Learning to Live in Liminal Space

Synthesis Statement: Sessions 1-5

October 2025 — February 2026

Recognizing the Polycrisis

This program is available to anyone, but it will likely resonate most with those who feel a calling — people deeply troubled by the polycrisis unfolding in the world and wondering how they might help. Not merely to observe or cope, or simply optimize what sits within their own circle of influence, but to help steward something genuinely better. That sense of calling becomes the entry point. It is also, in many ways, the first practice: saying yes to a path whose destination is not yet visible.

The world we are asked to face is real, and in many ways it is dire. Ecocide. The human-driven disruption of the climate. An unstable and concentrating global economy. The erosion of civility. The weakening of democratic institutions and the rise of autocracy. These are not distant abstractions. They are the living conditions of our moment. The uncertainty circles not around whether the Old Story is ending, but around how it will unravel and over what time.

What does the world look like 10, 25, 50, or 100 years from now? As artificial intelligence displaces entire categories of work, as climate change reshapes the face of the planet, as wealth and power consolidate in new and intensifying ways, these questions are not rhetorical. They hang in the air. They are the reason this work matters.

The complexity of these problems exceeds our capacity to solve them on our own. We must admit that hubris helped bring us to where we are and allow humility to guide us forward. While science works hard to find solutions, will it reverse climate change quickly enough? Will we find a way to halt species loss? Will our concern for ourselves individually allow us to see past ourselves and care for others? For marginalized communities? The world’s poor? 

Yet, the deepest truths of the world's mystical traditions remain the same. Stay humble. Stay open. Rumi writes: Be helpless, dumbfounded, unable to say yes or no. Then a stretcher will come from grace to gather us up…When we are able to make friends with that beauty, we shall become a mighty kindness. Jesus pointed out the difficulty for the self-sufficient man getting into paradise being comparable to a camel threading the eye of a needle. We need to be open, to be humble, and to be willing to receive help. 

Practice as Foundation

And so, in this program we practice. Daily. We commit to some sort of spiritual engagement. Prayer. Meditation. We find music that inspires. We find and create poetry and art. We write. We create community. We transmit and receive transmission. These practices are not decorative. They are the means by which we shift our interior space so that we can better face and serve the exterior world.

Through this work we begin to recognize something uncomfortable: the Old Story is not only out there, in governments and corporations and markets. It is deeply entrenched in our way of life. It is the story most of us were raised inside. It shapes our instincts about time, productivity, sufficiency, and control. The interior reckoning and the exterior reckoning are inseparable.

To move away from the Old Story we must begin, slowly, to detach from it. Not through rejection or rage, but through a conscious stepping away. We ground ourselves in a space that allows us to see the dying old clearly, to live among its institutions, and yet not be enveloped by it. We give it no heart. Only our witness, our grief for those harmed by it, and our energy directed toward what may come next.

The New Story and Its Seven Qualities

If the Old Story is ending, what replaces it?

The program suggests that the New Story cannot be built simply by opposing the old. The more we focus our attention on what is dying, the more power we inadvertently give it. Instead, we are invited to become a seedbed for what is emerging, placing our attention, imagination, and effort into what is life-giving.

Seven foundational qualities help orient that emerging story:

1. Respecting women and feminine principles

2. Respecting the land as sacred

3. Time no longer seen as linear

4. Non-hierarchical dynamics of power and control

5. Communities of all types

6. Oneness

7. Love

These qualities are not inventions. They represent the recovery of wisdom that has long existed in indigenous traditions, spiritual teachings, and the natural patterns of life itself. Their suppression has caused profound harm. Their recovery opens the possibility of healing.

As the program reminds us: Through it all will run the axis of love, from the center of the Earth to the center of the cosmos, present in every cell of creation.

Each of these qualities names both a place where the Old Story has failed us and a direction toward something more whole.

Stepping into Liminal Space

The program then turns toward one of its central teachings: liminal space.

Liminal space is the threshold, the space between what was and what will be. The terrain of transition. A sacred space. 

To enter liminal space is to consciously step away from the Old Story without yet having arrived in the New. This can feel disorienting. Our culture trains us to rush through uncertainty, to fill the unknown with activity and noise. This program asks something different: to dwell in the in-between.

From this vantage point we gain perspective.

When we make the subject the object, when we can look at the Old Story rather than only looking from inside it, its hold on us begins to loosen. We gain autonomy. We gain agency. We can live within the institutions of the old world without being captured by them.

Reflecting on this idea raises an interesting question:

Are we ever truly outside liminal space?

Once we loosen our attachment to certainty, life itself begins to appear as a continuous threshold, always unfolding between what has been and what may yet become.

To remain steady there requires practice. The simple orientation the program offers captures the posture well:

Witness
Grieve
Pray
Act

These four movements offer a way of orienting ourselves to the great challenges of the world. They describe a posture toward suffering and transformation. But they do not describe the texture of ordinary living.

For that, the practice of mindfulness, of stillness, of presence become essential. These allow us to inhabit each moment with awareness rather than reactivity. They are the ground from which witnessing becomes possible and from which compassionate action can emerge.

In some ways this is not unlike exercise or healthy eating. At first the effort can feel unnatural, even forced. But with time the body begins to recognize what is good for it. What once felt difficult begins to feel normal, even necessary. The longer we fall away from those practices, the harder it is to return. From the inside, though, it becomes clear that this way of being is simply the healthier place to live.

Witnessing, grieving, praying, and acting offer a way of responding to the world. Mindfulness and presence offer a way of inhabiting it.

Witnessing

Witnessing, we have seen, is a tool we use to allow ourselves to separate from the old. It allows us to recognize the pathologies, the hubris, the maladies, the corruption, the destruction — what the Buddha summarized simply as the suffering that emerges from the old story.

As we come into liminal space and allow ourselves to witness, we create that separation for ourselves. Not to dismiss reality, but to ground ourselves in a larger perspective.

Witnessing allows us to see and know much more, precisely because we realize we do not actually have to hold everything we see. We do not have to carry it. It is not ours. Or rather, it no longer needs to be.

And so the question arises: what do we do with what we witness? What do we do with tragedy?

We grieve.

Grieving

Grieving allows us to process the tragedy of the Old Story. It allows us to objectively see and understand it. It allows us to own our own participation in it and then let it go.

We must make peace with our shadow. We must make peace with our tragedy. We must make peace with our mistakes in order to move forward.

And so we grieve.

We grieve for the loss of what we love. We grieve for parts of ourselves and our communities that will never know full flourishing. We grieve for the losses and sorrows of the world. We grieve for what we expected but never received—for unconscious disappointment, loneliness, and a diminished experience of self. And we grieve for the unacknowledged and untended sorrow of those who came before us, for whom we can no longer help in any direct way.

Grieving opens the heart. If we allow it, it opens us to communion. One person’s grieving becomes everyone’s grieving. The more we allow for witnessing and grieving, the more we reconnect with our innocence and our deeper intentions, the more we allow ourselves to move toward love.

Operating from a place of love reshapes the world.

That is the basis of the New Story. A world created from love, from a sense of communion and oneness. From there hierarchy begins to soften. Time loosens its grip. The land is understood again as sacred. Masculine and feminine come back into balance. Communities begin to form around care rather than control.

Life begins to emerge in a more organic and unforced way.

And that emergence is seeded in liminal space, once we separate ourselves from the Old Story and choose to live differently.

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Grieving in Liminal Space

Following Session 5: Grieving in Liminal Space

February 10, 2026 — March 10, 2026

Synthesis Statement

This session helped us expand into a broader perspective of living in liminal space. The previous period was about witnessing, but many of us struggled with a metaphor about looking at the chaos and destruction of the dying old story as though you were standing in the next room. For many of us, it just felt passive, helpless, complicit even. Bill empathized with our struggle, valued the work we were doing, and recognized this to be a challenge of the course format as well. Living well in liminal space is a four-fold embodiment of Witness - Grieve - Pray - Act. We had only covered witnessing so far, and thus felt stuck, but witnessing does not occur in a vacuum. In this next session, by opening to Grieving in liminal space, we were able to better integrate witnessing as part of a process and not as a fixed act.

Bill also shared that the goal of the ‘other room’ metaphor is to help one stay grounded amidst the chaos. We can see and understand that all of this is happening, and maybe even begin to better understand why, when we are not feeling the ground falling from under our feet.

Thus, we moved into grieving.

We took time to consider those in all of creation who might be ‘crying’. We thought of those marginalized populations, the poor, the sick, the helpless, we thought of the plants and animals near extinction, we thought of the ignorant who knew no better. We felt their tears. We took time to grieve.

We spent time deepening our understanding of grief. One of the great values of grief is that it touches and honors something that is holy, something that is sacred. And that, that holy, that sacred, that is something we all have in common. The whole of creation shares that which is sacred. The more we can open to our shared grief > the more we can open to the sacred > the more we can open to one another > the more we can collectively heal.

We acknowledged that grief softens the heart, and that by feeling it, we are able to stop carrying it alone. Because of this, it is essential and healthy to grieve together so that all may understand how to do so. Grieving needs to become a habit. We need to share lamentation. This work needs to become public, so we all may move on.

When we hold grief unto ourselves, it can harden us, which ultimately contracts us away from others, away from community, which then further reduces connection and support to and from one another. We need the opposite. Grieving needs to be public. Shared. The more we grieve together, the more human we can become, and the better we will grow and evolve together.

I found myself wondering: Is there an official shared day of grieving? Should there be? What would it mean to publicly acknowledge lament as part of civic life?

Witness (the end of the old story)
Grieve (for the pain associated with endings)
Pray (for those in pain)
Act (for the good of all)

Report on Practice 

Grieving in the World

This period I tried to pay particular attention to grieving – for elements in my personal life as well as for events in the world. I saw our country engage in more wars: military, cultural, and class. We bombed Iran. Kansas rendered all transgender people’s driver’s licenses immediately invalid. No runway, immediately effective. We watched ongoing deep federal cuts and eligibility tightenings to Medicaid, SNAP, and ACA marketplaces, reforms that analysts say are reducing social-safety-net support for millions of low-income families and projecting income gains mostly for the wealthiest earners.

 The Bowl of Tears

In the session, we had a ‘bowl of tears’. An assignment we had was to find an opportunity, a location where we felt the world needed to soften its hardening a bit and to open to grieving and a new story a bit more. Perhaps it was a political institution, perhaps a location of a symbol of some sort. There, we should perform a ritual of sorts, and pour the bowl of tears there. I decided to pour the tears over myself. I wanted to open myself up even more. I felt hardened from my own past experiences. I felt I could do a better job of loving, of hearing, of holding, of being compassionate.

I slowly poured the tears. Some over my head. I drew lines across my forehead, down the center of my face, under my eyes, touched my cheeks. I poured a bit over each shoulder, onto the back of my neck, and the rest over my heart. I prayed that my heart would open and that my actions, my speech, my writing, my intentions, my life would serve to help spread compassion, to be where I need to be when I need to be there, so that I may be of service.

Then I took a warm shower, because those tears were really cold. :)

Dead Poets

I meet with a small group of people who have recently lost loved ones. We call ourselves a Dead Poets Society. I found our most recent meeting particularly related to our New Story Community for two reasons. One because of how this period was a reflection on grieving, and two, because of a topic that arose. I found myself sharing a story that was very much my Old Story. I don’t know why, I just felt like I had to share it. I think in part I was nervous and it was familiar; in part I just felt like I needed others to hear it so I could let it go. I guess I needed witnesses, and others to help share the grief for a moment. And they did. And the next day, I almost felt bothered, embarrassed even, that I had recounted the story because it was not my current story. It was my past. It was not where I am now, it is where I was. But for some reason, I could not be where I was in that moment. I was trapped in the past. Still looking for a way to get grounded in the present. I was, in that moment, in the room, not in the next room looking back.

Or maybe I was starting to look back and not quite yet realizing I was separating.

Facing Reality: Buechner

I have been reading The Sacred Journey by Frederick Buechner and found a passage particularly powerful. In a matter of just two paragraphs, he shared three profound (to me) insights.

Buechner’s father had recently died, and his mother was going to take her kids to Bermuda for a bit to live and grieve. His grandmother urged them “to stay and face reality…because if you do not face up to the enemy in all his dark power, then the enemy will come up from behind some dark day and destroy you.” Face reality. Don’t run from it. There is a necessary hardening that keeps you grounded.

But then Buechner cautions against hardening yourself too completely: “to do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do–to grit your teeth and clench your fists in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst–is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still. The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life also against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from. You can survive on your own. You can grow strong on your own. You can even prevail on your own. But you cannot become human on your own.” This is about internal transformation. You have to stay permeable enough to let something holy work in you. The steel that protects can also prevent you from becoming more fully yourself.

Buechner finishes this section: “Surely that is why, in Jesus’ sad joke, the rich man has as hard a time getting into Paradise as that camel through the needle’s eye because with his credit card in his pocket, the rich man is so effective at getting for himself everything he needs that he does not see that what he needs more than anything else in the world can be had only as a gift. He does not see that the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept, even from [God] himself, a helping hand.” This is something different from the second insight, though related. It isn’t only about being open to transformation. It’s about relational receiving, the willingness to depend on something beyond yourself. Community. God. One another. The open hand.

Not three steps, but three facets of the same truth. They cycle back on one another. You cannot fully receive without first facing reality. You cannot be transformed without opening your hand. And the open hand, over time, softens the steel.

Olympia Testimony

This period I also found a few opportunities to Witness > Grieve > Pray > Act. Perhaps the most outstanding, and most novel for me was traveling to our State capitol to testify before the House. I had seen a Senate Bill making its way through the legislature that was relevant to the death of my daughter. Passing the bill would enable the mobilization of coordinated resources to locate missing persons who are in a mental health crisis or actively suicidal. This bill would protect folks with autism, dementia, and others who might be lost and otherwise hard to locate.

So, I brought my wife and son, and we went to Olympia, sat before the House Committee on Community Safety, and told them the importance of making such resources safely available for rapid response.

What stayed with me afterward wasn’t the testimony itself. It was my son, sitting there, watching how this all works. Seeing the capitol. Understanding that real people show up and tell hard truths and try to make things better. I was glad he saw that. I was glad my community knew I was there.

The grief did not stay inside. It moved into the world.

And for the record, sometimes good enough ends up being good enough. I had written a three-minute statement. It was polished. It was measured. It was concise. Others called it powerful. It said all it needed to without fluff. When the session began, the Chair cut testimony time to ninety seconds. As the hearing progressed, they shortened it again to sixty just before the bill was called. I had to improvise on the fly. My testimony was no longer polished. It wasn’t perfect. It was simply what I could offer in the moment. Despite the interior chaos I felt, the Chair thanked me for my testimony and remarked that this bill, if passed, would become part of my daughter’s legacy. And my wife and son had a chance to hear that too. My son heard that acting matters. That showing up matters. That telling the truth, even imperfectly, matters.

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Witnessing in Liminal Space

Following Session 4: Witnessing in Liminal Space

January 12, 2026 — February 10, 2026

Synthesis Statement

Making the subject the object.

We, by and large, begin immersed in the Old Story. The first few sessions helped us recognize that there is an Old Story, that a New Story may be possible, and that there is a transition between the two. Those early sessions worked to loosen our attachment to the old and to help us step into the Liminal Space.

This most recent session was about seeing ourselves in that liminal space—about recognizing what it looks like and feels like to be there.

Understanding what it looks like.

Its textures.

How to dwell there—in the unknown, in the discomfort—comfortably.

We talked about how our habits, our normal ways of looking at things, very likely tie us to the Old Story, and what it might mean to move ourselves differently—to see ourselves from within liminal space rather than trying to observe it from a distance. What practices and perspectives might help us remain there? By better understanding that space, we may be able to immerse ourselves more fully within it.

We discussed a four-fold movement for nurturing ourselves in liminal space:

Witness the end of the Old Story

Grieve the pain associated with endings

Pray for those who are suffering

Act for the good of all

We will spend more time with the latter three in future sessions. This session focused most deeply on Witnessing.

One story we discussed came from the Old Testament. When the Jews were led from slavery in Egypt toward the Promised Land, they wandered the desert for forty years. Geographically speaking, Israel is not a forty-year journey from Egypt. Rather, it took time for the older generations—and perhaps more importantly, the older paradigms—to loosen their grip and pass away.

We also discussed a Sufi story of the Mullah who searches for his lost keys in a familiar, well-lit place rather than venturing into the darkness where they were actually lost. This brought to mind an idea often attributed to Einstein: that the significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.

I see this dynamic playing out in my own life. When I think about how to prepare my child for the future, I recognize a generation raised in a world of ubiquitous technology. They have never known a time when nearly any question could not be answered with a few keystrokes. While I can teach fundamentals, I have a hard time anticipating the institutions or industries that will dominate when his generation becomes the primary workforce—assuming society even resembles what we now imagine over the next fifteen to forty-five years. Similarly, it feels implausible to expect today’s legislative elders to meaningfully regulate emerging technologies like AI. I consider myself relatively tech-savvy, yet my child can run circles around me on my phone, just as I once did around my parents.

The point, at least as I am beginning to understand it, is that we may need to loosen our attachment to inherited ways of thinking and operating in order to give ourselves space to discover what might yet become.

We also talked about the need to recognize that the Old Story is dying and that, in a sense, it deserves hospice care. We are invited to allow it to die gracefully—with the least damage to itself or to those around it, with the least fallout, and with care, dignity, and respect. Marie Kondo offers a simple wisdom here: when letting something go, thank it for what it gave you, and then allow it to depart.

In meditation, one of the goals, as I understand it, is to make the subject the object. We are often trapped in our minds—thinking endless thoughts, feeling endless emotions, pulled in countless directions. But when we step back and witness this activity, when we create even a small amount of space, we begin to know ourselves differently.

I am drawn to Sri Ramana Maharshi’s self-inquiry practice. We ask ourselves:

I have a body, but I am not my body. Who am I?
I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. Who am I?
I have feelings, but I am not my feelings. Who am I?

In this practice, awareness slowly shifts toward the consciousness that is witnessing sensations, thoughts, emotions, and experiences as they arise and pass.

As we root ourselves there, we begin to empty ourselves out—not in a diminishing way, but in a receptive one. Perhaps this is how we become vessels for Spirit. Perhaps this is how we step more fully into liminal space and begin to sense what might arise that feels aligned with a New Story.

And so, through witnessing—within ourselves, in the world around us, and in the broader Old Story—we give ourselves space. Space to listen. Space to remain present. Space for something new to emerge.

We were offered a poem during the session, whose final lines stayed with me:

The rest of this must be said in silence
because of the enormous difference
between light and the words
that try to say light.

A few other lines I jotted down over the course of our session:

• When in doubt, practice loving kindness.

• Liminal space is a place to refill your tank.

• The prophets may sometimes sound angry, but they speak from anguish—their hearts broken open, their love outpouring to all.

Bill also shared something deceptively simple that resonated deeply with me. We were coming off the holidays—a time I often experience as overwhelming: too many people, too many activities, too much noise. Bill said that rather than focusing on the holiday season, he looks for holiday moments.

I loved this.

That shift—to be present and open to noticing those special moments that arise—feels far more manageable, and perhaps more meaningful over time. It feels like another way of witnessing. Stopping, now and then, to smell the roses.

Report on Practice

Witnessing as an Opening

Witnessing was at the center of this period’s practice. Our invitation was to engage with the news—to stay informed without becoming consumed by fear or worry, while still holding care and compassion. That distinction feels important.

It is easy to slip into apathy. Cognitive overload. Especially for empathetic and caring people. But the aim was not withdrawal. It was presence—staying with the chaos and seeing it for what it is.

During this period, I attended a summit for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation. One moment in particular has stayed with me. A survivor spoke about spending decades of her life being exploited—used for others’ gain, physically and financially. She was entertainment. She was an asset. She was property. More than five decades after being coerced into a life marked by violence, drugs, and confinement—often bought and sold—she was now standing freely before policymakers, practitioners, and advocates, speaking on her own behalf.

What struck me most was the challenge she offered. Their ask is large. And it is not unfair. It is for change.

If all we do is listen for our own benefit, are we not also exploiting them—however unintentionally? If we witness without responding, without allowing ourselves to be changed, what kind of witnessing is that? 

That stayed with me for days. Weeks, even. I did hear them. I witnessed them. But to what degree was that enough?

I don’t think true witnessing is a closed act.

We can see something and let it pass. But I attended with an open heart and an open mind. I went to truly listen. In doing so, I allowed their stories to shift something at my core. They have shaped how I think. They influence the conversations I have. They inform the decisions I make.

Since the summit, I have written about the experience and spoken about it publicly, including at a City Council meeting. That happened because of witnessing. Would it have occurred without that specific insight into exploitation? I honestly cannot say. But I do know that my worldview expanded, and that I will carry those stories into future conversations and decisions.

Witnessing, I am learning, is much more than simply seeing something happen.

A Realignment of Habits

My wife was traveling for a few months before the holidays. This was the longest we had been apart since we married more than a quarter century ago. My experience probably included all the elements you would expect. I missed her presence, and I enjoyed my autonomy. I had to do more for myself and less for someone else. I had more to manage around the house, yet fewer people around the house to account for. All of that was fairly easy to anticipate.

What was a bit more interesting was the living-without-a-partner-and-then-getting-them-back part.

At first, it was a bit like moving out of your parents’ house as a kid. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want. There’s a sense of unlimited freedom. Not that I ever felt bound — my wife and I have always been supportive of one another’s interests. Still, we would always check in with each other: what are you up to, do you want to do something together, what does the rest of the day look like?

Living “alone,” that check-in simply wasn’t there.

I was free to move as I pleased. I flowed more naturally across work, rest, socializing, exercise, reading, recreation, bathing, cooking, and sleep. Over time, certain rhythms emerged — some more prominent than others. It was, honestly, a fascinating way to come into contact with myself.

Then, months later, anticipating her return became its own experience.

Of course, I was excited to see her and be with her again. I could feel that something important had been missing. My partner. My confidante. My emotional co-regulator. And alongside that excitement, there was nervousness. What would reintegration be like? How would it affect my flow? Would it put more on my plate and feel heavier? Or would it take something off and feel lighter?

So, circling back to witnessing: when she arrived, I noticed myself slipping back into old habits. I checked in with her frequently. Context matters here — we both primarily work from home, so it’s easy to wrap up a meeting, see what the other person is up to, then head back to your desk and dive into whatever comes next.

But fairly quickly, I realized something.

I didn’t always need to check in with her first. And she didn’t need me to do so either. It was often healthier for me to check in with myself. What did I need next? What was my current flow state? Once I decided I was going to go for a hike, for example, I could then mention it to her and ask if she wanted to join.

In the weeks that followed, something subtle but meaningful shifted.

We became stronger both together and apart. More comfortable together, and more comfortable not. We could come and go to our respective obligations, keep one another in the loop, connect over shared moments — coffee, walks, meals, a movie, a dance, a date — while still maintaining a healthy autonomy that, somehow, I’m not sure we fully had before.

It’s honestly hard to say exactly what changed. We’ve been together a long time. We’ve been through a lot. There have been peaks and valleys, ebbs and flows, clean lines and blurry ones.

But something feels stronger now. Cleaner. More grounded.

And it feels like it includes a deeper kind of witnessing.

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Imagining and Welcoming a New Story

Following Session 3: Imagining and Welcoming a New Story

December 10, 2025 – January 12, 2026

Synthesis Statement

This session offered an opportunity to examine how we have come to organize our lives with an overemphasis on the wrong values or qualities of reality, or, perhaps more accurately, a misunderstanding of the hierarchies in which we live. 

Many of us implicitly take the Market Economy as the primary driver in our lives. And in daily experience, it can often feel that way. However, more foundational than the market economy is the Human Economy. It is our human minds that created markets, as well as communities, systems of care, compassion, and expressions of wisdom. And even these are nested within an even greater Natural Economy, where the forces and rhythms of nature govern our very existence. And so, we have it backwards. We should instead ground our strength and understanding of reality first in the natural world, and then allow our modes of existing to align with that. This framing of nested economies is articulated by Vandana Shiva. 

When we fail to see the forest for the trees, our limited vision drives decisions that generate disharmony. That disharmony is now threatening our collective well-being, and even our continued existence within these systems. At the time of writing, we see rising inflation, persistently high levels of economic insecurity, mass incarceration, widening gaps between the haves and the have-nots, and increasingly turbulent weather events occurring with greater frequency and severity.

The path to course correction lies in immersing ourselves in recognition and practice of different foundational qualities: respect for one another, an appreciation of the world as sacred, an openness to larger natural rhythms

Report on Practice

This period was a bit different than the others – not because it was more profound, but because it was messier, slower, and more constrained by life as it actually showed up. I was quite ill for more than half of this period, and it unfolded amid the chaos of the holidays. My wife returned from her extended travels, and we had a readjustment period with another person living in the house. 

One goal this period was to select from a provided list of ‘foundational qualities’ and live into them personally and professionally. While we had reviewed and discussed these qualities as a group, choosing which ones to focus on in my own practice was itself a provocative endeavour. Do I go with what feels familiar and accessible? Or do I push farther outside of my comfort zone and attempt to engage what feels most foreign? What might be the healthiest for me long term? What might be best for the program? What might be healthiest for me in the long term? What might be most generative for the program? What might open my eyes in ways others would not?

I went back and forth for some time. Eventually I quieted down and allowed a few qualities to speak to me. The truth is most of them resonated as true and meaningful. Many were qualities I felt I already felt I lived into in various ways – not perfectly, but not superficially either. Still, there were three in particular that called to me just a bit more loudly during this cycle. 

Non-Hierarchy

This quality posed the greatest challenge for me. The idea was that today’s hierarchies are problematic for a multitude of reasons and that a healthier future will function in a much more non-hierarchical way. I offer this reflection primarily to highlight my own struggle. 

I was not able to discover a non-hierarchical truth here. Perhaps I will one day. I can agree deeply that our current value hierarchies are misaligned with structures that would be more globally beneficial. And yet, hierarchies seem inevitable in nature itself: atoms into molecules, into cells, into tissues, into organs, into systems, into bodies, into families, into cultures, into, into, into. It’s turtles all the way up, and down. 

Bureaucracy, for better or worse, becomes a necessary tool for organizing complexity at scale. Can we do better? Yes. Should we? Absolutely. Does that mean looking deeply at our current structures and potentially disrupting them? Certainly. But does that mean that hierarchies themselves are inherently bad? I don’t think so. Not yet, anyway. 

Oneness

Can we include all people as we think through problems? Can we make decisions that treat everyone equitably? We certainly should try. How do we value everyone and everything for what it is – as a foundational orientation – before we begin making decisions? This feels like a noble effort, and one I attempt to embrace in my work as an elected official.

I tried to meditate daily on this idea, and to notice where my openness to oneness breaks down. I thought of professional experiences in which people failed to honor commitments, cheated, lied, or acted out of greed or self-interest. In situations where I experienced myself as the “victim,” it was those individuals with whom I struggled most to feel a sense of oneness. It is easy to feel that “we are all in this together” in the abstract. It is much harder when someone has taken from you, overtly or covertly. 

In a conversation with my program partner, we discussed this struggle, and he reminded me of the value of forgiveness. That immediately clicked. Forgiveness became a doorway to oneness. 

As I reflected further, I realized that not forgiving is a way of holding onto the past. It keeps turbulent emotions alive within me, while the other person may not be thinking about me at all. Much of my pain, I noticed, was actually anger at myself for not seeing warning signs, for not protecting myself, for how I responded in those moments. 

In that sense, forgiveness is largely about forgiving myself. It allows me to move forward without forgetting what happened. I can remember who those people showed themselves to be and choose not to give them what I once did, while also recognizing that they, too, are living in their own limited worlds, shaped by their own interpretations of life and reality. And in that, we are the same. 

I am not fully there yet. I know that certain situations may still bring emotional turbulence. But I am closer to oneness than I was when this practice began, and for that, I am grateful. 

Living in Harmony with Time Rather Than a Strictly Linear View 

Throughout my life, I have had many experiences that have broadened my perspective of time. I have experienced moments of déjà vu where I recall memories (sometimes even recalling the memory of having the memory) only later to find myself living through the event. I have also  experienced moments where intentions or desires manifested not through effort or force, but in their own time, when they were naturally ready to come about. 

A recent and relatively mundane example helped clarify this distinction for me. 

For some time, I had anticipated the need for an additional car. My son is now driving and needs transportation for school, extracurricular activities, and time with friends. We had been sharing cars, but it reached a point where doing so created more conflict our schedules could comfortably support. So, I began shopping for a car and eventually made a purchase in the second week of December. 

Because the car was out of state, it needed to be shipped. I also authorized the dealer to send temporary plates so I could drive the car while awaiting for permanent plates – a fairly standard process. Around this same time, I became quite ill, likely with some form of the flu. Despite this, my project management instincts kicked in. I tracked timelines, followed up with the dealer repeatedly, monitored shipping details, and pushed to resolve outstanding issues such as registration paperwork and infotainment system pairing. 

Despite my efforts, progress was very slow. The dealer was at times unresponsive, and it wasn’t until the second week of January that everything was fully complete: the car was in my driveway, the system was connected, and the temporary plates arrived. 

Looking back from a broader perspective, I can see that during the holidays my family’s schedule was more flexible. While I was sick, I wasn’t driving much anyway. When I actually needed an additional car, there was one available. By the time school resumed and schedules tightened, everything was in place. In other words, we had exactly what we needed, when we needed it. 

I don’t share this to suggest that one should never intervene. In fact, the dealer made an error and failed to process the temporary plates until I followed up. But the larger rhythm of events unfolded differently than the timeline I believed was necessary. The car became legally drivable when I truly needed it, and not before. 

When I widen the lens further, this pattern appears elsewhere in my life. After the stress of nearly losing my wife to cancer (she is thankfully in remission), the loss of my daughter, and deep vocational burnout, I needed the world to slow down. And in many ways, it did. I was given time to step into a meaningful role on the City Council, time to be more present with my son, time to grieve, and time to begin reimagining how I want to live the next chapter of my life. 

That work continues. Daily meditation helps me stay present – feeling what I feel, thinking what I think, evaluating options, reshaping habits, and slowly stepping into a New Story. I still don’t know exactly what that story is, but I am becoming more comfortable with not knowing. 

In our last session, someone shared the idea of emptying ourselves so we can be a vessel for input from Spirit. I am finding increasing comfort in that emptiness. We also heard the words: I don’t need to see. I don’t need to know. I only ask to be of use. That feels like one of the only sane aspirations in a world that so often feels absurd. 

Poem

Finally, this period, we were asked to write a poem that expresses our sense of our collective need for a new story. Here’s mine:

Nurture has dominated Nature.
The masses are exhausted.
I am exhausted.

What do you see, little bird, as you look down upon the world?
Do you see the angst? Do you see the confusion? 
Animals pushed out of developments. 
The “unsophisticated” pushed to the margins. 
Culture pushed out for power. 
It’s cheaper to feed than cage, 
but caging feeds the powerful, 
and the powerful are hungry.

And where is healing? How do we find solace? 
It’s here. 
It’s now. 
It will be present, 
when enough people are too.

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