Surprise meEntangled Vale
Meaning after the end of time
What good is a clock when everyone is on their own schedule?
Grokkist Press · Reading Room
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Essays, letters, talks and serialised books from people who meet the world with curiosity and care. New writing every fortnight.
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From the editor
The first letter from the editor is on its way.
Once a month, Will writes about what's coming through the Press and why. It arrives with the Press emails.
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Hey friends,
The letter is going monthly, and this is the first one in the new rhythm: about fourteen minutes of me talking through what has been going on around Grokkist while it has been quiet.
It's been a while, and I hope the video shows why. Most of the quiet has been building: a new home for the Press, a slower rhythm that leaves room for some crop rotation, and following the energy rather than the calendar. Tell me what you make of it, and if anything goes boink, the Elves would love to hear: [email protected].
Prefer reading to watching? The whole letter is written out below the links.
Links to everything I mention in the video:
Why it's been quiet
> Kairos Construction — the Making Legible piece on what it sounds like in my head when things are actually getting built
The new Press
> The Grokkist Press — the new Reading Room; tell us what goes boink: [email protected]
> The Realms — follow the qualities of attention you want: Entangled Vale, The Soma Isles, The Wild Margin
> Choose what reaches you — the letters, the Press, or just the parts you want
> Snackables — 400+ small good things, by mood, or hit Surprise me
> Read by register and browse everything
> The Realms map, the quests and the Crossroads
Series to start with
> First Sparks — seven short reflections, for new arrivals
> Unforgetting — nine pieces with things to try; begin with The ugly question
> Red Thread Talks — the library, and who's next
Books and reader circles
> The Practice of Being Alive — Jim Palmer
> The Practice of Being Alive: a six-week course with Jim — begins 9 November, at the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality
> Healing Fragmentation — Marcus Barrick, in five sections with a reader circle alongside; the series so far
Gatherings
> Coddiwomple Café: Who is AI in education actually for? — hosted by Richard Bennet, 6 November (NZ)
> True Detectives and Tiny Rebels: Learning from my Lifelines — Paul Courtney Clarke's Red Thread Talk, 18 November (NZ)
> Facilitator Sandbox — Ember Parkin, next session 20 November (NZ)
> Remembering Forward — Theresa Sansome, next session 4 December (NZ), members
Come play
> The Hearthlands — Jane's village, where you can wander about and meet the Elves; feedback to [email protected]
Coddiwomple with care,
Danu
The letter, in words
Through the silence
Hi everyone. Greetings from the Gold Coast, Australia, where I'm visiting my folks for a week or two.
I know it's been a while since you've had one of these. There's been a fair bit happening: some of the paid accompaniment work that I do, a bit of travel, a bit of personal stuff. The point is that through the silence there's been a lot of work going on, and I'm looking forward to showing you some of it.
Going monthly
Technically this is newsletter 99. It's been every two weeks for the last 99 issues. Grokkist is maturing now, and there are quite a lot of different projects and centres of activity around the ecosystem, so I find I need to reprioritise where I put my energy a little. One of those things is the newsletter.
I got some really nice feedback on the last one of these. People seemed to appreciate me being on video, and liked the round-up format of walking through everything that's going on. But over the course of two weeks you end up repeating yourself a bit. So the Grokkist newsletter is moving to monthly. This is the video letter for November: once a month you'll get one of these, a big round-up of everything that's been going on, where the energy is, and what the focus is.
Crop rotation
A personal note as well. As someone who is AuDHD, shall we say, I have a deep need for novelty and mixing things up, and a great need for systems and routine. Those two are often in opposition, and it's like a little battle going on in my head.
So what I actually do, and the way I organise my life, is to have a system, or a routine, of things that change. It's a bit like crop rotation. There's the thing you're planting, the thing you're harvesting, and the thing that's lying fallow for a while, so that you have a chance to miss it and it can regenerate and become new again.
That's part of why I have so many things going on in Grokkist all the time. Everyone tells me I'd get further if I just focused on one thing, but I can't do that. It's not how I work. I like to chase many tennis balls at once. Things have to be fresh but consistent. I've got bored of pretty much every job I've had, and I've had a lot of jobs, after two years or so. I have a two-year boredom cycle. The answer in practice seems to be to find a way to make it new: to press the reset button every now and again, in a way that makes sense to me internally, while keeping some outward consistency.
It's crazy in here. I wrote a piece in this cycle about one of the songs from my album, Kairos Construction, which talks a bit about what it sounds like in my brain. If you'd like to hear me talk more about the AuDHD stuff, go and check that out.
So I've been in a bit of a funk for the last six weeks or so, feeling restless and in need of a shake-up. I sat in that for a while and figured out what to do. Then a few things went clack, clack, clack, clack, clarity, and suddenly there's a huge amount of activity again, and everything feels fresh and wonderful and motivating. You'll see some of that energy in what I'm about to tell you. Let's get into it.
The new Press
A lot of the energy around Grokkist at the moment is in the Grokkist Press, which, as you know, is where we publish articles, essays and creations from members of the community and other grokkisty voices. It felt like time for a refresh: to spruce it up and give it the form it wants for its next phase.
A couple of months ago we put out the site for the books, and some of our new pages have this new design language. We wanted to take it all the way through the Press, where all the reading happens. You've probably seen some of the other things we've put out in the last couple of months, like the Realms map, the quests board and the Crossroads, which start to put more of our own design language around things. We want to keep going further in that direction.
It reminds me of the heady days of the early web in the late '90s, when people had GeoCities and all these different websites that were weird and custom and somehow connected to each other, like a way station between worlds. Every man and his dog has a podcast and a Substack now, and they all look the same. We wanted to re-skin the Press into the different kind of reading experience we think something like Grokkist warrants.
So have a look around. There's quite a lot to see. We're making it much more possible to subscribe to the bits that make sense to you. You can follow a particular author, a particular series, or things by realm. As a reminder, the realms are how we divide up the ecosystem by the quality of attention each one asks of you. If you like chewy, thinky pieces that are ideas-forward and quite intellectual, you might want to subscribe to the Entangled Vale. If you'd like more pieces about somatic experience, what things are like in the body, and creative expression, you might want the Soma Isles. Or if you like experimental change-making in the world, the Wild Margin.
We've been at this a while now, so there are hundreds of articles, and they tend to be enduring. We wanted to find ways of surfacing and showcasing that archive and making it more encounterable. So all the Snackables I've been doing in this newsletter for a really long time are now in one big compendium. You can browse them by mood, to find something that will surprise you or move you or give you something to chew on. You can look at the video things, the audio things or the written things, or just hit Surprise me.
Similarly, you can now browse the Press by register. Some of our pieces are polished, chewy syntheses from people who've been sitting with ideas for a long time. Sometimes people write field notes that sit much closer to the experience, more like a reflective practice. So you can browse by the register things are written in as well as the mood they evoke.
Series to start with
We've got some nice new series. One of the first things a lot of people see when they arrive in Grokkist is First Sparks, which introduces some of the Grokkist lore: the categories, the ideas and the vocabulary we use. That has a nice presentation now as well.
I've also just put the finishing touches on a series that continues on from it, with deeper ideas, called Unforgetting. If you've been through my Find Your Red Thread course or seen some of my Unlock Your Grok material, some of it will be familiar. I wanted to pull it all together in a format with the same energy as First Sparks, but deeper and a bit more interactive, without it being a course, because I think we're all a bit bored of courses, to be honest. It's nine articles, with some activities you can do along the way.
We also have a library of Red Thread Talks. Red Thread Talks are one of the flagship things we do in Grokkist's gatherings, where someone speaks something into existence and makes it socially real. Sometimes we record them, but people don't really like watching recordings. I know I don't. So rather than just publishing the recording or the transcript, we've been curating them, "pressifying" them into a beautiful version of the talk that works in the Press format. It's still my ambition for everyone in the Grokkist community to do a Red Thread Talk at some point.
All to say: have a look around the Press. We've put a lot of thought into it. There are probably some things that will go boink, and maybe a few bugs. If you find those, please let us know at [email protected]. We like to fix them. We'd much rather ship things than make them perfect.
What's next for the community
We'll be expanding this in the next couple of months to reimagine the way we do our events, our discussions and some of our community things. I've always said that the community is the people, not the platform, and the platform we've been using for the last few years, Circle, feels a little stale to me. It doesn't feel like where the energy is.
Grokkist asks for something different. It's a little bit magical, a little bit enchanted, a little bit on the edge of things, and I think we struggle inside Circle to express ourselves the way we want to. That can put a damper on the way the community's energy works. So we're going to make some changes, and you'll start to see more of the community work move into the look, feel and experience we've been setting up for the Press over the next couple of months. I much prefer to talk about prototypes than plans, but that's the direction.
Books and reader circles
A few other interesting things around the community. A few weeks ago we launched Jim Palmer's new book, The Practice of Being Alive, published by Grokkist Press. It's our fourth book and Jim's eighth. It deals with an experience many of us know: you can keep a life running, busy and functioning really well, without necessarily inhabiting it from the inside. By the time you're watching this it will have crossed its first thousand copies, which is a nice milestone for a small indie press. Jim is also running a reader circle to work through the ideas and chapters of the book in company, over at the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality. It kicks off on 9 November.
We also had the first reader circle gathering for Marcus Barrick's book Healing Fragmentation, which is about the tired political-economy paradigm we all know and loathe, and what might come next: what a process economy could look like. We have quite a lot of process philosophers, systems theorists, and sustainability and transformation people in Grokkist, and Marcus is writing at the intersection of all of those. It's a good, chewy read for people who like thinking these things through in detail. It's also our experiment in enacting the ideas the book is about: rather than putting it out as a shiny finished product, we're publishing it as a process. A couple of dozen people came along to the first gathering. The second part of the book comes out in the next couple of weeks, with another reader circle gathering to discuss it. If you'd like to be part of that, head over to the Healing Fragmentation Reader Circle and join the fun.
Gatherings
Elsewhere in the community, we had the first gathering of the Facilitator Sandbox practice room with Ember Parkin, and the first instalment of Theresa Sansome's Remembering Forward practice room, a chance for grokkists to experience her Future Self Now practice. We also had a Red Thread Talk from Sam Saltman, one of our regulars.
This month's Red Thread Talk is from Paul Clarke: True Detectives and Tiny Rebels. Paul will look back at the different stages of his life, how they connect, and what he's learned, including his pioneering work in social care in the UK, his community music and particularly the Cardiff Meltdown Festival, his songwriting, his healing work, and his coaching and psychosynthesis practice. It's always a joy to see how people integrate their inner landscapes, mind, body and spirit, so if you'd like to hear Paul pour himself out for everyone, please come along.
This month's Coddiwomple Café, our unhurried conversation where we wander around beautiful questions and see what wisdom emerges in the space between us, is hosted by Richard Bennet. He's asking: who is AI in education actually for? He wants to know what you actually think. Richard is a great facilitator, and I'm looking forward to it.
Come play
The last little fun thing to close on. Jane, one of the Grokkist Elves, has made a little interactive game for wandering around the Hearthlands, our community realm. It came out of a conversation about how boring it is to have a help centre or a resource hub. Surely we can do better than that.
I often think of Grokkist as a way station between worlds. I'm a computer game fan, and I love RPGs where you go to the village and see the potion master and the blacksmith and the alchemist. I think of Grokkist as that village, before you go and fight monsters in whatever lane you're in in life, where you meet all the interesting, enchanted people. Jane has taken that idea and made it into something really lovely. You can wander around the village, meet the Grokkist Elves, and ask how to submit something to the Press, how to put on an event, how to find your way around and get help. It's really lovely and cute. Let Jane know what lands for you and what could be clearer, different or more exciting, at [email protected]. You'll find it at hearthlands.grokk.ist.
Hopefully that gives you lots to play with and explore. I'll be back with another update in December. Meanwhile, be good, or be good at it. Coddiwomple with care, and see you later.
The letter · watch or read
Through the silence
Danu · 5 Nov
Snackables · new every Mon, Wed & Fri
Small good things.
Surprise meAll 445 ↗Gatherings
Rooms coming up.
Talks, cafés and circles happen on the Grokkist Network. You'll find what's coming up, in your own time zone, on its events page.
The lore
Start here, then keep going.
Three series at the heart of Grokkist. New to all this? Begin with First Sparks.
First Sparks · 7 short pieces
Are you a grokkist?
Seven small sparks for curious, many-sided people. A few minutes each, best read in order.
- ✨ 1. Reclaiming Curiosity
- ✨ 2. More Than One Thing
- ✨ 3. Comfort in Contradiction
- ✨ 4. Breathing Into Uncertainty
- ✨ 5. Belonging Beyond Fitting In
- ✨ 6. Being a Contribution
- ✨ 7. How to be here
Unforgetting · 9 pieces
Finding words for what you do.
For the dread of “so, what do you do?”, and the secret joy of being too many things to answer it in a sentence. Each piece ends with something to try.
- The ugly question
- The shrink-wrapped octopus
- The rooms of your inner home
- Thresholds and their guardians
- Wisdom you can't see in yourself
- The Greengrocer's sign
- Magic circles
- Legibility comes in stages
- Coddiwomple
Red Thread Talks · the latest
Members, following their thread.
Grokkists telling the story of the thing that runs through their lives, live, then written up with them here.
- The Speed of GriefNaomi Sonne
- You Might Be RightLarry Jordan
- Interrelating our Collective Agency in a Fragmented EraMarcus Barrick
- Open for whom?Eleanor Colla
- After the Body Says NoDr. Rodney King
- "More Fun, Less Stuff": Living on Earth as if we Want to StayMike Nickerson
From the stacks
One for each mood, pulled from the shelves.
Seven moods, seven pieces from the archive. A fresh hand every time you visit.
Make senseEntangled ValeWild Margin
How to fulfill your dream of escape
What do we do when there is no "outside" to escape to?
GroundedUnfolding RealmSoma Isles
You Might Be Right
A Catholic investment banker takes a match to his beliefs, reads a thousand books, chants to Shiva, and keeps the one thing he almost knows.
WonderEntangled ValeSoma Isles
The dance before dance
What if transcendence arrived before there was language for it?
ImagineUnfolding RealmMaker's Forge
Possibility Space
On the business that failed, and the permission you have to issue before you're allowed to want anything again.
Surprise meEntangled Vale
Healing Fragmentation: A book about process, and a process you can join
We're publishing Marcus Barrick's Healing Fragmentation one section at a time across the coming year, with a circle of readers in the room for the part that is still becoming. Here's what it is, and how to be in it.
Make senseEntangled Vale
The Light
Darkness is never fully banished, but the light can help us find a meaningful life within it.
Series and collections
Writing that belongs together.
Series arrive in parts from one writer, some of them books in the making. Collections are gathered by the editors from many.
Collection · 7 pieces
Coming back to the body
A cold swim, a juggling ball, a cricket pitch, bare feet on a beach. These pieces are about returning to the body when the head has run too far ahead.
Read in any order ↗
Collection · 8 pieces
Everything is connected. Now what?
The relational turn says nothing exists on its own. These pieces take that seriously, and ask what it changes, what it costs, and how to live inside it.
Read in any order ↗
Collection · 10 pieces
Holding two things at once
Pieces about doubt, ambivalence and contradiction, and about staying open when the pull is to pick a side. Read them when certainty feels too tidy.
Read in any order ↗
Collection · 9 pieces
Living as if we want to stay
Mike Nickerson asks what it would mean to live on Earth as if we wanted to stay. These pieces answer from gardens, farms, trees, hikes and a book tour through a Europe already adapting.
Read in any order ↗
Collection · 8 pieces
No Plan A
For people whose lives have not followed a straight line. Stories and reflections on wandering, being stuck, doing many things, and finding the thread that holds them together.
Read in any order ↗
Collection · 7 pieces
Thawing our frozen politics
Essays and conversations about how we disagree, who gets heard, and what politics could be if it remembered the questions underneath it.
Read in any order ↗
Series · 4 parts
Meditation Primer
A gentle, accessible introduction to meditation that explores its practical benefits and demystifies the practice for beginners and curious minds alike.
Start at the beginning ↗
Series · 1 part Becoming a book
Healing Fragmentation
Start at the beginning ↗
Series · 8 parts
Making Legible
Notes on the making of Danu Poyner's concept album Legible: music, memory, AI, and becoming readable to yourself.
Start at the beginning ↗
Series · 16 parts
Living in Absurdity
In this serialized adaptation of his essay, Living in the Absurd: Notes from the Modern World, Rodney King reflects on the silent dissonance of modern life and explores what it means to be human in a time that often feels anything but.
Start at the beginning ↗
Series · 13 parts Becoming a book
Dance of Lead+Follow
The Dance of Lead+Follow is a series of letters by Margarita Steinberg on the subtle, delicate choreography of human relationships — how we meet ourselves, one another, and the world.
Start at the beginning ↗
Series · 52 parts A book
Flirting with Wisdom
Peter Gilderdale's Flirting With Wisdom series reflects on the interplay between curiosity and conviction, blending personal stories, history, cultural critique, and philosophical musings. Each vignette invites readers to embrace the beauty of unfinished thinking and the art of holding life’s ongoing questions.
Start at the beginning ↗
Series · 4 parts
After the End of History
4-part essay series which delves into the crisis of authority and legitimacy facing liberal democracy. Overall, the essay series serves as a call to reimagine our politics to address contemporary challenges by reviving the foundational questions of political life, aiming to reinvigorate public discourse with moral and ethical considerations about the societies we aspire to create.
Start at the beginning ↗Grokkist Press · Books
Some of this writing becomes books.
A book is what a cluster of thinking becomes when it is ready to endure. Several began right here, as columns and letters.
New · out 13 October
The Practice of Being Alive
Fiction · Solarpunk
Salt & Seeds
Began here as a column
Flirting with Wisdom
Field guide
To Sustainability and Beyond
Taking root in the Reading Room Healing Fragmentation · arriving in parts Dance of Lead+Follow · letters becoming a book
Visit the books ↗An experiment
The Press, mapped
Every piece placed by our reading of it. See where the writing gathers.
Everything
Browse the whole Press
Mix mood, Realm, how settled and series, and see what's on the shelf.
How it works
The guide to the Press
How the Press knows, how to find your way in, and how to read a fingerprint.
Write with us
Start with a conversation
Bring a seed, a draft or a finished piece. An editor reads every one.