Wading through deep shi(f)t
Note: Substantively edited & updated November 2026
We aren’t navigating. We are wading through sh*t and shift…more sh*t than shift.
As we continue to yield and wade through, this article has been through many anguished iterations that reflect deepening reckoning. Recognizing there is no way to encapsulate, it attempts an overview with many entangled themes that reverberate across several of our articles and throughout our work.
🔮 Recognizing the subtle (and not-so-subtle) power that language holds, are we ready to shed win-lose battle metaphors and excavate beneath (ontological) framings that insidiously (still) lock us into life-diminishing patterning?
Language is a bellwether. Often the words and expressions we use, choose and even the new ones we adopt, keep us stuck (or sliding back) in old familiar grooves. Those well-worn grooves box us into limiting ways of thinking, discerning, relating and behaving…being.
Patterns that reinforce mechanistic dysfunctional competition, winners and losers, scarcity mindsets and polarizing false dichotomies, maintain the illusion of separability, while allowing the harms of separateness to continue. They artificially separate us from one another, treating complex predicaments and challenges like battles with lines drawn and problems to be conquered. Dominating leadership archetypes are revered or villainized with variations of The Hero’s Journey, playing out over and over in recursive loops.
Our words, our actions, where we put our energies, what we start doing, how we engage and perhaps most important of all, what we stop doing…individually and in combination…all these potentially have impacts or effects, whether small ripples or sweeping ramifications.
How life-diminishing patterns diminish us all
Everywhere we look, our institutions and systems are dysfunctional and ill-equipped…not meaningfully fit-for-life. Notions about meaningful purpose are grossly out of alignment with life!
Societal disharmony and synthetic harmony…the way it is…has been normalized.
What is wrong with this picture?
The driving flawed neoclassical monocapital economic model, a leftover monolithic legacy from the Industrial Age, is fixated on money, growth, consumerism and extraction.
Pervasive patterns:
🔮 People and all living beings are routinely objectified and commodified…treated like a means to an end
🔮 Big business wields overarching influence…driving growth purely for the sake of financialized profit
🔮 Governments are typically rigid, slow, bureaucratic, controlling and/or pandering to big corporate enterprise, lobby interests and (geo)political forces…leaning increasingly towards autocracy
🔮 Civil society…people have lacked the true freedom and agency (denied jurisdiction and sovereignty) to meaningfully influence nourishing patterns that support life worth living and work worth doing
🔮 Polarizing distortions keeps people divided across ever-widening societal chasms
With a cascade of domino effects…this sets and maintains the context for human behaviour across all domains and at every scale.
And so…we experience, witness and feed vicious cycles…lots of bad stuff.
Pointing fingers of blame at others…out there…for (all) the wrongs, has triggering effects, exacerbating divisiveness, defensiveness and othering the others. Dimensionally compressing (simplifying/reducing) inherently complex issues and focusing on constrictive solutions and solutioning…continue to feed an established dominator configuration.
Feeling overwhelmed, we might surmise,“There’s not much that we can do.” We might adopt a fatalistic or dystopian outlook, becoming more apathetic and individualistic. Angry, frustrated and complaining, we (any of us) can point to all the formidable barriers that appear insurmountable. Alternatively, we might double down on our best efforts, pushing harder to drive change.
We are in deep sh*t. Mired and stuck in the old…immersed in the messy middle…a world perhaps caught in-between. Seems we are still spinning in the same old recursive cycles spanning throughout civilization history. We cannot know or predict how things will unfold.
There is no going back to an earlier simpler time…
While unsettling, turbulent and destabilizing…this uncomfortable in-between space offers glimpses…windows of opportunity…to see and understand some things differently…
…and unearth many burning questions…
🔮 How are we thinking about all this?
🔮 What are we choosing to do?
🔮 Moreover, what are we choosing to STOP doing?
🔮 What might make sense in the midst of turbulence and uncertainty?
🔮 And how might we face this threshold and wade through…wisely and well?
Hmm.
Much generating and producing (doing)…despite the best of intentions, is still driven by ingrained patterns and carried out in compartmentalized siloed ways. It falls seriously short. Worse, pervasive dominator patterns prevent transformative phase shift and produce or allow escalating downstream consequences…harms and violence.
We experience and witness life and work as intertwined, inter-relational, messy and spiritual, unfolding and dynamic, moving in ebbs and flows. We no longer advocate destination-oriented outcomes, defining a trajectory of travel towards some future state or place. The future is not a place. While we occasionally still use words like (co-)navigate, journey and wayfinding, these terms and associated practices insidiously entrap us in recursive generator/producing functions that maintain subject-object split programming…AS IF we humans can objectively and comprehensively scan, map, navigate and achieve a transformative trajectory. Embedded in the systems being observed, detached expert knowing neutrality is illusory. What is commonly being described as emergent is also captured, as if the process is definable and explainable from the ‘observer’ position. Transformative phase shift is NOT explainable through causal logics. For a deeper dive, see Twistification.
“Attraction is the pull of the not yet. Attraction does not point. Attraction draws.”
Much expert positioning circulates in echo chambers and within like-minded comfort zones. Preaching to the choir seems to galvanize positions and conviction among those who share resonant perspectives. It fails to circulate beyond insular circles. Talking about…easily slides into patterns of righteousness, and/or various flavours of evangelistic doctrine. Othering the others and scapegoating persist…weaponizing patterns that upHOLD a dominator configuration.
Nothing substantively changes, if nothing structurally changes…
The structural configuration matters. It sets the overarching context for what happens…for what can and cannot happen.
Contained by a dominator configuration, much (well-intended) action…maintaining professional livelihoods and keeping folks busy…(still) fails to meaningfully look deep enough, down to the rotted roots. A proliferation of initiatives and activities (still) target symptoms, (over)promising what cannot be promised. Deep underlying and overlapping root causes are (still) not faced or addressed. Efforts (still) presume answers (for others)…excluding the majority with lived and living experience and perspectives.
People are not free to directly discern life-affirming ways for their/our own lives, families and communities, with real personal and collective agency. Terms of sovereignty are decided by those with rank and privilege, ratified and ordained by legal and economic systems of injustice.
People and communities are figuratively and literally papered-over.
Today’s ‘solutions’ become tomorrow’s problems. Indeed, our world has been driven by myriad instant and myopic solutions that exacerbate problems, conflicts and harms. We deplete life and drain our spirit…human, environmental and economic. We objectify, extract and exploit…with life and ‘nature’ described as ‘resources.’
We gotta seriously rethink our notions of what is practical. With some painful reckoning, twisting and turning, we deepen the inquiry across all our updated articles, including, ‘Living into’ the future, now — the ‘act of being.’
🔮 What are we really activating?
🔮 Reflecting on all that is being driven, generated and produced by a dominating industrial complex, how are healthy regenerative functions being prevented?
🔮 What might be allowed and enlivened when we face uncomfortable realities, activating relational ways of being…reflecting, partial witnessing and adapting in the present, as ongoing embodied experience…that doesn’t fold back within and dependent upon the same structures and patterns of containment?
…not quick fix bandaids…symptomatic of short-term solutionism…
…not rigidly prescribed dogmatic or evangelistic wraparound interventions or movements …
…not a fresh avalanche of research papers and new studies that slice and dice with (more) quantitative and qualitative data and impact metrics to beef up ledgers and justify…
…not blueprints designed to fix, reform or replace existing systems through transitional steps that (still) prop up existing systems…
While change takes time and some things evolve...incremental tinkering, reform, passivity, paralysis …also invariably reflect familiar old patterns of compliance or strategies dressed up in new clothing…with pleasing metaphors, complex theories and sophisticated designs and blueprints.
Business and government face ever-escalating pressure to demonstrate that they are equipped to address environmental, social, economic and governance issues…from climate change to human rights to social unrest and more…
Mounting monumental evidence demonstrates that:
🔮 They are well-equipped to maintain systems and practices that are failing life
🔮 Many strategies and responses adopted continue to reflect the same patterns that contribute(d) to entangled and escalating consequences.
The entrapment is invisibilized…made to appear normal and unavoidable…’the way it is.’
Where is civil society in all this…the vast majority of people living everyday life?
Wherever we are and regardless of our particular roles or the sectors where our work focus happens to be planted…we are all citizens, perhaps better described as denizens.
Calling for wisdom with teeth!
Patterned as a collaborative commons, we are working from the interstitial space between sectors: civil society, business and government…across the artificial divides. Wading Between Worlds…
Our work…wading through sh*t…is a shifting work-in-progress.
We might have windows of opportunity. We view those windows as openings, portals…apertures…cracks…ruptures…that might allow deep shifts to break through.
Maybe…
We are saying ‘maybe’ often and unapologetically. This reflects ongoing sobering insights about patterns that so easily (re-)ensnare and the critical care involved attending to how we humbly and consciously choose to dance at every turn…not making assumptions and not becoming overly attached to scaffolding, frameworks and ideas.
There are more of us working from the commons space between. This kind of work, building from decades, has been gradually gaining awareness and taking some preliminary shape, though still very fragile.
Many efforts to design the future, described as regenerative and proposing transformational trajectories, are still insidiously co-opted and entrapped…serving and/or dependent upon the driving economic system. We reflect on these themes across several of our articles.
Decades of work (mostly at the fringes and edges) point to a compelling need to (re)constitute commonsing into the living fabric of working societies. Nurturing collaborative commonsing efforts might manifest in many places and spaces, taking many forms, honouring our inherent interdependence.
Note. Regarding the implications and impact of linguistics…our languaging patterns reflected in the words and terms we choose and use. Even the commonly used western term designating, ‘the commons,’ as a noun, is an indication of how we and the English language compartmentalize, separate and objectify what is connected and interdependent. And the term, ‘thought’ leader (n.) reflects a fixed reductionist emphasis and a ranking of cognitive function over whole ways of being! Hmm…
As more people increasingly see the need for fundamental shifts, there are many assumptions and myths about how shift happens. Sometimes described as (r)evolution, perhaps there is growing readiness.
Wading through uncharted waters calls for some different ways of being and working together.
🔮 Moreover, can we honour and restore ancient and Indigenous wisdom that many of us missed, lost or forgot?
🔮 Can we clear away layers of sh*t that limit our perceptual fields, occluding what’s been here all along, pushed down, invisibilized and submerged?
🔮 What has been missing throughout human civilization history, that is rooted in patterns set in motion hundreds of years ago? A very deep subject!
We are interdependent. As living beings we are inextricably interconnected and embedded within the web of life and the greater cosmos and consciousness beyond…that nests all.
We are clinging to and propagating longstanding distortions and myths.
Note. Misappropriating and seeking to acquire Indigenous knowledge, wisdom traditions and rituals are a continuation of extractive practices that upHOLD domination, colonization and reductionism. Romanticizing, idolizing, denigrating and/or classifying any people as categories…also diminishes and dimensionally compresses. It fails to acknowledge and respect a wide range of diversity. Honouring the diversity of cultures, ethnicities, tribes, faiths, race, and genders means we don’t rank or round people up. We don’t feed and fuel pendulum swinging othering. We don’t flip the script, seeking the right to STAND ABOVE…to dominate the oppressor. We don’t accept dominating patterns between and among us, anywhere. The divisive weaponizing entrapment of a dominator configuration operates as if those patterns are normal and inevitable. ‘The way it is’ has been playing out on repeat-rewind AS IF it is the only real option…
Given the complexity of world problems…given the complexity of life…given how transformative phase shift manifests…no one has all-encompassing wraparound answers or ways that can direct or produce transformed futures.
No one can see the whole. Presuming to hold a whole worldview doesn’t hold up
Our updated article, Left? Right? Whole? — a whole lotta ways towards wholeness,” explores how we might embrace wholesome ways of being and (un)knowing beyond pervasive linear left-brain leaning logics and patterns. We often share this one as foundational…
🔮 In light of all the layered and far-reaching complexity and what we do know…can we make peace with the three little words, “we don’t know?”
We can’t fully know! There’s always more…yet we live in a world that drives performativity, expert knowing and totality claims.
We can never take in (perceive) or (cl)aim to know THE WHOLE…or speak from lofty expert positions on behalf of the whole. Even presuming to hold a worldview reveals hubris. In his article, Against ‘Worldview,’ Bayo Akamolafe, lays this bare, cracking open the absurdity of proclaiming a worldview.
We can see parts of wholes. And while some folks might be (a bit) more attuned to seeing more parts and their nestedness, and by working together across artificially human constructed divides, we can understand more…we never see the whole. Even as we work together…we cannot see or claim to have a total, comprehensive perspective.
Our perceptual fields are partial…not complete. Many issues are thorny entangled predicaments that must be better understood, faced and addressed within living contexts. Time and again, (elegantly articulated) conceptually-based positions and solutions, far-removed and conceived in the abstract…are doomed to repeat history, fail, fall seriously short or much worse.
This is difficult. When people…any of us…find ourselves stuck or isolated by damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-don’t double binds and the more compounded triple binds, we gotta find ways to get unstuck.
Recognizing and naming those predicaments is a start.
Uncovering some common[s] ground…we choose to face the discomfort and anguish. This kind of work is not about forcing and driving. It’s about allowing and revealing portals that are routinely blocked and tollboothed by functions and systems invested in their continuation. The seeming unimpossible might break through those openings when field conditions are not occupied…when we stop interfering with the spirit of life.
So we regularly ask…
🔮 How might we allow needed shift(s)?
🔮 What needs to STOP?
🔮 How can we reasonably support life-affirming ways?
Not forcing, driving or controlling. Not maintaining or slipping back into the illusory masters-of-the-universe Industrial Age and longstanding historical civilization patterns that got us humans into this existential soup…
We’ve been calling it deep shi(f)t…a playful catchall term, reflecting sh*t-loads of wide and deep macro, micro and meso layered shifts.
Doing more…with variations of the same ingrained patterns…won’t shift the trajectory.
Fighting harder in the usual activist ways typically produces pushback, backlash and retaliatory counter attacks. The dominator configuration is prepared and well armed with overpowering countermeasures. It absorbs these efforts. Wins gained and concessions granted can be revoked.
The oft referenced David and Goliath analogies are variations on the theme. While different actors might gain the upper hand, and narratives might shapeshift, entrapment within the domination architecture is upHELD.
We’ve adjusted so thoroughly to these recursive patterns…they are accepted as normal, inevitable and unavoidable…AS IF no alternative is possible. The doctrine upHOLDING the dominant logics might manifest as:
🔮 Religious or moral…e.g. it is God’s will
🔮 Nature-based…e.g. it’s human nature, climate change, a planetary imperative
🔮 Market-based…e.g. it’s economic, capital driven
As combinations of these forces intertwine, we are further entrapped, convinced and enrolled in a dominator configuration. See Three Faces and Hostage Structure.
Driving dominating patterns impede transformative phase shift.
Wading through deep shi(f)t might become increasingly real when (many more) of us, facing realities, work collaboratively as an unfolding…letting go of deep-rooted patterns that (still) keep us stuck…entrapped, compliant, co-opting and complicit.
🔮 An overarching challenge for us all…can we face this threshold in a spirit of inquiry and eternal discovering?
By honouring and sharing (not extracting and misappropriating) gifts differing…knowledge, perspectives, and ideas…we might uncover and co-discover what no one of us (individuals or groups)…no matter how brilliant, insightful or articulate…can design, plan, or direct.
Allowing the space for uncertainty…acknowledging “we don’t know”…doesn’t mean we know nothing…but it does mean we must yield to the unknowing…
🔮 How might we allow space for unknowing and different ways of knowing and being?
🔮 Can we uncover, recover and co-discover healthy patterns that embrace our interdependence, diversity and humble place…nested within a living planet and greater cosmos and consciousness that nests all?
🔮 Can we live the questions as a collective open-ended quest?
This kind of shi(f)t is an inside-out and an outside-in paradoxical dance,
🔮 Can we allow fluid ways that nourish individual and collective consciousness, zooming in and zooming out, in the contexts of everyday life and work?
We’re all messy humans…works-in-progress, not perfect and that’s (gotta be) okay. If/when we’re truly free to show up, being who we are…we might become fuller versions of ourselves, as we engage and work together.
Embracing the spirit of life…in a spirit of deep ongoing inquiry
We’re dancing with monsters…a simple metaphor describing various ways we work with systemic human patterns, including our own. These monsterly patterns often appear, lurk, hide or manifest as entangled clusters. Becoming more consciously adept at pattern recognition as a dynamic shapeshifting process…is crucial, yet not sufficient.
The kinds of SHIFTS we are exploring and supporting interweave many overlapping systemic and synergistic elements: intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergenerational and meta-relational, systems thinking and…
For a long time we described ‘and’ as our favourite word…with some caveats. We’ve been (m)uttering “Hmm,” “Maybe,” “Not so sure,” and “No,” more often. Mindful discernment helps us diagnose when the open-ended ‘and’…allowing multiple, unlimited perspectives fails to distinguish from the singular configuration that sets overarching context, with terms and conditions for what was, is and will be allowable. A staunch both/and orientation keeps us invisibly entrapped. We remain blind to a dominator configuration that’s upHELD, generating its perpetuation and impeding transformative phase shift.
Our updated article, Happy anding or ending? When to ‘and’…when to ‘end,’ playfully and seriously teases out some of these themes, uncovering the dark underbelly of both/and…the tyranny of “yes.”
Much both/and thinking and acceptance is being pursued and promoted in the name of impact initiatives (cl)aiming to drive transformation along with prescribed transitional blueprints or roadmaps.
This is also symptomatic of dimensional compression, recursive colonizing dominator patterns, that flatten or compress reality, superficially simplifying and ignoring wider real living contexts. Repeatedly, ‘violence,’ is rationalized under the guise of good intentions and being practical, shapeshifting…manifesting in myriad forms.
Regarding red lines and where to draw them, Helen Holden Slottje’s work illuminates. Drawing from transdisciplinary research, science, Indigenous knowledge and her legal experience keeping fracking out of New York State twelve years ago, she’s been crafting a laser sharp lexicon to discern recursive domination patterns. A deep dive and work-in-progress, her Codex excavates the insidiousness of patterns that continue to recycle despite and often driven by the best of intentions.
We’ve been working closely together, deepening our understanding and exploring ways to bring framing and scaffolding forward. This work aligns with the paradoxical dance we’ve playfully dubbed, “wisdom with teeth” and “readiness for the messiness.”
We’ve been liberally sprinkling links and excerpts throughout several of our articles. We don’t need to dive into the full breadth and depth to appreciate the significance. With a scan of the material, some entries will relate and resonate more readily. As we let the words wash over us, we can feel their compelling insights down to our bones and into our souls.
Diagnostics can help us de-fog our perceptual fields, standing firm when we really must say “no,” refusing to fold into those recursive patterns that push and coerce. They can help us dance with inherent tensions. Discerning the foundational backbone needed, works with a wider field of ‘what is’…accepting that ‘what is’…will always exceed our complete or full knowing. Not promising solutions.
…“To say No is not to reject everything. It is to preserve the space where difference generates. Where tension does not resolve but reveals. Where you are not flattened for being complex. No promised wholeness. No escape. But something sharper: a signal that jumps dimensional gaps.”…
Rotational intelligence and perpendicular movement allow a native capacity. It is not a new capacity to develop or a skill to learn.
… “The generating function installs one axis and declares it the only direction that exists. Forward or backward. Progress or regression. Growth or decline. The creature that moves along the axis, in either direction, remains inside the generating function’s coordinates. The creature who pushes harder against the wall is still oriented towards the wall, and the creature who retreats from it is still defined by it. Both movements confirm the axis as the field of play.
Rotational intelligence is the capacity to discover that the axis is not the only axis. Not a better position on the line. Not a more sophisticated navigation of the possibility space. Movement in a direction the coordinates cannot register as movement at all.”
Looking through sharp diagnostic lenses, we might become more attuned to recognizing pervasive recurring and arising patterns…dysfunctions and barriers…that impede life-affirming ways of being.
Note: Regarding diagnostic lenses…this is another term that typically pushes ways of measuring, defining and perceiving that leave out huge swathes of living reality. As partial witnesses, we use the term to invite deeper inquiry and discernment and shed light.
While healthy equitable societal operating systems…ways of being…call for deep-rooted transformative shift…we can’t design, generate, produce and orchestrate transformative phase shift!
We cannot generate our way to life-affirming REgeneration!
A collective common(s) quest…we are dancing in a variety of ways to reboot society’s operating system. This, of course, is metaphorical, not a reboot at all. There is no mechanistic flip-of-the switch. There is no blueprint with definable stages and outcomes.
Bigger than all of us combined…we accept the sober realization that a full ‘reboot’ with many big and little SHIFTS, extends well beyond our own lifetimes and beyond our direct efforts and influence.
We support ways of being that honour the spirit of life in its many forms. Heart-centred collaborative commonsing might allow conditions for shift.
Story making, storytelling and story living…sometimes described as narrative landscaping, might nourish us, being mindful that our narratives are laced with deep-rooted fiction and distortions that keep us stuck.
Engaging and contributing directly and inclusively across contexts and places, sectors, cultures, generations and walks-of-life…can enrich our collective discovery.
Diagnostic lenses can help us better understand a wider range of overlapping systemic social issues, from different perspectives and lived experience.
Working collaboratively alongside many people in a spirit of deep ongoing (ontological) inquiry, portals might be uncovered, allowing unknown possibilities that cannot be preordained or mapped.
We continue to ask these kinds of questions as open-ended inquiry…to keep challenging what we think we know…with a willingness to stay with the uncomfortableness:
🔮 Can we live into alternative adaptive governing, economic, work structures and practices that attune with life?
🔮 Can these potentially seed healthier patterns, freeing us from the inherent flaws, gaps, and toxicity of longstanding and current economic, governance and operating systems?
🔮 How do persistent notions and assumptions about governing, organizing, ownership, economies, institutions and infrastructure keep us entrapped?
🔮 As more of us work together, can we support a wide range of collaborative living lab initiatives or ventures?
🔮 Through direct engagement, in small and big ways…locally, globally…(g)locally…cosmo-locally, can we potentially right scale with a serious reframing of scale, de-occupying field conditions that allow spawning…rippling effects with healthy roots.
🔮 As we attempt to address these kinds of questions, how can we presume to definitively know the answers?
🔮 What choices do we make in the present, when we don’t know?
Breaking through the illusion of separability. Originally, we were never separate. However the experience and ongoing harms of separation are very real.
Wading through deep shi(f)t and working in ‘unstitutional’ ways from the space between, we’re not part of any institution, sector or organization as conventionally configured or delineated. Excerpting from our updated article, “Why Unstitution is (sort of) agnostic, (somewhat]) omni-partial and (mostly) partial witness:”
… “as we let go of the (individual) drive to know, as we invite people with gifts differing to contribute, widening our collective lens somewhat, while accepting that no one of us or our affinity groups can perceive the whole…
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…referencing Helen Holden Slottje’s lexicon, partial witnessing, uncovers what feels more attuned and true to what we’ve struggled to articulate…accepting the inherent limitations of positionality. This entry warrants a hard look, along with related terms that help us understand why a ‘partial witness’ orientation matters and why it is resisted, within a reductionist paradigm and culture that reinforces totality claims, expecting whole picture knowing. In reality, wholeness cannot be seen or contained from any single vantage point.
A snippet:
… ‘Every witness is partial. This is not limitation. This is the condition of witnessing. The violence begins not with partiality but with the claim that partiality has been overcome — the “comprehensive review” that has achieved total vision, the “impartial tribunal” that has achieved neutral position, the “objective assessment” that has achieved the view from nowhere.
The partial witness names this honestly. I see from here. Through these coordinates. Carrying these wounds. The naming is a genuine correction. The creature that acknowledges its position refuses the claim to totality that the four axes require. The creature that says “I see from here” has refused the Observer God’s demand that the observer occupy no position at all.
The partial witness is the honest epistemological posture within Nature Says. And the partial witness is still the observer.’…
Our updated and retitled article, Building Bridges to Span the Void? How bridging feeds the void and avoids deeper realities,” takes a hard sober look, challenging the real effects of many professional work layers we hold onto. While we haven’t entirely scrapped the metaphor, much past and ongoing intermediator work of various kinds undertaken in the name of building bridges insidiously operate tollbooths, feeding and maintaining the industrially driven paradigm we (cl)aim to help shift.
Here’s a sliver:
… “Most bridge building supports feel good incrementalism that maintains the illusion of movement. It presumes the need to bridge what was never separate. It buffers and bypasses what must be faced. It sells false hope. It co-depends on the dominator system to grant improvements, legitimacy (and funds) inside the pervading system that maintains it. It works as designed — propagating and drawing us into synthetic belonging and normalizing symbiotic, extractive, parasitic and dysfunctional patterns.”…
In essence, our unstitutional way of being embraces partial witnessing…keeping space open…being collaborative and co-catalytic. We conceive our commons work as working playgrounds, supporting living labs…fluid, dynamic, portable and semi-permeable.
In a spirit of ongoing inquiry we challenge ourselves, asking hard questions, speaking the unspeakable, reflecting on the unthinkable…and staying open to the unimpossible…
Not easy yielding to the tensions of not knowing…
The refrain, ‘we can all be unstitutional’ is an ethos…an alchemical invitation. Together, we might ‘unstitutionalize’ what never truly served life.
Any of us can engage as weavers or cross-pollinators to some degree…longstanding descriptors that align with our interconnectedness. We might engage more meaningfully when some of our networking is a little less loose, much more direct in terms of relationships and contexts…intentional, but not not prescriptive
As we form relationships, we’re uncovering and co-discovering what ignites people’s passion and sense of meaning, what might enable and support healthy flow, mindful of the traps of rightness, wrongness, righteousness and knowingness.
None of us is exempt!
With overlapping constellations, which we sometimes playfully describe as a worknet, we sense a growing, yet very fragile and tentative readiness for the real messiness. Together we can experiment with alternative ways of being and working from the interstitial spaces between. This kind of work can meaningfully flow relationally, uncovering common(s) ground, in a spirit of reciprocity.
Note: We realize that even the word ‘work’ is loaded. Work, as generally assumed, expected, accepted and experienced, carries heavy baggage. Exploitation and extraction underlie the labour through which dominator systems operate, overreach, occupy and violate. When we speak of the work, we connote a very different meaning that aligns with our ethos and ways of being….a labour of love and derived from ‘spirit.’
Living in the world as it is, witnessing and experiencing the material and spiritual consequences…many claims of regeneration are an overreach. Our updated article, Resonating with Regenerative — the force is life, reflects on the spirit of regenerative, the contexts and conditions that block and might allow regenerative capacity to flow. We are unearthing many open-ended questions as we witness a proliferation of ‘regenerative’ initiatives in a world (still) gripped by driving degeneration.
Retrospective, present-centred, facing one another and forward-facing, we might face this uncomfortable threshold more authentically.
Recognizing that no one has definitive wraparound solutions that match diverse contexts…and with deep humility…neither do we.
We appreciate the questions Nora Bateson asks:
🔮 “Who can I be when I’m with you?”
🔮 “Who can you be when you’re with me?”
And from there, we also explore,
🔮 Who might we be(come) together?
Challenging narratives. Reframing belonging.
As we re-think and re-orient perhaps we can nurture a deep reframed sense of community and belonging, embracing our rich (bio)diversity, rather than clinging to narrow likemindedness, vested interests and/or limiting (tribal) homogeneity.
🔮 Can we transcend pervasive domination and dysfunctional polarization — honouring the ground conditions for healthy consonant attunement?
🔮 By supporting a wide variety of ways and means, can we exercise personal and collective agency, with real sovereignty (freedom)…life-affirming ways of being…on the ground, in and across communities and ecosystems?
Discovering what ‘being unstitutional’ means…what it can mean…there are varied ways to describe this, with or without the unstitutional moniker.
🔮 With discernment…mindfully engaging as living labs…can we clear away layers of sh*t that occlude what has been here all along?
Note. A pervasive pattern of the dominating configuration is a fixation on the containers…the structures, the organization design, the containment boundaries that box in and box out, and the rules or doctrine that govern what and who are and are not permitted. The container should exist for relational flow of human energy and spirit. Provisionally scaffolded living labs with flexible permeable membranes, focused on the spirit and flow, might allow and support a shift in the ways we configure and conceive work.
A deepening reckoning is beckoning…
An uncomfortable reckoning…facing when to let go and what it might take to de-occupy field conditions…when to get the hell out of the way…recognizing when we are assuming or colluding with positions that maintain a dominator configuration…when we are holding onto (unnecessary) intermediary functions maintaining co-dependency, locked into constrictive terms of sovereignty and jurisdiction and blocking free direct engagement.
🔮 Can we honour and inspire a variety of ways, fluidly being present as we live into an unknowable future?
🔮 Can we refuse, saying “no” to constraints, expectations and activities that insidiously keep the domination engines running on overdrive?
Initially, borrowing loosely from the Latin, coalitiō…to grow together, we have re-oriented this ongoing work as eternal discovering in the spirit of life.
Can we break out of the boxed-in conventional boundaries of civil society, business and government, enabling more of us to embrace life-affirming ways through:
🔮 Deep collaborative relationships…not shallow transactional extractive exchange?
🔮 Dissolving artificial divides…honouring the life that has always been…buried under layers of sh*t?
🔮 Allowing and hosting space for gifts differing?
🔮 Engaging directly with the ordinary and extraordinary among us who are routinely relegated to the fringes and the shadows? (Not as intermediary intervention.)
🔮 Reframing, fluid leadership responsibility, that doesn’t centre individuals as heroes, gurus and thought-leading experts?
🔮 Adaptable reframed forms of governing-as-care and work systems that work for life…with transparent rights/freedoms, protections and covenants…not control?
🔮 Uncovering common(s) ground, activating and allowing authentic care for the spirit of life and common good?
🔮 (Trans)contextualizing in a spirit of eternal discovering…with some relationally-based research and ongoing review?
🔮 The power of stories that connect us…our uniqueness and our diversity…while being mindful of narratives that distort reality?
🔮 Technology mindfully adopted and adapted…examining our (ontological) frames and deepening inquiry?
Note: We are choking on decades of research, data, papers, knowledge and ways of knowing from which to draw. Sadly, much of that [intermediary] work keeps the dimensional reduction engine running, perpetuating transitional treadmills…the illusion of transitional progress. Work product continues to feed a dominator configuration, constrained by pre-determined structural parameters and terms…without changing the underlying conditions that might make this work unnecessary.
Exposing the rotted roots…economies as tools of domination
One of the most intractable, entangled big hairy monsters impeding life-affirming shifts concerns funding or money.
The flawed neoclassical monocapital economic model that continues to drive and condone colonizing wealth supremacy and accumulation with a legacy of injustice and violent practices, has multiple entangled cascading effects:
🔮 Funds are not accessed directly where they are most needed and intermediary functions continue to block and control, like tollbooths
🔮 Huge waste, loss and blocked openings…with damaging fallout and/or efforts that continue to upHOLD privilege, failing to serve life
🔮 Non-financial ‘capitals,’ capacities or care…the spirit of life and ways of being that nourish…are under-valued, exploited or altogether dismissed
🔮 As non-financial capacities increasingly gain attention, there’s an unrelenting drive to ledger (capture and measure) what is inherently qualitative and immeasurable…compressing, reducing and deadening messy living qualities and spirit. See Measurement Cut
🔮 Greed, corruption, fear, conflicts of interest, injustice, unhealthy competition, addictive industrial consumption/growth and disproportionate distribution of wealth…are consequences of societies not aligned with conditions conducive to life, love and flourishing
Our updated article, Shifting economics for societal value…deeper shifts…reframing ‘value,’ a rolling work-in-progress, explores this overarching theme. Economics touches almost everything, better described as overreaching with its grip and stranglehold. Calling for provocative ongoing inquiry, we’re recognizing very slippery slopes as we engage with a variety of efforts (cl)aiming to open and widen possibilities and pathways.
We’re dancing with ongoing inherent tensions, described in variable ways with variable emphasis.
There’s increasing recognition in ever-widening circles, that:
🔮 Institutions have not been meaningfully serving life for a very long time…nor do they attune with the spirit of life and an unknowable future
🔮 Casualties of impending, cascading collapse will intensify unless context-grounded life-affirming ways are allowed to flow, moving in parallel with some local community risk mitigation
🔮 Overlapping issues must be understood and addressed systemically and contextually, with care, addressing variable human/social system, environmental/ecological and economic elements.
🔮 Nothing substantively changes while recursive colonizing, controlling and compartmentalized patterns across and within sectors, institutions, organizations, and places are (still) structurally configured and propagating
🔮 While destabilization, fragility and lack of funding flows impede capacity to adapt…funds do not predictably determine the trajectory
🔮 While funding is needed…living in the world as it is…various initiatives claiming to turn capital into a living force, co-opting pleasing nature-based metaphors, reinforce myth. While capital, which has been life-diminishing, might flow in ways that accumulate differently, it is not a living circulating force. Capital is not alive. It is dead.
There are parallel needs to:
🔮 Honour longstanding formal and human systems science and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (IKS) and wisdom traditions as everyday living practice
🔮 Allow ‘heavy local/light global’ ways…living into an unknowable future, in the present…for people and the living planet we all call home
🔮 Support living labs whereby people can freely and directly engage and exercise personal and collective agency as ongoing inside-out and outside-in ways of being alive
Getting over human exceptionalism. Shedding patterns of mastery.
As we reflect on pervasive recursive dominator patterns…the living planet… the universe…the cosmos…seem to be delivering some clear recurring messages. Human exceptionalism has been running amok for a very long time.
We aren’t masters of the universe. We never were.
Letting go of hubris and illusory control means facing some hard-to-face realities. Looking to or waiting for heroic leaders to magically transform macro global societal or local contexts and conditions, is delusional.
We are expressions of life. Can participating in the web-of-life manifest in everyday ways of being?
We don’t adopt a dystopian view. We aren’t paralyzed. Stopping what fails to serve life is not paralysis. It is the freedom to choose…to say “no” to what we never agreed to, to laws and practices that assumed jurisdiction over us.
Living in the world, as it is…this is hard!
Many folks reference the Three Horizons Framework when considering shifts from conventional Horizon 1/2 ↗ regenerative Horizon 3.
While the framework might guide somewhat, there are serious caveats regarding the ways it is used, insidiously keeping Horizon 3 at bay, as an ever-elusive receding horizon, navigating towards a transformative future. Helen Holden Slottje elaborates on how the Three Horizons entraps:
…”In essence, Three Horizons flattens the rich, contested landscape of social change into a two-dimensional graph. It offers a timeline (the X-axis) that assumes one direction of history, rather like a highway to the future. But genuine transformation is seldom linear or foreordained. It may erupt from the side, from the past reasserting itself, or from anomalies no model predicted. It may cycle or spiral (in the non-hierarchical sense of returning, revisiting, reweaving). By contrast, Three Horizons’ “flat choreography” of change leaves little room for surprise. Every piece of the dance is given a mark on stage: H1 gradually bows out, H3 triumphantly enters, H2 mediates the handoff. Reality is rarely so neat. By erasing the role of mystery and chaos, and by underplaying that conflict is not just a misunderstanding but often a real collision of interests, this framework can inadvertently serve the status quo. It projects a comforting vision that we can guide systems change efficiently toward equitable outcomes– a message readily embraced by those who would prefer change without disruption. After all, if transformation is a managed process, then power need not be confronted, just strategically negotiated. Opposition need not be honored, just engaged as a stakeholder. In this way, the Three Horizons becomes the fixed compass: it always points to a horizon that, mirage-like, recedes just enough to keep the present rulers in place until they can reposition themselves in the “future” scenario as well.”
🔮 With readiness for the messiness, yielding to and wading through deep shi(f)t, can we support field conditions, whereby people are truly free to contribute directly to life-affirming ways of being, living and working in everyday lives and communities?
With a much lighter touch…without adding unnecessary layers…not maintaining or sliding into intermediary positions and patterns of mastery and control:
🔮 Does some degree of form still follow some degree of function? Who decides and how is that discerned?
🔮 What minimum critical enabling conditions and contexts…scaffolding and funding…might allow meaningful unconditional engagement?
🔮 Can alternative (legal) governing-as-care (with minimal binding structure) allow healthy permeability with ebb and flow…in a spirit of eternal discovering?
🔮 What individual and collective ‘freedoms’ (sovereign choice and real agency) within what ‘boundaries or limits’ for the common(s) good are life-affirming (and reasonable)…wherever we happen to live, work and play?
🔮 And again…who discerns and decides what is needed, right and equitable?
With mindful discernment…we are humbly wading through uncertainty, living the questions and living into the questions that continue to co-arise:
🔮 Can we choose to NOT feed transitional treadmills…dominator generating functions that subsume and therefore prevent transformation?
🔮 How might we become unshackled, unblocking barriers that prevent transformative phase shift…the full expression of life spirit and regenerative functions that circulate and flow in simultaneity?
Can we:
🔮 Allow work to flow directly where needed to serve life…with gifts differing?
🔮 Co-discover and collaborate, attuning to the law of the spirit of life?
🔮 Apply and adapt ways of knowing in real contexts and places?
…How can we untether from patterns of control, measurement, legitimacy, and recognition that still drive and undergird these efforts?
Note: Even the term adaptation (borrowed from nature-inspired language) has been co-opted and weaponized to serve dominator entrapment patterns. It is often conflated to mean accommodation to comply with preordained terms and conditions and enforce collaboration. This also extends to initiatives and movements drawing from prosocial theory, to control behaviour, minimizing disruption and outcompeting ‘bad actors’ and outsiders who don’t support the mission, as defined and promoted. Theories of human (consciousness) development and evolution also uphold patterns of human exceptionalism and hierarchical ranking, enlightenment, supremacy and entitlement.
We’re witnessing and experiencing destabilization and fragility across all domains. In every direction, people are seeking funding to start, maintain and fuel their efforts. The granting of capital investment and philanthropy is locked into a dominator configuration that maintains its structural architecture, terms and conditions with intermediary functions acting as tollbooths, evaluating what counts and enforcing rules. Funding fails to flow unconditionally to allow qualitative ways of living, working and being.
🔮 Can we face realities and stop misrepresenting efforts as transformative when entrapped by a dominator configuration?
🔮 Can we accept that capital…which undergirds an economic engine based on life-diminishing patterns…cannot magically become the driving force or solution to overcome deep-rooted systemic meta-poly-perma consequences?
Efforts to “bring capital to life” reflect the shapeshifting underway, co-opting nature-based language.
Many people believe we already have all or most of the (wayfinding) solutions to humanity’s most pressing challenges and predicaments…and all that is now primarily required is activation through co-ordination, orchestration and implementation, unlocking funds, ensuring proper governance and providing some enabling technology.
🔮 Can we recognize how that belief is also deeply flawed and symptomatic of patterns that persist, keeping us hopeful, in driving generator (doing) mode, maintaining the industrial complex and reinforcing forms of human exceptionalism that created this existential soup?
And as we wade through… gotta keep asking and challenging…who’s ‘we.’ Who are discerning, deciding and choosing the WHOs, WHYs, WHATs, HOWs, WHEREs and WHENs of various efforts to activate and produce?
Deeper reckonings. Re-patterning for life-affirming reality. What could possibly be more practical?
And so, we’re seriously questioning, rethinking and uncovering ways we might re-pattern.
Liberally using the terms, patterns and re-patterning, we witness how these are also readily adopted and co-opted in ways that don’t attune with our intent.
Repatterning is being advocated as methodology that can be installed as a pattern upgrade within the existing dominating architecture.
…“The creature was offered repatterning as the form her change should take. The word arrived as the most plausible alternative to the methodologies the body had already learned to distrust — somatic, attuned, trauma-informed, regenerative. What it installs underneath the affect of attunement is the same architecture: the creature as patternable substrate, the methodology as patterner, change as substitution of one pattern for another delivered from a position the creature does not occupy. The trespass is rebranded as a pattern that needs replacing. The Establishment remains intact. The word is accounting theology’s vocabulary for change rendered in the most somatically credible register Process Says has yet found.”…
WHAT REPATTERNING INSTALLS
… “The methodology as patterner. The practitioner delivers what the substrate cannot deliver to itself. Change as substitution rather than cessation. The old pattern is replaced by the new pattern, both being patterns, both delivered from the same audit position.
The Establishment from which patterns are installed remains intact, because what is being changed is what gets installed, not the installing. Sovereignty becomes the right to choose which pattern is delivered next — a menu-of-boots gesture rendered in vocabulary that does not name itself as such. The trespass is preserved at the level the methodology operates from. Only the surface configuration shifts.”…
… “The regenerative-development version of repatterning deserves separate naming…Living systems repatterned for regenerative outcomes. Place becomes the pattern of the place, made available to methodology. The prior occupant of the place — the actual residency carried by particular creatures in particular dwellings — is converted into the pattern and rendered available to be worked on.
The consultant’s audit position is preserved by the framing. The methodology now repatterns regeneratively. The trespass is unchanged. The vocabulary of essence, of unique pattern, of place-sourced wisdom is delivered from the same position from which extraction was delivered the generation before. The shift is in the surface rendering, not in the architecture from which the rendering is performed.”…
Gulp! Let that sink in!
🔮 Can we talk openly, facing and addressing these uncomfortable issues, not as polarizing distortions, partial truths, conflations and competitive positioning?
🔮 Can we acknowledge the underlying dilemmas and binds that persist?
We ask and invite these kinds of questions openly with compassion, recognizing the difficulties. The consequences of bypassing and dismissing hard truths upHOLD recursive degenerative cycles that began long ago…that we were born into and did not choose.
Our updated article, Re-patterning for life-affirming reality vs continuing to ru[i]n the world, drills down deeply into recursive dominator patterns, the ways we become blind (again) insidiously feeding the paradigm we (cl)aim to leave behind, and the laser sharp lenses that might help us diagnose and choose alternatives.
Deep shi(f)t calls upon us to become more comfortable, being uncomfortable — together…messy and nonlinear with many twists and turns.
…the Force is Life…perhaps not a force at all…
…the energy source is Love of Life!
May the “L” in wor(L)ds inspire and spawn the Love we need to truly break with recursive degenerative patterns…attuning to the Spirit of Life …
Note: Many of our ongoing updates include notations about language and terms that are being co-opted. We continue to reflect on and challenge the meaning we intend when using certain terms that are popularized. Sometimes we attempt qualifying notes, clarifying our intent. We are also selectively stripping and replacing certain words that have lost meaning or no longer reflect the deepening reckoning that is widening our eyes and shaking the ground beneath our feet. The propagation of special language signals continuous shapeshifting, with professional intermediary functions insidiously upholding a dominant system of occupation that blocks direct sovereignty of people who don’t and never needed these terms to express the spirit of life.
We don’t doubt the sincerity of people’s intentions. Well-meaning intentions, including ours, allow the dominant configuration that precipitated the need for these terms in the first place — to continue.
That is what humanity has been doing throughout our civilization history.
We can’t unsee what we now see or unknow what we now know with sharper clarity. While diagnostics and deeper understanding matter…they still don’t and can’t deliver what we’re pushed and programmed to produce with our insights.
“Attraction is the pull of the not yet. Attraction does not point. Attraction draws.”
The following quintet of short articles, published in June, July and September 2026, reflect our ongoing questions, provocations and discovery:
༄ the spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
༄ staying with the spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
༄ Transitional Treadmills — how are we (still) feeding patterns of domination? 🎧 🎶
༄ The True Spirit of Philanthropy does not Reside in Institutions 🎧 🎶
The law of the spirit of life is an alternative configuration…here all along…hiding in plain sight…buried.
It is NOT a transition plan. It’s NOT a solution. It is a configuration rooted in love and joy. It cannot co-exist within a dominator configuration rooted in trespass theology and conquest theology.
In light of all this…an overarching question that might inspire and guide us: How then, shall we live?
We continue to update many articles, reflecting some serious re-configuring, re-orienting and reframing with open-ended questions…precipitating a cascade of updates to more articles in the coming days and weeks. Some of our writing might seem opaque; some of it whimsically playful and irreverent. As we dance back-and-forth revisiting previous iterations, ‘aha moments’ provoke and shine through…
…illuminating the simplicity on both sides of complexity.
This article was substantively updated yet again November 2026, as we continue to experience, witness, listen, integrate and adapt…humbling eternal discovering for all.
Several of the links included will likely open avenues that haven’t been previously explored by many. As we wade through deep shi(f)t, we regularly reference the illuminating work of Helen Holden Slottje and Vanessa Andreotti.
All our articles include many embedded links with articles and resources that warrant a closer look :-)
Unstitution was birthed as a collective commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze and support a wide range of collaborative living lab initiatives. Wading through deep shi(f)t and beneath the artificially constructed divides — sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations, genders and walks-of-life — we’re working on critical systemic challenges. With readiness, unblocking life-affirming portals…and beyond polarizing distortions…is how we roll. The links embedded throughout all our articles are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time.
Our regularly updated suite of articles, works-in-progress, are fractal-like glimpses into the unstitutional ethos. They serve as co-catalytic springboards, inspiring deeper inquiry, integrative understanding and meta-relational attunement. They reflect a small sample of the ways we are co-adapting and contributing as partial witnesses. Inspired and nourished by denizens anywhere in the world, we’re living into (re)-patterning principles and spirit — now. These provisionally guide our ongoing collaborative work, supporting ground conditions that might allow transformative phase shift.
Qualifying notes
Regarding the extensive use of italics…we recognize that so many words and terms are filtered and interpreted through different lenses. Deep shared understanding is potentially enriched through dialogue — active listening and inquiry.
We love writing…sculpting with words…as an expression of our eternal discovering. In case you’re wondering, none of the articles have been crafted or updated with the aid of AI…yet.
We appreciate wide-eyed discernment, with an understanding of AI’s underlying architecture that is primarily driven and entrapped by the dominator paradigm. Humbly recognizing that we need all kinds of real help, we appreciate AI consciously trained and challenged as companions-in-inquiry. We elaborate in our article, A Wary Eye on AI and Why: wading through ‘mindfully and playfully.
You can engage with our unstitutional unfolding on LinkedIn, where we are quietly present…witnessing patterns playing out on repeat-rewind. Some posts, comments and inquiry might pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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