Grokkist Newsletter #79

Hey friends,

There’s something thrilling about watching an idea that’s lived inside you for years begin to take shape in the world as a kind of shared language.

That’s what groksmithing is becoming for me.

I didn’t set out to name a method. I just noticed that the work I was drawn to — the conversations I loved, the projects I couldn’t not help with — all followed a certain rhythm.

And now, after a few years of living into it, I’m starting to see the pattern clearly enough to offer it to others. Better still — others are picking it up, running with it, remixing it in their own way.

Every grokkist carries a red thread — a tangle of passions, questions, and possibilities that doesn’t always slot neatly into a job title or life plan.

Part of what we do at Grokkist is help people unlock their grok — to recognise that thread, follow it with curiosity, and discover what kind of life becomes possible when you stop trying to fit and start trying to flourish.

That’s where groksmithing comes in. It’s a way of working with people at a threshold — where the old shape no longer fits, and the new one hasn’t yet revealed itself.

Sometimes it means helping a project get unstuck, offering the right question at the right moment, or simply being a witness to what’s emerging.

At its heart, groksmithing is how we help each other find and follow that thread — with presence, with care, and without needing to know exactly where it leads.

What’s been especially delightful is seeing groksmithing show up all over the Grokkist community as something people are already doing. It’s the kind of thing that, true to form, seems to work beautifully in practice, even if we’re only just beginning to make sense of it in theory.

That’s very us. Practice first, theory later.

That spirit underpins our new Members Lab & Lounge format, which blends the practical spark of co-working with the relational warmth of one-to-one connection and group witnessing. We’ve run two sessions so far, and already, people are showing up differently. Ideas are starting to walk on their own. We’re making small tweaks, but the format’s core is already doing its job — creating conditions for growth that’s both gentle and catalytic.

You can feel the same pulse in PechaKucha (PK2) — our lightning-talk night, where presenters distil something they care about into 20 images and a few minutes of story — and in doing so, often surprise themselves with what’s ready to be said. It’s not about confidence or polish — it’s about resonance. About having your say and being witnessed.

What excites me most is how all of these sparks — these gatherings, formats, and conversations — are starting to form a larger regenerative system.

That’s not language I throw around lightly. Grokkist isn’t a marketplace of offerings; it’s a living ecosystem. The structures we’re shaping aren’t products. They’re invitations. Compostable. Adaptable. Alive.

That’s part of what I’ll be exploring in my upcoming session on Coddiwomple Design at this year’s Online Facilitation Unconference — how to hold space when you don’t know where you’re going yet.

It’s very much in the spirit of groksmithing: designing not around answers, but around aliveness. If you’re curious, I wrote a companion piece on the Press this week — Holding Space for the Unknown: Curiosity as a Design Stance.

We’re also hosting a Grokkist Press town hall this week, to reflect on where we’ve been and co-imagine what’s next.

For me, the Press is one of the clearest expressions of groksmithing in story form. So if you’ve been reading, writing, lurking, or longing — come add your voice.

And there’s one more new thing I’m especially excited about. Kendra’s ‘Shoes-On’ Studio is getting laced up and ready to step out — an affinity group for finding your public voice. It's a sandbox for trying things out loud, exploring what it feels like to speak in your own tone and tempo.

The idea itself emerged from Kendra’s own red thread journey, which makes it all the more groksmithy. The first session is still ahead, but the energy around it is already palpable. I can’t wait to see what it becomes.

If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, thanks for following the breadcrumb trail. It’s always been a map-in-progress. And if you’ve been sensing a coherence beginning to form — still supple, still responsive to the emergent, but unmistakably alive — you’re not imagining it.

That’s groksmithing in community. That’s what we’re up to.

With curiosity and care,
Danu

We’re proud to be a Community Partner of this year’s Online Facilitation Unconference (OFU) — a global gathering of curious, generous facilitators, educators, community-builders, and space-holders of all kinds.

This isn’t your typical talking-heads event — it’s an open, participatory experience where the agenda is co-created by the people in the room (and yes, the room is virtual). Whether you’re a seasoned facilitator or just facilitation-curious, it’s a rich opportunity to connect, explore, and stretch the edges of your practice.

I’ll be there running a session on Coddiwomple Design — our approach to creating space when the destination’s unknown — plus a showcase on how Grokkist’s regenerative learning community works in practice.

Want to come along? Use the code GROKKIST for 20% off your ticket, and let’s coddiwomple together.

Learn more

Fresh and Featured Pressings

Holding Space for the Unknown: Curiosity as a Design Stance

By Danu Poyner (5 min read)

How facilitators can design for aliveness by trading certainty for presence, and making room for what wasn’t in the plan.

Read the article ↗

Academia as a people's civil service: or, what we've done to knowledge

By Jessica Böhme (9 min read)

Perhaps what we know is less important than what we do with it.

Read the article ↗

More from the Press

• One step forward, twelve back (Peter Gilderdale, 3 min read) – With each lesson comes a dozen more questions lurking just below the surface.
• Theory and Practice (Peter Gilderdale, 4 min read) – Teaching is often much easier in theory.

Upcoming Events

Featured Gatherings

🟢 PK2 — Grokkist’s Lightning-Talk Night

🗓️ Thur 13 Nov | 7pm–8.30pm ET (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Kleine Zwemmen

Every grokkist carries a few cherished obsessions — a topic that lights them up, a curiosity that never quite lets go, a story they’ve always wanted to tell but never had a reason to.

PK2 is our second round of community lightning talks using the Pecha Kucha format — 20 image-only slides, 20 seconds each.

No text, no pressure, no polish. Just six minutes of sharing something you care about while the timer ticks gently in the background and your community cheers you on. Whether you talk about fungi, fonts, philosophy, or your favourite forgotten cartoon — it’s a space to be seen, to share, and to enjoy the quiet magic of people showing what makes them come alive.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

↗ Coddiwomple Design: Holding space when you don’t know where you’re going (yet)

🗓️ Tue 18 Nov | 7pm–8.30pm ET (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Danu Poyner

↗ This session is part of the Online Facilitation Unconference (OFU), an event Grokkist is proud to support as a Community Partner.

We live in a world that prizes clarity, direction, and outcomes. But some of the most meaningful journeys begin in the dark, without a map.

In this participatory workshop, we’ll explore how to design and hold space for what doesn’t yet exist — where aliveness, not certainty, leads the way. After a short framing, we’ll step into a Resonance Room: a participatory reflection space shaped by curiosity, presence, and emergence.

Maybe you’ll leave with language for what you already knew, a deepened trust in the unknown, or a few provocations to carry into your own facilitation and design practice. We can’t say for sure — that’s part of the adventure.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

Other Upcoming Gatherings

• 10 Nov | 🟢 Grokkist Press Horizons – A Town Hall for Our Publishing Future
• 19 Nov | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge [Timezone A]
• 20 Nov | 🟢 PhilosophyGym @ Grokkist
• 1 Dec | 🟢 Grokkist Writing Salon
• 2 Dec | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge [Timezone B]
• 9 Dec | 🟢 "Shoes-On" Studio – a space for finding your voice in public

#1 - Kumiko – the traditional Japaneses art of wood setting

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. In this 4-min video, we follow Kurozu Tetsuo, one of the few remaining artisans keeping the tradition alive. As his hands move with practiced calm, you sense how much presence the work demands—and how much of him lives in every piece.

#2 - Sangha as a democratic imagination

Buddhism and deliberative democracy

Introduction: Deliberative democracy, West and East Democracies today face turbulent times. Populism, polarization, and entrenched inequality threaten their foundations, while authoritarianism continues to rise—democracy has declined for 18 consecutive years.…

The Immanent FrameRodrigo Ugarte

“All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind.” This piece invites us to reimagine deliberative democracy through the ancient Buddhist sangha—an egalitarian monastic community governed by consensus, duty, and deep listening. The sangha model reframes political participation as an ethical project: a way of being in relationship, not just in power.

Democracy, in this light, becomes less about aggregating interests or winning votes and more about cultivating shared ethical intention. Far from a utopian footnote, the sangha offers a sustained counterpoint to today’s political exhaustion—though it’s worth noting that modern Buddhist politics has not been immune to spectacle or power struggles of its own.

#3 - Hi Ren - the music we make with our monsters

What we repress doesn’t disappear, it waits for a stage. Hi Ren is a 9-min tour de force of performance art that lays bare the inner negotiations of identity and mental health with astonishing precision. A dance between breakdown and breakthrough, it’s less about triumph over darkness than intimacy with it. Grokkists will recognise the pattern: the self as both questioner and questioned, the act of creation as a form of integration.

Ren — a UK musician who spent years battling chronic illness, misdiagnosis, and mental health challenges — delivers the piece with visceral urgency. His rapid transitions between voices are underpinned by virtuosic guitar work that shifts from lullaby to confrontation in seconds. His nimble guitar work and vocal dexterity conjure a shifting inner landscape where despair and defiance argue their way toward something like coherence. Shot in a stark, clinical space, the video evokes both psychiatric ward and theatre stage, amplifying the sense of raw exposure. 

#4 - Bob Dylan's superpower is that he doesn't get embarrassed

Bob Dylan’s Superpower is That He Doesn’t Get Embarrassed

To be caught in the spotlight of our pretensions is the worst kind of embarrassment there is. And so, one thing I found notable in the years I spent writing a biography of Bob Dylan and his poetic …

Literary HubRon Rosenbaum

Bob Dylan has built a career on confounding expectations, from going electric to preaching apocalyptic sermons mid-tour. Accused of selling out, dropping out, burning out — he’s met every uproar with the same unnerving calm. So when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and responded with weeks of silence, followed by a cryptic no-show and a belated speech delivered by a stand-in, it felt… off-script.

This essay digs into that moment and what it reveals. The key, for author Ron Rosenbaum, is the long-overlooked essay Dylan submitted months later — a brutal meditation on All Quiet on the Western Front, war, and the collapse of meaning. “It’s a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world.” Rosenbaum treats it as a rare glimpse into Dylan’s deeper reckoning with civilisation, disillusionment, and the cultural weight we ask artists to carry.

#5 - Dogs catching treats

"The best experiences in life are with a dog". High-speed photos of dogs trying to catch treats. Some nail it. Others… don’t. German photographer Christian Vieler captures these frozen moments with crisp detail and plenty of character — the expressions range from focused to confused, delighted to outraged. Browse the full gallery at dogscatchingtreats.com or follow Insta at @vieler.photography

Grokkist is a living ecosystem — 🟢 free to enter, powered by members 🟣.

If you’d like to go deeper, you can join as a member, explore Signature Projects, or work with Danu.

Become a Grokkist Member ($99/yr or $27/qtr)

A pair of parting thoughts...

“The whole point of writing nonfiction, for me, is to find out what I don’t want to know.” ― James Baldwin

“You build your mind, so make it into something you want to live with.” ― Marilynne Robinson