understanding patterns; connecting dots

Paul Kelly’s  Deeper Water is an iconic ‘cycle of life’ song with a gut wrenching finale. It’s been a favourite for many years because it feels to me that whatever life teaches me, and wherever I think I am on the journey, the rips of life keep drawing me into ‘deeper water’. In the finale of the song, Paul Kelly sings the paradox -that the water is calmer the deeper you go. And so it has been. The deeper I have gone into my inner world, the less turbulent the outer world appears. The world is, of course anything but calm. After decades of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity ( VUCA ), we now live in brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible ( BANI ) societies. I am therefore leaning less on what is happening in my outer world for how I think, sense, imagine and feel. To navigate deeper into my psyche and soul I’ve had to find new guides, those for whom pathways in these domains are well travelled. Via his book SoulCraft , Bill Plotkin has introduced me to so...

We are always in transition. As I’ve written about before , not knowing the path IS probably the path. But after 18 months of uncertainty about housing and work, an 18 month transition period where we were not sure where some of the major pieces in our life would land, the uncertainty (about these things at least) came to an end. And interestingly, the period of transition ended up being bookended by the worst illnesses I’ve ever experienced. In February 2024 my world was upended when the The Make it Better Project collapsed and a few days later I flatlined in an ambulance after a severe reaction to morphine. I had two weeks with nothing but my own thoughts and a recovering body. What followed was a sabbatical of sorts which included five months in our caravan and the design of a new vocational contribution called Vocate . As 2025 started, we had begun to envisage another shift; a radical simplification of our living which included selling our house and liquidating some funds that woul...

I’ve been wondering about the influence of leaders. I’ve been wondering about the conditions that facilitate leaders contributing to major shifts in the ecosystems in which they operate. And conversely how other apparently talented and powerful people seem to be restricted in their influence. Some find pathways of ‘flow’, while others seem to be pushing against the system. For example … On November 3 rd 2020, the voting citizens of the USA chose Joe Biden over Donald Trump and the world sighed in collective relief. But as Hugh White argues in the latest Quarterly Essay , Biden’s view of America’s place in the world was grounded in the realities of 25 years previous, when the post Cold War world assumed its friendship and protection. Ironically, Trump’s instincts and prejudices mesh perfectly with the trajectory of global power structures that are seeing the US move from what White refers to as a unipolar to a multipolar power structure. The reality is, according to White, that the US...

I cut the grass this afternoon. The sun was out, the remnant autumn leaves littered the yard and driveway. I didn’t really need to because at this time of year nothing is growing very much, but it just seemed the best way to spend an hour. And I thought about the season we’re in right now and wondered what it is inviting. It makes sense that we have our long holiday breaks in the summer, when we can enjoy the long days and warm weather. That’s our way right? Endless summer days and beach rituals. But as I’ve been pondering the seasons and impending winter solstice, I wonder how our lives would be different if we celebrated the winter solstice in the yule tradition. (Of course, this is a southern hemisphere question!) Imagine if we had a week off where we paused from our go go go. Imagine if (like many of us were forced to do during the pandemic lockdowns) we bunkered down and went slow, reconnecting with ourselves, our loved ones and the things that matter. Imagine if it was the norm t...

What if time wasn’t linear after all? What if a spiral was a better model? This morning, as we walked along the river beach at low tide and bathed in the beauty of the early morning sun shrouded behind fog, Maria suggested that the season we have been living through has been a bit like an autumn. Autumn is a time of shedding, when external growth slows and nature begins to retreat into itself. The environment composts the unused harvest, harnessing the energy to invest back into preparation for the next season. That’s what it has felt like. Our frequent and at times vulnerable ponderings about our living have been almost exclusively about what we need to leave behind, rather than what we need to become or achieve. We have no regrets about what we have accumulated or become, but we are increasingly committed to being and having less, by letting go and shedding. The masks and strategies we use to navigate life are revealing themselves as we push further into our inner worlds and discover...

As I wandered along the beach a couple of days ago, a bloke with a metal detector traced a methodical path on the sand. As I passed he was digging deep with his sieve and the expression on his face was like our King Charles Cavalier Spaniel when she buries her nose into an interesting smell in the sand. Metal detecting is not an activity I am drawn to, but I did admire his searching determination. A couple of hours later I was on an aeroplane doing my own prospecting. Or maybe it wasn’t prospecting as much as awareness, but in any case, I struck gold in an unusual place. I was listening to a podcast recommended by my friend Nik. The deeply calming voice of Krista Tippett was in conversation with the late Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue. Coincidentally their topic was the Inner Landscape of Beauty, which was a wonderful and stretching dialogue, but I found myself mesmerised by the sounds of their voices. John almost sings his sentences which are strung out with slow poetic ext...

As Maria and I lingered over breakfast one morning this week I had one of those ‘aha moments’ that offers an instant and substantial paradigm shift. The context was me lamenting (weirdly and perhaps funnily) how favourable circumstances improve my mood. Why lamenting? Because I seek an inner disposition that sees beyond the circumstantial. I can’t remember when I first came across the sentiment apparently common in Sweden and Norway that in essence says, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.” But when I did, it had a striking impact on me, and since then I have been frequently reminded by my wise daughter of a related idea, that “all weather has beauty”, and to describe weather as ‘beautiful’ conflates it with the experience of pleasantness, betraying our civilised and domesticated bias toward comfort and convenience. A significant expression of my commitment to re-wilding, is swimming in the ocean early every morning: whatever the conditions, same time, ...

The more I pursue my own integrity, the more frequently I feel alienated. The more I seek a life characterised by slow and simple, the more I am uncomfortable with recognition and power, and desire truth and humility, the less I feel at home in the world. I am discovering that my inner journey is actually less about acquiring attributes and more about shedding. Shedding the masks I have worn, but also divesting the mindsets and attitudes that have defined my lifestyle and that are unchallenged in mainstream media and public discourse. It seems like the tribe I feel most at home among is marginal and probably considered a bit weird. Am I sliding into misguided weirdness, or am I seeing the front edge of human consciousness? It’s little things that trigger these thoughts. People come back from travel and have ‘done’ Brazil rather than being humbled by her. I walk around our town house and feel burdened by cupboards and rooms filled with ‘stuff’ (good and useful stuff mind you!) when our ...