Wading through…in the spirit of life
Note: Substantively edited & updated September 2026
Wading through is messy.
This article has waded through many uncomfortable iterations. We’ve continued to deliberate long and hard about how to describe what defies description. Increasingly the English language and the words we choose and use fail to express the spirit that underlies this work. Readiness for the messiness and wisdom with teeth playfully point to the patterns and principles that gently, provisionally and steadfastly guide. There are many intertwined grounded dynamic themes…as we dance this paradoxical dance — organically and consciously.
Intuitively and systemically, wading through is about attuning and eternal discovering. Many patterns are discoverable and recognizable as relational work flows. As we look beneath the surface, we uncover what has been submerged, subsumed, squelched, invisibilized, hiding in plain sight…
Lots of ongoing inquiry, messy human insights and relational needs are unearthed here — vital human system stuff that is overlooked, dismissed, undervalued, misunderstood, distorted, manipulated, exploited…
The human system ‘soft stuff’ represents some of the ‘hardest stuff.’ Perhaps our greatest challenges and potential for breakthroughs become possible through ruptures and openings — breaking with patterns that don’t serve the spirit of life.
Patterns, witnessed, experienced and shapeshifting over decades and hundreds of years, offer insights through which we can, uncover, discover and work together, attuning to living systems and the spirit of life.
Laser sharp diagnostic lenses can help us diagnose and understand patterns, as we live into an unknowable future, in the present.
As we dance, yield and wade through, conditions for readiness might flow, becoming apparent.
Collaborative living lab work hosts playspace to experiment in the present. Diagnosing and understanding patterns can help us discern life-affirming choices, ways of being that align with healthy living operating systems.
Note. Dimensional compression and constrictive binaries have become normalized — the ways life and work are reduced…chunked down to conform to the boxes, labels and ledgers that separate and codify, artificially discerning who and what matters and counts, cutting out huge swathes of living reality as if it doesn’t exist. Terms like diagnosing, deciphering and decoding …typically push measurement cuts, defining and perceiving from subject-object split positionality, as if we’re neutral observers…as if we are not embedded in the systems we (cl)aim to observe, analyze and understand.
Accepting our position as partial witnesses, wading through invites deep ongoing inquiry with diagnostic lenses that shed light on our always limited perceptual fields, mindful of ontological reduction, framing and assumptions that uphold distortions. It helps us stop and reflect…dancing with uncertainty, inherent paradox and polarities.
Relational, nonlinear and unmappable, this kind of work…wading through…is intentional without being prescribed, staged, designed, facilitated or programmatic.
Severed from living contexts, we see and name polarities in artificial binary ways, as opposites…as opposing forces…with a tendency to divide and conquer…to force choices. These patterns keep us entrapped, serving a dominator configuration that depends upon and perpetuates these patterns.
We can illuminate ways and means, to activate mindfully, in rhythmic flow. We’re guided by a reframed sense of meaningful engagement and belonging, while attuning to needs and openings.
Living labs that are allowed to live reject conventional performativity, business models and minimum viable productization. While there might be core elements that embody the essence, this work is not prescriptive, reducible or reproducible. Varied capabilities, knowledge and wisdom might support particular living lab initiatives through messy commons-based discovery. As people engage directly, bringing gifts differing, this work is more about ways of being.
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 a dominator configuration operates, overreaches, occupies and violates. 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 ‘essence.’
This might engage people from a worknet constellation, honouring and allowing life-affirming ground conditions as relationships form and shift.
Evolutionary wading through isn’t modelled. There is no blueprint.
Facing an uncomfortable threshold, we’re mindful of the proliferation of initiatives and movements with blueprints, roadmaps and theories of change that haven’t shifted the deep-rooted degenerative trajectory, despite well-meaning intentions.
Note: We are saying ‘maybe’ often and unapologetically. This reflects ongoing insights about recursive shapeshifting patterns of domination 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.
Wading through deep shi(f)t…mired in sh*t and shift as we playfully describe it…is more sh*t than shift:
🔮 Diagnoses recursive degenerative and dysfunctional patterns — playfully described as monsters — that manifest and recur within and across contexts, systems, organizations and social/human behaviour
🔮 Identifies potentially life-affirming patterns of being, living and working
🔮 Identifies needs and potential ways of being (re-patterning) with personal and collective agency (freedom)
🔮 Recognizes blockages…the ways jurisdiction and sovereignty are ordained
🔮 De-occupying field conditions, allowing and nurturing the ever-present uncontained ground…the commons that is not claimed or owned
🔮 Forges deeper understanding of the elements and patterns that might support and/or impede transformative phase shift and regenerative health and flow.
🔮 Identifies the chasms and traps within and across (artificially constructed) divides where efforts typically become (re-)entrapped or get stuck
🔮 Explores readiness for the messiness to work collaboratively from the interstitial space between sectors, organizations, institutions and disciplines — a reframed sense of commons and belonging grounded in direct engagement
🔮 Co-accompanies, partnering with, and supporting those engaging directly and freely…as individuals and groups in the spirit of true community
🔮 Together, discerns ways of being…honouring incomplete knowing, diverse practices, wisdom traditions and methods…attuning to living contexts, cultures, place and the spirit of life
Note. A pervasive pattern of the dominating configuration is a fixation on the containers…the structures, the organization design, the containment boundaries and borders that box in and box out. The container and boundaries become gatekeepers upholding and legitimizing power structures and ranking whereby some people are granted privileges and rights to oversee others. The container is a means to maintain control and restrict freedom, deciding the rules or doctrine that govern who and what is allowed. The container should primarily 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. What flows between us, relationally, is what matters most…not the container.
Evolutionary wading through helps us recognize patterns. We might experience these as loosely, provisionally framed and overlapping:
🔮 Preliminary threshold of awareness and readiness — however meaningful exploration might begin to flow
🔮 Showing up and being present — acknowledging ‘monsters’ and engaging directly
🔮 Deeper, authentic living lab engagement — becoming more aware, identifying human and ecological field conditions, nurturing relationships with mutually discerned covenants….ways of working together
🔮 Allowing and honouring the expression of life spirit…the full range of feelings, including grief and joy, facing and attending to trauma and reckoning with difficult stuff
🔮 Experiencing some ‘aha’ moments and breakthroughs or insights …letting go — trusting the relational process and soul-nourishing spirit of life, sharing stories and deepening inquiry, understanding and discovery
🔮 Freely discerning healthy choices, with patterns shaped by lived experience and insights — deep collaborative engagement embracing eternal co-discovering…systemically re-patterning
🔮 Expressed and (becoming) regenerative over time —life-affirming effects and flows might become normalized — as living demonstrations of what is life-affirming and what is directly experienced as possible* (see previous)
We’re ever-mindful that our maps, models and frameworks are really not the living terrain. Well-devised strategies to methodically guide ‘transition,’ insidiously maintain or slip back into patterns that continue to feed a dominator configuration fixated on generating, structurally contained and entrapped within existing or modified operating/production systems that foreclose, impeding possibilities.
The expression of spirit of life and regenerative functions are blocked. Transformative functions are not produced. They don’t emerge as output/outcomes through the dimensionally compressed architecture of generator functions. Real transformative phase shift is necessarily messy…birthed through ruptures, disruptions, discontinuity, breaks, openings…that might allow a transformed dimensional state of being.
In effect, many well-intended efforts are co-opted. Folding back into Horizon 1 or 2 cyclical patterns, Transformative Horizon 3 remains an elusive abstract hypothetical future when (linear) transitional pathways, methodologies or solutions are prescribed, expected and/or demanded by the current system/power structures. Furthermore the framing of ‘horizon’ implies that the future is a destination or place. Deep subject explored across several articles.
Circumventing complexity and spiritually bypassing what is inherently relational, uncertain and messy — initiatives insidiously slide back into pervasive hard to see patterns. This is further obscured as people, invested and hopeful, remain (or become) blind to ongoing deep-rooted invisibilized recursions.
Note. 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 tend to 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 or manifested through causal logics. “Attraction is the pull of the not yet. Attraction does not point. Attraction draws.” For a deeper dive, also see Navigation, Emergence. and Twistification.
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Throughout evolutionary wading through, we’re:
🔮 Engaging, witnessing and diagnosing patterns, to understand insidious entrapment barriers, our own complicity and discern what might reflect meaningful direct engagement and a reframed sense of what might meaningfully attune with the spirit of life
🔮 Exploring discovery in multidimensional and multimodal ways including regularly updated articles, ongoing storymaking and storytelling and more…reflecting on readiness, messiness, life, love and rippling…especially mindful of narratives that propagate myths and distort realities
🔮 Undertaking some participatory research with a partial witnessing orientation, sharing (trans)contextual insights, facing difficulties and discomfort, exploring and directly experiencing effects
🔮 Identifying potential to adapt and spawn or right scale …seriously challenging our notions about scale…whereby field conditions might spawn life-affirming rippling effects
Evolutionary wading through might reflect a variety of overlapping collaborative commons themes. This is only a fractal-like glimpse. The work might ripple our wider and deeper. Relational ecologies might come to life as ordinary people — any and all of us messy humans, bring gifts differing into the living, breathing, heart centres of our interconnected work and lives.
Evolutionary wading through is more about ways of being — a labour of love and joyful resilience. We might live into juicy life-affirming ways — as partial witnesses…facing realities in the present.
‘Being unstitutional’ is an ethos and a warm invitation. With some clear red lines, ‘and’ is still a favourite word.
And’ can work with the inherent tensions of polarities, acknowledging the co-existence of multiple truths.
Distinguishing between some truths, states of being and phases also matter, versus conflating…lumping them together into an indistinguishable heap. Clear discernments are necessary, knowing when and under what contexts and conditions we need to draw hard lines with dedicated laser sharp focus.
Note. For a long time we’ve described ‘and’ as our favourite word…with some caveats. We’ve been muttering “hmm, maybe and no,” more often. Mindful discernment helps us diagnose when the open-ended ‘and’…keeping too many doors open in the name of collegiality…adding more and more perspectives and initiatives…paradoxically forecloses…closing the most important doors, while failing to stop what must stop. A staunch both/and orientation keeps us stuck, upholding and generating recursive patterns of domination that impede transformative phase shift potential. Much well-intentioned activity underway, (cl)aiming to drive regenerative transformation is feeding transitional treadmills…while a deep-rooted dominator configuration remains intact…shapeshifting, absorbing and digesting variations of what has grabbed hold for hundreds of years.
We can nurture many ways to directly engage as interplay — for people and the living planet we all call home, while recognizing our nestedness and the consciousness of a vast cosmos beyond.
🔮 Described in various ways, what might open up when we’re guided by ever-present spirit of life or lifeforce?
Stereographic intelligence, flowing with the spirit of life might deepen our understanding of alternative choices that are blocked. …
…“This is not a cognitive upgrade. It is an understanding that allows you to stop accepting the menu. Stop believing that the compression is just how things are and that the remedy is a better way of seeing it.”…
Nothing substantively changes, if nothing structurally changes.
A deepening reckoning! Understanding matters, but deeper awareness and understanding are not enough. Hundreds of years of understanding haven’t freed us from the dominator configuration through which most everything operates. Also see Hostage Structure. Very deep subject!
And so, we’ve been calling for wisdom with teeth, to identify alternative choices, not reacting and complying legibly to a system that enforces and feeds on ingrained dominator patterns.
If we are unable to raise and face uncomfortable questions and speak truthfully about the ways we’re entrapped — efforts will not only fall short, they will continue to uphold and feed a rotted root system that depends on denial and false hope, while blocking joyful alternative ways of being.
🔮 As we wade through, uncovering common(s) ground… gotta keep asking and challenging who’s ‘we?’
🔮 Who are discerning, deciding and choosing the WHOs, WHYs, WHATs, HOWs, WHEREs and WHENs of these various endeavours?
🔮 Are we re-patterning with and for life?
🔮 Are we sliding back into recursive patterns that insidiously (re-)ensnare and contain…still privileging the relative few with oversight?
Laser sharp lenses can help us diagnose as we live into an unknowable future, now. At this imperilled juncture, the most important SHIFT WORK of our times beckons. It calls for a different kind of energy. It won’t look or feel like what we’ve been used to doing…the ways we are (still) pushed to operate, perform, measure up, serve and deliver.
With readiness for the messiness and wisdom with teeth…we continue to inquire, dance and engage at the boundaries and blurred edges, taking a hard look at the ways we…any of us…reinforce life-diminishing patterns of domination…reflecting on alternatives…ways of living, working and being that might allow life-affirming shifts to birth.
The following quintet of short articles, published in June, July and September 2026, reflect our deepening reckoning with 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 🎧 🎶
We also share more about our nonlinear wading through and discovery in these recently updated articles. They reflect some serious re-orienting, re-configuring and reframing with open-ended questions…precipitating a cascade of updates to several more articles in the coming days and weeks:
🔮 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. Note additional reflections on re-patterning
🔮 Why Unstitution is [sort of] agnostic, [somewhat] omni-partial and (mostly) partial witness — a deepening reckoning as we let go of the impossibility of comprehensive total knowing in a world that still upholds human exceptionalism and performativity.
🔮 Building Bridges to Span the Void? How bridging feeds the void and avoids deeper realities — how layers of intermediary functions and expert professional roles function like tollbooths, insidiously reinforcing codependence and feeding the industrial complex. They/we prop up the fiction of separability, while upholding the fiction that trespass theology perpetuates, as if the dominator configuration is the only option…and allowing the harms of separateness to continue.
🔮 Justice in society? For who? — We choose lifeforce, broaches themes underlying domination, keeping us tethered to a justice system that is unjust.
🔮 A little bit about our ‘unstitutional’ why…and how…‘we can all be unstitutional’ — unpacking some of the backstory and describing the ethos that underlies this kind of work…however we might describe it
🔮 Happy anding or ending? When to ‘and’…when to ‘end,’ elaborates on the power of ‘and,” while uncovering an unexamined dark side of an indiscriminate both/and orientation.
🔮 Collaboration — sweet dreams (and pipe dreams) are made of this, explores the importance of deep collaboration, while uncovering an overlooked dark side of collaboration and co-creation…as reflected in the title change
🔮 Eternal discovering…enrolled in the school of life cuts across everything, integral to the spirit of life and open-ended inquiry. We also explore ways we might reconfigure and integrate education, learning, arts and culture into everyday life.
This article was substantively updated again September 2026, reflecting additional perspectives and ongoing research, as we continue to experience, witness, listen and adapt…humbling eternal discovering for us all.
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 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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