Grokkist Newsletter #89

Hey friends,

One of the things I’m noticing more clearly is that my work seems to move in seasons.

There are seasons of relating—conversations, collaborations, supporting other people’s unfolding, being in the web of it all.

And then there are seasons of creating—where I need to pull back a little, get quiet, and actually build the thing that all that relating has been gesturing toward.

The last stretch has very much been a relating season. Lots of conversations. Lots of threads. Lots of holding space. And it’s been wonderful. Necessary, even.

But I can feel the pull now toward making again. Getting the ideas out. Becoming more legible.

There’s a line in my Too Many Tennis Balls song that keeps coming back to me lately:

“Every two years, I shed my skin
New job, new dream, same restless grin.”

That line serves as a joke that's also a confession. A kind of 2-year boredom cycle that I know many grokkists will recognise.

The tricky part is that even when you’re working on something you care about—something you chose, something you built—these cycles don’t go away.

Grokkist turned four this month. Which means, more or less on schedule, I’ve found myself at the beginning of another one.

That familiar restlessness and sense that something wants to run wild again—not because anything is wrong, but because something else has run its course.

You’d think autonomy would solve it. That if you just found “your thing,” you could settle into it and keep going indefinitely.

It doesn’t seem to work like that.

Even Grokkist—this thing I’ve shaped, iterated, lived inside for four years—isn’t immune. I still hit the edge of a cycle and think: okay, what now?

Which raises a couple of uncomfortable questions:

• How do you build something that lasts… when you don’t stay the same?
• How do you create continuity across seasons that, by their nature, want to move on?

The core of Grokkist has always been about helping people make sense of themselves—and express that in a way that others can meet.

Version one (the first two years) was driven by that instinct in a very raw way. I didn’t really know what Grokkist was yet—I just had a sense that people were carrying around valuable, lived knowledge that didn’t have a place to land.

I called it education at the time, but what I was reaching for was something more embodied than that. Less about teaching, more about drawing something out—helping people give form to what was already inside them.

Version two (the second two years) taught me a lot about the inner landscape around that process—the hesitation, the self-doubt, the strange dance of wanting to contribute while quietly needing to receive.

Version three, I think, will be about bringing all those pieces together more cleanly. Making the thing itself more legible. More usable. More alive.

Less sprawling. More intentional.

So here’s what I’m sitting with at present: if these energy cycles are real and not something to “fix” or smooth over into a regular routine, then the work becomes how to design for them.

A structure that can keep unfolding even as I keep shedding skins.

I'm still navigating both the practicalities and the emotional upheaval of all that. But I think Grokkist v3 is, in part, an attempt at creating something that can hold seasonality in its design—for myself, and for others.

And I’m realising I’ll need to put more of myself into it this time. Show my working a bit more. Be inside the process, not just shaping it from the edges.

After all, I’m client zero of Grokkist—just reporting back from the frontlines of the experiment.

I’d be curious to hear how this shows up for you. How do you navigate your own energy cycles in a world that seems to reward consistency above all else?

With curiosity and care,
Danu

💌 P.S: A quick thank you to everyone who reached out about the Red Thread 1:1 work after the last couple of newsletters. It’s been a real privilege to step into that with a few of you—to trace what’s already there, and help bring it into focus.

There’s space for one more at the moment. If you’re in a season of “something’s shifting but I can’t quite see it yet,” that’s usually the right time. What I'm offering is a six-session process where we work together to trace the thread running through your experiences, interests, and instincts — and bring it into a form you can actually stand in and communicate.

We use my self-paced Find Your Red Thread course as a backbone, but it’s very applied and flexible. We focus on the parts that are most alive or stuck for you. By the end, you’ll be able to name, claim, and explain what you’re actually doing — becoming more legible to yourself and to others as you do. This round is USD$750 for the full process. If this feels like the right moment, just reply and let me know.

Fresh and Featured Pressings

The opposite of sustainability is boredom

By Jessica Böhme (6 min read)

Before we can change the world, we need to pay attention to it.

Read the article ↗

Leading Lightly | Letter 6: Dance of Lead+Follow

By Margarita Steinberg (10 min read)

Sometimes a light touch can form a stronger connection than an iron grip.

Read the article ↗

More from the Press

• The Work Imperative (Rodney King, 4 min read) – If we are the the sum of our actions, how much of ourselves are we willing to sell?

Upcoming Events

Featured Gatherings

🟢 Coddiwomple Cafe: The Practice of Being Alive

🗓️ Tue 21 Apr | 12.30pm–2pm CT (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Jim Palmer + Danu Poyner

There’s a particular feeling some grokkists will recognise. Not that anything is obviously wrong, and not that life has fallen apart. Things are moving. You’re getting things done. From the outside, it all looks more or less fine.

But the experience of it is different. As if you’re slightly at a distance from your own life. Close enough to function, but not quite inside it. Relating to what’s happening, managing it, keeping pace with it — without fully inhabiting it.

Sometimes that distance is subtle enough to ignore. Sometimes it sharpens into something harder to name — a sense that the texture of being here has thinned out, or that you’re organising your experience more than actually living it.

And then, at other times, a moment opens and you find yourself back inside your own life again, even if only briefly.

Jim’s recent piece on the Grokkist Press, The Practice of Being Alive, offers a way of recognizing the moments when you are no longer inside your own life — and allowing yourself to come back into it.

This Coddiwomple Café takes that as a starting point and brings it into the room as something we can explore through our own lives.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

🟢 Coddiwomple Cafe: American Dream Disillusionment Trauma

🗓️ Sun 3 May | 10.30am–12pm PT (view in your timezone)
Facilitated by Elizabeth Childs + Danu Poyner

For many people growing up in the USA, the ‘American Dream’ has meant more than aspiring to a house in the suburbs with a two car garage. It is the promise of a just world — a meritocracy — where life may not always be easy, but hard work and virtue are rewarded, no matter how humble your origins.But you rarely have to look far to begin seeing the cracks in that promise. They appear in everyday encounters — with good people who can’t seem to catch a break, or systems that don’t work how we were told they would.
It’s often easier to file those moments away as exceptions, or remnants of an imperfect past, rather than signs of something more structural, more intentional. 

But as the cracks deepen, they become harder to ignore. We may catch disturbing glimpses of violence, corruption, the kinds of things we were taught happen in ‘other’ places, but not here. We may even come to the question: Was a just world ever truly the goal, or was that promise merely a pretense to compel our complicity?

Even if this question has never crossed your mind, you may have felt its presence. In the tension between friends and family, the vitriol in political discourse, the increasing dissonance between competing narratives about who we are, and who we want to be. 

In this cafe, we’ll make space for that dissonance. We’ll explore the grief that comes with watching familiar stories unravel, and the disorientation of losing shared identities. And perhaps, together, we’ll begin to ask what becomes possible on the other side of that unravelling.

Event Details and RSVP ↗

Other Upcoming Gatherings

• 19 Apr | 🟢 Grokkist Town Hall: Four Years In
• 29 Apr | 🟣 Members Lab & Lounge
• 30 Apr | 🟣 Creative Space
• 4 May | 🟢 Grokkist Writing Salon
• 7 May | 🟣 Creative Space
• 12 May | 🟢 "Shoes-On" Studio – a space for finding your voice in public
• 21 May | 🟢 PhilosophyGym @ Grokkist

#1 - Chronic illness, meritocracy, and the pressure to do more

Effort Without Improvement

Chronic illness, meritocracy, and the pressure to do more

Kristie De GarisKristie De Garis

Kristie De Garis writes from two decades of trying to get better. It starts early—cutting foods, changing habits, tightening routines—each adjustment a way of taking responsibility for what her body is doing. Over time, the list grows longer, the effort deepens, but the body doesn’t follow the expected arc. Around that, a wider assumption stays in place. That health, like most things, should respond to effort. That if nothing changes, something must be missing.

“If you’re still not better you must not be trying hard enough. Have you tried x, y, z?”

What she describes instead is the work of staying level in a body that requires constant work just to stay the same, inside a culture that only knows how to reward visible progress. “The absence of improvement erases my labour.”

#2 - Who is the worst person Louis Theroux has met?

Louis Theroux has spent decades sitting with people most would rather keep at a distance—cult leaders, extremists, offenders—and asking them, gently, to explain themselves. What he keeps finding isn’t some unbridgeable otherness, but something more unsettling: familiar motives, loosely held together, rarely examined for too long. “People make their mistakes or even do predatory and awful things for reasons that are somewhat relatable.” He circles back to a diagnosis in line with Hannah Arendt's idea of the banality of evil:

“Evil arises out of almost a lack of introspection… people not even interrogating their choices.”

And so the work becomes less about exposing villains, more about staying in the room long enough for the logic—however fragile or distorted—to reveal itself. (25 min watch)

#3 - How well can you remember a colour?

Color Memory Game — How Well Can You Remember Colors?

We show you colors. You recreate them from memory. Challenge friends to beat your score. It’s harder than you think. Play free at dialed.gg.

DialedDialed

"Humans can’t reliably recall colors." A fun web game in which you’re shown a colour for a few seconds, then asked to recreate it. Five rounds and harder than it looks. I got 32.23 out of 50.

Some Snackables come from the grokkist community. Follow the links below to join the conversation, or add your own in the Snackables space on the Grokkist Network.

#4 - Hilma af Klint (arguably the first abstract painter)

Hilma af Klint — AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

It was not until 1986, with the exhibition The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985 at the Los Angeles Museum of Art, that Hilma af Klint’s work was finally acknowledged in art history and by the general public. Her paintings were shown alongside those of…

AWARE Women artists / Femmes artistes

🙏 Contributed by Grokkist member Emily Jane DeWoolfson:

Hilma af Klint began painting abstract works in 1906, a few years before Wassily Kandinsky produced the paintings that would make him famous as a pioneer of the style. They were both influenced by theosophy. Klint’s art is beautiful. Some of her pieces, especially the botanicals, remind me of the Voynich manuscript. Almost no one saw her work until decades after her death.

(Discuss this Snackable further on the Grokkist Network)

#5 - The greatest poem ever known is one all poets have outgrown…

To A Child by Christopher Morley

Comments & analysis: The greatest poem ever known / Is one all poets have outgrown: / The poetry, innate, untol

All Poetry© by owner. provided at no charge for educational purposes

🙏 Contributed by Grokkist member Margarita Steinberg:

Two decades after I first read To a Child by Christopher Morley, its lines were ready to leap to my lips again, as I gazed at a copy in my archive. All those years ago, I had felt the enchantment of this poem, but now I knew its essence: cherishing.

To cherish is to hold dear. It sustains and nourishes the heart. The poem kept bubbling up, like a tune that won’t let go. I kept humming it to myself. So one fine morning, I got up and recorded it as an IG Live. If you’re in the mood to watch me recite this poem, it’s here.

(Discuss this Snackable further on the Grokkist Network)

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...

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." – Søren Kierkegaard

"A crooked tree lives its own life, but a straight tree is turned into wood."
– Chinese Proverb