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...