GroundedMaker's ForgeSoma Isles
Catching Confidence, Dropping Fear: Juggling as a Lifestyle
What juggling has taught me about patience, presence, and the power of play.
GroundedEntangled Vale
Roots of Connection
Beneath the surface lies the network that sustains us—a reminder from the sequoias that true resilience balances towering individuality with the power of interdependence.
GroundedUnfolding RealmSoma Isles
“One breath at a time”: daring life, mindfulness, and non-self - Lalith Gunaratne | S3E6
Lalith Gunaratne is a parent, entrepreneur, and educator on mindful leadership. We discuss Lalith’s mindfulness journey, his experience starting a solar energy business, and how his approach to equity, diversity, and inclusion training is informed by mindfulness and personal integrity.
GroundedSoma Isles
Coming home to your shoes-off self
The wind and waves bring me back to my “shoes-off” self—unburdened by social armour. In the Grokkist Network, I hope we create this same freedom: a place to let go, breathe, and simply be.
🎨 Sculpting with Tree Sap and Time
A 15-minute documentary following Kyoto artist Mine Tanigawa as she creates sculptures from urushi lacquer, a material used in Japan for over 7,000 years. Less a 'making of' than a portrait of attention: raw tree sap transformed through layer upon layer of colour, polishing and curing, eac
Read the note ↗👁️ Iris Murdoch and Love as a Way of Seeing
Matthew Crawford revisits Iris Murdoch as a philosopher pushing back against thin, hyper-rational models of human life. For Murdoch, morality isn't mainly abstract reasoning but attention — the difficult practice of seeing the world, other people and oneself more clearly. Her radical claim
Read the note ↗🕯️ A Religion Without Doctrine
A case for a religion that doesn't ask you to believe the right things but to show up and practice. Modern Quakerism is almost purely orthopraxic: sit in silence, pay attention, speak only if something real needs saying. At its centre is a simple claim — there's a part of you that already
Read the note ↗🏺 A Potter's Love-Hate with Porcelain
'Somewhere down the line it's just going to be another failure…' A potter returns to porcelain after years with stoneware and captures, with exquisite honesty, the tender friction of re-encountering a material that resists and reveals. Porcelain throws like plasticky cheddar, he says — sed
Read the note ↗🕊️ Simone Weil on the Generosity of Attention
'Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.' For Simone Weil, attention isn't effortful focus but an emptying out — a waiting, a letting-go of expectation so that something real can arise. 'Our thought must be empty, waiting, not seeking anything.' A kind of secular prayer. For
Read the note ↗🪵 Kumiko: The Japanese Art of Wood Joinery
Kumiko is the centuries-old Japanese craft of assembling wooden lattice patterns using nothing but precisely cut joints — no nails, no glue, just care and tension. We follow Kurozu Tetsuo, one of the few remaining artisans keeping the tradition alive; as his hands move with practiced calm,
Read the note ↗