Grokkist Newsletter #68

Hey friends,

If you’re new here — welcome. You’ve landed in the middle of a living experiment.

(And if you’ve been around a while, consider this a fresh snapshot of where we’re at, and a reminder of how we got here.)

Grokkist is a community of curious misfits, multidimensional creatives, and slow-blooming thinkers figuring out how to flourish on purpose — without leaving parts of ourselves behind.

We’re into things like unlearning, coddiwompling, rehumanising systems, and saying yes before we feel ready. We do this through gatherings, courses, publishing, consulting, and relational experiments of all kinds.

If that sounds gloriously unfinished — that’s because it is.

The Grokkist ecosystem grows like a garden: wild in some places, precise in others, with sudden spurts and unexpected beauty.

No one knows exactly which shoots are weeds and which are flowers — and that’s part of the point.

There’s no master plan, only a shared ethos and a deep trust in emergent direction. If you find a rough edge, let us know. If you feel a spark, follow it.

One of my favourite metaphors for how we operate is from the Wallace and Gromit train scene — you know the one, where Gromit is frantically laying down track just ahead of the train.

That’s what it feels like when you work with momentum. When you let the work pull you forward instead of pushing it uphill.

That’s how Jes Böhme’s PhilosophyGyms found a home in the Grokkist calendar — offering unhurried, embodied conversations that help us exercise our meaning muscles.

It’s also how Salt & Seeds, our first physical book through Grokkist Press, came to be — Alan Raw simply announced that a train was leaving the station, and track appeared under it.

The occasion created just enough joyful pressure to turn a long-held intention — “we should publish books one day” — into reality.

But the real story isn’t just that we published a book.

It’s that we created the conditions where that could happen — where someone’s bold announcement became an occasion for growth, learning, and doing the thing, because the context made it feel alive to do it.

That’s the deeper function of a space like Grokkist.

Not just doing the thing, but creating the kind of aliveness where doing the thing suddenly feels possible. Where someone else’s spark animates your own, and a collective momentum carries us further than careful planning ever could.

Which brings me to this newsletter.

Think of it as a kind of curated campfire — a place to sit down, take a breath, and warm your hands on the glow of everything that’s been stirring across the Grokkist ecosystem.

It’s a crash tutorial and a pulse-check. A mix of updates, reflections, and snack-sized wonders. A way to catch the vibe in one go, even if you don’t click on everything.

You’re not expected to keep up — this isn’t a nudge to be more productive. It’s a chance to slow down and tune in.

So settle in. Read what calls to you. Follow your curiosity. The rest will be here when you’re ready.

And if you’re wondering what to do with all this — don’t wait for structure.

Just dive in. Join an event. Read a piece. Make one. Comment in the Network. Write me. Start something. Let yourself be met.

We’ve got more things coming down the pipe — new experiments, new gatherings, new ways to participate in the ongoing dance of meaning-making. But you don’t need to wait for the perfect moment. The invitation is always open.

Thanks for being here. Let’s keep laying track together.

With curiosity and care,
Danu

Fresh from the Press

3 | Loving the Least of These While Working for Justice with Martha Hennessy and Dr. Cornel West

By Jim Robinson and Liam Myers (51 min listen)

Martha Hennessy and Dr. Cornel West reflect on the legacy of the Catholic Worker movement and the ongoing call to comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable, and disarm the world with love.

Explore the episode ↗

Stockhausen, Picasso, and Egg on your Face

By Peter Gilderdale (4 min read)

Getting it wrong — and faking it — turned out to be useful. It taught me what real understanding takes, and how hard it is to ask for.

Read the article ↗

More from the Press

• Thunder on the Keyboard (Peter Gilderdale, 4 min read) – Sometimes the most powerful music is the kind that proves you wrong.

Upcoming Events

🟢 PhilosophyGyms @ Grokkist

🗓️ Thur 5 Jun | 7pm–8.30pm Central European time (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Jessica Böhme

What if you’re already living a philosophy—whether you realise it or not? And what if you could train for that philosophy, the way you train for fitness?

PhilosophyGyms are communal workouts for your ethical imagination. They’re not about mastering theories or reaching agreement. They’re about strengthening your capacity to sit with complexity, speak from curiosity, and make space for wisdom to emerge in good company.

This 7-week series hosted by Jessica Böhme is for anyone seeking to live with more coherence, more aliveness, and more conscious participation in the systems we’re part of.

Just like a real gym, it’s great if you come every week—but no pressure. Drop in when you can. You’ll still feel the stretch. 

Event Details and RSVP ↗

🟢 Grok Cafe [#4 in 2025]

🗓️ Wed 11 Jun | 6–7.30pm Central European time (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Danu Poyner

You’re invited to the Grok Cafe: our signature social gathering for grokkists.

At the Grok Cafe, we gather not just to talk, but to connect—with each other, with ourselves, and with the strange and wonderful stories that make us who we are. This time, we’re turning our attention to the battles we’ve chosen to fight—especially the hilariously unnecessary ones.

Our beautiful question for this session is:
“What’s the most ridiculous hill you’ve ever died on—and was it worth it?”

We’ll swap stories of stubborn stands, unlikely crusades, and the glorious absurdity of the things we once thought really mattered. Maybe you’ll laugh, maybe you’ll cringe, maybe you’ll discover something true hiding in the punchline.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

Other Upcoming Events

• 24 Jun | 🟢 Writing the Future: celebrating Salt & Seeds, speculative fiction, and the launch of the Grokkist Writing Salon

Groksmithing is our in-house approach to project work. It blends coaching, collaboration, creative delivery, and strategic sense-making — all held in a container of curiosity, care, and practical momentum.

We don’t do it to you. We don’t do it for you. We do it with you. It’s the kind of help grokkists need — and the kind grokkists love to give. Find out more.

Featured Menu Offering

Publishing Push-Off

You’ve got something to say — an idea, a story, a perspective — but the medium, the message, and the mechanics are all swirling.

Is it a blog? A newsletter? A podcast? A video series? Something entirely your own?

We’ll help you shape your intention into a publishing container that fits. Together we’ll choose the right platform, and then actually set it up with you, step by step. You’ll get your first piece out into the world, with a publishing space that feels right and works the way you want it to.

You leave with something live, a simple rhythm, and the clarity and confidence to keep going.

🍽️ 2–3 calls + async support
🔖 $280 (members) / $1,400 (non-members)

Enlist a Groksmith ↗

Featured Course

Find Your Red Thread

Find Your Red Thread is about helping you make sense of yourself. Sometimes, life feels scattered—like the pieces of your story are out there, but they don’t quite add up.

Maybe you’ve been chasing the next goal, trying to live up to an idea of success that isn’t yours, and now you’re wondering what it was all for. It feels like burnout, but it’s something deeper: a longing to realign with what brings you alive and makes you feel whole.

This is a space to sit with those pieces—not to fix them, but to look at them honestly and see the patterns, the connections, the story they’re trying to tell.

🔖 Suggested Tuition (USD$99)*

(*Can't afford it? Don't worry. Our Forget About the Price Tag policy ensures this course is open to everyone, regardless of budget.)

Explore 'Find Your Red Thread' ↗

#1 - Journalism After the Dream

Against Reporting

Denunciations

CastaliaSam Kahn

“The idea was that there was a sweet spot that reporting could get to…”

A gorgeous, clear-eyed reflection on journalism’s mythos and its limits. Sam Kahn grew up chasing the dream of being a capital-J Journalist — the kind who could unearth injustice with fairness and objectivity, and by the force of well-crafted prose, spark sweeping reform. He traces this ideal back to Lincoln Steffens, the patron saint of muckrakers, whose moral urgency helped shape the belief that journalism could be a force for public good.

But over time, that dream got folded into what Jay Rosen calls “the view from nowhere” — the myth of the neutral, professional observer. Kahn doesn’t rage against this loss, nor does he sink into despair. Instead, he gently lets the fantasy go, choosing to engage with the world as it is, not as he once hoped journalism might make it. He offers a reframing of journalism’s crisis not just as a technical or economic failure, but a relational one. Detached objectivity only works in systems we trust — and trust is what’s eroded. What Kahn offers instead is a path grounded in relationship, presence, and attention.

‘Journalism’ doesn’t have to mean a boring, detached, clinical, telegraphic, faux-lab-coat-wearing style. Journalism really can just be a curiosity about the world — an interest in talking to different kinds of people, in keeping one’s eyes open, in learning things, in finding creativity within the non-fictional.

#2 - The Internet lays down in the grass

One Minute Park

available at a park near you

Hundreds of one-minute, handheld videos of parks — just that. No narration. No viral hooks. Just people showing up to record their local patch of grass and sky. A collective love letter to public space, One Minute Park feels like the kind of internet we once hoped for — idiosyncratic, heartfelt, and deeply human. An antidote to the optimised feed. Go take a walk through it.

#3 - The art historian who thought he was a werewolf

Warburg’s Werewolf: An Anamnesis

Aby Warburg spent his life finding forms that could hold their own against the flow of time. All the while, as Kevin Dann explores, he was churning on the brink of madness with the sense that he himself was changing — into a terrifying animal. What kind of history would a werewolf write?

The Public Domain ReviewKevin Dann

Aby Warburg is best known as a boundary-breaking art historian who saw visual culture as a kind of long memory across time. But in 1921, during a stay in a psychiatric hospital, he penned an extraordinary document — part confession, part cosmology — in which he grapples with the idea that he might be a werewolf. At times, he wrote from the perspective of the werewolf, mingling hallucination with academic research.

His “anamnesis” fuses childhood memories with Renaissance symbolism, Mesopotamian myth, astronomical events, and the instincts of wild animals. It’s not so much a loss of reason as a reconfiguration of it — a serious attempt to chart the inner weather of a human soul in extremis. Warburg doesn’t reject the irrational so much as trace its contours with all the tools at his disposal. The result is strange, sincere, and unforgettable.

#4 - A file converter that respects you

VERT.sh — Free, fast, and awesome file convert

With VERT you can quickly convert any image, video and audio file. No ads, no tracking, open source, and all processing (other than video) is done on your device.

Most of us have likely needed to convert a file and ended up on some sketchy website full of ads, limits, or upsells. Vert is different — open-source, private by default, and thoughtfully designed. It handles images, audio, documents, and video, with most processing done locally in your browser. No account, no file size limits, no nonsense. Just a tool that works the way it should.

#5 - Owls in towels

Owls in Towels

Owls in Towels

Another deeply good use of the internet. Wildlife rehabilitators often wrap owls in fabric so they can be weighed, treated, and fed. If not, the owls get in a flap. The result? Loads of pictures of owls in towels.

Owls are amazing! We like to see owls in towels, because it means people are helping owls. This site exists to document and share stories of owls in towels to as many eyes as possible. No ads. No sponsors. Just owls being rescued, treated and rehabilitated by people who care.

Membership Benefits

As a Grokkist Member, you’re part of a circle of active grokkists walking the grokkist path. Here’s what membership includes:

• 🟣 Member-Only Gatherings
• 🛠 Groksmithing Project Support at Member Rates
• 🚪 Unlock Your Grok - Self-Paced Course
• ❤️‍🔥 30% Discount on Courses and Ticketed Events
• 🎭 Featured Member Profile
• 📣 Post Calls & Invitations
• ✨ Early Access & Prototypes
• ▶️ Events Recording Library
• ⭐️ Digital Member Badge

Become a Grokkist Member - $75/yr

A pair of parting thoughts...

“The saddest illusion of the revolutionary is that revolution itself will transform the nature of human beings.” ― Shirley Williams

“And those who were seen dancing, were thought to be crazy, by those who could not hear the music.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche