Pushing the Boat Out

Hey friends,

There's a moment I've come to love, and it arrives just before anyone knows whether the thing works.

You build the boat on land. Many hands, over weeks, in a shed. And then comes the day you have to get it into the water, which somehow takes more people than the building did — all shoving and shouting and nobody quite agreeing on the angle. It goes in badly. It wobbles. It sits lower than you expected.

And then, usually, it floats.

Two boats went in this month, and I got to stand on the shore for both.

The first was Tea with Margarita, @Margarita Steinberg’s new monthly salon for curious humans. It begins from the premise that thoughtful companionship is worth wanting for its own sake — that you don't need a problem to solve or a takeaway promised in order to deserve a good conversation. If you're usually the capable one that other people bring things to, it's a room where you get to be held rather than do the holding. The next one is on 25 August.

The second was Revenue Café, where @Bo Alroe sits with one or two members and works through the revenue questions hiding inside their real projects, live, while everyone else watches. Bo has a knack for helping people approach commercial reality without feeling they have to become somebody else first. You don't need a project of your own to come — most of the learning happens watching someone else's puzzle get unpacked. Next instalment on 20 August.

Both had that quality a first outing has: a great deal of goodwill in the room while the thing finds its shape, everyone rowing slightly out of time, and then it catches the current. Both are already back on the calendar, and there are more formats coming.

Much of what I do one-to-one is a smaller version of the same job — helping someone get their thing off the beach and into the water, and then arranging it so it actually sails. If working together directly appeals, you can find me here.

Two Red Thread talks are coming up, which are their own sort of launch — someone bringing a thread into a room while it's still being worked out.

On 19 August, @Naomi Sonne offers The Speed of Grief. Her premise is that grief isn't something to get through but something to be witnessed, carried, and slowly moved with — and that the long, invisible griefs are the ones needing the most consistent care. It's an invitation into solidarity rather than answers, and a small oasis from the demand to get back to normal.

On 30 August, @Marcus Barrick brings Interrelating our Collective Agency in a Fragmented Era — a path from engineering physics through cognitive science to a way of seeing the world as process rather than product, and what that does to our sense of what we can do together. He found his way here after a few conversations with Em, who told him he was a hundred per cent a grokkist. We agree.

If you have something sitting on the beach yourself, there's a call out for September and October events open now. That's the moment to say so.

I have a half-built thing of my own in the water, a pilot of a new interactive quests system on the Network to sit alongside the Realms, and rather than wait until it's watertight I've invited people to wander it and try to break it. I'll finish implementing it when I'm back from a break. This is something I've wanted to do for a long time and I'm excited that it has finally become close to reality.

Over at the Press, our next book is in the final stages of pre-production: @Jim Palmer’s The Practice of Being Alive, which has just come through a beta-reader process with the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. It's been a good demonstration of how much a book gains from being read by people before it's finished.

And the biggest boat is out of the shed and into the shed's doorway, at least.

Last time I told you we'd found ourselves inventing a festival. It's now a real thing we are doing next year, and @Alan Raw is organising it. We still don't know exactly what it will be — that's rather the point of the next few months. We'll post about it soon and pull you into the working-out. If you missed his Red Thread talk, What Was Built Without Permission is the recording, and the best possible argument for putting him in charge.

A more personal note to close.

I've come to the end of two months of visiting people around the UK, and I'm heading home to New Zealand this week, with a much-needed fortnight of rest along the way.

What the visiting has clarified for me is that the traffic runs both ways. Grokkist was built online-first and globally facing on purpose, and I've never thought of online as the lesser version of anything — those relationships are the reason any of these visits were possible at all. But sharing a space with someone for a stretch of days does something else again. It extends the whole thing out into three dimensions. You find out how tall people are. And then you go back to the screen and it's different there too, warmer, with more in it.

That's the loop we want to make more room for over the coming year, and the festival is only the most obvious part of it.

I'm also not travelling home alone. Lars is moving from Denmark to New Zealand with me, and we're going to start building a life together. We met this time last year, and it has been the longest of long-distance relationships. It's a good week to be pushing a boat out.

Until next time, find something worth getting into the water.

With curiosity and care,
Danu