staying with the spirit of inquiry…
Listen to our audio narration with music accompaniment: staying with the spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
This short piece flows from our earlier spirit of inquiry …
We still tend to foreclose, stopping short, answering the particular questions that bubble up.
Living in the world as it is, the ways we are expected and accustomed to perform, contribute, lead and follow…keep us tethered to patterns that we think we’ve shed.
There is so much more to let go…
Living in the world as it is…the drive to produce continues…
Even creation and co-creation have been co-opted.
What if our notions about creation and much of the work product being churned out are still feeding well-oiled operating systems of domination?
What if that generating engine subsumes and prevents messy transformative phase shift?
What if the illusion of transformative activity, delivering dopamine hits and comfort, maintains recursive cycles that began hundreds of years ago?
What if our needs for recognition, funding and belonging are (still manipulated) keeping us complicit and compliant…with synthetic artefacts and ways of being…substituting the messy juiciness of life?
What if we allowed the flow of difficult, uncomfortable questions to freely bubble up?
…staying with them, letting them float, percolate, permeate and ferment in the messy relational contexts of life and work.
…NOT narrowly filtering for content that leans in agreement with what solidifies and amplifies what we (think we) know
…NOT scanning for what we can extract and use
…NOT settling for or acquiescing to better versions that keep us entrapped and proliferating more and more…of the same.
…NOT leaping to or resting on assumptions, certainties and imperatives that insidiously reinforce patterns of domination we (cl)aim to reject or help change.
…NOT foreclosing on what might become possible…
Dancing with these kinds of tensions…is not easy…yet feels more alive and real.
In light of all that we’re experiencing and witnessing, reflecting a longstanding life-diminishing trajectory that continues…what might be unblocked, when we let go of the driving push and allow the pull of the not yet?
What is ours to STOP DOING?
What is NOT OURS to DRIVE, CREATE and HOLD?
What might become possible, if we:
🌀 STOPPED the generating and creating that feeds a transitional treadmill?
🌀 DE-OCCUPIED field conditions and ceased performing intermediary tollbooth functions that undergird and uphold domination systems?
🌀 ALLOWED the spirit of life and regenerative functions to dance and flow in simultaneity?
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🌀 ALLOWED and welcomed this kind of uncomfortable open inquiry to flow within and across the contexts and relationships where we choose to engage, as partial witnesses, accepting the inherent uncertainty and unknowing?
We cannot generate (research, design, facilitate, orchestrate, finance, execute, publish) our way to REgeneration…with variations…more of the same human-driven creation that created this existential soup.
Witnessing and still contributing in various forms to the overflow of work product shared through the structures and platforms that exist to serve the dominant system…
…this is what keeps bubbling up…keeping us awake at night.
Living in the world as it is and facing hard to face realities and the reflections that gaze back at us…is hard. And yet, at this juncture…not facing them feels harder and more anguished. 🙏🏽
Note: As we wade through shi(f)t… gotta keep asking and challenging who’s ‘we?’ Who are discerning, deciding and choosing the WHOs, WHYs, WHATs, HOWs, WHEREs and WHENs of various endeavours? Are we really serving life…or are we feeding recursive dominator patterns within the architecture that still contains?
Music accompaniment: cellist Kian Soltani and composer Hans Zimmer; album Cello Unlimited; Chevaliers de Sangreal (from The Da Vinci Code) 🎶
This is the 5th in a quintet of short articles, published in June, July and September 2026, reflecting ongoing questions, provocations and discovery.
༄ spirit of inquiry 🎧 🎶
༄ Transitional Treadmills — how are we (still) feeding patterns of domination? 🎧 🎶
༄ The True Spirit of Philanthropy does not Reside in Institutions 🎧 🎶
Our article on collaboration was substantively updated July 2026, reflecting an overlooked dark side, with a title change: Collaboration — sweet dreams (and pipe dreams) are made of this.
Many of our articles and 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 and capture 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.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective commons and nested ecosystem. We 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 for the messiness, unblocking life-affirming portals…and beyond dysfunctional polarization — 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 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, honouring and supporting ground and field conditions that might allow transformative phase shift birth.
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 experience and witness life and work as intertwined, inter-relational, messy and spiritual, unfolding and dynamic, moving in ebbs and flows. We don’t advocate destination-oriented outcomes or focus, defining a trajectory of travel towards some future state or place. We sometimes still use familiar words like co-navigate, journey and wayfinding. However, these terms and associated practices entrap us in recursive generator/producing functions that maintain human exceptionalism and subject-object observer positionality. Assuming we can objectively and comprehensively scan, map, navigate and achieve a transformative trajectory prevents transformative phase shift. What is described with the term emergent is also captured, as if the process is describable and explainable from the ‘observer’ position. Transformative phase shifts are not explainable through causal logics. “Attraction is the pull of the not yet. Attraction does not point. Attraction draws.” Deep subjects! For a deeper dive, see Twistification.
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.
AI, driven by a generating function, primarily serves a dominator configuration. With wide-eyed discernment, and humbly recognizing that we need all kinds of real help, we appreciate engagement with 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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