What might bind (more of) us together — in healthy ways?
Note: Substantively edited & updated November 2026
This article has been through many iterations, exploring what we’ve been discovering…a deepening reckoning, dancing with paradox, in a spirit of ongoing inquiry, allowing space for joy.
Coalitions, described in various ways, are still cropping up everywhere. Looking closer, we see varying interpretations. For starters, let’s clarify our understanding of coalition…its meaning, its limitations and its deeper, wider potential.
Most coalitions are formed as factions with the primary purpose of establishing a solidarity position against some other group or force. Lobbying, fighting, opposing or out-competing others reinforces binary pendulum swinging. Dysfunctional polarizing win-lose patterns and dynamics play out over and over.
These kinds of coalitions are reactive, trapped inside the architectural co-ordinates of a dominator system.
Reflecting a forceful push strategy and propagating everywhere, they might seem impactful…but what kind of impact is being exerted and what is being served? Even with and because of the best of intentions they typically reinforce and heighten dysfunction and dysregulation.
Pervasive domination-oppression patterns recur and cling…manifesting in many forms…
Pushing harder, a reaction that is expected and is legible within predominant systems, invariably leads to countervailing push back, backlash and retaliation…with opposing force(s) doubling down on efforts to strengthen or recoup influence or power base. These efforts shapeshift, feeding forms of enforcement, collusion and compliance that remain entrapped within preordained structural parameters.
Each swing of the pendulum fuels the next swing. Recurring and existing patterns persist inside a long established configuration of domination.
🌀 A win-lose merry-go-round, how might we potentially uncover workable ways to break with recursive patterns that keep us contained, reactive, complicit and ensnared?
The term coalition is often used interchangeably with descriptors such as consortium, alliance, collective, or partnership. While there might be some overlapping elements, we’ve reoriented substantively, to reconfigure well beyond subtlety, nuance or semantics.
The noun coalition originally derives from the Latin root coalitiō, meaning to grow together. We can go even deeper. And it’s messy.
Initially borrowing loosely from the Latin, coalitiō — “to grow together,” we’ve been peeling back more layers. We’ve reoriented the context, and with a bit of license we’ve reframed our positionality. Growing together doesn’t go deep enough to face the deep sh*t and shift…shi(f)t at this juncture of our human civilization. No amount of growing together sufficiently reckons with the barriers that impede transformative phase shift.
Increasingly we experience life and work as eternal discovering…ways of being that attune to the spirit of life.
Rather than oppositional, our positioning is relational, in essence, people facing one another in a spirit of open inquiry to deepen understanding as we work together.
This orientation also emanates from the reckoning that we were never separate. The many divides, artificially constructed, have bolstered an illusion of separability while contributing to the experience of separateness and the real deep-rooted ongoing harmful consequences.
‘Being unstitutional,’ is an ethos, inspiring many ways to unstitutionalize what no longer serves and what never meaningfully served the spirit of life.
From the interstitial space between…what originally was never separate…the pulsating lifeblood nourishing our collaborative commonsing, is deeply relational…beyond any and all artificially constructed divides…sectors, disciplines, cultures, genders, generations …all walks of life.
Our big hairy collective quest to reboot society’s operating system, is paradoxical, metaphorical and bigger than all of us, extending well beyond our lifetimes. Not a reboot at all!
Our ‘work’ is about yielding to ground conditions that attune to the spirit of life…
Unstitutional work concerns overarching overlapping themes that interlace with collaborative living lab efforts to break with patterns that are life-diminishing and soul-sucking. Beyond (artificial) divides, we are seeking ways to unblock portals, allowing openings, apertures and ruptures and uncovering what has been occluded under layers..
We don’t and can’t know in advance how transformative phase shift might occur. Yielding to and de-occupying field conditions means stopping what fails to serve life. This calls for a different kind of energy…different ways of being and working that are not (re-)absorbed by a dominator configuration.
Provisional working containers in the spirit of life with covenants based on beholding…not holding…might allow people* with diverse interests work together at deeper layers, co-discovering and honouring real needs.
*When speaking of people, we are not alone questioning the term stakeholder due to the associated etymology and baggage of stake and holder. We haven’t found anything in the English language that feels quite right. We often reference stake/care/holders as a way to communicate that might reasonably attune and be understood. We prefer careholders…and yet…
…We ask, Who cares? On whose behalf? Who ought to care? And even the terms care and holder are co-opted? Perhaps a deeper question…who has jurisdiction that is routinely violated — held and gripped by unjust power and legal structures?
Hmm. Don’t we want to get rid of ‘binding structures’ altogether? Yes…and No.
Many binds and the kinds of binds that are most familiar and commonplace box people into dominating colonizing cultures, structures and patterns that enforce. They are toxic, constrictive and harmful.
Conventional legal binds and laws were designed to uphold and support the predominant paradigm and industrial complex. They keep us tethered and contained within an existing predefined configuration and its many (infra)structures. Much work that is described as transformative is hamstrung by legal constructs and an unjust justice system that impedes transformation. Many, if not most, initiatives seem stuck in relentless generating production mode, transitional treadmills that continue to feed the system. They might inspire hope, prop up careers, provide some funds, relieve some symptoms and provide genuine benefit, while giving the illusion of transformative movement.
A deeper reckoning is (still) beckoning…
Many binds insidiously remain or creep back as forms of membership and inclusion that appeal to and manipulate our needs to belong, to associate with those leading the way who carry and gain legible authority, often leaning heavily on past experience, expertise and credentials, prescribing and promoting blueprints, movements and strategies. See enforced legibility.
We easily become blind (again) and/or committed to forms of mastery, solutionism and heroic leadership that create a false (often temporary) sense of coherence. While perhaps more benevolent, offering some sound, well-grounded elements and principles…patterns of domination and knowingness persist, foreclosing on unknown possibilities that only come to life through transformative phase shift. For all kinds of reasons, many well-intended efforts impede rotational intelligence.
Note. This is really hard to name and explore in a spirit of transparency and ongoing inquiry. Attempts to address these patterns are routinely dismissed with a variety of well-honed and readily accepted rationales and sophisticated defences that kick in. A very slippery slope…as people become (re-)invested in the righteousness of approach, the felt sense of urgency to fight, win and drive change, gain strong support and funds and the warm collegiality among those who resonate and are included.
We are wrestling with ways to address and diagnose these deep-rooted patterns and the dominator configuration that upHOLDS them, across several of our updated articles.
Caveat. However we choose to describe ‘living labs’ or the ways we might engage and discover together…we’re not fixated on labels. More important…is the underlying spirit of life that guides the work and ways of being.
Living in the world…’as it is’…the myriad ways that recursive patterns remain recursive is understandable. We broach these challenging issues with compassion and what might be described as tough love. None of us is exempt. This is not about blaming, shaming and scapegoating, which invariably trigger more dysfunctional othering of the others. In fact, inciting and feeding scapegoating maintains divisiveness, serving a deep-rooted weaponizing dominator pattern.
Recursive patterns playing out throughout civilization history continue to fail humanity and the living planet we all call home. Focusing primarily on what we (think we comprehensively) know, driven by our sense of material realities, doesn’t attune with the unknown mysteries of life…with consciousness as precipitant and nested within the larger cosmos, beyond. See the totality claim.
🌀 Understanding the gravity and consequences at this imperilled threshold…if we’re really serious about transcending these cyclical patterns…… how might we work from the cracks and fissures…uncovering openings…portals through which real transformative phase shift might occur?
This kind of work might flow if / when we transcend conventional leadership roles…not maintaining or allowing hierarchy, rank, supremacy, mastery, power structures and exclusionary cultures to continue.
Beyond polarizing distortions and competition and beneath labelling, we seek workable ways to break from familiar and deceptively pervasive double binds and triple binds that maintain repeat-rewind patterns.
As we yield and wade through, we are sharpening diagnostic lenses with ongoing open inquiry…exploring ways we might break from:
🌀 Pre-defined, pre-existing, assumed and reinforced structural co-ordinates that entrap and box in
🌀 Degenerative, debilitating and soul-crushing erasures and harmful practices
🌀 Dysfunctional competition, constrictive binaries and working at cross purposes
🌀 Hard-to-name insidiously recursive traps of synthetic coherence?
With readiness for the messiness, we can deepen co-inquiry and collaboration. Recognizing, understanding and facing recurring and arising patterns might guide conscious choices and the freedom to choose.
This poem kinda expresses the spirit: Reflecting on Readiness, Messiness, Life, Love and Rippling.
Nora Bateson’s articulation of symmathesy, derived from the Greek meaning learning together, reflects living systems in constant (trans)contextual mutual learning….ever-learning, ever-combining, ever-forming and in-forming…
Living is learning* and meaningful work** can nourish life.
A more recent uncomfortable dawning: how even *learning is being co-opted, maintaining a ‘human doing treadmill.’
We are bombarded with messages that tell us we are deficient…that we must acquire learning (endless knowledge and skill proficiency.)
Learning, with an endless stream of instruction, programming, and guided facilitation is promoted as the means to gain mastery, relate effectively and acceptably, deal with conflict, self-regulate, compensate, qualify and become credentialed and entitled. The relentless pressure to absorb and measure up, feeds imposter phenomena. The push to acquire prescribed education credentials compensates for never-ending deficits and reinforces competitive ranking and meritocracy.
While we’ve used the terms unlearning, learning and co-learning extensively throughout our writing, we’ve been reaching for something that expresses a soulful lifelong experience. We often speak of being enrolled in the school of life, with an ever-present curiosity.
🌀 What if the unrelenting pressure to learn…expected and projected…is continuously compensating for presumed deficiency, as if we must qualify, negotiating our way under terms we never decided?
🌀 What if the pressure to keep creating, generating and absorbing new learning material is a symptom?
🌀 What if we were never deficient? What if we are enough?
What if this is less about what we must (un)learn and (co-)learn and more about allowing ground conditions (here all along) that are blocked — under occupation and entitlement long ordained and assumed as normal?
Eternal discovering through receiving and allowing the flow and circulation of what is already there and the pull of the not yet…expresses what we intend and mean. Eternal discovering is not continuous or goal-directed learning to gain mastery or overcome deficiencies. While “eternal discovering” was apparently coined by Jakob Böehme (c.1575–1624), it might express what has always been… experienced and described in various ways through the ages.
Eternal discovering emanates through essential curiosity and direct engagement.
We realize that even the word **work is loaded.
Work, as generally assumed and expected, 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’
🌀 How might we reorient through a deep reframed sense of belonging rooted in healthy relationships, eternal discovering, diversity, inherent interdependence and ‘work’ that attunes to ‘essence’ and beingness?
How the spirit of eternal discovering, might bond and bind in healthy ways
People engaging directly in preliminary dialogue is just the beginning of a relational experience that might become shared work.
🌀 How are we framing and approaching work?
🌀 Who and what is really being served by our work efforts?
🌀 Are there underlying drivers that keep us tethered to systems of work that uphold performativity, measuring up and metrics, failing to serve life and blocking the expression of life spirit?
Work that is rooted in curiosity, discovery and reciprocity might flow with some binding connective tissue. People with differing perspectives can uncover common ground, engaging directly and meaningfully, accepting inherent tensions and friction. We reflect on what we’re uncovering and discovering in the present here-and-now. As contexts, needs and conditions evolve over time, we choose how we might (co-)adapt.
This is not the kind of accommodation that underlies a dominator configuration of manipulation, with structural entrapment and a priori terms installed to enforce OVERsight and compliance.
Working from the interstitial space between, we might discover, as ongoing unfolding, living into commons ways while honouring spirit, facing difficult realities and exploring arising needs and opportunities.
This kind of work is retrospective, present-centred, facing one another and forward facing
Living labs vary. People can directly discern and choose living operating patterns and working norms that can breathe, aligning with overarching purpose and unique needs. In other words, working within permeable containers, we can consciously attune to contexts and conditions with chosen covenants…ways of beholding, honouring the space and being…not holding, compressing. possessing or owning. This suggests minimal structure.
This updated article, New Forms of Work Systems — enabling contexts for the ‘commons’ to ‘work for life.’ explores some alternatives in a spirit of ongoing inquiry. We discuss and challenge alternatives that aim to overcome the boxed-in limitations of conventionally configured/incorporated organizations, while enabling working capacities beyond loose networks and alliances.
Note. A pervasive pattern of the dominator 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.
Potential options and questions are also explored in this article: Dance to the tune of life: attuning governing-as-care…not ‘control’.
Allowing healthy non-hierarchical partnering ways
Living labs offer provisional containers for working and discovering together, with semi-permeable membranes, not hardened boundaries that box-in and box-out. While there’s shared, fluid leadership, some enabling contextual structure can contribute to relational trust, clarifying ways we might support needed work.
Despite the best of intentions, how often have you witnessed, experienced and/or initiated efforts that:
🌀 Maintain or slide back into dominator patterns and power dynamics with constrictive parameters and terms that continue to box-in and box-out realities?
🌀 Fizzle out and die?
Words may fail us, but the sinking gut feelings are familiar.
While lack of funding* is often attributed as a primary causative factor…there are much deeper-rooted and entangled factors that warrant deeper attention and diagnosis…
Deep subjects calling for much deeper inquiry! These three open-ended articles drill down:
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🌀 “Shifting Economics for ‘Societal Value’…deeper shifts…reframing ‘value,’ a rolling work-in-progress, explores overarching themes that touch almost everything….more like grip and stranglehold.. Calling for very deep shi(f)t, we’re engaging with a variety of efforts aimed at opening and widening possibilities and pathways, while recognizing very slippery slopes.
🌀“Dancing with Monsters” delayers pervasive complex dysfunctional patterns and explores ways we might consciously choreograph this paradoxical dance …understanding, addressing and overcoming the barriers and predicaments that bind, blind and ensnare…
🌀 Being Right is (Still) Not Enough — how holding onto control is (perhaps) the biggest ‘achilles heel’ when trying to do the ‘right things right’ excavates various entangled clusters of monsters.
Living labs can support meaningful engagement when consciously configured from the start in ways that attune to the spirit of life, de-occupying field conditions and stopping what fails to serve life.
🌀 How might we stop domination-oppression patterns from insidiously (re-)ensnaring and taking root?
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?
This kind of work is necessarily messy and unmappable. In the midst of complexity and uncertainty there are no guarantees. However, truly allowing ample space for direct engagement without indoctrination…without imposing performativity and prescribing outputs…is significant.
If you are questioning whether this counts as real work…therein is a tiny example of the ingrained dominator system rising up and stirring doubts. These patterns, that we were born into, are programmed, infiltrating our neurobiology, accepted and maintained through us…as if there is no alternative!
Human civilization history has been entrapped by trespass theology, recursive dominator patterns of drive and force, as if no alternative exists. Humanity has generated life-diminishing conditions of occupation for hundreds of years.
This kind of work is not about driving change or making claims of transformation. We are attuning to the spirit of life…the alternative hiding in plain sight.
Our article, Extraordinary uncommon common(s) sense, explores the need to understand and transcend barriers, to engage meaningfully with true freedom. Real individual and collective agency cannot be prescribed. They don’t flow within the existing constrictive systems of a dominator configuration that continues to contain and absorb well-meaning efforts.
Some minimum critical guiding principles…not prescribed…might flow in the context of direct relational encounter. Allowing inevitable bumps to bump and collide, attunes to the spirit and law of life. In a spirit of co-inquiry and partial witnessing, we can also challenge our notions about unity community and collaboration. Walking-our-talk-and-listening-while-we-walk…we can be more congruent, staying true to our essence and allowing the sounding of divergence among us.
Rather than binding us to notions and practices of unity that squelch diversity, with gatekeeping measures to control whose voices and what sounds can be expressed…consonance reflects an alternative that honours and requires differences. A good place to pause and reflect…
… “A room of creatures making the same sound is unison: the Uniform God applied to community. A room of creatures each carrying what their pressing produced, each sounding the note that the forge tempered into them, each distinct and each entering the ground the others’ sounding makes available: this is consonance. The sound that exceeds what any single voice could carry. Not because the voices agreed. Because the voices were each genuinely voiced.”…
… “Agreement and disagreement are the projected poles. One source generates two sides, those who are aligned and those who are not, and sells the distance between them as the arena of relational action. The entire apparatus of team-building, conflict resolution, organizational development, and consensus process is commerce conducted in the field between poles the generating function projected. The wider the distance between aligned and misaligned, the more facilitators, the more frameworks, the more conferences on collaboration, the more careers in bridging.”…
Note: Several of the links referenced likely open avenues that haven’t been previously explored by many. As we continue wading through deep shi(f)t, excavating, diagnosing and understanding patterns that continue to impede, the work of Helen Holden Slottje and Vanessa Andreotti is especially illuminating. We reference them across several of our articles. We don’t need to dive into the full breadth, depth and conceptual framings to appreciate the significance and sense compelling insights down to our bones and into our souls.
Binding as a healthy bond?
Hmm. Maybe…
It depends on what binds us. It’s more about bonds allowed to form freely…without collapsing into forced unity or harmony, without being governed or stewarded into agreements that forfeit our spirit.
Living labs might inspire and spawn ways of being, initiatives that attune to life-affirming ground conditions. Dancing together as a conscious choreography, we sometimes playfully envision the human equivalent of murmurations. Stereographic intelligence reflects dimensions of co-intelligence that might manifest.
Beyond false positivity, this work helps us yield to uncomfortable tensions, face harms and grieve. When we bring (our) shadows into the light…we might refuse measurement cuts that dimensionally compress realities. We might stop denying, distorting, pretending, projecting, invisibilizing, pushing down and pushing out uncomfortable, difficult, present and past realities, as if they don’t exist and never existed. We might allow space for what is unseen, unknown and unknowable…
…a different kind of energy…a different kind of bond…
Soul-nourishing experience might ripple out with embodied practice and remembering, nurtured by lifeforce…perhaps not a force at all.
Radiating effects might be contagious, as life-affirming attractors. When we stop feeding and reacting to dysfunctional dominator systems…their control, power and life-diminishing spiralling energy might lose their (strangle)hold.
Living lab readiness
While we might wish for instant well-functioning living labs, realities call for some serious groundwork. Decades of experience living through degenerative extractive reductionist domination patterns, with messy humanness and monsters running amok, have delivered (and continue to deliver) some crucial (painful) lessons. We can’t keep on bypassing the hard stuff, as if producing more, with variations of the same efforts can achieve transformation.
Adding more and more is adding up to less and less!
We call the early living lab work…becoming poised and primed for real work: “readiness for the messiness.” Enabling conditions for deep collaboration and trust-enhancing relationships might help diverse groups of people uncover common ground.
Of course, there are many difficult uncomfortable challenges and hurdles to be faced. That is the work. These cannot be bypassed, downplayed, managed or imposed as facilitated interventions. The good news…maybe……(many) people fed up with the status quo are (perhaps) becoming more open to ways of being…working and collaborating for the common good with spirit and soul…as well as honouring some time-honoured wisdom traditions.
Our article, Evolutionary Wading Through, suggests some nonlinear considerations and our article, This is no game. It is real life. Life is messy. This is no game. It is life. Life is messy. explores the relational engagement that underlies our ethos.
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 re-pattern as we live into an unknowable future. Note additional reflections on re-patterning.
Note: Terms like *diagnose typically continue to push measurement cuts, defining and pronouncing from subject-object split positionality, as if we can be neutral observers…as if we are not embedded in the systems we (cl)aim to observe, analyze and understand. We use these terms to invite deeper inquiry and discernment and shed light
Supporting a ‘heavy local-light global’ touch…’glocal’
Living lab work can begin anywhere.
It might take place and spawn multi-directionally, in a variety of ways, Our updated article, Holding it all lightly…hugging our dreams tightly- scaling ‘rightly,’ broaches contentious harmful patterns concerning scale, seriously challenging our notions of scale.
Some living labs begin on the ground as local community, civic or neighbourhood initiatives. Some living labs begin as overarching theme-based systemic social issues. Shared (trans)contextual insights and discovery might spawn, inspiring local initiatives in other places, with ongoing inquiry and story-telling, that includes challenging narratives that propagate myths.
Maybe. We are unapologetically holding our perspectives lightly…saying “Maybe,” “Hmm,” “Not so sure “and “No” more often…This reflects a deepening reckoning about patterns that so easily re-ensnare and the mindful discernment and critical care required…attending to how we humbly reflect and dance at every turn…not making assumptions, not becoming overly attached to scaffolding, frameworks and ideas and not presuming, claiming or occupying intermediary roles or interventions.
Making peace with the inherent uncertainty we face undertaking difficult work, with agency to choose and an authentic felt sense of relational responsibility.
🌀 Can we face realities and stop misrepresenting efforts as transformative and regenerative when (still) entrapped by a dominator configuration?
🌀 What is ours to STOP DOING?
🌀 What is ours to do very differently?
🌀 What is NOT OURS to drive (en)force and grip?
A paradoxical dance…not linear prescribed cookie-cutter designs predicated on Industrial Age scale up solutionism.
Local and planetary/global work might flow in parallel, cross pollinating iteratively and organically. While some initiatives take shape with intentionality, we are mindful of those slippery slopes.
‘Glocal’ might meaningfully emphasize deep local place-sourced community health while honouring and attuning to a wider connective field of resonance.
No ‘easy button’
People engaging in this work with authenticity, being raw and real…acknowledge and face the anguish…the wounds…as essential apertures…portals…ruptures…that might allow transformative phase shift to occur.
Maybe…
The painful lessons continue, along with the joy of deeper relationships…embracing life worth living, work worth doing and “enoughness as abundance.” Over time we might live into regenerative life-affirming patterns, dancing with the inherent tensions of complexity, uncertainty, messy humanness and monsters.
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 🎧 🎶
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.
🌀 Where are you rooted in the world?
🌀 What patterns are you witnessing?
🌀 What patterns are you feeding?
🌀 What needs, challenges and opportunities are you exploring?
🌀 What questions are you asking, surfacing and inviting?
🌀 What uncomfortable realities and questions are you (likely still) avoiding?
🌀 How might the spirit of living lab work, as we’ve tried to articulate it, nurture deeper relational bonds…living into life affirming ways?
These updated articles also reflect some serious re-orienting, re-configuring and re-framing, precipitating a cascade of updates to several more articles in the coming days and weeks:
🌀 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 intermediaries and expert professional roles function like tollbooths, insidiously reinforcing codependence and feeding the industrial complex.
🌀 Eternal discovering…enrolled in the school of life, elaborates on how this 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.
🌀 A little bit about our ‘unstitutional’ why…and how…‘we can all be unstitutional’ unpacks some of the backstory and describes the ethos that underlies our work
🌀 Wading through deep shi(f)t offers an overview of of recurring overlapping themes that cut across many aspects of our work, reflecting on our ongoing discovery and twists and turns as we partial witness, deepen understanding and reckon with (submerged) realities that are hard to face.
🌀 Beyond Dysfunctional Myths that Polarize…It’s a Dance!…peels back more layers revealing the ways polarization distorts perceptions of reality and maintains the weaponizing patterns of a dominator configuration, fortifying its hold.
This article was significantly updated again November 2026, with additional reflections and research, as we continue to experience, witness, listen, assimilate and adapt…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 polarizing distortions …is how we roll.
Our regularly updated suite of articles are fractal-like glimpses into the unstitutional ethos. They serve as co-catalytic springboards, inspiring deeper inquiry and integrative understanding…attuning to the spirit of life. 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 an unknowable future, in the present. These provisionally guide our ongoing collaborative work, supporting the ground conditions that might allow transformative phase shift.
Qualifying notes
No article can fully or adequately cover or convey the breadth and depth of what we are exploring. We reference several other articles and include additional links that speak to intertwined themes. We invite a readiness and willingness to sit with this stuff…to dip in…to allow multiple sittings.
The writings are artefacts. How we choose to engage…bringing them into our everyday contexts and relationships…matters more.
We love writing…sculpting with words…as an expression of our eternal discovering. 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, 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 subject-object observer programming. Assuming we can objectively and comprehensively know, scan, map, navigate and achieve a transformative trajectory feeds transitional treadmills. What is often described with the term emergent is also captured, as if the process is describable and explainable from the ‘observer’ position. For a deeper dive, see Twistification.
Transformative phase shifts are not explainable through causal logics. Attraction is the pull of the not yet. Attraction does not point. Attraction draws.
In case you’re wondering, none of the articles have been crafted or updated with the aid of AI…yet. Understanding that AI is primarily driven and entrapped by a dominator configuration, we advocate wide-eyed discernment. Humbly recognizing that we need all kinds of real help, we appreciate when AI is 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.
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.
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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