regular feat for my neurodivergent brain that has been used to immediate reaction. To stay with the feelings and allow them to expand and evolve in time.

And as I sat, feelings began to bubble up. 

The consoling feeling of not being alone in struggling with thoughts and feelings. A hint of guilt - these letters are not addressed to me, it feels like peaking into a private conversation. And then a phrase stuck out.  It stuck out so much I couldn’t remember anything else from your exchanges:

And I realized that I know so many people who DO care but don’t know what to do. We have been trained to feel helpless. Frozen in front of our daily doom scroll. Fed with images that are both too far away and too close. 

“Here look! See the devastation? The evil? The darkness? See the blood and gore???? There is nothing you can do about that”.

That wondrous connective web that I so love is also my trainer in learned helplessness…

And something snapped in me. But not in a bad way. See, last year I was diagnosed with ADHD and medicated. The change it brought felt not short of a miracle to me. I never knew things could be so easy. I had no idea how much I struggled all my life for some basic tasks.

But as I got on medication, something else happened – I lost a big part of my intuition and my empathy. As if there was a buffer between that part of myself and the world.

So, back to now. There I was pondering on Steve’s phrase when a video of a Palestinian father holding his dead son popped on my feed. And for a fleeting moment, my reality unravelled.  For a single second I saw myself, holding my dead daughter in my arms, right there on the screen. 

And I felt it. For a single second I felt all of it and it was too much to bear.

Even for that single second.

The experience was over, but my mirroring / empathic traits were back.

Since then I have been rocking my brain to formulate a plan. Enough of the passive observer! I made some calls. Rallied my friends. Teachers, artists. Everyone is eager to participate -as if everyone was waiting for something - an idea, someone to take the lead? We are working on a project that will fundraise as well as create awareness. 

Dance classes, dance parties, lectures, fanzines. If you are interested, I will keep you posted as we progress.

Humanity demands action it seems. And I for one, I am done doom scrolling.

Free Palestine! 

Editor’s note: you can find information on ’s first wave of MOVE FOR PALESTINE Solidarity Dance Workshops, which she and others are running in Athens in October 2025 at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hVIpYvrTTAaQREURq9jTr-49CcBLNgVu/view?usp=drive_link

Steve

Your response made me smile, Erifily! I love the way you’re tracking your own unpsychological territory – and a lot of it rang true for me. All those buffers and pieces of empathy that obstruct or hurt and take us down potentially different paths of life and experience…

I think, as Julia alluded to, that a lot of the truest and on-the-nose insights around mind and world at the moment come from those who inhabit – through no fault of their own – the edges of this experiential reality: mad folk, neurodivergent people, those who suffer psychologically in and from this world. Everything seems to be upside down – and so it takes a lot to do what you have done and turn the grief and despair into something with action and smiles!

As you say, “Humanity demands action it seems…”

I wanted to dig in a little to what it takes to move from where you were before to where you moved to. And to also reflect on a question that Nora Bateson asked on social media recently, namely: “What are the conditions that allow someone to NOT be caught in seductive, destructive hoops of false sense of belonging?” 1

It feels to me as if these hoops are what take us from what we might call ‘reasonable relationship’ (that I think all humans and living things are capable of and, at least some of the time, practice) to something akin to hate, denial, projection and blame. What is it that enables people to justify the mass killing of tens of thousands of other human beings, in the name of ‘justice’ or ‘freedom’? What makes it possible for people to continue poisoning and destroying the ecosystems and landscapes of the earth? Why does genocide keep cycling around the human psyche – even though most of us would consider it ‘evil’?

And what makes it possible for you, Erifily, to not be caught in these destructive hoops, reaching for something more beautiful and empathetic instead – to send us “smiles from Greece”?

I am asking a lot of questions here, and I’m not asking for answers necessarily, but I am aware that people who are faced with the experience and reality of their own neurodiversity and/or madness are often able to be clear about what justice and injustice really looks (and feels) like.

It’s complex (because the world is complex) but not particularly complicated. I’m interested that those of us who are living at the edges of the contexts of what society sets and defines as ‘normal’ behaviour, often look aghast at the actions and pronouncements of those who claim to be speaking for ‘common sense’ and ‘moderation’. However, we also know that, as Nora puts it: “ It is possible for human beings to warp their realities and get caught up in just about anything at the expense of everything.”

Is this what is happening here? Because if the warping of reality is wrapped up in the very fabric of the political and economic systems we live with, then maybe we edge-dwelling humans need to be a lot more imaginative – and courageous!

There are no easy paths, it seems, but there are ways in which people, at various times in their life – like you, Erifily, in the here and now of your life – are about to do something a little different. To extend ‘reasonable relationship’ beyond just a family or friendship group, and “to address the nourishment of these unspecified conditions that allow people to remain able to find belonging more readily in the broader embrace of life.”

And anger. What about anger, and grief, and the urge to walk away? What can we do with these emotions and impulses? It seems important to know something about how these are to be ‘in the mix’ too…

Erifily

Dear Steve, I am sorry I was so late to respond. I was trying to take my time to process. Your words are important to me. I wanted to read your answer several times, before replying, to read the link to the Nora Bateson article and take time to think on it.

Does life work that way? Of course not.

My first response was in the summer. I took my time to reply… I was on vacation. I wanted to repeat the same process. Tough luck… Neither my personal nor professional life got the memo…

I have been stalling because this is important ot me. This is not a business email to just respond, mindlessly. Unsychology was a moment, a connection, an inspiration to me. It still is. I was trying to give it the courtesy,

Now, lonelier than ever and pressed for time, pressed for answers, with the urge not to leave anyone behind, with everyone asking “what do we do now?”, and my intention scattered again, I stand here.

Now I’m working again, fighting again, being there for people again. Listening again. Im lucky to have so many people in my life. But some days its easier said then done.

You asked “what makes it possible for me…” This is my “Why”…

When I was young. 8 or 10, I don’t remember exactly, the apartment next door was a physician’s private practice. My grandpa, Ilias, went out one day and saw this girl, crying, sitting on the stairs. She was sick, the doctor gave her medicine she couldn’t pay for. (1980s- no credit cards, no paypal)

He just gave her the money. Money he couldn’t afford to give. A neighbour saw him and asked him – What if she is lying? He replied – What if she is not?

I remember that moment so clearly. The goodwilled person who asked, in fear, in hopes of helping my grandfather not to be taken in by a possible con artist. I remember my grandfather. They both came from a good place. They both tried to help. But helping from a place of fear doesn’t have the intended results and can often do more harm than good.

That day, I choose to be that person. Like my grandfather. Someone who can give fearlessly. A truly rich person.

Some will always take advantage - so what…? In this cheap and stingy world, I would rather lose by giving than from holding back. We need each other. Now more than ever in our lifetime. Right now we need clarity of intent if we are to overcome this age of miscommunication, propaganda and gaslighting.

To find trust and faith. And dance. No more sitting still in front of scrolling images.

Tonight all eyes on Sumud (the Global Sumud Flotilla). Until they safely arrive. Tomorrow all the bodies will be out on the streets, protesting their abduction.

Apathy is humanity’s worst enemy. Pandora’s gift or curse, was hope. The enemy is inside each and every one of us.

For me, it’s believing in people enough to keep engaging with the world.

Editors note: the progress of the Global Sumud Flotilla sailing to Gaza in September 2025 can be tracked HERE: https://globalsumudflotilla.org/tracker/2

The next part of this conversation will follow soon… when it’s ready… In the meantime, please let us know what you think about this question. What does From Here To Somewhere mean to you in these breaking times?

These online, on-page ‘unpsychological’ dialogues have been a staple format for Unpsychology Voices for a number of years. We’ve used them here in our online publications, and in our magazines too. It’s a time of trouble for the world at the moment (hasn’t it always been so?) and this plays out in our bodies, our minds and our everyday lives… So, here’s a short exchange between us that comes out of our own individual and relational experience… on fatigue…

It begins on Saturday and extends into Sunday, the following day…

On fatigue…

Julia (Saturday)

Hello Steve.

I'm on a train just now, heading home from London where I was attending a meeting. I'm feeling pretty exhausted: it's the end of the day, and the Big Smog – while a brilliant city – is also demanding with its crowds and its traffic and its urban pace.

Fatigue has been on my mind lately, as I've just come out of a period of unusual malaise. For several weeks I'd been tired and dragging, with sleep making little difference. Mainly this has been due to a relentless workload, but also a recently-identified vitamin deficiency. Having now dipped into vitamin supplements, I've noticed that I am feeling better. But even that temporary drain on my resilience has made me more aware of my limits, more cautious about making commitments.

I've also recently found myself trolled by books such as Tricia Hersey’s Rest is Resistance, and Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing. I keep coming across them, and thinking, with bitter irony, that I don't even have the time to read, let alone to stop and do nothing! All the more reason why I must unplug!

But I haven't meant this to be a moan – rather as a chronicle of our times. Only five years ago, things came to a standstill and we all focused on the immediate circumstances surrounding Covid. In 2020, it felt as though the fast-paced culture of our society might really have broken under the weight of its own collective hubris. Yet here we are, a few years later and as busy as ever – streets glutted with cars, schedules glutted with appointments and social arrangements.

I love the work I have chosen to do – the projects in which I am involved, the writing I’m doing at this very minute – I just wish I had more time and more energy, less fatigue and less frazzled attention. So that is my opening bid to you: how can I observe this fatigue in such a way that it makes a difference? In other words, how can I slow down? Over to you…

Steve (Saturday evening)

Hi Julia,

I know that one of the things both of us have had to learn through our lives, and maybe through the past decade or so in particular, is how to work with our personal limits, and also with what we want to achieve in and for the world.

Our passions and calling don’t give us much choice in what we do. When we feel the ‘tug’ it’s almost impossible to resist, I think. But the cost can be the toll it takes on our very human bodies and minds. I share the frustration around the ‘self help’, ‘slow’ and ‘unplug’ movement. I know these writers mean well, but the seams of experience that both of us tap into, in our particular ways, don’t have any straight lines, causality and intent in them, however much someone tells us to slow down or stop!

And yet rest is essential for me too. As you know I retired from my employed work at the end of last year and it feels a bit like I am trying to recover from decades of engagement and ‘frazzled attention’ (as you put it!). I know that pandemic times were awful in many ways, but I must admit (slightly guiltily) to enjoying the pace and pattern of those times, and the seeming promise of a reset.

I think an important thing we’ve been exploring and learning together – personally and creatively – in the last few years is the importance of diversity of experience and the ways in which interrelating social, ecological and collective contexts (what Nora (Bateson) would refer to as transcontextuality) affect the individual human psychology (in this case, yours and mine) – in mind, body and spirit…

Anyway, while you’ve been on a slow train, I’ve been on my sofa on a filthily rainy day, watching sport for much of the time – escapism, some might say – but it’s part of what I need (I’ve discovered) to let my system settle. Even so, my darting, overactive mind still wants to be doing something… making a difference!

You ask: How can you slow down?

Frankly, I don’t know, Julia, except that sometimes our bodies and/or our minds short circuit or break down if we don’t find the right ways of balancing these energies and contradictions – the tensions between what we love to do and where our limits lie, and the big feelings we have about the world and each other…

Julia (Sunday morning)

Dear Steve

It’s morning now, and I’ve had a good long sleep. I’m ensconced on the sofa with a rug over my lap, cup of coffee by my side, and a view from my window out onto a glorious autumn morning. Fatigue is at bay.

Interestingly, much of my current work in the mad movement extols the value of breakdown. When I step outside the haven of my home, into the fast-paced world of 21st century capitalism, I see breakdown as a necessary corrective. I learned so much from my own personal breakdown, more than ten years ago now. Perhaps the hardest lesson was to recognise with humility that I can’t do it all. Clearly it was the hardest lesson: I’m still wrestling with it!

So I look with gratitude to the idea you’ve mentioned: balance. I think there is so much in this. I was about 12 years old when I finally learned how to ride a bike, overcoming my fear with a friend’s help. I can recall her shouting out words of encouragement from the pavement, and can still evoke the feeling of elation that I felt when I mastered the wobbling and found the sweet spot of balance which kept me upright. So perhaps I might evoke this memory in my current circumstances, and visualise my various commitments as the wobbles of gravity tugging on me. Work and rest both pull in their respective directions, and if I can stay attuned to them each simultaneously then I can find that sweet spot which will allow me to keep my momentum. This process is somatic - whether cycling or moving through the world’s challenges.

And taking the metaphor a bit further, I’m thinking now of the taxi ride which brought me from the Southbank area up to Kings Cross, before that train journey. The window of the cab was open onto a beautiful and freshly cool early afternoon. It snaked through the various neighborhoods - through Aldwych, along the Strand, by the Courts of Justice, along Fleet Street - and something I noticed was the many cyclists navigating past us. Bold and agile, they glided past us and slipped neatly into the small gaps between cars and buses, creating a sort of traffic ballet.

So there is something to be learned there as well: how to navigate the crowded roads of my responsibilities, with the agility and balance of an urban cyclist. I don my high-vis and I stock my pannier with my personal skills and inner resources. I know my friends have got my back – like the friend who helped me learn to ride in the first place. So I take hold of the handlebars and step down onto the pedal and….

Steve (Sunday morning)

…step on the pedal, Julia, and… away you go! Gliding and sliding through the cracks in the world and the city. Like the London cyclists, I think this is available to us, you know! It’s a marvellous thing, and an antidote to the apocalyptic naysayers who say that modern life is all rubbish. Because even when things are rubbish, there’s still joy, movement, relationship and relaxing moments to be had.

Your work with madness is a real boon, I think, because it tells us something crucial. That much more than big picture critiques of modernity, we might need nuanced and forensic reflections of individual and collective experience. That’s why I love Ursula LeGuin’s work. Somehow she always gave the impression of balance and integrity – even as she was telling her wonderfully detailed stories (and working very hard at her writing!). At the same time, diversity and normality is baked into her humanity – it’s just there, not debated or fought over. That kind of creative life makes me feel far less tired!

An old friend of Unpsychology, , who has an editing platform here on Substack posted this today:

I think it’s relevant. When we focus on consequences (for individual protagonists, that is to say, us) it might be easier to see our way through to what might be necessary for us to keep ourselves in balance. Obviously if marauders are attacking us, we need swift action, but at other times the everyday magic of ordinary human life might be enough to fend off fatigue…

I’m not sure if I’ve gone off track a little bit here (or a lot) but somehow finding context seems relevant when there are so many ‘big brains’ trying to bloody explain everything! Now that makes me very tired!

Julia (Sunday early afternoon)

I’m going to pick up on that wonderful word: joy. We could do worse than to use joy as our guiding principle, when finding balance. Obviously joy is as subject to the winds of fate as any other response: life’s only constant is change, so expecting constant joy is deluded. But recurrent moments of joy are possible, and finding these moments helps us to endure the things which drain us. For the record, I’m feeling a quiet joy just now, looking out at the lush green of the shared garden, and communing through words with you, and with our readers by extension.

I do think this is part of the story of balance – because it is so easy to get caught up in our work, and the demands upon us, and just settle into a groove of stress and resentment. I don’t mean that we can happy-think our way out of anything. But just as my body responds to a healthy diet and necessary vitamins, my mind is likewise nourished and sustained by those pockets of joy. Settling my attention onto those moments, when they happen, and allowing them to soak into me. Thank you for reminding me of this simple truth!

Steve (Sunday afternoon)

Hi Julia,

You’re so right! Pieces of joy.1 They make all the difference, and make the tiring stuff – even the bits we choose and love – more manageable, I think.

Like you, I’m enjoying the garden this afternoon – blue skies and sunshine replacing the stair-rod, greyed-out rainstorm skies of yesterday! And the birds are back flying, no longer hiding their bedraggled selves under bushes and trees.

I went to a class at the sports centre this morning – it’s called Body Balance – which is apt, given we’ve both been taking about balance in this conversation! I always feel rejuvenated after sessions like this, my yoga classes and the tennis I now play regularly. I know it’s a privilege to live like this, but all this does give me the sense of something that is the opposite to fatigue. Something joyful, balanced, engaged and then, perhaps, even enabling and energising.

And to reflect: championing balance and reminding each other of the importance of joy. I think that’s pretty unpsychological, don’t you…?

To be continued….?

1

In 2014, I (Steve) published a book of poetic essays entitled Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy, so JOY is right up there for this particular soul manifesto: https://www.rawmixture.co.uk/soulmanifestos

Raw Mixture are hoping to republish the book soon and Steve has been writing a series of short essays in the style of Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy on this Substack, you can find the most recent one below and the full series as it grows here: https://unpsychology.substack.com/s/soul-manifestos-24

Introduction

As editors of Unpsychology Magazine, we decided to take a pause, this year, from publishing a magazine. This would have been our 11th issue since we began back in 2014. Instead of a magazine we conjured up some ‘nubs’ – small projects that each of us would facilitate and encourage – A Lattice of Letters, coordinated by Lesley. A Writers’ Playgroup, hosted by Julia. A Small Forms pamphlet project, facilitated by Steve. These are all ongoing, and the results of some or all of these may (or may not!) appear here on Substack in due course.

This post is the first one in a series around one of the pamphlet themes – a conversation between members of the Unpsychology community around the title From Here To Somewhere – A Conversation for Breaking Times. The idea is to hold a series of online dialogues around this theme; a way, perhaps, of resetting this unpsychological inquiry after a decade of curation and practice, and setting out some tentative directions for the future.

We’ve used the dialogic approach on this Substack in the past and its worked well. This first dialogue – between Steve and Julia – will be followed by others over coming weeks, and these will also be published here. An edited version of the whole thing may then be published as a printed pamphlet and/or digital download. As always, we’d welcome your comments and feedback, and hope that this will contribute something other than the wider conversation around ‘world’ and ‘mind’ in these troubled times.

, , - Unpsychology editors

From Here to Somewhere - conversation 1: Steve and Julia

&

Steve

Dear Julia. I’m starting with grief, because that’s what I am sitting with right now – and I know I am not alone. Grief has a complicated dynamic, but when the causes are so clearly in our faces then the avoidance it can bring becomes a visceral thing. 

My grief-filled avoidance feels visceral – embodied, even. In the face of the horrors I see, my body tries to preemptively calm itself. As a new story comes down the line, my body starts to calm itself. My mind and body begin to turn away. This is a problem, because when we who have privilege and cultural dominance turn away, calm and numb ourselves with our visceral avoidance, we put ourselves in step with those whose more considered, deliberate avoidance will someday break our world completely.

Here is a world in which grief and avoidance are visceral:

News; hardly watchable. Information: overloaded and untrustworthy. Truth: subjective. Normality: a state emerging from avoidance and a growing civilisational fear of difference. The results are what we see. A heating world; racism, discrimination, othering; justified genocides; drone warfare, missiles raining.  

The ‘troubled mind’ – the pathological, mad, neurodiverse mind – emerges from how these things, literally, drive people mad. Injustice. Unfairness. Cruelty. The fear we feel at accumulated consequences of all these troubles for ourselves, our families and the wider global community of humans and non-humans. 

The premise we’ve held in relation to what we have called unpsychology is that ‘mind’ is contextual. And ecological. In psychotherapy, we (psychotherapists) work with individuals – sometimes groups. The focus is usually the individual’s distress, dysfunction and development. The contexts are family, identity, experience. They might be cultural. They are seldom civilisational.

During my years as a psychotherapist, I worked with people whose ‘trouble’ was centred on the ungraspable hyperobjects of climate and ecological breakdown. People have cried with me over burning tar sands, the plight of an injured bird, their desperation at worsening climate change, the tick tick tick countdown to something catastrophic that they could see coming and felt helpless to prevent. 

Often their anger and despair was at the wider political and economic contexts and with the people who are in positions to make decisions and make changes, but who have refused and/or are too tied into transactional politics and commercial interests to do so.

Somewhere is where we might be heading – for better or worse. This might be a starting point for our inquiry here, I think. What do you think? 

Julia

Dear Steve. When I think of ‘Somewhere’, I hear Judy Garland’s poignant voice calling out in her signature song about a ‘Somewhere’ without troubles, without pain and grief and cruelty and misery and without even trivial discomforts and annoyances. The Somewhere she evokes is just out of reach, just beyond the rainbow which we can see but cannot touch. It is of course an imaginary place, unreal and unreachable – even Oz had slavery, bureaucracy and a humbug behind a hubristic curtain at its helm.

But this yearning for relief from our world’s troubles, this has been a part of the human experience since the very beginning. So my first response to you, my dear friend, is to reassure you that the instinct to numb yourself from the sharp pains you encounter, this is not a failing. It is as natural a part of our inherent self-protection as the blood’s ability to form a clot, or the immune system to produce anti-bodies, or indeed the mind’s ability to dissociate during a traumatic event.

I often think of this famous invocation by Julian of Norwich:

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

How on earth do we reconcile the suffering of the world with a faith in the ultimate goodness of things? And how can we feel comforted by this reassurance when the state of things is so badly skewed with inequity, exploitation and violence?

Walt Whitman considered this conundrum in his poem, O Me! O Life!:

O Me! O Life!
O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
 That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

‘We’ are many, many voices here in this world we share together. Our most valuable contribution is to offer our truth, our one note to the harmony. For some, that note will be a joyful carefree laugh. For others, it will be a sobbing cry of despair. The point is to meet one another wherever we’re at, with compassion and with love.

We create ‘Somewhere’ with every note, every breath in and out.

Steve

Hi Julia… Yesterday, I was sitting in the garden on a very windy and changeably sunny afternoon. I had been playing tennis and so my body was tired but that, and the tumultuous landscape around me, felt viscerally joyful – almost ecstatic. Everything felt ‘in the now’ – entirely phenomenological – and I felt the temporary nature of things - of everything, including myself - and was ok with it…

So despair is not the only thing that is embodied – and I know that you’re right (and Julian of Norwich and Walt Whitman too) when you remind me of this. I also know that I’m not personally responsible for the conditions of despair, but the point is that it sometimes feels like I am, if only as part of a whole in which these conditions have been created and are playing out in our daily lives.

This might be the point on which the world balances, or tips. There is a psychological struggle and many of us humans “vainly crave the light”, as Whitman put it. There is a cultural expectation that there needs to be meaning, purpose or some kind of direction in our individual lives, but experience often tells us otherwise. Either the meaning or purpose seem out of reach, or the world just seems too brutal and imbalanced to hold any kind of direction for us, as individuals or collectively. So we retreat to the knowable and mundane. 

It seems to me that living with the contexts of crisis has always held characteristics and consequences: The crisis builds, becomes real in our human minds; then people suffer, or try to avoid suffering in various ways; then try to make a new type of meaning out of it – or a combination of all these. 

One difference from, say, a crisis the world might have faced in the days of Julian of Norwich (The Black Death), or Walt Whitman (the American Civil War), or the 20th Century crises of World and Cold Wars, and today’s ‘metacrisis’, is that social media magnifies everything. It makes the suffering and the awareness of suffering seem close in. It magnifies the immediate and makes every drama a crisis. It makes the personal and collective traumas of our world inescapable. 

They should be, I guess. Inescapable, I mean. We should be caring about climate breakdown and genocide and ecological collapse and fascism. We should be talking and thinking about what these mean, but sometimes the clamour of mis- and dis-information overwhelms us, and avoidance seems the only sensible way for a body and mind to respond. 

Until the drone bombs find us too… sitting in a garden, listening to the birds, watching the clouds racing…

As Anohni sings on her harrowing song Drone Bomb Me:

“So, drone bomb me, drone bomb me
Blow me from the mountains, and into the sea
Blow me from the side of the mountain…

…Let me be the first. I'm not so innocent.
Let me be the one. The one that you choose from above.
After all, I'm partly to blame”

And writing out those lines, I realise both that this is the grief I’m sitting with, and I should be sitting with it. Just as I should be sitting with the everyday life that exists for me in my garden too…

Julia

Dear Steve. It has been some weeks now and I’m finally replying. The world’s crises have cranked up a notch, with Israel now planning to occupy Gaza City - what is left of it, after bombing and starving its people into obliteration. The invasion of Ukraine continues, while further afield there are civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar. Conflict and discord exist all over the world. The USA is descending into fascism, and in the UK the right to civil protest is being dismantled. And of course, I’m picking and choosing - the suffering continues unabated for those all over the world who are being abused, raped, murdered, trafficked, exploited and bullied in all sorts of contexts. Violence persists. We persist in engaging violence. You are right to understand our entangled complicity, and to grieve accordingly.

You are also right to sit in your garden in peace, safety and quiet reflection. Because life is large enough to hold the grief and the peace together; both real, both valid. 

Steve, we’ve been sharing dialogues for nine years now, and from the first we concerned ourselves with the concept of paradox. In my own work, I’ve explored the idea that madness is an unfiltered perception of paradox - what I call the both/and nature of ‘madreality’. And in the pages of Unpsychology, over and over again we have invited our contributors and readers to explore questions that tease out the paradoxical aspects of life, to embrace contradictions as contextual iterations of something beyond our prescriptive and binary habits. Paradox is a compelling and demanding idea - perhaps never fully understood - and it deserves respectful and persistent inquiry.

We tend to think of paradox as an abstract, a theoretical way of framing things. But we’ve got it the wrong way round: we theorise reality as singular and discrete, in order to navigate our way through a bewildering blur. We’ve theorised this way for hundreds of generations, and now we mistake this practical lens for the way reality is.

But the nature of reality itself is complex, relational, contextual, and yes, paradoxical. Paradox is embedded in our every breath which keeps us alive but takes us that bit closer to our death. It is in the beauty of the fluttering zigzag flight of a butterfly which is snatched in the air by a swooping bird and cruelly devoured. It is found in every bite of a delicious meal, which gives us the energy that was stored within the cells of the deceased plants and animals consumed. Reality assures us that life is death - the ultimate paradox.  

And that too is the gift of paradox: we grieve for death and for loss, and at the same time we find comfort in life and in love. They are not either/or, they are both/and. (This is what the madfolk have been trying to tell us, all along…) 

Now I think it’s time to open up this dialogue to others, to see where it leads…

The next part of this conversation will follow soon… when it’s ready… In the meantime, please let us know what you think about this question. What does From Here To Somewhere mean to you in these breaking times?

Soul Manifestos introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has been well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

In the meantime, these pieces are written in a similar style to the original essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing over the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE, and find the full series as it grows HERE.

Soul Manifestos 2024/25

#08 : Ecologising

Note: a longer early version of this piece first appeared on Medium at https://medium.com/21stcenturysoul/tools-for-troubled-times-9b446e8366b, March 24, 2019

This cultural pattern is linear, so not a pattern at all, just a line leading to the sky. Whether the concern is fame, wealth, influence or spirit, or ‘loving oneself’, or yoga positions, or political power, we hold a fantasy that we ‘make it’ through our own hard work, and/or the benevolent intervention of a loving universe.

This pattern that is not a pattern is a problem. This linearity – a world of disciplines, cause and effect, input and output, resources, growth – is a big problem – for me, you (‘I’ and ‘I’), the Earth and all the other ‘singularities’ out there. The line goes up and out, and our journeys are tracked with words like ‘goal’, ‘growth’, ‘development’, ‘stages’, ‘advancement’, ‘solution’ and ‘success’.

A problem in the pattern that is no pattern always has to have a solution. It must always carries a knowing, a certainty, a reason ‘why’. And yet:

There is no why to ask.
We are why. ‘We’ includes inclusiveness,
We are crooked trees, in our forests
While ‘why’ resumes there is an answer,
Erasing necessary ambiguity.

(Nora Bateson, 2016)2

The act of re-engaging ‘mind’ with and within its evolving contexts (i.e. Earth and the crooked systems that have emerged from and within it), is an active process — so a ‘doing word’ is needed: Ecologise.

Q: what do we all do when we ‘ecologise’?

We place our minds within ever-shifting ecosystems (which exist in relation to a myriad of other ecosystems) and we pay attention — in the closest, most forensic, mindful way possible — to what emerges and changes in, around and through this complexity – this meshing mind and world.

Then we notice the ways in which our interdependent frames connect and relate, and through this come to a kind of understanding of the ever-changing relationality of our human ‘being’, and an awareness of what human life might begin to mean in amongst all this other (non-human) life and non-life.

Ecologising includes the dimensions of the human relational world – psychology has that piece right – but the social self is only a partial vision: a human-centred version of a much more interesting whole. Ecological relating is multi-dimensional and reaches out in all directions; and human beings are not at the centre of things.

I am saying here that we have to place ourselves differently in the schema before we can ever get to a point where we can see the pattern rather than the line; to start to act as if we are truly all within and part of that pattern. The spiritual intuition is that we are all connected. Connection is all well and good, but like most human-based schema it connects ‘I’ – the human being – with some other transcendent version or imagined extrapolation of ‘human’ (gods, God, universal consciousness, Gaia), rather than looking around to the material Earth we live upon and the lifeforms we share it with.

Placing ourselves differently in the world – ecologising in other words – might be a prerequisite to living differently in relation to the Earth and its systems (including human systems). This mind-shift requires humility, discipline, imagination and grounding – it’s all too easy to get caught by spiritual bypassing and political expediency – wherever you sit on the spiritual and political spectrums.

Ecologising requires interdependent thinking and integral practices. It asks us to see the world and its lifeforms as part of our own complex human ecology, not as ‘out there’. Not to see us as ‘us’ and everything else as ‘other-than’, but to sense the diverse and beautiful experiential worlds that all of us contribute to the pattern. And it invites us to connect, entwine and integrate the imaginal creations of our minds – our stories, poetry, music, art – with science, technology and the other more ‘material’ knowledge, within this ‘ecology of mind’, as Gregory Bateson terms it.

One ‘ecology’ we should seek to be intimately familiar with is that of our own body. We experience the world through our embodied perceptions, and it is through our embodied sensing of others that we relate to the world: to the other humans in our close-in circles and wider spheres, to the immediate ecosystems that surround us, and to the wider biosphere.

All this is ever-changing, ever-evolving. The way we perceive and experience this ecological self, is via what David Abram called “the body’s silent conversation with things”. He wrote in ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ that: “The sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world. The body’s action and engagements are never wholly determined, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself, continually shifting”.3

Our bodies senses interdependency, and this - when brought to mind - is how we experience our relationship with the world. Or, conversely, when we fail to tune in to the body’s moment-by-moment engagements, adjustments and adaptations to what is around us – and crucially with the diversity of what it might mean to be in a human body – we again swallow the myth of this ‘pattern that is a line’, coming to believe that there is one kind of privileged body and mind that is to be striven for.

We are all now living with the cultural, economic, industrial and ecological consequences of this pattern that is not a pattern; the privileged self that is not an ‘I’. These times are terrible and scary, and have carried us to the edge of global disaster. However, we can remind ourselves of a state of mind that can be held in our diverse and different minds and bodies – that of ecologising. So, as we step purposely towards the next rung of the ladder to climb, or the next stage of the quest to conquer, we could perhaps stop and remind ourselves of the infinitely more complex reality: the interdependent ecosystems – frames within frames within frames – that offer us the widest possible contexts for human and other-than-human life on earth.

A few weeks ago our website provider got in touch to say that they were no longer supporting legacy websites on their ‘portfolio’. This would be a bit of a long and boring story of big tech and marketing brands in the era of late-stage capitalism taking each other over and then deciding to ditch the unprofitable bits, but I’m not going to go there right now…

Anyway, here’s some information about subsequent changes to Unpsychology online and some reminders about where you can download and buy copies of Unpsychology Magazine and how to find us on the web.

Unpsychology online

1. The unpsychology website - www.unpsychology.org is down for the time being. Our main online presence for the time being will be this Substack. Over the next couple of weeks I am hoping to redirect the web address so that it points to Unpsychology Substack, where we publish our regular posts and articles. Watch this space!

2. We also have a Medium site for those people who prefer to get their online reading there: https://medium.com/unpsychologymag

3. Our unpsychology.org domain is still active and belongs to us, however, so you can get in touch with us by email - steve@unpsychology.org, julia@unpsychology.org and submisssions@unpsychology.org

4. We also (reluctantly) have Unpsychology social media accounts on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/unpsychology and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/unpsychology/. We don’t post that much in these places, but I’ll be keeping them open to keep contact open, and we’ll keep these under review.

Access to Unpsychology Magazine in FREE digital editions

Unpsychology Magazine has been published every year since 2014. Every issue is packed with great writing and beautiful art – as well as links to original music and video playlists in some of our later editions.

We’re taking a break this year, but all past issues are available as digital publications, and the last few are available to buy in beautiful print editions (see next section). Some of the later issues are available in different digital formats: Hi or Low resolution, page layout or spreads, you can find all these variations in the first two folder links.

Digital editions

• Issues 1 through 9a and 9b are all available for free download in this folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1pt0v8_Vb3DSseFUvKVIr1dBqErL9Sg7u?usp=share_link

• Issue 10 is available for free download at:

  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nVwuokVG2MV_XX-XpV8Wj9fiX6s4gAWm?usp=share_link

Specific issues can also be downloaded by clicking on the titles below:

• Unpsychology Magazine No.1 - Autumn 2014

• Unpsychology Magazine No.2 - Summer 2015

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 3 - Summer 2016, The Childhood Edition

• The Childhood Edition poetry supplement

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 4 – Spring 2018, Climate Minds

  Anthology

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 5 – Summer 2019, Earthsongs: sweet soul

  elegies and dancing the blues

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 6, Spring 2020, Other-Than-Human edition

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 7, Spring 2021, Climate Complexity Change

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 8, Summer 2022, An Anthology of

  Warm Data

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 9a, Summer 2023, Imaginings #1

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 9b, Autumn 2023, Imaginings #2

• Imaginings 9.1 correction sheet (for broken QR codes and links)

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 10, Autumn 2024, Edges

  ---

Unpsychology Magazine in print

Unpsychology started in print (for the first three editions), then went digital, and then went back to print again due to the wonders of print-on-demand technology. You can get copies of the last four issues: 8, 9a & 9b and 10 from The Great British Bookshop: https://www.thegreatbritishbookshop.co.uk and searching for ‘unpsychology’. Alternatively you can buy specific issues at the link below:

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 8, Summer 2022, An Anthology of

  Warm Data, £10 plus postage and packing.

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 9a, Summer 2023, Imaginings #1, £10 plus postage and packing. (see also correction sheet above).

• Unpsychology Magazine No. 9b, Autumn 2023, Imaginings #2, £10 plus postage and packing.

• Unpsychology Magazine no. 10, Autumn 2024, Edges, £12 plus postage and packing.

New directions…?

This year, 2025, we’re taking a break from publishing Unpsychology Magazine. We’re still putting out articles and posts here on Substack, and we are also running three ‘nub’ projects with members of the Unpsychology ‘community’ (see link below). These, in turn, may result in published pamphlets or magazines in the future. Whatever we decide to do, we’ll be posting information here on Substack. if you’re a subscriber, then you’ll find out our next steps.

In the meantime, stay safe in this troubled world, if it’s possible for you to do so…

With love , and - Unpsychology editors