Each edition contains the latest from the Grokkist Press, a roundup of events and highlights from our community, and a care package of snackable outside links selected to nurture your curiosity.
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Hey friends,
Last time we talked about the power of therapy projects as a way to reflect on and honour what life has taught us, while putting something meaningful into the world that is valuable to those around us.
I'm a firm believer that all of us have something wise and wonderful inside us that wants to come out.
Sometimes all it needs is a little encouragement, a helping pair of hands to bring it into the world, and a place to be born into where it will be loved and appreciated.
Those things are what Grokkist is all about.
For some of us, once we've experienced the joy and sense of achievement of getting our wise and wonderful thing out into the world where it belongs, we find that once isn't enough!
We want to keep going.
Some of us feel called to be a wellspring that others can return to when in need of replenishment, or a campfire that offers warmth and companionship. (Choose your own 'nourishing source' metaphor!)
So we're trying out a new kind of gathering, alongside our cohort-based courses and our program of one-off events.
We're calling them 'practice-based classes' (at least until we come up with a better name).
The aim of practice-based classes is to offer a regular series/sequence of workshops hosted by Grokkist members that provide space to develop and apply a skill while extending and deepening your relationship with a particular practice.
Like the class/workshop timetable at your local gym or community centre, you drop in when you can, you get to know the rhythms of your favourite facilitators, and you look forward to improving with repetition and practice.
We're kicking off this latest experiment with three very different classes:
Authentic Relating is aimed at healing one's relationship with oneself. Join Chris Fuller and your fellow grokkists in a practice of tuning in to our interoception, where we will practice embodied techniques to calm muscles, nerves and minds, opening the door to safe exploration of our emotional landscapes.
AI is here and it’s changing things, fast. Don’t want to get left behind but not sure what to do? Already dabbled but not getting the results everyone seems to be raving about? Here’s your chance to practice. Young or old, curious or confused, tech lover or luddite, all are welcome.
Plant Communication and the Language of the Heart
Lost in linearity, our current ways of thinking reduce, extract, and analyze facts to assert a definitive conclusion. We have forgotten our hearts. Discover Other Ways of Knowing as you practice listening to the voices of the trees and learn to speak the language of your heart.
Our practice-based classes are open to all.
Grokkist Full Members can enjoy unlimited classes free of charge. For everyone else, there is a modest suggested tuition per class, with our usual Forget About the Price Tag options for those who aren't in a position to afford it.
Come along to experience our class leaders in their groove and enjoy basking in the glow of what lights them up.
Grok on!
- Danu
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This edition we are revisiting my wide-ranging conversation with Amanda Nicole from last year on escaping from damaging institutions, reclaiming your space, and other ways of knowing.
Listening with the heart: how the wisdom of plants helps us remember our connection to the divine - Amanda Nicole
by Danu Poyner (5 min read / 87 min listen)
Amanda Nicole is a liriodendress, a human embodiment of the tulip poplar tree. We discuss her journey of reconnecting with nature, listening to the wisdom of plants, and exploring alternative ways of knowing in her pursuit of heart-centred living.
From the Grokkist Network
Events and updates from our community
Learn more about the Grokkist Network ↗Featured events and meetups
🟢 Free and open to all
🟠 Open to all with suggested cover charge. Free for Full Members.
🟣 Exclusive to Full Members only (Grokling, Indie Grokker, Groksmith)
Stilling the Tempest: Free Writing Workshop
🗓️ Wed 31 Jul | 5–6.30pm PDT (UTC-7) (view in your timezone)
Hosted by Jeanne
🟢 Free and open to all.
Sometimes, writing and drawing can be the only refuge. Speak in whatever language you’d like. Let it be a liberatory and laboratory process.
I will guide our practice by giving us lines from a selected poem or novel that is unrelated to what we might be working through – to free ourselves and find surprise in our writing. An example might be – This entire story starts with a single line, “I’ve been waiting years to be funny again.”
Let the mind wonder and wander and meander and write what it wants. Unlock something that illuminates You from the dark matter of your mind.
Work Burnout and Moral Injury | Themed Café
🗓️ Wed 7 Aug | 11am–12.30pm NZT (UTC+12) (view in your timezone)
Hosted by Danu Poyner
🟢 Free and open to all.
Have you ever been chewed up by a workplace, profession, or institution you initially thought was your friend?
Does your work environment actually uphold or rather obscure the thing it’s supposed to be about?
Maybe you’ve fought hard to be in the right place to be doing the work you care about most, but now you’re there, do you find yourself consistently unable to find time and space to do the practice you actually care about, and instead find yourself enveloped by an impenetrable fog of bureaucratic bullshit or put in situations that make you do things that go against your core beliefs?
How did we get hurt and how do we heal?
Let’s make a safe space to talk about it… far, far away from HR… and learn from each other’s experiences.
Other Upcoming Events
- 24 Jul | 🟠 Plant Communication and the Language of the Heart
- 25 Jul | 🟢 Grokkist Network Office Hours
- 8 Aug | 🟠 Authentic Relating
- 27 Aug | 🟠 Making Friends with AI
🍬 Snackables
Assorted awesome links to nurture your curiosity
#1 - I am the river and the river is me
Whanganui River here in Aotearoa New Zealand is the first river in the world to be granted the status of a legal person. For the Māori, the Whanganui is a living being – their ancestor. A new documentary follows Māori river guardian Ned Tapa as he invites a First Nations Elder from Australia and his daughter, who are activists dedicated to saving their own dying river back home, on a five-day canoe trip down the sacred river. The full documentary is screening online in July as part of the DocEdge film festival. And if you're curious about some of the practical implications since the river was granted legal personhood in 2017, you might enjoy this article.
#2 - Oracles in the machine
Deeply considered reflection on computers as a kind of divination (a way of knowing, with subjective validity and narrational depth, and a form of collective care), and whether it is possible for technology to care for us without really understanding us. "Under the hoods of my digital oracles lie models which have learned from my data and interaction patterns. Yet I have no interpretable context for what I receive. On one hand, speculations, randomness; on the other hand, a stroke of luck, a sign from the universe."
It puts me in mind of The Myth of Disenchantment, which makes a compelling case that although the story goes that since the Enlightenment, people no longer believe in spirits, myths, or magic, this story is itself a powerful and misleading myth. For more reflections you may enjoy Grokkist member The Ungoogleable Michaelangelo's reflections on AI art and the implications of outsourcing the imagination to a dreaming machine.
#3 - The State of News in 2024
Large, comprehensive, and well-researched report on the state of news and journalism worldwide in 2024. Interactive with lots of citation-friendly data and charts. Big takeaways (none of which will be news to you): trust in news organisations is declining, misinformation is rampant, and a great platform reset is changing the way people interact with news. TikTok is up everywhere, Facebook is down, video reigns supreme, and more people are feeling worn out by the news agenda and are avoiding news altogether.
#4 - What makes a good politician?
Václav Havel
In the midst of worldwide election season (half the world's population are holding national elections in 2024), it might be worthwhile (if ultimately futile) to revisit the late Václav Havel's thoughts on what makes a good politician. [The article is free but requires registration, so here's an unlocked version from archive.ph - you're welcome.]
"The true art of politics is the art of winning people’s support for a good cause, even when the pursuit of that cause may interfere with their particular momentary interests. This should happen without impeding any of the many ways in which we can check that the objective is a good cause, thereby ensuring that trusting citizens are not led to serve a lie and suffer disaster as a consequence, in an illusory search for future prosperity."
Havel, a poet and playwright imprisoned for his essays in communist Czechoslovakia, was "that rare intellectual who, rather than forcing his way into politics, had politics forced upon him", eventually becoming President of Czech Republic in the Velvet Revolution.
#5 - Medieval LOLs
Irina Dumitrescu
Were the Middle Ages a funny time? You bet! Medieval LOLs is a 7-episode podcast series from the London Review of Books in which historians Mary Wellesley and Irina Dumitrescu embark on close reads of some of the rudest, silliest and surprising works in English literature in search of the Medieval sense of humour. Inevitably, it starts with Chaucer and ‘Miller’s Tale’, "a story that is surely still (almost) as funny as when it was written six hundred years ago."
A pair of parting thoughts...
"Character is destiny." – Aristotle
"To say we know a person is to write that person off." ―Yiyun Li
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