Grokkist Newsletter #81

Hey friends,

As the year winds down and everyone starts sharing their Spotify Wrapped and other forms of seasonal self-mythologising, I’ve been sitting with my own version of reflection.

Less about stats or milestones—though there are plenty of those—and more about how it all felt, what changed, and what’s quietly grown under the surface.

Looking back, there’s a lot I’m proud of. The grokkiverse has doubled in many ways—more people, more activity, more depth.

But it hasn’t felt rushed or inflated. The pace has felt good. Grounded. Like it’s growing at the speed of trust.

The big arc this year, for me, has been discovering groksmithing as the energetic centre of the whole thing.

That’s the word you'll notice I've started using to describe the mechanism of energy transfer in the ecosystem—the stuff that actually moves us. The blood, the sap, the charge. It’s become the way I think about how value flows relationally and commercially across the network.

That story starts a bit over a year ago when I soft-launched Unlock Your Grok. It was meant to be a kind of “tutorial level” for entering the grokkiverse—a gentle guide to help people show up without armour, start gathering their scattered pieces, and reconnect with whatever makes them feel alive.

I put a lot into it. And people liked it, but it also didn’t land the way I hoped.

Some folks found it too intense. Too direct. The invitation to explore “what lights you up” landed, for some, as a painful reminder of how far away that spark seemed. Instead of feeling welcomed, some wondered if they even belonged.

It was hard to realise that something I made with care could end up accidentally intimidating the very people it was for.

That experience has shaped a lot of how I’ve thought about thresholds since. How we move toward help. How we sidle up to the places that hurt. The ways we don’t always know what we need—or how to ask for it.

And especially, the role of what are sometimes called third objects.

A third object is something we can look at together when direct relational intensity is too much. I think of it like the Men’s Shed principle—put two people in a room and ask them to talk about feelings, and it might not happen. You might not even get them in the room.

Give them something to tinker with, though, and suddenly the conversation flows. The indirectness soothes the vulnerability and allows the medicine to go in sideways.

So this year I’ve started deliberately designing more sideways ways in. Third-object experiences.

The new batch of courses we’ve been co-creating this year through the groksmithing process are good examples—Intro to NeuroGraphica, Visit Your Future Self Now, and a new one that’s coming soon.

The same energy is there in our monthly affinity group gatherings. They’re framed as being “about” something—writing, philosophy, speaking—but what they’re really doing is creating space for people to unfold.

That’s the word I’ve found myself using most lately: unfolding.

It’s not my word originally—it came from a community member who described what lights them up as "experiencing the unfolding that people do of themselves, when they feel safe and supported." A kind of "acceptance without understanding."

That thought landed gently, settled in, and hasn't left. Because yeah, that’s it. That’s what this place is.

Everything we’re doing here—whether it’s a course, a conversation, a newsletter, or a gentle nudge—is about creating the conditions where unfolding can happen.

And it is happening. Quietly, steadily. In you, in me, in the space between.

Here are some things I’m celebrating from this year:

Grokkist Press

• The Grokkist Press found its feet. Dozens of new pieces, a steady rhythm, new voices, and a growing sense of what it wants to be.
• Salt & Seeds became a book we didn’t expect, and it landed in a way that turned it into a conversational third object. I didn't know anything about publishing books at the start of this year and now Grokkist Press has a physical presence in 11 countries. That still blows my mind.
• The glossary of grokkistry is becoming a living artefact of our language and culture.
• The First Sparks series of short reflections created a way to introduce new people to the core grokkist ideas

Grokkist Network

• Realms and Affinity Groups started to take shape as organising principles for the community—I’m excited to bring that to life visually next.
• Our events program has matured into regular fixtures in the affinity groups—Writing Salon, Philosophy Gym, Shoes-On Studio, PK Lightning Talks and more.
• The quality and richness of our talks and café gatherings keeps deepening—we’ve hosted expansive conversations on everything from AI and creativity to Indigenous leadership, natural wisdom, narrative inquiry, solarpunk futures, and what makes an anti-cult.
• We crafted two new courses through groksmithing: Intro to NeuroGraphica and Visit Your Future Self Now, and gave our live cohort courses Find Your Red Thread, Ecosophy, and Comparative Meditation an enduring self-guided form.
• We minted Sparks—the internal currency we’re using as part of building a regenerative business model.

Through it all, the grokkiverse has stayed international, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary—a kind of speakeasy for the soul, where you can stumble into loving encounters with the unfamiliar.

In a world that’s becoming more fragmented and polarised, that feels like no small thing.

And 2025 will quietly go down as the first year the ecosystem generated enough revenue to begin supporting me—just one person, after a couple of years of income freefall.

A relief, a beginning, and a sign that this thing really does have legs. It’s still unfolding. We’re just getting started.

With curiosity and care,
Danu

Fresh and Featured Pressings

Euro Book Trek: The Last Legs

By Alan Raw (16 minute read)

Final instalment of a literary and climate-themed journey through Europe, one bookshop at a time.

Read the article ↗

Scuttlebutt - ancient and modern

By Peter Gilderdale (4 min read)

As the world changes at an unprecedented rate, perhaps we can learn from what is written in stone.

Read the article ↗

More from the Press

• Rosemary Sutcliff and Stoicism (Peter Gilderdale, 4 min read) – How do the stories we read shape the stories we live?
• The Palaeography of the Future (Peter Gilderdale, 3 min read) – Who can say what the future holds, but surely it won't involve long division.

Upcoming Events

Featured Gatherings

🟢 "Shoes-On" Studio – a space for finding your voice in public

🗓️ Tue 9 Dec | 12pm–2pm New York time (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Kendra Fee

Shoes-On Studio is an open space for anyone who wants to get more comfortable speaking in public—whether that means giving a talk, leading a session, joining a panel, raising your hand, or just saying what you mean when it matters.

You don’t need to be “a speaker” to belong here. You just need a voice—or a desire to find yours.

🗓 What happens in the monthly sessions?
Each live session blends discussion, exploration, and practice. Expect something like this:

• 👋 Settle In + Topic Chat
   A shared conversation around a speaking theme or challenge (like: “What makes an idea resonate?” or “What actually helps with nerves?”)
• 🟪 Grok-n-Go
   A short, off-the-cuff speaking game. Just you and your voice, in the moment.
• 🟩 Studio Space
   A few folks share something they’re working on and choose what kind of support they want —
  → Prep (talk it out — shape the idea before you really get started)
  → Practice (try it out — build comfort and flow)
  → Perspective (sharpen it up— refine message and delivery)
  → Play (mess around — experiment, exaggerate, or just have fun seeing what happens)
• 🪶 Reflect + Rhythm
   Space to debrief, celebrate, and help shape what we want for next time.

You can come to speak, to support, or to soak it in. Everyone’s voice matters — including the quiet ones.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

Other Upcoming Gatherings

• 18 Dec | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge [Timezone A]
• 18 Dec | 🟢 PhilosophyGym @ Grokkist
• 5 Jan | 🟢 Grokkist Writing Salon
• 21 Jan | 🟠 Visit your Future Self Now - Live Circle

#1 - Revisiting collapse awareness

Revisiting collapse, a year later

What kind of world do you want to live in?

What Do We Do Now That We're Here?Rosie Spinks

“We are going to have to live here with one another.” Rosie Spinks revisits the quietly viral essay she wrote a year earlier about becoming “collapse aware” — the slow, grief-tinged reckoning with the idea that the way things are might not just be broken, but ending. In this follow-up, she leans deeper into the emotional labour of that awareness, asking not just what’s failing, but what’s worth holding onto. Instead of fear or fatalism, Spinks suggests collapse awareness can be a portal: into grief, yes—but also into care, community, and attention. Parenting, gardening, dinner with neighbours, creative friction—these become small but radical acts of resistance and world-building. She maps a way to live with collapse, choosing curiosity, care, and inconvenient humanness over the sterile ease of algorithmic futures.

#2 - John Berger on tenderness

A luminous, slow-burning conversation between John Berger and Michael Silverblatt that ranges from WWI trenches to mountain peasants, from marionettes to motorcycles (13 mins). At its centre is tenderness, considered here less as a sentiment and more as an act of freedom, a refusal to judge, and a way of staying human in the face of pain. Berger speaks of living with the dead as a defining feature of being human. He links this with an ethics of attention and embodied immediacy: the kind you find riding a motorbike, where choice and consequence are felt in near-real time. “The real freedom… is the free choice, in some way, by gesture, or glance, or action, of tenderness.”

#3 - The Evolution of Horror podcast

The Evolution of Horror

The Official Website for The Evolution Of Horror podcast.

The Evolution of HorrorHome

The Evolution of Horror is a long-running podcast that treats horror cinema as cultural archaeology. Host Mike Muncer guides listeners through subgenres like slashers, ghost stories, folk horror, and body horror—tracing how our fears mutate across time, technology, and society. Each episode pairs a film deep-dive with thoughtful guests, exploring horror variously as thrills, myth, memory, and meaning. Start with the folk horror series for Straw Dogs, Deliverance, and Blair Witch Project, or the “Man-Made Monsters” season to explore how dread meets science and identity from Frankenstein to Robocop.

#4 - A potter's love-hate relationship with porcelain

“Somewhere down the line it’s just going to be another failure… and it’s this mindset that’s made me trepidatious.” 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 (15 min). Porcelain throws like plasticky cheddar cheese, he says—seductive in its translucency, maddening in its fragility. This quiet visual essay is a masterclass in attentiveness: not just to clay, but to mindset, memory, and the muscle of failure. A slow, meditative watch for anyone who’s wrestled with a craft—or with themselves—on the wheel.

#5 - All the calendars that ever were

The Library of Time is a web‑project that gathers — or tries to gather — “every calendar with a verifiable date at a specific point in time,” alongside a survey of different systems of timekeeping across civilisations. It’s like a virtual museum of temporal imaginaries: ancient, non‑Gregorian calendars, historical reckonings of time, cultural variations, eclipses, cycles — an interactive deep dive into how different peoples have named, ordered, and made sense of time.

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)

Parting thoughts...

Lost
by David Wagoner

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.