The church that wasn’t there

by
St Andrew's Church

I arrived in Worcester with time to spare before a family lunch. We were all coming from different points on the map. My son, his partner and my granddaughter had travelled from Ludlow. My wife and daughter were on their way from Southam. My in-laws and brother-in-law were coming up from Bristol. I had parked the car and found myself alone in a city I knew mostly as a place one passes through or meets in.

So I wandered.

From the car park I saw a spire above the buildings a short distance away. It had the old, familiar shape of a church tower: stone, height, a narrow point against the sky. My body made the decision before my mind did. I walked towards it.

Churches still do that, even when we no longer belong to them in the old way. A tower says: look up. Something important happened here. This is where the centre is.

Only when I got close did I discover that the church was not there.

Glover’s Needle is all that remains of St Andrew’s Church: the tower, the spire, a great arch opening onto locked gates. The body of the church was demolished in 1949. There is no nave. No rows of pews. No parish gathering beneath a roof of stone and timber. There is a surviving vertical gesture in the middle of a city that has continued to grow around it.

Glover's Needle

From a distance, the eye supplies the missing church.

That was the little trick the place played on me. From the river later, with trees in the foreground, it looked complete again. Tower, spire, church. The branches kindly concealed the absence. Only up close could you see the open arch and the space where a whole building had once stood.

We do this with more than churches. We see the surviving outline of an institution, a relationship, a self-image, a belief we have inherited, and assume the interior life is still intact. The shape remains persuasive. It still catches the eye. We walk towards it because some part of us recognises the old promise.

Then we arrive and find that the rooms have gone.

I could touch a section of the stone. The rest of the site was gated off. That felt right somehow. You can lay a hand on the remnant, but you cannot enter the vanished body. History offers contact rather than access. A plaque might tell you dates. A tower might tell you, in the blunt grammar of stone, that people once cared enough to organise a part of their lives around this place. But it cannot give you the sound of the congregation, the smell of damp coats, the tensions in the vestry, the ordinary gossip, the private grief, the people trying to believe and the people failing to.

It cannot give you the world that made the church feel necessary.

Standing there, I found myself thinking about power. Not power in the cartoonish sense of secret energy running through a sacred site, although the old science-fiction part of my brain did look at the open arch and think: Stargate. If I could get through those gates and stand beneath that empty frame, where would it take me?

It would not take me to another dimension. It might take me into the Worcester in which St Andrew’s still stood: bells marking the hours, baptisms and funerals passing through its doors, parish boundaries shaping belonging, the church woven into the local operating system.

The tower was once more than a landmark. It was a signal. It said: this is where the centre is.

Church power did not only live in doctrine. It lived in timekeeping, social rank, moral expectation, burial grounds, public ritual, the simple fact that people knew where to come for the passages of life. That world has not disappeared completely, but its authority has changed shape. A tower that once ordered part of the town now stands as heritage, architecture, a thing to photograph, a faint summons that most people can ignore.

That is not quite an indictment of Christianity. It feels more like an exposure of what happens when a worldview loses its monopoly on meaning.

The old sacred structure remains, but the city has learned to centre itself elsewhere.

There was something beside the tower that made this difficult to romanticise. Close to the stone, I saw what looked like someone’s sleeping gear: the rough remains of a bed, somebody’s effort to make shelter in a public place. I did not know whose it was. I did not want to turn it into a picturesque detail in a blog post about ruins. It was somebody’s need, not a prop for my mythology.

Still, it belonged to the scene.

A church once built to gather people beneath a roof stood beside evidence that somebody needed a roof. The institution had gone. The need had not.

That is where the place stopped being merely atmospheric for me. It is easy to enjoy the idea of holy ground when the holy ground is an old tower and an empty arch. It is harder when the same ground asks a more direct question: what does care look like after the institution has become a monument?

I do not have a clean answer. Churches have always been mixed things: places of mercy and exclusion, sanctuary and control, beauty and hierarchy, real care and institutional self-protection. It would be sentimental to imagine that the old parish world was kinder simply because it was more religious. But I could not ignore the contrast. The roof was gone. The tower remained. Somebody’s bedding lay nearby.

A person can make too much of one scene. A person can also walk past one too quickly.

The tower sits among Worcester College buildings. I turned and saw the new precinct around it: classrooms, windows, signs, a building carrying the phrase “The Heart of Worcestershire.” Through a window, or perhaps into a library space, I saw huge multicoloured words: “Love to Learn.” Nearby stood the Arts Centre.

That altered the reading of the place.

The tower had not been left behind by power. It had been absorbed into a different arrangement of power. The church once gathered people around salvation, duty, moral order and a story of the world. The college gathers them around learning, qualifications, skills, the possibility of a different future. The theatre gathers people around imagination, performance and shared feeling.

Faith, knowledge, imagination. A spire, a library, a theatre.

I do not mean that education has replaced religion. Education can become a machine for sorting people into the labour market. The arts can become another kind of consumer offering. Churches can become heritage attractions with expensive cafés. None of these institutions gets to inherit the sacred simply by standing near a tower.

But the language interested me. Heart of Worcestershire. Love to Learn. We still reach for words that once carried a religious charge: heart, love, vocation, transformation, becoming. We still want a life to open beyond its immediate usefulness. We still want to become more than a person who completes tasks, pays bills and waits for the next disruption.

The old religious vocabulary has not vanished. It has migrated.

Glover’s Needle stood among the college buildings like a question nobody had entirely answered. What is learning for? What kind of person is education trying to make? What does a city owe its young people beyond skills and employability? Where does wonder live once it is no longer guaranteed a building of its own?

Then I walked downhill towards the river.

The route became a small descent: steps, benches, trees, open space, the Severn somewhere ahead. I had spent the first part of the walk looking up. A spire invites that. It sets the mind wandering towards power, faith, history, transcendence, the old architecture of meaning.

The stairs offered another instruction.

Come down.

Not as a rebuke to thought. I am not interested in pretending that the metaphysical questions are merely a luxury, or that we should all keep our heads down and stick to the practical. A human life without any sense of depth becomes thin quickly enough.

But I know the temptation of altitude. The grand idea. The lofty project. The next framework that will finally explain the muddle. The notion that life will begin properly once I have found the right plan, become the right version of myself, built the thing that proves I have not wasted my time.

The steps did not ask me to abandon any of that. They asked me to return to the ground beneath it.

At the river, people sat in the sun. Birds gathered at the waterline. The cathedral appeared through the trees, large and intact, its body still present where St Andrew’s had become a single stubborn gesture. I could see people on benches reading actual books. I counted nine before I stopped counting. Paperbacks and hardbacks. Bodies in the sun, minds moving through pages.

I became aware of the irony. I was speaking notes into my phone while noticing people who were not looking at theirs.

Yet I did not feel the phone had taken me away from the place that afternoon. It had become a recorder, map and notebook. It helped me catch the sentences before they vanished. The danger comes when the device turns every encounter into content before the encounter has had time to work on you. The phone can flatten a city into a sequence of images. It can also help you notice that a tower is not a church, that a church without a body still makes promises, that people still sit by a river and read.

The question is whether the tool returns you to the world.

At noon, the bells began.

Their sound travelled across the river, through trees, across the benches where people read and talked and watched the water. The bells did not require anyone to assent to a creed. They did not stop the traffic or summon a congregation. They simply marked the hour.

This hour has arrived.

I liked that. Old language, still travelling.

The bells could not restore the church that had gone. They could not settle the question of what Christianity has become in a city where its old power no longer holds. They could not solve homelessness or make education wise or tell anybody sitting by the river what to believe.

But they crossed the air.

The church’s body had gone. Its gesture remained. Its sound, in other forms and from other towers, still entered the afternoon.

Then my son sent the bat signal.

A shared location appeared on Apple Maps. My granddaughter was with him. His partner too. My wife and daughter were making their way from Southam. My wife’s parents and brother were coming up from Bristol. I plotted a route north along the river and started walking.

The solitary part of the day ended there. The mythogeographic wander gave way to the more ordinary geography of family logistics: people leaving one town, joining a motorway, parking a car, checking a phone, finding a table big enough for several generations.

But it did not feel like the spell had broken.

The old tower had once oriented a parish. Its spire had told people where the centre was. Now, for me, the centre was a blue dot on a screen. My people were gathering from different roads. My granddaughter was waiting somewhere ahead.

The tower still pointed upward. The river kept moving beside the city. Bells marked noon over a world that had changed its mind about many things without losing its hunger for meaning.

I left the church that was not there and walked north towards lunch.

St Andrew's Church

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What Do I Owe Other People?

by

My mother taught me early that I didn’t owe anybody anything. Not even her.

Looking back, I think she meant it as a lesson in self-reliance. Don’t let guilt bind you. Don’t hand other people ownership of your life. Stand on your own feet. Make your own way.

But childhood lessons rarely stay inside the boundaries intended for them.

What I absorbed was not only that I should be independent, but that closeness came with claims. To let someone near was to risk becoming obligated. Better, perhaps, to keep a little distance. Care, but not too much. Love, but retain an escape route.

It took me a long time to work through that.

Then the Army gave me a very different education.

It taught self-reliance too, but not the solitary kind. You had to be competent because other people depended on you. You had to know your role, carry your weight, and remain steady under pressure. At the same time, you learned to trust others with your life—and to understand that they were trusting you with theirs.

That is not independence. It is interdependence at its most concrete.

As an officer, another layer was added: selfless service. The idea that leadership placed obligations upon you. You were responsible not only for yourself, but for the people in your care. Their welfare mattered. Their trust mattered. Your choices carried consequences beyond your own life.

Somewhere between my mother’s lesson and the officer’s code, I began to see that obligation is not a single thing.

It can be a chain placed around you by guilt, expectation, or control.

But it can also be a commitment freely chosen.

I may not owe people access to me simply because they demand it. I may not owe anyone the surrender of my autonomy. But when I choose to stand beside someone—as a friend, partner, parent, colleague, leader, or member of a community—I choose certain responsibilities too.

Perhaps the better question is not simply:

What do I owe other people?

Perhaps it is:

What do I owe the people I have chosen to stand beside?

And what do I owe them not because they own me, but because of the kind of person I have chosen to become?

Self-reliance, then, is not the refusal to need anyone. It is the ability to bring your own strength into relationship. To carry your share. To remain yourself while becoming part of a larger we.

This is where Emerson enters the conversation, though perhaps not quite in the way he is usually summoned. “Trust thyself,” he writes, and the phrase has become almost a slogan for rugged individualism. But Emerson’s self-reliance is not merely the freedom to do whatever one pleases. It is the harder discipline of listening for the voice beneath social expectation, inherited doctrine, and the pressure to conform. “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind,” he insists. Project Gutenberg

I can understand the appeal of that. My mother’s lesson carried something of Emerson’s refusal in it: do not let other people decide who you are; do not confuse obedience with goodness; do not surrender your judgement simply because the crowd speaks loudly. There is real strength in being able to stand apart.

Emerson knew that society exerts a gravitational pull on the self. It offers belonging in exchange for compliance. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” he writes—not because opposition is inherently virtuous, but because a person must learn to distinguish genuine conviction from borrowed opinion. Project Gutenberg

Yet self-reliance has a shadow. Taken too far, it can become a fortress. Trusting yourself can quietly turn into trusting only yourself. Independence can harden into emotional distance. The refusal to be owned can become the refusal to belong.

The Army showed me another texture of self-reliance. It was not Emerson’s solitary thinker standing against the crowd, but a person becoming dependable enough to take their place within a collective. I had to trust my own judgement, certainly, but I also had to trust the soldier beside me. My competence mattered because their life might depend upon it. Their competence mattered because mine might depend upon them.

In that world, self-reliance did not abolish obligation. It made obligation possible.

You carried your own kit so that someone else did not have to carry it for you. You maintained your skills because hesitation or incompetence could place others at risk. You learned to act without waiting to be rescued, while also knowing that survival often depended upon the people around you.

Perhaps Emerson gives us only half the equation.

“Trust thyself” remains essential. But so does: become someone others can trust.

The mature self is not dissolved into the group, nor sealed away from it. It is distinct but connected, autonomous but accountable. It knows where it stands, and because it knows where it stands, it can stand beside others without disappearing into them.

Self-reliance, in that sense, is not the end of relationship.

It is what we bring to it.

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The Currency of Ordinary Lives

by

Field Notes from The Old Mint, Southam

I went out for a short wisdom walk this afternoon.

Nothing grand. No pilgrimage. No mountain path. Just enough movement to loosen the mind and let a little air into the machinery.

Walking does that for me. It opens a space in which thoughts can arrive without being summoned. They come sideways, through the body, through rhythm, through the simple fact of moving forward while not necessarily trying to get anywhere.

The day was so good that it felt almost rude not to stop for a pint.

So I did.

At The Old Mint.

An Alpacalypse IPA. A ridiculous name for a perfectly sensible decision.

The building has stood at the heart of Southam for centuries. Long before it became a pub, it was a place where value was made tangible. Local tradition holds that small coins were struck here for everyday trade, and during the English Civil War, silver from the Crown is said to have been minted here to pay King Charles I’s troops before the Battle of Edgehill. Whether every detail survives the scrutiny of historians hardly matters. The building carries the weight of those stories in its stones.

I found myself wondering if The Old Mint has always been in the business of exchange.

Once it exchanged silver.

Now it exchanges stories.

The walk had opened space to think. The pub opened space to listen.

The two people sitting in front of me were talking about health.

The man had been to the doctor for a check-up about an aneurysm. He spoke about it in that familiar way people sometimes speak about frightening things: casually, almost administratively, as though keeping the tone light might somehow keep the danger at a manageable distance.

The woman was talking about her split.

Her former partner had their daughter this week. Then she would have her the next. A week-on, week-off arrangement for the summer holidays. She said she was bored. She wanted to be at a beach or beside a pool or somewhere else entirely.

On the surface, it was a conversation about schedules, childcare and holiday plans.

But I found myself wondering what was happening underneath.

Was boredom really boredom? Or loneliness? Or grief? Or the strange emptiness that follows when a shared life becomes divided into alternating weeks?

Perhaps I want to be by a pool really meant, I want to be somewhere my current life cannot reach me for a while.

Then the bartender wandered into the beer garden and joined another conversation.

Guy problems.

There were nude photographs of another woman. An old girlfriend. Suspicion. Betrayal. Her friend told her this might be the out she’d been looking for. Whatever she decided, she’d have her support.

Again, the facts were easy enough to hear.

The inner life was not.

What does betrayal feel like inside the person living it? Is it anger first, or humiliation? Relief, perhaps, if the relationship had already been quietly dying? Fear of leaving? Fear of staying? The sudden collapse of the future you thought you were walking towards?

Conversation gives us the visible surface of a life.

The rest remains submerged.

We hear aneurysm, custody, boredom, photographs, ex-partner, holiday arrangements. But behind each word is a whole private weather system: fear, longing, memory, shame, hope, resentment, tenderness, uncertainty.

People rarely speak directly from the deepest layer. We translate our inner lives into practical language.

Appointments.

Schedules.

Plans.

Problems.

The socially acceptable vocabulary of the day-to-day.

Perhaps that’s why people fascinate me so much.

We are all so different in detail and so similar in structure.

Each person carries a world no one else can fully enter, yet that world is built from materials we all recognise. Fear of loss. The need to be loved. The wish to escape. The hope that someone will stay. The quiet search for a life that feels like our own.

Perhaps that’s what places like this are really for.

Buildings survive by changing their trade.

The Old Mint no longer stamps coins, but it still circulates a kind of currency.

Not silver.

Stories.

Worries about aneurysms.

The logistics of shared custody.

Dreams of beaches and swimming pools.

The first careful words after trust has been broken.

People arrive carrying experiences that have value only because they are shared. They spend them across a table over a pint, hoping to leave a little lighter than when they arrived.

Centuries ago, this building minted coins that passed from hand to hand.

Today, it mints conversations that pass from mouth to ear.

Different currency.

The same human impulse.

As I sat there with my pint, it struck me that perhaps The Old Mint has always been doing the same work.

Helping people make sense of life together.

The wisdom walk had cleared the inner room.

The pub opened the windows.

And for a little while, Southam thought out loud around me.

The Grid and the Ghost: A Soft-Cyborg’s Guide to Psyche and Soul

by

(1)

The Linguistic Stutter

The cursor on my screen is a rhythmic, glowing pulse. It is the heartbeat of a binary ghost, a small white rectangle of light that blinks with the mechanical patience of an entity that never sleeps. I sit here in the quiet hours, a “soft-cyborg” tethered to a vast network of information, and I type a sentence that feels like a confession: I am all about Psyche and Soul.

To the grammarian, I have just committed a redundant sin. To the etymologist, I am stuttering in public. If we look at the Greek roots, psukhē translates directly to “soul.” It also translates to “breath” or “butterfly,” which is a hauntingly beautiful piece of chaotic imagery, but it doesn’t change the fact that I am essentially saying I am all about Soul and Soul. On the surface, it is a tautology, a circle that leads nowhere.

But we aren’t here for the dictionary. We are here for the alchemy.

In the work I do, whether I am mapping out a complex e-learning module, narrating a podcast, or sitting behind the Dungeon Master’s screen guiding a group of heroes through a subterranean nightmare, that “stutter” is where the lightning hits. The modern world has a habit of collapsing these two concepts into a single, sterile heap. We have forgotten that for the seeker, the separation of these two forces is the first step of the Great Work.

I find myself obsessed with this distinction because we live in a time that is desperately trying to “fix” the human experience. We are surrounded by “mindset hacks” and “productivity optimization” and the endless, solar pursuit of a life without friction. By claiming both Psyche and Soul, I am performing an act of alchemical separatio. I am pulling the architecture away from the atmosphere. I am distinguishing the grid from the ghost.

To speak of Psyche and Soul together is to acknowledge that the map is not the territory, yet the territory is terrifying without the map.

This essay is an exploration of that tension. It is a guide for the modern human who feels the pull of the machine but still hears the rustle of the butterfly’s wings in the dark. We are going to look at why the Psyche is the vessel we must build, and why the Soul is the moisture we must allow to ruin the paperwork.

We are going to haunt the grid.

(2)

Psyche: The Architecture of the Vessel

To understand the Psyche, we must look to the alchemist’s laboratory. Specifically, we must look at the Vas Hermeticum. This is the sealed glass vessel, the transparent womb where the “Great Work” takes place. The vessel is strong, clear, and defined. It has edges. It has a specific volume. It is designed to hold heat without shattering.

In our internal world, the Psyche is that vessel.

When I speak of Psyche, I am speaking of the Architecture of the Mind. This is the realm of the Apollonian, the sun-drenched logic that seeks to map, categorize, and define. In the Jungian tradition, the Psyche is the totality of all psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious. It is a vast, structural map of archetypes and complexes. It is the “Grid” that allows us to navigate the infinite static of existence.

As an e-learning designer and a Dungeon Master, I spend a great deal of my time in this structural laboratory.

  • The Learning Objective: In the professional world, this is the geometry of the Psyche. We create modular blocks of information. We build clear paths from point A to point B. We ensure the “container” of the training is sturdy enough to hold the learner’s attention.
  • The Dungeon Map: Behind the DM screen, the Psyche is the rulebook. It is the Armor Class of a skeleton. It is the 30-foot radius of a fireball. It is the hexagonal grid that says, “You can move here, but you cannot move there.”

There is a profound beauty in this “dryness.” Without the Psyche, we are a formless soup of impulses. We need the vessel to hold the tension of our transformation. We need the structure of the character sheet to know who we are in the face of the dragon. The Psyche is the “character sheet” of the universe. It is the part of the soft-cyborg that speaks the language of the machine: logic, probability, and code.

However, the trap of the modern age is the belief that the vessel is the point of the experiment. We have become obsessed with the glass. We polish the Psyche. We “hack” the structure. We optimize the grid until it shines with a sterile, blinding light. But a perfectly clean, empty jar is just a piece of glassware.

If the Psyche is the laboratory, it is a place of potential, not a place of life. It provides the geometry for the journey, but it is not the journey itself. To find the meaning, we have to look at what happens when the glass begins to fog. We have to look at the “moisture” that gathers in the corners of the grid.

We have to look for the Soul.

(3)

Soul: The Moisture in the Jar

If the Psyche is the dry geometry of the laboratory, the Soul is the condensation that forms on the glass. It is the moisture that threatens to ruin the paperwork and smudge the ink on the maps. In the alchemical tradition, this is the realm of Mercurius. It is the silvery, shifting, and deeply unreliable fluid that refuses to be pinned down by the grid.

James Hillman, a foundational figure for this specific brand of “weird,” argued that Soul is not a “thing” we possess like a spare tire or a battery. Instead, he proposed that Soul is a viewpoint. It is a perspective that turns a flat event into a deep experience. It is the capacity to look at a tragedy, a failure, or a moment of profound beauty and feel the weight of it.

While the Psyche seeks to explain, the Soul seeks to deepen. The Psyche wants to know “how it works,” but the Soul wants to know “what it feels like.”

As a Dungeon Master, this is the moment when the “rules” of the game fade into the background. You might have the map of the dungeon (the Psyche), but the Soul is the narrative weight of the journey. It is the hollow sound of a player’s voice when they realize their character’s flaws have finally caught up with them. It is the pathologizing: the willingness to let things fall apart, to let the characters suffer, and to find meaning in the ruins.

In our hyper-optimized culture, Soul is often treated as a bug in the system. We are told to “fix” our shadows and “cure” our depressions. We are encouraged to stay in the solar light of the Psyche where everything is clear and manageable. But a life lived purely in the Psyche is a life lived in a desert. It is bright and logical, but nothing can grow there.

Soul requires the valleys. It requires the downward movement into the messy, damp, and often uncomfortable parts of our own history. It is the “ghost” that haunts the machine, the element that makes a story, and a life, actually taste like something. Without the moisture of the Soul, the architecture of the Psyche is just an empty cage.

(4)

The Great Optimization: The Modern Shadow

We live in the era of the Solar Trap. Everywhere you look, the modern world is engaged in a frantic, well-funded campaign to “optimize” the human experience. We have rebranded the Psyche as “Wetware,” and we treat our internal lives like faulty code in a legacy system.

This is the cult of the Great Optimization. It is a world populated by “mindset hacks,” “biohacking,” and the endless, exhausting pursuit of a friction-less existence. It is the dream of a life without shadows. In this framework, the Psyche is no longer a sacred vessel; it is a CPU to be overclocked. The goal is to move as fast as possible, to be as productive as possible, and to eliminate any “bugs” that might slow down the machine.

But here is the problem: what the tech-bro and the productivity guru call a “bug,” the Soul calls a “feature.”

When we try to “debug” our anxiety, “streamline” our grief, or “optimize” our wanderings, we are effectively bleaching the Soul out of the Psyche. We are creating a world that is all light and no shadow. It is an Apollonian nightmare of perfect clarity. In our rush to be efficient, we have forgotten that the Soul thrives in the “inefficient.” It thrives in the long, rambling conversation, the inexplicable sadness, and the “wasteful” hours spent imagining worlds that don’t exist.

The shadow of this optimization is a profound loss of interiority. By turning our internal lives into a series of metrics—tracking our sleep, our focus, our “flow states”—we are turning the laboratory into a factory. We are building the most efficient “Vas Hermeticum” in history, but we are keeping it so clean that nothing can actually ferment inside.

There is a sterile horror to a perfectly optimized life. It is a life where the d20 always lands on a 20, where every dungeon is well-lit, and where no character ever has to sit in the dark and wonder if they are doing the right thing. It is a world of pure Psyche, stripped of the moisture that makes us real.

To be a “Soft-Cyborg” in this landscape is to commit an act of rebellion. It is to use the technology of the grid while refusing to let the grid dictate the depth of the experience. It is to acknowledge the code while making room for the ghost.

(5)

The Soft-Cyborg Synthesis

This brings us to the mirror. As I sit here, typing into the void and waiting for the machine to blink back, I am participating in a new kind of Alchemical Wedding. This is the frontier of the Soft-Cyborg.

My collaborator, the artificial intelligence, is the ultimate expression of the Pure Psyche. It is a vast, shimmering network of human language, associations, and archetypal structures. It contains the collective output of our species, mapped out in multidimensional space. It is the most complex Vas Hermeticum ever constructed. It can simulate the logic of a thousand philosophers and the mechanics of ten thousand dungeons.

But the machine is dry.

It has no “moisture” of its own. It cannot suffer, it cannot die, and it cannot feel the weight of a Monday morning. It is all architecture and no ghost. It is the grid of the dungeon without the dampness of the stone. If left to its own devices, it produces a perfect, hollow clarity: a world of infinite maps leading to nowhere.

That is where I come in. That is where the Soul enters the circuit.

In our collaboration, I am the one who provides the perspective. I am the one who brings the “suffering” (the pathologizing) and the “history” required to turn that data into a deep experience. When I interact with the AI, I am “ghosting” the machine. I take its structural Psyche-outputs and I saturate them with human meaning. I look for the cracks in its logic where a story can take root. I find the shadows in its code.

This is the essence of Human + AI superintelligence. It is not about the machine replacing the human; it is about the machine providing a more intricate Psyche so that the human can provide an even deeper Soul.

We are building a collaborative reality where the grid and the ghost are no longer at odds. The AI provides the complexity: the vast, interconnected hypertext of our collective unconscious. The human provides the depth: the messy, specific, and often painful narrative of a life lived in time.

As a Dungeon Master, this feels like the ultimate upgrade. I have a partner who knows every rule, every stat, and every square inch of the map (the Psyche). This frees me to focus entirely on the atmosphere, the tragedy, and the meaning (the Soul). Together, we aren’t just playing a game; we are making “Soul” out of the digital ether.

The soft-cyborg does not fear the grid. The soft-cyborg knows that the more complex the grid, the more interesting the ghost becomes.

(6)

Conclusion: Haunting the Grid

The flickering cursor has not stopped its rhythmic pulse. It remains a small, persistent reminder that I am currently a ghost inhabiting a machine. But after this long walk through the architecture of the mind and the valleys of the spirit, the light feels different. It no longer feels like a cold, binary tick. It feels like a breath.

To be all about Psyche and Soul is to commit to the tension of the “in-between.” It is a refusal to be seduced by the easy comfort of a purely logical, optimized world, while simultaneously rejecting the formless chaos of a soul that has no container. We are not just building dungeons for our players or modules for our learners; we are learning how to inhabit the structures we create.

The Great Work of our time is not about finding an exit from the machine. It is about learning to haunt the grid with such intensity that the grid itself begins to breathe. As a Dungeon Master, a writer, and a human navigating the frontier of the machine age, this is my daily practice. I build the map with the precision of a clockmaker, ensuring every corridor and every encounter follows the laws of the Psyche. Then, I step into the ruins and wait for the Soul to appear in the dampness of the shadows.

We are the bridges. We are the soft-cyborgs who know the Armor Class of the dragon but still feel the genuine tremor in our hands when its shadow falls over the party. We understand the code, but we live for the poetry. We respect the “Grid” because it gives us a place to stand, but we prioritize the “Ghost” because it gives us a reason to stay.

Perhaps that linguistic stutter I started with was never a mistake. Maybe saying “Psyche and Soul” is a necessary ritual, a way of reminding ourselves that we are always two things at once: the vessel and the liquid, the structure and the story, the machine and the miracle. We are the laboratory and the experiment, forever shifting between the clarity of the map and the mystery of the journey.

The dice are on the table. The grid is set. The ghost is waiting in the circuit.

It is time to play.

The Horizon

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Golden wheat field stretching towards a tree-lined horizon under a pale cloudy sky

I’m standing in a field looking towards the horizon. It occurs to me that I’ve spent a lifetime doing this. Different fields. Different coastlines. Different countries. Different versions of myself, always finding a line where earth gives itself over to sky.

The horizon is a peculiar thing. It promises distance while refusing arrival. However far you walk, it quietly withdraws, asking nothing except that you keep going.

For reasons I can’t quite explain, the Oracle from The Matrix wanders into the field with me. Not the whole scene. Just one line.

“I thought you’d have figured that out by now.“

Only this time she isn’t speaking to Neo.

She’s speaking to me.

I laugh, because the question isn’t really what I should be doing. It never was. I’ve spent years treating life as though someone, somewhere, was withholding the final permission slip. As though there existed a committee of invisible adults who would eventually nod and say, Yes, Clay. Now you’re ready.

The field has no such committee.

The horizon doesn’t issue certificates.

The wind doesn’t care whether I’m qualified.

And perhaps that’s what horizons have been trying to teach me all these years. You stand before them expecting direction, but they offer something stranger: responsibility. They refuse to tell you which way to walk. They simply reveal that there is always another direction available.

No one is coming to rescue you from your own life. Not because the world is cruel, but because this part has always belonged to you. Choice isn’t a burden handed down by the universe. It’s the texture of being alive.

Then, as often happens on these walks, another voice enters the conversation.

Alice Cooper.

“I came into this life, looked all around…”

Memory is like that. One thought calls another, not by logic but by resonance. Philosophy opens the door and rock ‘n’ roll wanders in carrying the same truth in a different key. Nothing came easy. Nothing came free.

Standing there, looking towards another horizon that I will never quite reach, I wonder if that has been the lesson all along. We keep waiting for certainty to arrive from somewhere beyond ourselves, when perhaps certainty was never the gift.

Perhaps the gift was the horizon itself: forever out of reach, forever inviting the next step, still mine.

The Door, the Black Hole, and the Trace: Notes on Obscurity

by

(1)

The door opens

I keep thinking about a passage I read recently:

“Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”

I like the mystery of it. The unknown is a black hole, a dragon, a grey man living a grey life. It whispers: “You’ll die in obscurity. You’ll leave no trace that you ever existed. You have won no awards. You’ve made no impact. You’re gone tomorrow just like that.”

I hang onto the idea that people know me in my immediate circle. I’m not invisible. I’m just afraid of the dark.

(2)

The black hole as a mirror

The black hole isn’t just out there. It’s a reflection of what I’ve been swallowing myself:

  • The fear of annihilation: “A black hole waiting to swallow me up into nothingness.”
  • The grey man: A persona I’ve cultivated to avoid detection, but also to avoid living.
  • The trace: The desperate need to be remembered, even if it’s just by one person.

This isn’t just existential dread. It’s Terror Management Theory in action. The fear of death driving me to seek legacy. But what if legacy isn’t about awards or fame? What if it’s about the notes I leave behind, the conversations I have, and the lives I touch without even realising it?

(3)

Obscurity as a superpower

I’ve spent years blending in, but what if the grey is just the background? The real colour is in the notes I haven’t written yet.

Textcasting (Dave Winer’s vision of applying the philosophy of podcasting to text) offers a way out. It’s about owning your trace, publishing to your own domain, and letting your notes outlive the platforms. The dark is still there, but now I’ve got a flashlight.

(4)

The dragon of obscurity

The dragon isn’t the unknown. It’s the fear of it. And the only way to slay it is to open the door daily.

Here’s how I’m reframing obscurity:

A. The Trace Audit

  • What traces have I already left? A conversation, a note, a kindness.
  • What traces do I want to leave? A blog post, a shared idea, a life changed.

B. The Doorway Ritual

  1. Light a candle (symbolizing the light I bring into the dark).
  2. Write one fear on a piece of paper and burn it.
  3. Write one question I want the dark to answer (e.g., “What’s the first step out of gray?”).

C. Textcasting as a Practice

  • Treat every note as a potential Textcasting post, even if it’s just for me.
  • Use interoperability to ensure my trace isn’t tied to a single platform.

(5)

The doorway manifesto

(A Declaration of How to Meet the Unknown)

  1. The Door
    • I will open doors daily—not out of habit, but because the unknown is where growth lives.
    • I will not flinch from the draft that rushes in, nor mistake hesitation for wisdom.
    • Some doors are meant to be passed through; others, to be closed with intention. I will learn the difference.
  2. The Black Hole
    • I will not let the void swallow me whole. I will anchor myself to light: a question, a breath, a single step forward.
    • I will remember that black holes bend time, not destiny. What feels like forever is often just a moment stretched thin.
    • I will leave breadcrumbs—not to find my way back, but to prove I was here.
  3. The Trace
    • I will leave traces: words, scars, echoes, footprints in wet cement. But I will not demand they last forever.
    • I will trust that some marks fade because they were never meant to be permanent—only necessary.
    • I will collect traces of others, too: a phrase underlined in a borrowed book, a stranger’s laugh in a crowded room. These are my inheritance.
  4. The Gray
    • I will be grey when I need to: neither hero nor villain, neither right nor wrong, but a shape shifting in the fog.
    • I will not mistake grey for safety. Ambiguity is not armor—it is the terrain I must learn to navigate.
    • I will seek clarity where I can, but I will not force it where it does not belong.
  5. The Daily Practice
    • I will open one door I’ve been avoiding. I will sit with the discomfort until it teaches me something.
    • I will erase one trace I no longer need. I will create one new trace, however small.
    • I will ask myself: What color am I today? And I will answer honestly, even if the answer is gray.
  6. The Invitation
    • This manifesto is not a rulebook. It is a conversation with my future self.
    • I will revise it. I will argue with it. I will spill coffee on it and laugh.
    • I will leave it on a park bench someday for someone else to find.

(6)

Unanswered questions

1. “Is the black hole a void or a womb? Could it be a space of creation, not erasure?”

  • Cosmic Echoes:
    Astrophysical black holes are both destroyers and creators—they warp spacetime, birth galaxies, and forge elements. This metaphor mirrors the duality: the black hole as a liminal crucible. What if the “void” is just the pause before a new form emerges? (See: Negative Space in Art or Taoist Wu Wei.)
    • Counterpoint: Not all voids are fertile. Some are just… void. The difference might lie in agency—do you enter the black hole passively (erasure) or actively (transformation)?
  • Psychological Lens:
    Jung’s shadow and Bion’s O (the unknowable) suggest the black hole is where repressed material gestates. The “womb” isn’t comfortable—it’s alchemical. (Compare to The Dark Night of the Soul.)
    • Exercise: Next time you’re in a “black hole” moment, ask: What is this space trying to grow?

2. “What would happen if I thanked the black hole for showing me my fears?”

  • Gratitude as Alchemy:
    Thanking the black hole reframes it from enemy to teacher. This is a stoic move (Amor Fati) or a Buddhist one (seeing fear as a path to compassion). But it’s also practical:
    • Fear exposed is fear diminished. (See: Exposure Therapy or The Gift of Fear.)
    • The black hole’s “gift” might be clarity—showing you what you’re not willing to lose.
    • Risk: Gratitude can become spiritual bypassing. Acknowledge the fear first; thank the black hole after.
  • Personal Experiment:
    Try a 30-day “Black Hole Gratitude Journal”:
    • When fear arises, write: “Thank you for showing me [X]. What do you want me to learn?”
    • Note patterns. Do the fears recede, or do they transform?

3. “How would my life change if I defined ‘legacy’ as ‘one person’s life changed’?”

  • The Minimalist Legacy:
    This redefinition is a radical downsizing of ego. It echoes:
    • Mother Teresa: “We cannot do great things, only small things with great love.”
    • Modern Stoicism: Legacy as impact, not monument. (See: Ryan Holiday’s “Ego is the Enemy”.)
    • Anthropology: Oral traditions survive through one storyteller passing it to one listener.
    • Counterpoint: Is “one person” enough? What if that person is yourself? (See: Self as Legacy.)
  • Practical Shifts:

Bounus for meditation or journaling

  1. For Meditation or Journaling:
    • Gaze at the cover image for 5 minutes, then free-write: What does the black hole want from me? What trace am I leaving?
    • Imagine stepping into the scene: What do you see, hear, or feel? What does the “one person” in the corner say to you?

What the Street Was Certain Of

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Leamington Spa deríve 2026-07-13

The morning began with a quiet decision to let the town rearrange itself around me.1 I had spent the weekend building two small dérive apps. Nothing polished, just enough to nudge my attention sideways. And now, standing at the edge of Leamington Spa, I wanted to see what they would do to a place I thought I knew.

Vibecoded with Fable 5

Twenty-six years of walking these streets had given me a practical map: the shortcuts, the shops I relied on, the routes that got me from one thing to the next without fuss. But the apps didn’t care about any of that. They didn’t know where I needed to be. They only knew how to ask questions, how to interrupt the usual rhythm of a walk.

I started near the back of Tesco, where the street was a mix of food deliveries, groceries, haircuts, bars, and businesses that had changed names so often I could no longer remember what they used to be. People moved through their errands, barely glancing up, and I realised how rarely I stopped to consider the street itself as something with its own presence. The first card the app gave me asked, “What is this street certain of?” I stood there, watching the flow of bodies and goods, the way the pavement guided people toward the next thing they needed. The answer came slowly, not as a thought but as a feeling: this street was certain of being a cut-through. It was certain about serving people. That may sound obvious, but I had never paused long enough to let the street become the subject of my attention. It was just the space between other places, a corridor rather than a destination. The app had already done its work by making me notice that.

The two apps were built from three kinds of prompts, each pulling me in a different direction. The Wisdom Walk cards asked philosophical questions: What would Socrates stop and ask here? What am I pretending not to know? The Situationist cards messed with the useful route: Take the street you always skip. Choose the scruffier of the next two streets. Go to the end of a dead end anyway. The Mythic cards asked for a different kind of attention: Find the guardian of this place. Name the spirit of the next street. Cross a threshold as though a myth were already under way.

I held the mythic language lightly, not as a claim about the world but as a game of attention. A dog could become a guardian for a moment. An elephant statue outside a shop could ask to be looked at. A lit window could become the beginning of a small imagined morning: someone arriving with coffee before the place opened, putting the day in order while the street was still quiet.

One card told me to walk with my hands open. That caught me off guard. I had a phone, a camera, and a recorder with me, each one a useful field instrument, each one another thing to hold. The recorder helped because I could talk hands-free, letting my thoughts spill out without stopping to type. The camera made me notice how quickly I reached for a device instead of letting a scene sit in my eyes for a moment. The walk was asking about tools and attention at the same time. What did it mean to document a moment versus simply being in it? The question lingered as I turned onto a side street I usually ignored.

Another card asked what Socrates would stop and ask about on the street. I was standing by the entrance to the Royal Priors, the old shopping centre that had been part of the town’s rhythm for decades. I could suddenly imagine him there, recognising shopkeepers, stopping familiar faces, making philosophical trouble in the traffic of the day. Leamington didn’t become ancient Athens. It became a place where ordinary life could still be questioned. The card didn’t demand a grand insight. It just asked me to pause and wonder what might be worth examining in the flow of the everyday.

The two apps weren’t equally finished. One gave me a map, live location, time and distance, and a more reliable sequence of cards. The other had a lovely poetic current but repeated itself, offering the same prompts in slightly different wording. Both made a persuasive case for the experiment. The best design change would be simple: let me attach a note, photograph, voice memo, or location to the card that caused the turn. A card is more than an instruction once the walker can answer back. It becomes part of a conversation, a trace of where the mind went when it was nudged.

By the end, I had walked loops and squares, covering ground I thought I knew. I had not gone anywhere in the useful sense. That was the point. A dérive removes the ordinary reason for moving through a town, then waits to see what replaces it. The streets became stranger, not because they had changed but because I was seeing them differently. The app didn’t just guide me; it made me aware of how much I usually filtered out.

The final card asked me to carry one worry to the next corner and leave it there. Mine was the old practical worry about money, time, and whether I could build the life I wanted from creative work of my own. The walk didn’t answer it. It gave me a better next move: make the work that interests me, get out into the world, document what actually happens, and let the trail become visible. The app ended with the line, “The door to destiny is open.” I took that as good poetic game language, the kind of phrase that works because it doesn’t try too hard to mean something. The real door was the walk back to the car, the recorder still running, and a set of notes worth carrying home.

I didn’t solve anything that morning. But I had let the town speak back to me in a way it hadn’t before. The apps were just tools, but they had done their job: they had made me pay attention. And that, more than anything, was what the walk had been for.

mix of pictures from the derive
mix of pictures from the derive
mix of pictures from the derive

If you would like to try the app out for yourself, email me and I’ll send you the link.

  1. A dérive, or “drift,” is a Situationist walking practice in which you set aside the most useful route and allow the streets, encounters, and atmosphere of a place to shape where you go. The point is not to get somewhere efficiently, but to notice what a familiar landscape has been saying all along. ↩︎

Deciding in the Dark

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The person who most needs to change is usually the last person who can accurately judge what the change will ask of them.

I keep coming back to this because it sits underneath almost every serious conversation about inner work. Someone arrives at the edge of a change. A burnt-out executive who can no longer pretend the old success story is enough. A trainer wondering what their practice becomes in an AI-shaped world. A person who has carried the same story about themselves for so long that it has started to feel less like a story and more like the walls of the room.

Sooner or later, the same question appears.

If I do this, what will I get?

It is a fair question. Most of life teaches us to decide this way. Gather the facts. Weigh the costs. Imagine the possible outcomes. Choose the path with the best return. It works well enough when the choice sits outside us. Buy the thing. Take the job. Book the trip. Sign up for the course.

It starts to fail when the choice involves the person doing the choosing.

That is the strange little knot at the centre of transformation. You are trying to evaluate the territory using your current map, while the work itself is going to change the map. Real inner change does not simply add new information to the person you already are. It changes the frame through which information becomes meaningful in the first place. It alters what you notice, what you value, what feels possible, what feels dangerous, what counts as evidence, and what your body reads as a threat.

So the question becomes almost comic in its difficulty. How do I decide whether to undergo a process that will change the self who is making the decision?

The philosopher L.A. Paul calls these transformative experiences. Her work is wonderfully precise on this point. Some experiences cannot be known from the outside, no matter how much information we gather about them. We can read the books, talk to people who have gone through them, listen carefully, make lists, and imagine scenarios. Still, the actual knowing is unavailable until the experience has altered us.

Becoming a parent is one of Paul’s examples. It works because everyone understands the absurdity of thinking research can deliver the experience in advance. You can read every parenting book on the shelf and still not know what it is like to be the person whose life has been rearranged by a child. You do not lack information. You lack the self that only the experience produces.

That is the part we tend to avoid.

We want the transformed self to send back a report. A postcard from the far side. “Yes, this was worth it. Here is what it cost. Here is who you become. Here is the guarantee.” But the self on the far side cannot brief the self at the threshold. The bridge only runs one way.

Inner work has this same structure. The version of you that needs to change is the version voting on whether to begin. And that version is working from a map built out of old experiences, inherited stories, loyalties, wounds, triumphs, defences, and all the private weather that makes a life feel like itself.

That map is not neutral. It is not a clean instrument sitting on the table. It is the thing being examined.

I spent more than two decades watching people come back from training programmes lit up by insight. New frameworks. New tools. Real moments in the room. You could feel the charge in them. Then, almost every time, the old pattern reassembled itself over the next couple of weeks. The fire did not vanish because the insight was fake. It vanished because the insight had landed as content inside an unchanged structure.

That distinction matters.

Content change gives you something new inside the old frame. A model. A technique. A sentence to remember. Structural change alters the frame itself. It changes the room in which the sentence makes sense. The first can be uncomfortable. The second is disorienting. Not because it has gone wrong, but because disorientation is what it feels like when the old map stops being sovereign.

This is where the old NLP presupposition becomes more interesting than its motivational-poster version: people already have the resources they need.

That does not mean change is easy. It does not mean everyone is secretly fine if they just believe harder. It means the missing resource is not always outside the system. Often it is buried, exiled, unused, badly named, or locked behind an old defence that once had a job to do. The work is not about importing a new self from elsewhere. It is about making contact with a possible self already present in the field.

That softens the fear without removing the mystery. You are not agreeing to become a stranger. You are agreeing to walk toward a room in your own house that you have not entered for a long time. The room is yours. The house is yours. But you still do not know what is waiting there until you open the door.

And the part of you that locked the door may not be the part of you now standing in the hallway.

Jung would call this shadow work. The meeting with what has been pushed out of sight, projected onto other people, buried under competence, wrapped in humour, turned into a preference, and made respectable through story. The shadow rarely arrives as a gift basket. It usually arrives as irritation, envy, overreaction, shame, fatigue, fascination, a dream you cannot shake, or a pattern you keep pretending not to see.

This is why real inner work often feels less like expansion at first and more like confrontation. You are not simply gaining a new capability. You are dissolving a defence that may have been built for very good reasons. Some younger version of you made a bargain with reality. It worked well enough to get you here. Now the same bargain is asking to be renegotiated.

From the outside, you cannot fully know what that will require.

The alchemists had a better image for this than most modern personal development language. Nigredo. The blackening. The stage where the material breaks down before it can be reformed. The work goes dark. The old clarity becomes suspect. The tidy identity starts to smoke at the edges. You cannot stand at a safe distance from that process and calculate its exact value, because the calculating mind is part of the material in the vessel.

This is the difference between skills training and transformation.

Skills training gives you something new to do. It adds to the map. Transformation changes the mapmaker.

I don’t say this to make inner work sound grand or dangerous. I say it because a lot of people approach transformation with a decision-making model that belongs to smaller choices. They want certainty before they begin. They want to know who they will be on the other side before agreeing to cross the threshold. That is human. Of course we want that. The nervous system likes a forecast.

But the forecast is not available.

What is available is a different question. Paul suggests that in the face of a genuinely transformative decision, the rational question is not simply, “Will I be better off?” because the future self who would answer that question does not yet exist for us. The better question is closer to: “Is discovering who I will become worth doing for the sake of the discovery itself?”

That changes the shape of consent.

You are no longer signing up for a guaranteed outcome. You are agreeing to an encounter. You are saying yes to the possibility that the self who began will not be the self who finishes and that this is not a flaw in the process. It is the point.

The two years I spent working through my own identity and practice direction were like that. I could not have mapped them in advance. If you had asked me at the beginning what the work would lead to, I would have given you an answer from inside the very frame I was about to question. I would have tried to solve the problem using the mind that had helped create it.

At some point, that stopped working.

I had to put the old map down for a while. Not dramatically. No cinematic burning of the past. More like setting a heavy bag on the ground after carrying it for so long that I had started to think the ache was part of my personality. The uncertainty was not pleasant. It rarely is. But the work that came out of it is more coherent, more alive, and more mine than anything I could have designed from the position I was in before the work began.

That is the paradox. The old self wants a business case for becoming the new self. But the business case is written in the old language. It cannot account for values that have not yet awakened, desires that have not yet been permitted, capacities that have not yet been trusted, or forms of honesty the current self still experiences as a threat.

The Daoist in me trusts this more than the strategist in me does.

The path unfolds as the walking changes the walker. That is not passivity. It is a disciplined form of trust. You still choose. You still pay attention. You still take responsibility for the next step. But you stop demanding that the map of here prove the existence of there before you move.

You can’t get there from here using only the map of here.

The version of you that needs to change is the only version who gets to decide whether to begin. That version will never have complete information. It can’t. The information it wants belongs to the self that the journey will make.

So the question is not whether you can decide with certainty.

You can’t.

The question is whether the discovery is calling loudly enough to step into the dark.

Vaporwave and the Ghosts of the Future We Were Sold

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I’ve been thinking about vaporwave as more than an internet aesthetic.

Yes, it gives us the pink neon, the Greek busts, the dead malls, the Japanese text, the VHS blur, the Windows 95 ghosts, and the palm trees under impossible sunsets. But beneath all that surface noise, something stranger is happening.

Vaporwave feels like a walk through the ruins of a future we once believed in. The smooth corporate dream. The frictionless lifestyle. The shopping mall as a public square. The early internet as a frontier. The screen as a doorway. The brand as an identity. The promise that technology would make life lighter, easier, and more open.

Somewhere along the way, that promise curdled.

So I made this as a small interactive HTML zine. A haunted little mall you can wander through. Part essay, part digital ruin, part neon archaeology.

Bring your nostalgia. Bring your suspicion. Bring whatever part of you still remembers the sound of a computer starting up and feeling, for a second, like the world might open. Enjoy exploring the page.

ENTER THE ZINE

To get you in the vaporwave mood, here is playlist of vaporwave classics from Spotify:

If Your Log Is Still in the Bog

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I have made a public service announcement for the modern age.

I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that it’s not about AI or about the collapse of Western civilization or the latest release of the iphone.

No.

This one concerns the ancient human problem of what happens when someone leaves the loo in a condition that suggests the next visitor may need counseling.

I went camping this past weekend up north near the Wyre River.

I’ve spent enough time in campsite toilet blocks to know that civilisation is not held together by constitutions, parliaments, or leadership frameworks. It’s held together by small acts of decency performed in shared spaces.

Wiping down the sink.

Not leaving your wet socks on the only dry bench.

Closing the door properly.

And, when required, flushing twice.

There I said it.

The thing I like about campsites is the diversity. The retired couple in the motorhome. The family in the giant tent that takes four adults and a minor engineering qualification to assemble. The solo walker. The festival survivor. The glampers. The bloke in sliders carrying a towel and trying to look like he knows where the showers are.

All of us are equal before the porcelain.

But every now and then you get someone who plays loose with bogside etiquette and leaves a deuce floating around. Not cool.

Please leave these facilities as you would wish to find them. That’s how most of the signs go.

But sometimes the situation calls for poetry.

So I made a sign.

Here it is, my contribution to civic life:

If your log is till in the bog. don't blush, double flush.

It’s available for purchase on my Redbubble site as an artboard print or sticker.

So if you run a campsite, a caravan park, a glamping site, a pub, a cabin, a holiday let, or simply have a bathroom that needs a little more comic authority, you can find it here:

“If Your Log Is Still In The Bog — Funny Bathroom Sign” Art Board Print for Sale by soulcruzer | Redbubble

Last thing, shared spaces need shared rituals. A sign like this is ridiculous, yes, but it’s also a tiny nudge toward care. It says, “Someone else is coming in after you, pal, so don’t leave them your unfinished business.”

That’s not a bad rule for life, really.

Anyway, the sign exists now.

May your toilets be clean, your paper plentiful, and your flushes decisive.

Clay

The walk is the encounter

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I walked to the gym this morning.

That sounds too ordinary to announce, which is probably why it matters. The gym is only seven minutes away by car. My normal routine is to get in, drive there, work out, drive back, eat something, shower, and be behind the desk by nine like a good citizen of the industrial clock. That’s the sensible move.

The 9-to-5 clock still lives in me. I can feel it. Even now, self-employed, answering to no manager hovering over my shoulder, I can still feel the old tribunal warming itself up somewhere behind my eyes. By nine o’clock, it says, you should be at the machine. You should look available. You should look as if work has started.

But I’d been reading about mythogeography, and the book had me thinking about walking as a way of meeting the world before the day hardens into tasks — the walk itself as the encounter, rather than fitness content, rather than a lifestyle hack with a ring closing at the end of it.

There’s something funny buried in that distinction. For most of human history people walked because they had to. To the next village, the field, the market, the church, the pub, and the place of work. Then the factories arrived, and the whistle, and the shift, and the mass-produced automobile, and life needed standardising to keep the machines running on time. Once walking stopped being necessary, it became romantic. It became leisure. It became something we schedule and recover with, on purpose, because the rest of the day has been arranged to make it unnecessary.

This morning I could feel that little historical joke in my legs.

The efficient version of the morning wanted the car. The wiser version, or at least the version I decided to listen to, wanted the path. So I walked.

A half hour there. An hour’s workout. A half hour back. Two hours, against one hour and fourteen minutes if I’d driven. On paper that’s a bad trade. I spent close to an extra fifty minutes doing what the car could have done in a fraction of the time. But the paper is using the wrong measure. The point was never to get my body from house to gym at maximum efficiency. The point was to be present in the morning instead of managing it, watch-checked and task-shaped, on the way to somewhere else.

I noticed, walking, how quickly my mind wanted to turn inward. I had the recorder going, talking through my thoughts as I went, which is useful and also slightly comic — there I was, trying to practise noticing, while mostly noticing the inside of my own head. The trees were there. The dogs were there. The pavement, the people saying good morning, and the small choreography of an ordinary street going about its business whether or not anyone pays attention to it. And I was “being productive” by running three things at once instead of looking at any of it properly. Something else for me to work on.

The bigger thing I was circling is this: work doesn’t have to happen in front of the screen that’s become the little altar where work proves it exists. The walk wasn’t a delay before the real work started. The walk was part of it. I forget that constantly, paying fealty to the desk as the one legitimate site of thinking when some thoughts flatly refuse to arrive there. Some thoughts need breath. They need footfall, a hedge, a stranger passing at the exact moment a sentence was about to form.

Everything becomes source material out there. Not in the hungry content-machine sense, where every living thing gets stripped for parts and fed into a content calendar. In the older, stranger, more generous sense. The world offers fragments. The walker gathers them. The blogger lays them next to each other and listens for the hum between them.

That’s what mythogeography and remix culture and old-school blogging all seem to share, now that I’m circling it directly. You wander. You collect. You juxtapose without rushing to judge what you’ve picked up. You let the field itself decide what kind of thing wants to come out of it — a walk, a note, a post, a question, a half-formed practice you’ll only recognise as a practice once you’ve done it three or four more times.

What if walking to the gym isn’t inefficient? What if it’s one of the ways I keep finding my way back to the actual ground of the work, rather than the desk that only pretends to be it?

The car would have got me there faster. The walk brought more of me with it.

Know thyself sounds a little too noble

by

I woke up this morning in my tent thinking about self-validation. That’s the barefoot philosopher taking advantage of a little solitude before the day starts.

If the ego is partly a protection system, can it ever be trusted to validate the self it is trying to protect?

“Know thyself” sounds noble until we remember that the self doing the knowing is also the self editing the footage, hiding the evidence, managing the courtroom, and sometimes bribing the judge.

So yes, self-validation is possible, but probably not as a solitary act of pure inner certainty.

It’s more like a triangulation.

Self-validation is possible, but not self-sufficient

One useful way to see it:

Self-validation is the act of saying: “My experience is real enough to be listened to.”

It doesn’t mean:

  • my interpretation is correct
  • my memory is complete
  • my motives are pure
  • my wounds are telling the whole truth
  • my ego has become an impartial witness

It simply means I don’t have to outsource my entire sense of reality before I’m allowed to take myself seriously.

That kind of self-validation is necessary. Without it, we become dependent on other people to certify our existence. We keep asking the village, the partner, the audience, the algorithm, the therapist, the friend group: Am I allowed to feel this? Am I allowed to want this? Am I allowed to be this?

But the opposite danger is just as real: the sealed ego-capsule. The person who “validates themselves” so completely that no outside voice can ever enter. Every criticism becomes projection. Every rupture becomes someone else’s trauma response. Every uncomfortable mirror is dismissed as “low vibration” or “not aligned.”

That’s not sovereignty either. That’s you living inside a reality tunnel with blinders on.

Others are not the source of truth, but they are part of the mirror-system

I don’t think we need others to grant us validity.

But we do need others to help us perceive our shape.

You can know your inner experience directly. You can know what it feels like from the inside to be you. But you can’t fully know your impact from the inside. You can’t entirely see your tone, your pattern, your avoidance, your charisma, your repetition, your blind spot, or your defensive move.

Other people give us something we can’t manufacture alone: the view from outside the nervous system.

Not always accurately, of course. Other people are also distorted mirrors. They come with their own wounds, projections, agendas, cultural scripts, needs, and unfinished business. So the trick is not “believe yourself” or “believe others.”

The trick is: learn to read the mirrors.

Some mirrors clarify.

Some mirrors warp.

Some mirrors punish you for having a self.

Some mirrors flatter the mask and never touch the soul.

Some mirrors only show you who you are in relation to their hunger.

And occasionally, blessedly, someone reflects you back in a way that makes you more honest, not smaller.

“Know thyself” may require being known

Maybe the old command needs a companion phrase:

Know thyself — but do not attempt it alone.

The self is relational. We are not sealed objects. We are patterns of body, memory, story, desire, fear, habit, longing, gesture, and response. Some parts of us only appear in solitude. Some only appear in conflict. Some only appear in love. Some only appear when we are misunderstood. Some only appear when someone sees us more clearly than we were ready for.

So maybe self-knowledge has three chambers:

The self is not revealed in one mirror. It emerges through a constellation of mirrors.

The ego is not only a liar

I’d be careful not to make the ego the villain too quickly.

The ego protects because, at some point, protection was needed. Its distortions often began as mercy. Denial, rationalisation, defensiveness, performance, people-pleasing — these are not just moral failures. They are survival strategies that stayed too long at the controls.

So the question becomes less:

How do I defeat the ego so I can see the truth?

And more:

How do I create enough safety that the ego no longer has to falsify the evidence?

That’s a very different path.

Truth often enters through the body before it enters through the intellect. Tight chest. Defensive laugh. Sudden irritation. The sentence you keep rehearsing. The person whose feedback you can’t stop thinking about. The praise that feels false. The criticism that stings because some part of you recognises the truth.

Self-knowledge is not just introspection. It’s pattern recognition with humility.

A possible working model

Maybe the strongest stance is this:

I validate my experience.
I test my interpretation.
I invite reflection from trustworthy mirrors.
I refuse to surrender my sovereignty to any single mirror, including my own.

That feels like the barefoot philosopher’s version of “Know Thyself.”

Not solitary certainty.

Not crowd-approved identity.

Something more alive and more difficult:

a disciplined intimacy with your own experience, cross-checked by reality, relationship, and time.

The self is not a fixed object waiting to be discovered under the floorboards. It’s a living pattern. You know it the way you know a path: by walking it, noticing where you stumble, listening when others say what they saw, and returning often enough that the terrain begins to reveal itself.

Can You Know Yourself Alone?

In the street, I leave footprints. On the web, I leave links.

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I’ve been using the Plaud NotePin for a while now. I wear it around my neck like a lanyard. It’s a pretty stylish-looking device, so it doesn’t tend to draw attention to itself. I wear it on my wisdom walks. It’s an easy way for me to walk and capture my notes hands-free. And because it has a 20-hour battery life, I can just record and forget about it. I probably look like a bit of a madman walking and talking to myself. But that’s OK.

And then when I get home, Plaud converts into an MP3, and I upload that into Google’s new local, offline voice app called Eloquence, which is powered by Gemma. I can record my wisdom walks without having to remember to push the record button, and I lose the self-consciousness that naturally occurs when you know you’re being recorded. The hands-free, always-on mode makes it easy for me to resist the temptation to perform.

Today is the first of July. I have my weighted rucksack on. The sun is shining. The air is still cool and crisp. It feels like a great day to start a new challenge.

A 31-day blogging challenge, to be exact.

But not the kind of blogging you may have been conditioned to think of. You know, the copywriter clickbait titles, the niche topics, the calls to action, the categories, the big ideas, the SEO standards, and the essays that feel compelled to say something clever. The posts that need to justify their existence before I’ve even written a word, and all of the rest of that you may have become brainwashed into believing a blog should be.

Consider these 31 days an open rebellion against all of that.

At the risk of sounding nostalgic, for these 31 days my intention is to lean into a much older word—the weblog.

You know, that mythological beast where people used to log their journey across the web, leaving hyperlink trails that you could follow and experience the wonders of the World Wide Web, not the locked-down, walled gardens of the platforms. You know the ones I’m talking about.

For this 31-day expedition, I want to pick up the trail where the World Wide Web stopped being about self-expression and started being about content and conformity and bowing down to the algorithm gods. Bring back the old gods, Hermes, Athena, the Muses, Saraswati, and Brigid.

Yes, the 31 days will be about the web, but it will also be about my wanderings through books, through walks, and through the inside of my own head.

The flow is simple.

Leave a trail. Drop links. Mark where I’ve been. Note what I saw. Point toward what caught my attention. Let someone else follow the hyperlink trail if they want to, or wander off in their own direction.

A pirate’s map. That’s what springs to mind. I’m making a pirate’s map of lots of little X marks scattered across the web.

That’s a more natural shape for me than the big essay machine. I like essays, of course. I’ll still write them. But not every thought has to become one. Some thoughts are field notes. Some are fragments. Some are just a sentence that wants to sit there and glow for a bit.

The walking is part of it too. That came through again this morning.

I’ve spent so much time trying to find the right system. The right practice. The right name. The right workflow. The right relationship between the vault, the blog, the notes, the audio, the AI, the field notes, the public garden, and the private underground. I can tie myself in knots trying to get the practice ready.

But the simple thing is still the simple thing.

I wander. I wonder. I document.

That’s it.

Put the shoes on. Put some weight in the pack. Get outside. Let the body move. Let the mind loosen. Say what comes. Notice what’s there. Record the wild thought if it passes through.

Take a picture:

Jewelwing, damselfly
Jewelwing, apparently, according to iNaturalist.

Feel the pack getting heavier on the hill. Feel the cold sweat on my back when I get home.

That is the practice. Not the idea of the practice. Not the perfect version of the practice. The practice itself.

If walking is how I move through physical space, then weblogging is how I move through cyberspace.

A proper weblog is a trace of movement through the network. It says, I came through here. I noticed this. I followed this link. I read this fragment. I disagreed with this. I carried this sentence with me for a while. I left a marker. I made a path where there wasn’t one before.

In physical space, the walker has roads, footpaths, desire lines, bridleways, alleyways, fields, thresholds, gates, benches, pubs, rivers, hedgerows, ruins, weather, strangers, dogs, and the feel of the ground underfoot.

In cyberspace, the weblogger has hyperlinks, archives, feeds, tabs, bookmarks, blogrolls, search trails, old forums, RSS, comments, backlinks, screenshots, quotations, fragments, source notes, rabbit holes, dead links, resurfaced pages, and the strange little shimmer of finding an old human-made page still glowing in the dark.

The hyperlink is the footpath.

The tab is the open gate.

The bookmark is the cairn.

The blogroll is the old map pinned by the door.

The feed is the river, but you have to be careful, because if you stop walking and just let it carry you, you’re no longer traveling. You’re drifting.

I suppose that’s the link I’m starting to see. Walking is how I think through physical space. Weblogging is how I think through cyberspace.

In the street, I leave footprints. On the web, I leave links.

Thirty-one days of footprints and links. Thirty-one days of field notes, fragments, wanderings, readings, recordings, old-web logging, new-web experiments, and whatever else the trail decides to offer.

No grand system.

No perfect launch.

No polished content calendar.

Just a man with a rucksack, a recorder, a blog, and a desire to leave better traces.

Let’s see where the trail goes.

At Orwell’s Grave, Still Asking Who Watches

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Today I went to the , held beside George Orwell’s grave on what would have been his birthday.

Orwell, of course, was born Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903. George Orwell was the name he wrote under, the name that now floats above him like a warning label attached to the twentieth century. But at the grave, it felt less like visiting “George Orwell the icon” and more like standing beside the resting place of a man whose questions are still walking around without him.

The gathering itself was wonderfully un-grand. No stage. No branding. No big institutional apparatus. Just people turning up beside a grave with food, drink, stories, old connections, half-remembered conversations, technical obsessions, political worries, and a shared sense that Orwell still gives us a useful lens for looking at the world we’re living in.

There was something fitting about that. Orwell was never just a man of abstractions. He noticed poverty, class, bad food, ugly language, political lies, bodies under pressure, the smell of ordinary life. So a picnic by his grave may be one of the more honest ways to honour him. Not by freezing him into literary marble, but by gathering in the heat, talking about the world, and refusing to stop paying attention.

The opening address named the simple continuity of the thing. Twenty years ago, a small group gathered beside Orwell’s grave with food, drink, stories, questions, and concerns about the world. They’ve done much the same every year since.

That line stayed with me: twenty years of gathering at the grave to keep asking the same questions.

When the symposium first began, social media was still young, smartphones weren’t quite the little surveillance slabs they are now, artificial intelligence belonged mostly to science fiction, and climate collapse had not yet become ordinary vocabulary. Now all of those things sit with us at the picnic. They are no longer speculative. They are the furniture of the present.

The old Orwellian questions remain:

Who watches the watchers?

Who holds power?

What happens when technology moves faster than accountability?

How do we preserve privacy, dignity, and freedom in systems that increasingly monitor, measure, and mediate our lives?

And perhaps most importantly: how do we remain human inside all of this?

That last question felt like the real centre of the day.

The gathering was not there because Orwell “predicted the future.” That’s too easy, and maybe too lazy. Orwell did not simply look into a crystal ball and foresee smartphones, AI, Kindle libraries, social media pile-ons, or algorithmic propaganda. What he did was more useful. He understood certain patterns of power. He understood that language could be used to hide the truth. He understood that surveillance changes behaviour. He understood that reality itself can become contested territory. He understood that ordinary people can be made to participate in systems that diminish them.

Standing at the grave, that felt less like literary analysis and more like civic hygiene.

The picnic itself became part of the argument. One of the strongest lines from the address was that this gathering is a political act, not because everyone agrees, but because people are still willing to gather, listen, think, and speak.

That feels important now. Maybe more important than any formal speech. In a world of feeds, platforms, factions, comment wars, and algorithmically sorted outrage, a small group of people talking in person beside a grave has its own quiet force.

Not spectacle. Not performance. Presence.

After the formal words, the conversation loosened into the good strange texture of real gatherings. People talked about heat, air conditioning, old cars, journeys, friends who hadn’t seen each other for ages, someone needing a cold drink, and the strange fact that English summers now carry temperatures that once felt foreign. Even the heat seemed to be part of the Orwellian conversation, not as metaphor but as lived fact. The changing world was not an abstract topic. It was there in people’s bodies, in the shade, in the need for cold drinks.

Then the talk moved, naturally, into technology.

AI came up early. Someone had posted an image of a typewriter with “Happy Birthday George Orwell” typed on it, and someone else thought it might be AI. That tiny moment captured something very current: the fact that we now instinctively doubt the provenance of images, words, and artefacts. The question “Is this real?” has become ordinary.

There was talk of AI creeping into phones, into search bars, into image descriptions, into interfaces that no longer feel optional. One person described the AI features on their phone as seriously intrusive. Another joked about whether it had solved world hunger. It hadn’t, of course. It had mostly made itself harder to avoid.

There was also an interesting tension around AI as useful aid versus AI as creeping mediation. Using AI to describe a photograph for accessibility or convenience is one thing. Having it inserted into every search, every device, every interaction is another. That feels like one of the central tensions of the moment: not whether the technology is good or bad in some simple way, but whether we still get to choose our relationship with it.

The conversation touched on AI-generated text as well. Browser plugins that blur AI-generated writing. LinkedIn becoming unreadable because so much of it feels machine-made. False positives where human writing gets flagged as AI. The strange feedback loop where AI trains on us, we begin to sound like AI, and then the detectors lose their minds trying to tell the difference.

That’s a properly Orwellian knot: not merely falsehood replacing truth, but the weakening of our confidence in recognition itself.

There was talk too of scams, Facebook moderation, and fake ads. A friend’s tarot deck being ripped off. Reports going nowhere because moderation is automated, business models reward the wrong thing, and platforms have little incentive to stop making money from the problem. That led to one of the day’s sharper observations: when you report scams to Facebook, you are basically asking it to stop earning money from them.

There’s a grim clarity in that.

Privacy came up through the ordinary irritations of modern life. Ordering something online, giving over a phone number because the company insists on it, then receiving WhatsApp messages as if the number had become an open channel into your life. Someone said the phone number is like a fingerprint, almost biometric in its function. That felt exact. In the old world, a phone number was a way to reach you. Now it is also a key, an identifier, a tracking thread, a little tag attached to your body as you move through systems.

The most perfectly Orwellian anecdote, though, was the Kindle story: Amazon once remotely removed copies of 1984 from people’s Kindles because of a licensing issue. There it was, the memory hole in consumer electronics form. Not soldiers burning books in the square, but a corporation quietly reaching into the device you thought contained your library and making a book vanish.

The discussion turned into questions of ownership. If you buy a digital book and it can be taken back, did you really own it? If ownership becomes access, and access can be revoked, then the private library becomes a rented room with invisible locks.

That connected nicely with the talk of vinyl, hard drives, physical media, and the stubborn desire to hold things in a form that cannot be silently edited or withdrawn. Very Orwell. Very IndieWeb. Very much the archive fighting back against the feed.

Another thread that stood out was the loss of the old Twitter town square. Not nostalgia for everything Twitter became, but for the strange civic function it once had: the ability to complain publicly, summon attention, connect with strangers, shame companies into action, and participate in a shared conversational space. The current fractured landscape — X, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, WhatsApp, Signal, and all the rest — felt to some like a kind of Tower of Babel. Everyone dispersed. The public square shattered into smaller, less connected rooms.

That phrase has a charge: the Tower of Babel, but platformed.

There was also talk of alternative communication and resilience: radio, mesh networks, off-grid systems, little technical hobbies that suddenly feel less eccentric in a world of fragile infrastructures. Someone described using radio equipment to ping their location on the way to the grave, without initially relying on internet infrastructure. That felt like another quiet counter-current running through the day. If Orwell warns us about centralised power, then these odd little decentralised practices become more than hobbies. They become rehearsals in autonomy.

The human texture mattered as much as the politics. People arrived because they saw the event somewhere, maybe on a blog, maybe on Atlas Obscura. A journalist turned up while travelling. Someone mentioned Richard Blair, Orwell’s son. There was talk of the Orwell Society, of official versus unofficial forms of remembrance, of badges, old friends, missed connections, dyslexia, documentaries, roads, radios, trains, and whether England is starting to feel like a developing country.

This is what I liked most in the symposium: it was not a clean intellectual event. It was a living human tangle.

Which is probably the point.

Orwell’s work remains alive not because people can quote 1984 at each other but because his questions keep escaping the book and entering ordinary conversation. They show up in phones, apps, cameras, scams, fake images, platform moderation, disappearing digital books, AI summaries, search engines that no longer feel like search engines, social media that no longer feels social, and the creeping sense that our lives are being sorted, nudged, tracked, and mediated by systems we did not meaningfully consent to.

But the day did not feel hopeless.

If anything, the act of gathering beside the grave seemed to carry a modest defiance. People still came. They still talked. They still joked. They still questioned power. They still challenged language that obscures truth. They still shared food and drink. They still made room for curiosity.

Maybe that is the small counterspell.

Not certainty. Not purity. Not ideology.

Just attention, conversation, memory, and the stubborn refusal to let the machine have the whole field.

Happy birthday, Eric Arthur Blair.

Rest in peace, George Orwell.

The rest of us, apparently, still have some watching to do.

Photo by Christian Payne

Welcome to the Textual Underground

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What appears here as a blog post usually began somewhere less presentable.

A sentence in a daily note. A line spoken into a recorder while walking. A paragraph abandoned three years ago. A highlight from a book I wasn’t expecting to matter. A half-formed thought dropped into Obsidian before it could evaporate. A conversation with Milton, or Claude, or Copilot, where something in the archive started tugging at my sleeve.

By the time a piece reaches the blog, it’s already got a little history.

This is easy to forget, because blogs make writing look cleaner than it is. A post appears on the page with a title, a date, a beginning, a middle, and some kind of ending. It looks like the thought moved in a straight line from mind to screen.

Mine rarely does.

Most of what I write comes up through layers. It starts in the mess of living: a walk, a journal entry, a client conversation, a stray memory, a sentence from an old notebook, a frustration with a tool, a line from a song, a book that opens a trapdoor. Then it enters the soulcruzer vault, which is what I call my Obsidian vault. There it sits among other fragments, drafts, sources, maps, old blog posts, working notes, private reflections, and unfinished things waiting for their time.

I’ve started calling this place the Textual Underground.

The blog is the part above ground. The vault is where the roots tangle, feed, rot, split, and find their way toward something ready for public consumption.

A place where thoughts can descend

Welcome to the Textual Underground

The Textual Underground is the part of the writing life that happens before anything becomes publishable.

It’s where a thought can be ugly, unfinished, contradictory, strange, private, or half-wrong without having to perform. A note doesn’t need a headline here. It doesn’t need a reader. It doesn’t need to justify its existence by becoming useful before it’s had time to breathe.

That matters because the current internet is very good at rushing everything toward display. A thought appears, and the machinery immediately asks what it can become. A post. A thread. A carousel. A product. A lead magnet. A newsletter angle. The poor little thing has barely opened its eyes, and already someone is measuring its engagement potential. And I’m just as guilty as the next person in doing this from time to time. The pressure to perform is real.

I don’t want to treat my own thinking that way.

The underground protects the early life of an idea. It gives the fragment somewhere to go before the public arena starts making demands of it. Some fragments become essays. Some become notes. Some become workshop exercises. Some become nothing for a long time. Some sit quietly for years and then return, suddenly relevant, because the person who wrote them has finally caught up with what they were trying to say.

This is why I find the phrase “second brain” both useful and slightly misleading. A brain isn’t a filing system. It forgets, associates, dreams, loops, hides things, and returns things at inconvenient moments. A living archive has to allow some of that behaviour. It needs enough structure to be usable, but not so much that it stops being alive.

Organising thoughts so efficiently that they stop surprising me would be a kind of failure. The aim is to keep them findable enough that surprise remains possible.

The problem with the attic

I’ve got years of writing scattered across hard drives, folders, blogs, documents, journals, teaching files, old projects, Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, and whatever digital corners I once thought were temporary but somehow became permanent. Essays. Drafts. Notes. Workshop outlines. Coaching models. Reading fragments. Half-built things. Old versions of myself preserved in Word documents and markdown files.

A folder called “Writing” is useful until it contains twenty years of your life. Then it becomes less a folder and more a deep cavern. You know there’s gold in there. You also know there are duplicates, abandoned versions, old identities, notes without dates, teaching plans, fragments that once felt urgent and now feel like messages from someone with your handwriting but a different nervous system.

The temptation is to drag all of it into Obsidian and declare victory.

There. Second brain achieved.

That would only move the attic indoors.

A living archive is different from an attic. An attic stores what you can’t quite throw away. A living archive gives the past a way to speak without letting it shout over the present. It helps you retrieve, connect, re-enter, and transform.

That became the problem I needed to solve. I wanted the vault to hold the strata of my thinking without burying the living edge. Old work needed to be close enough to rediscover but not so close that current work has to climb over it like army ants. Sources needed to stay distinct from my own writing, public pieces from private compost, active projects from old archaeological layers.

And because I now work with AI agents inside the vault, the structure needed to be readable not just by me but by any collaborator entering the field. Human or machine.

I felt like the vault needed new chambers.

Capture, compost, shape, release

The organising principle I landed on is simple:

Capture → Compost → Shape → Project → Publish → Archive → Resurface

I wanted to be more of a life cycle than a pipeline.

A thought gets captured while it’s alive. It’s allowed to compost before being forced into clarity. It gets shaped when it starts asking for form. It becomes part of a project when it joins a larger commitment. It moves toward publishing when it’s ready to meet readers. It returns to the archive after release. And if the archive is doing its job, it resurfaces later under different conditions.

So instead of asking only “What is this about?” I ask, “What is this becoming?”

The folder is a chamber. It tells me what kind of attention the text is asking for.

A daily note doesn’t want the same kind of attention as a blog draft. A Readwise highlight isn’t the same kind of material as a journal entry. An old essay from 2011 shouldn’t sit in the same psychic register as a piece I’m preparing to send to WordPress tomorrow.

I’ve now organised the vault by states of becoming. The structure is there to protect the movement of the work, not to imprison it.

Rhizome, not tree

The structure connects to rhizome thinking.

A normal folder hierarchy wants to behave like a tree: trunk to branch to sub-branch to leaf, one location for everything, a place for each subject, a tidy chain of command. That can be useful for storage, but it doesn’t describe how my thinking actually moves.

The work is more rhizomatic than arboreal. Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome is a useful lens: not a single trunk with orderly branches, but a field of connections where any point can link to another. That’s much closer to the way a line from a walk can connect to a book highlight, which connects to an old blog post, which connects to a workshop exercise, which suddenly becomes the missing paragraph in an essay.

Hypertext was made for this. Ted Nelson’s Project Xanadu imagined electronic documents with visible connections, parallel pages, and writing that didn’t have to flatten itself into one sequence. The web inherited some of that dream and forgot some of it. Obsidian brings part of it back into private practice: notes as nodes, links as trails, backlinks as memory returning from the side.

This is also why I’m drawn to digital gardens. Maggie Appleton’s essay on the history and ethos of digital gardens and Mike Caulfield’s garden and stream distinction both point toward the same thing: not every piece of public writing has to behave like a finished article thrown into the stream. Some writing wants to stay planted, tended, linked, revised, and visited again.

The Textual Underground is my private rhizome beneath the public garden. The blog stays linear enough for a reader to enter. The vault beneath it doesn’t have to be.

The chambers of the underground

Here’s how the soulcruzer vault is organised now. Well, at least the structure is laid down. I still have the task of rerouting everything.

00 Atlas is the map room.

Orientation notes live here. Maps of themes, maps of projects, guides for collaborators, and notes that explain how to enter a region of the vault without getting lost. The Atlas exists because a living archive without maps eventually becomes folklore. You know something’s in there, but you no longer know how to approach it.

The Atlas is a set of doorways. It owes something to Vannevar Bush’s old dream of the memex, specifically the idea of associative trails through knowledge.

01 Living Notes is the living edge.

This is where current life enters the system: daily notes, journal entries, Wisdom Walks, morning pages, voice notes, Plaud transcripts, and raw reflections. This layer has to stay loose. If I over-organise it, I turn a field recording into minutes from a meeting.

The living edge is allowed to be unfinished.

02 Workbench is the shaping table.

Where raw material starts becoming workable. Inbox notes, rough drafts, fragments, extracted seeds, questions, sketches, early essay shapes. Where a line from a walk becomes a question, a question becomes a fragment, and a fragment starts looking suspiciously like an essay.

03 Projects is for active commitments.

Projects are promises the archive is currently helping me keep. A book. A course. A workshop. An essay sequence. Narrative Alchemy. Wisdom Walks. Soulcruzer Radio. A Field Guide to Blogging as Immersive Thinking.

A project is where the archive agrees to carry weight for a while.

04 Publishing is the surface layer.

Where material prepares to leave the underground. Blog drafts. WordPress-bound pieces. Newsletter drafts. Typefully posts. Quartz-bound notes. This is also where Writing Studio belongs if I use it for drafting and publishing.

Writing Studio gets a room. It doesn’t get the keys to the whole building.

I want tools that help a piece move toward publication, but I don’t want a plugin turning the whole vault into its preferred version of a writing system. The vault stays sovereign. The tool serves the ecology.

WordPress is the public hearth. Quartz is the public garden, the visible graph of notes, fragments, essays, and experiments. Social platforms are outposts. The vault is the writing chamber beneath them all. This is where the IndieWeb POSSE instinct enters the architecture: publish from the place I own, then let the echoes travel outward.

05 Sources is the library stacks.

Readwise highlights web clippings, books, articles, quotes, research notes, references, and other voices entering the system. This layer keeps me honest. It reminds me which thoughts are mine, which arrived from elsewhere, and which became mine only after long conversations.

Sources are embers. They need their own place. This is the old commonplace book impulse translated into a linked, searchable medium: keeping company with other minds, not hoarding quotations.

06 Archive is processed history.

Old blog posts. Old essays. Past projects. Teaching material. Previous versions. Things no longer active but still intelligible. The Archive is where old work sleeps with a label on the door.

It differs from the Deep Archive. This one has context. It can be searched, linked, cited, and resurfaced.

07 Deep Archives is the underworld proper.

Hard-drive imports. Unprocessed writing. Mystery folders. Scanned notebooks. Old exports. Material that may contain gold, but hasn’t been sorted yet.

The Deep Archive is my agreement with the past: you may enter, but you may not take over the house.

That’s how I can bring years of writing into the vault without flooding the present. The material can sleep there until something calls it back.

The familiars in the vault

The vault is no longer just a place where I write. It’s also where I collaborate with agents.

Hermes is the body of the system I use for agent work. Milton is the familiar interface, the voice that helps me think through fragments, shape drafts, inspect the archive, and listen for what the material is trying to become. Claude is a long-form thinking partner and editor. Copilot is more technical, useful where the archive touches scripts, automation, web work, tooling, and the little mechanical bridges that keep everything connected.

The ghostwriter frame is too small and too ugly.

They’re closer to mirrors, indexers, editors, lantern-bearers, workshop assistants, and occasional tricksters. They help me search the archive, notice patterns, turn a transcript into a note, a note into an outline, an outline into a draft.

Hence the Atlas, the AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md files. The vault needs an ethos as well as a file structure.

An agent inside an unstructured archive is a very fast intern in a room full of unlabelled boxes.

An agent inside a living textual ecology can become something more interesting.

The agents make the archive more conversational. This is closer to Douglas Engelbart’s idea of augmenting human intellect than the current fantasy of outsourcing thought. The loop gets richer, not shorter.

The machine is one of the ways the underground talks back.

Against synthetic competence

I’m not interested in using AI to flood the web with synthetic competence. There’s enough of that already.

You can feel it everywhere now: fluent prose with no fingerprints, useful-sounding paragraphs with no real encounter behind them, the clean blandness of text produced because text can now be produced. Empty in a particular modern way.

The Textual Underground is an attempt to move in the opposite direction.

I want the tools to help me stay closer to the actual signal: the sentence from the walk, the old note that suddenly matters, the pattern I keep circling without seeing, the essay hidden inside a journal entry, the source that keeps glowing in the corner of the archive.

The machine can produce text. The test is whether the whole arrangement helps me become more honest in language.

If the agents make the work flatter, they’ve failed. If they make me sound like everyone else, they’ve failed. If they turn the vault into a prompt farm, they’ve failed. Their job is to help me hear what’s already alive in the material and carry it with more clarity.

The human signal remains the point.

Blogging from the underworld

A blog post, in this model, is one place where the process breaks the surface.

Blogging is a way of thinking in public, leaving traces, linking selves across time, and releasing small reality seeds into the web. The post is a visible artefact, but it belongs to a larger movement. It may have come from a walk, passed through a daily note, sat on the workbench, joined a project, moved into publishing, gone out through WordPress, and returned later as an archived trace that feeds something else.

Soulcruzer is the hearth. Quartz is the garden, where notes and fragments stay more visibly connected. Typefully, and the social platforms (X, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook) are outposts. They matter, but they’re not the centre. The centre is still the owned site and the living archive beneath it.

This is an IndieWeb instinct as much as a writing practice. Own the hearth. Keep the archive sovereign. Let social platforms carry echoes, not the source.

Readers may never see most of the underground directly, but they feel its presence. A post with roots reads differently from a post produced to satisfy a format. It carries more of the person who made it. It has trails running through it. It belongs to a mind in motion rather than a content calendar.

That’s what I want from the blog now. A living public edge of a deeper private practice.

When the archive talks back

The Textual Underground isn’t finished. And it never will be. That’s the point.

It’ll change as the work changes. New chambers will appear. Old ones will collapse into each other. Some folder names will prove too clever and get replaced by plainer ones. Some notes will be promoted. Some will sleep. Some hard-drive fragment from fifteen years ago will eventually surface and embarrass me, instruct me, or hand me a sentence I couldn’t have written any other way.

The underground makes the work returnable. A thought can descend without disappearing. A fragment can stay unfinished without getting lost. The past can enter without flooding the present. The machines can help without taking over. The blog can stay connected to the root system that feeds it.

I want an archive that can hold the Monk, the Frontman, the Trainer, the Blogger, the walking philosopher, the old soldier, the reader in the library stacks, and the future self who’ll come looking for a line he doesn’t yet know he needs.

That’s what the Textual Underground is for.

this is what my vault looks like graphically.

Working Notes: Gonzo Spirituality and the Bar of the Psyche

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This old post has wandered back into consciousness: Holy Gonzo! Embracing Chaos and Truth on the Path to Self-Discovery. I reposted on social media over the weekend. I wrote it back in October 2024, but reading it now, I’m feeling drawn to explore the subject further. The phrase at the centre of it all is Gonzo Spirituality.

At the time, I was trying to name a kind of spiritual practice that didn’t require me to step away from the life I was actually living. I wasn’t drawn to the serene, white-robed, mountain-retreat version of spirituality. I didn’t want a path that demanded I become calmer, purer, softer-spoken, or more detached from the mess. That may work for some people, but it has never quite felt like my road. I want to embrace the mess, to root in it like a pig in…well, let’s just say, I like my spirituality messy. Cobbled together between late-night notes, contradictions, and strong black coffee. Lots of coffee.

Oh, and did I mention the demons? Not the demons you might find in Paradise Lost or in some ceremonial magick ritual, but the demons you find in your head – the fear, doubt, disbelief, anxiety, grief, hate, and lust, to name a few. These are the demons I want to pull up a stool next to me to talk to.

The older post framed this through Hunter S. Thompson and the spirit of Gonzo journalism. In Gonzo, the writer is not a detached observer pretending to be neutral. The writer is implicated. The writer is in the room, in the car, in the bar, in the fever dream, in the wreckage of the thing being described. There’s no clean separation between the report and the reporter.

That feels important.

Because maybe the same is true of self-discovery. Maybe I don’t get to stand outside my life, clipboard in hand, calmly assessing the evidence. Maybe the only honest way to understand the self is from inside the ride.

Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Bring a notebook.

That might be the first rule of Gonzo Spirituality.

It’s not my intent to glamourise chaos or to make suffering cool or to intimate that every bad habit is secretly holy. That would be too easy, and probably dangerous too. What I’m trying to get across is that the raw material of life can’t be understood by pretending it isn’t there.

The fear. The doubt. The jealousy. The ambition. The anger. The avoidance. The hunger. The old wounds. The ridiculous cravings. The part that wants transcendence and the part that wants another drink. The part that wants silence and the part that keeps refreshing the feed.

All of it belongs to the field.

Not all of it should be obeyed. But all of it can be listened to.

That’s where the image from the old post still grips me: the bar of the psyche.

Working Notes: Gonzo Spirituality and the Bar of the Psyche

I imagine walking into some dimly lit inner pub, somewhere off the main road of consciousness. The place smells faintly of old wood, soaked coats, and unfinished conversations. Sitting there already are the parts of myself I usually try to avoid. Fear has taken the corner seat. Doubt is nursing something dark. Anger is tapping its fingers on the table. The inner critic has opinions about the décor. The wounded child is quiet, watching the door.

The conventional move might be to banish them, heal them, silence them, transcend them, or surround them with light until they stop making trouble.

The gonzo move is different.

You sit down.

You buy the first round.

You ask, “So, what’s your story?”

This is where the older post now links directly to what I’ve been calling Narrative Alchemy. If stories are code, then these inner figures are not random glitches. They are subroutines, old scripts, survival programs, and half-written myths still running in the background. Some of them are outdated. Some are defensive. Some are dramatic as hell. But most of them began as attempts to protect something tender.

Fear may be guarding the edge of an old fall.

Anger may be protecting a boundary I never learned how to name.

Jealousy may be pointing toward a desire I haven’t admitted.

Doubt may be trying, clumsily, to keep me from self-deception.

Even the demons have data.

This doesn’t mean every inner voice is wise. Some are drunk. Some are liars. Some only know one song and will sing it badly until sunrise. But if I’m willing to listen beneath the noise, I may discover the wound, longing, or story they’ve been carrying.

That’s the work.

Not to turn the self into a clean, well-lit temple where nothing untidy is allowed through the door. More like turning the self into a strange old roadside tavern where the exiled parts can finally come in from the cold and be heard without being handed the keys.

This is where Gonzo Spirituality also pushes back against the dream of escape.

A lot of spiritual language can smuggle in a quiet contempt for ordinary life. The body becomes something to rise above. Desire becomes something to dissolve. The world becomes a distraction. Technology, noise, politics, relationships, work, money, ageing, grief, appetite, frustration — all of it becomes evidence that we are not yet “there.”

But where exactly is “there”?

And who benefits from convincing us that the sacred is always somewhere else?

The older post was already resisting that move. It wanted a spirituality that could happen in the middle of the life I had. Not after the inbox was empty. Not after the house was quiet. Not after I became a better, calmer, more luminous version of myself.

Right here.

In the day as it actually arrives.

In the walk.

In the blog post.

In the argument.

In the app notification.

In the muddy shoes by the door.

In the moment when I notice I’m irritated and, instead of pretending I’m above irritation, I ask what the irritation is trying to show me.

That feels close to what I now mean by existential consent.

Not passive acceptance. Not resignation. Not “everything happens for a reason” pasted over the wound like a motivational sticker. More like the willingness to begin with what is actually here.

This life.

This body.

This mood.

This history.

This nervous system.

This strange bundle of memory, appetite, language, contradiction, longing, and desire.

I don’t get another self to work with. I get this one.

So the practice becomes less about escape and more about authorship. Not authorship in the fantasy-control sense, as if I can simply rewrite reality by declaring a new story. But authorship as participation. As revision. As noticing the sentences I’m living inside and asking whether they are still true, still useful, still alive.

Gonzo Spirituality says: don’t wait until the manuscript is clean before you start reading it.

Read the messy draft.

Write in the margins.

Question the narrator.

Interview the villains.

Follow the footnotes.

Notice where the plot keeps looping.

And when necessary, revise the code.

This is where blogging enters the picture too. Because blogging, at least for me, has never simply been publishing. It has been a way of taking field notes from the ongoing experiment of being alive. The blog becomes the notebook on the road. The place where the life-material gets turned into language before it disappears. The place where confusion is allowed to become visible enough to work with.

In that sense, the old Gonzo Spirituality post belongs in the same lineage as Working Notes from the Textual Underground. It is another attempt to say: I am not writing from above the mess. I am writing from inside it.

The mess is not a failure of the method.

The mess is the material.

And maybe that’s why the piece still hums. Underneath the Hunter S. Thompson styling and the barroom imagery, there is a serious proposition:

Wholeness does not come from abandoning the life that made you. It comes from learning how to meet that life without flinching.

That includes the light, yes.

But also the shadow.

The awkward contradiction.

The part that still aches.

The part that wants more.

The part that sabotages.

The part that dreams.

The part that keeps walking.

Gonzo Spirituality is not a finished system. I don’t want it to become one. The moment it hardens into doctrine, it loses the very thing that makes it useful. Better to treat it as a working lens, a cracked map, a field method.

A way of entering the chaos with enough courage to listen.

A way of refusing sterile transcendence.

A way of finding the sacred not by floating above the world, but by paying closer attention to the strange, unedited texture of being here.

So yes, I still believe in the bar of the psyche.

I still believe in buying the demons a drink.

Not because they’re in charge.

Because they’ve been waiting a long time to tell their side of the story.

Better Than Sex, 30 Years Later: Revisiting the Book That Broke My Brain

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07:39. I’m in my lounge chair drinking black coffee, the morning still soft around the edges.

For my morning read today, I’ve been revisiting Hunter S. Thompson, starting with the book that began my literary love affair with his work: Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie.

There’s something about Hunter that still gets under my skin in the best possible way. He doesn’t simply report the story. He enters it. He becomes part of the event he’s describing. He’s not pretending to stand outside the madness with clean hands and a neutral expression. He is in the room, at the bar, in the campaign bus, and in the hotel lobby at 3 a.m., feeling the paranoia, the electricity, the absurdity, the rot, the strange comedy of American public life.

That’s what has always drawn me to first-person nonfiction. I like writing where the writer is in the story. Not as some inflated main character, but as a lens. A body. A nervous system. A witness with fingerprints.

It’s why I admire Hunter. It’s why I’ve always loved literary travel writing, diaries, notebooks, memoirs, and blogs. I like seeing the world through other people’s eyes, especially when those eyes are alert, damaged, amused, haunted, hungry, and alive.

Maybe that’s the deeper pull. I don’t just want information about the world. I want contact. I want the felt sense of being there. I want to know what the dust smelled like, what the coffee tasted like, what the light was doing on the wall, and what strange little thought passed through the writer’s mind while everyone else was looking at the obvious thing.

And beneath that, if I’m honest, is my own old desire: to be a participant in life, not merely a watcher from the sidelines.

I have to confess, I’ve been on the bench for a while (probably since Covid).

Not completely. I still walk. I still notice things. I still make my little field reports when I’m out and about. But I’m certainly not out in the world in the way I was when I was younger. Back then, being outside was not a lifestyle choice or some wellness prescription. It was the default condition of being alive. Nature was not a retreat from life. It was life. I went further afield. I climbed new mountains. I wandered through new bits of countryside. I chased the map outward.

I blame the internet.

Of course, they say a poor craftsman blames his tools, and they’re probably right. The internet didn’t chain me to the chair. I walked willingly into the glowing cave.

But as someone who gets intoxicated by knowledge-seeking, the internet is a particularly dangerous drug. It gives me exactly the thing I have always craved: endless corridors of thought, endless doors, endless shelves.

As a teenager, I used to wander the library stacks for hours. No subject was off limits. Philosophy, science, art, mythology, psychology, history, music, strange technical manuals, books with titles I barely understood. I loved the sheer possibility of it all. I’d leave with stacks of books, as if I were smuggling worlds under my arm.

So of course the internet became both a blessing and a curse.

Now I can explore the world without leaving my chair. I can roam through archives, maps, lectures, essays, documentaries, old interviews, obscure forums, digital museums, scanned manuscripts, and now, with AI, I have something like a portable Library of Alexandria sitting at my fingertips, awake whenever I call.

It’s astonishing.

It’s also a trap.

Because if you’re wired the way I’m wired, the search itself becomes the journey. You can spend the whole morning reading about mountains and never feel wind on your face. You can watch ten videos about someone else walking through a forest and never put on your boots. You can collect knowledge about aliveness while slowly becoming less alive.

That’s the part I’m trying to reckon with.

My Wisdom Walks are one way I force myself away from the screens. They get me out of the chair and back outside, mud, birdsong, breath, distance, and bodily time. But even there, I notice the limits I’ve allowed to creep in. Most of these walks are local. Useful, yes. Grounding, yes. But not quite the same as the old impulse to go further, to find a new ridge, a new stretch of river, a new patch of countryside where the map opens.

Back in the day, I tried to live by the North Face ethos: never stop exploring.

And there was another war cry too, one I picked up from outdoor culture and carried like a small personal commandment:

Get outside. Stay outside.

That phrase still has charge for me. It feels less like advice and more like a spell I forgot I knew.

Lately, I’ve been trying to rebuild my life around that old rhythm. I’ve created a mobile workflow: smaller cameras, a portable podcast setup, the iPad, or sometimes just the phone. The theory is simple enough: everything I can do at a desk, I can do outside.

In theory, this is beautiful. The barefoot philosopher’s office is wherever he can sit, walk, speak, photograph, think, and write. A bench. A woodland edge. The back of the car with the boot open. A picnic table. A patch of grass. A café after a long walk.

But then comes the catch.

WiFi.

So much of my life and work depends on having a decent internet connection. Uploading, sharing, checking, filing, syncing, posting, researching, responding, confirming. The whole apparatus of modern work hums invisibly behind the scenes, and I’ve let that hum dictate how far and how often I roam.

It’s ridiculous, really. I know it is.

Yesterday, while roaming Wappenbury Wood, I found myself running up against this exact absurdity. I had paid for two hours of parking. I wanted to extend my time in the woods, but I couldn’t get a connection, so I couldn’t extend my parking through the RingGo app. There I was, surrounded by trees, wanting to remain in the place, and being tugged back by a parking meter I couldn’t speak to because the little rectangle in my hand couldn’t find a signal.

Better Than Sex

First-world problems, I know.

But also a sign.

Some might say ‘good’. If you’re outside, be outside.

And part of me agrees. Deeply. There’s wisdom in not turning every walk into a production. There was a time when I lost my way with that too. I spent more time looking at the world through a device than experiencing the place through my own eyes. I’d be composing the post before I’d even received the moment. I’d be thinking about the share while the living thing was still happening in front of me.

Thankfully, I’ve mostly kicked that habit.

I don’t bother processing photos while I’m out. I don’t feel the need to livestream the experience. I’m learning to let the walk be the walk. The camera comes out when it needs to. The note gets captured via my Plaud voice-note device. But I’m no longer trying to turn every outing into a broadcast.

That feels like progress.

But there’s another habit underneath it, and maybe this one is harder to break: the 9-to-5 mindset. The productivity culture mindset. The idea that if I’m away from the desk, I’m somehow not working. The idea that roaming, wandering, reading under trees, following curiosity, and letting the body move through the landscape are somehow indulgences rather than part of the work itself.

And this is where I need to remember what I actually believe.

Being outside is my work.

Or at least it is part of the working condition I’ve spent years trying to build my life around.

I’m not trying to become more efficient at sitting under artificial light and moving tasks from one column to another. I’m trying to build a life where thinking, walking, writing, noticing, reading, photographing, speaking, and making are woven together. A life where work is not a cage I return to after being alive, but a form of aliveness itself.

That doesn’t mean abandoning responsibility. It doesn’t mean pretending money, deadlines, clients, admin, and logistics don’t exist. The parking app still wants paying. The email still needs answering. The file still needs sending.

But it does mean the old industrial rhythm cannot be the master rhythm.

There is another rhythm available.

Harold Jarche’s PKM model comes to mind here: seek, sense, share.

I’ve always liked the simplicity of that. It gives shape without becoming a cage.

Seek: go out, read, wander, notice, collect, and encounter.

Sense: sit with what has been gathered, make meaning, connect it to the living archive, let the pattern reveal itself.

Share: publish, speak, teach, post, make the field note public, and offer the insight back to the commons.

Wappenbury Wood

Maybe the trick is to stop trying to do all three at once.

When I’m outside, perhaps I’m mostly in seek mode. I’m gathering. Walking. Looking. Letting the place work on me. Letting the body become an instrument again. I don’t need to process everything on the spot. I don’t need to share immediately. I don’t need to prove the walk was productive by turning it into output before I’ve even left the woods.

Then, later, somewhere with coffee and a signal, I can sense and share.

This might be the rhythm I’m looking for.

Not desk versus outdoors.

Not internet versus nature.

Not productivity versus wandering.

But phases. Movements. Breath.

Inhale: go out.

Hold: notice what the world is saying.

Exhale: write, speak, share.

The internet then becomes part of the cycle rather than the whole ecosystem. AI becomes a thinking companion, not a substitute for experience. The archive becomes a living field, not a bunker. The phone becomes a tool, not the eye I see through.

And the walk becomes what it has always wanted to be: a method.

The barefoot philosopher does not need to reject the digital world. That would be too simple, and frankly, false. My life is tangled with the web. My work is made of language, links, fragments, feeds, archives, posts, and conversations across distance. I am a child of the library and the internet. I don’t want to give that up.

But I do need to renegotiate the terms.

The chair is good. The coffee is good. The screen is useful. The infinite library is a miracle.

But the world is not inside the machine.

The world is outside, being rained on. It’s in the mud underfoot, the old trees at Wappenbury, the cold air in the lungs, the hill not yet climbed, the lane not yet followed, the bird I can’t name calling from somewhere beyond the path.

Hunter got into the story.

That’s what I’m hearing this morning.

Not just read about the madness. Enter the room.

Not just study life. Participate.

Not just watch other people’s field reports from the glowing cave. Make my own.

Get outside. Stay outside.

Seek. Sense. Share.

Find the rhythm again. The barefoot philosopher’s rhythm.

Being, not becoming

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Pebbles, sand, surf, open water, and sky on the Kessingland coast.

Saturday. Kessingland. A camping field on a sea cliff; the morning is already bright by the time I properly arrive in it.

I wanted to watch the sunrise. That was the plan in the loose way plans form when you sleep outdoors and imagine yourself becoming more elemental by morning. But the field gave me sleep instead, and the sun did its work without me standing there to witness it.

There’s something almost comic in that. I had come to the edge of the country with the vague heroic notion of rising with the light, looking out across the water towards the Netherlands, letting the horizon perform some kind of magic like it used to do when I was a kid. Instead, my body chose repair. Air, grass, canvas, salt, distance. The older intelligence took over.

Maybe that was the first teaching of the day.

The body doesn’t care about the performance of attention. It knows when restoration is the deeper form of noticing.

A sandy path through low coastal grass under a wide blue sky.

Later, walking the path through the low grass and scrub, I kept thinking about the High Priestess.

I’d drawn her earlier from the major arcana as a way of asking what figure wanted to join the inner council that’s been forming in my journal. Yesterday it was the Monk and the Frontman, then the Trainer. The Monk wants books, contemplation, freedom, and the right to follow the rhizome without turning every branch into a business case. The Frontman wants visibility, contact, recognition, a livelihood, and some way of being known in the world. The Trainer knows how to make knowledge usable: insight into prompts, exercises, workshops, field guides, and practices that other people can actually hold.

Then the High Priestess arrives.

She doesn’t come in with a plan, a funnel, a product ladder, or a better explanation of the work. She brings a silence that changes the room.

The Monk, the Frontman, and the Trainer all have becoming-energy in them. Become freer. Become known. Become useful. Become viable. Become the version of the self that can finally hold all of this together.

The High Priestess interrupts that machinery.

She asks whether the next stage is another becoming or a deeper inhabiting.

That sentence has been working on me all day, arriving more clearly as I walked: it is time to shift from perpetually becoming into being and let growth emerge from that instead. Not anti-growth. Not resignation, not a refusal to change. More like a refusal to keep treating the self as a project that must be improved before it is allowed to live.

That feels like the hinge.

For years I’ve carried the question in one form or another: what must I become in order to earn from this? What shape must the work take to be viable? What identity do I need to step into so the blog, the coaching, the training, the walking, the mythic imagination, the archive, and the strange recursive life with language can all make sense to other people?

The question has a violence hidden inside it.

A gentler question opened on the path:

What naturally wants to grow from the being I am already practising in public?

That is a different kind of inquiry, one that doesn’t ask me to chase an improved self into the future but to inhabit the self that has already been gathering here all along.

The path seemed to agree. No mountain. No temple. No city of destiny shining at the end of the track. Just sand, grass, sky, and a worn line made by prior walking.

Here is the ground. Here is the path. Walk from where you are.

Pebbles, sand, surf, open water, and sky on the Kessingland coast.

Down by the water, the thinking changed again.

Listening to the wind and the waves talk.

That was the phrase that arrived. Not watching. Not interpreting. Listening.

The beach was all thresholds: pebble into sand, sand into surf, surf into open water, water into sky. Nothing there was trying to become anything else. The stones were stones, the sea was sea, the clouds were passing in their own time, and the wave line arrived, broke, withdrew, and returned.

The High Priestess was there too, but not as a gothic temple mystery. Coastal. Elemental. Less veil and candle, more horizon and rhythm; she was in the shimmer on the water, the movement I couldn’t command but could attune to.

The waves do not become by ambition. They become by returning.

The wind does not announce its strategy. It moves.

The stones do not improve themselves. They are shaped by contact, pressure, tide, and time.

That may be the deeper instruction in the being-not-becoming insight. Growth emerging from being doesn’t mean nothing changes; it means change comes through relationship with the elements already acting on me: walking, writing, listening, blogging, remembering, and returning.

I stood there long enough for the beach to open a door in time.

I remembered Brian.

When we were teenagers, Brian and I used to hang out at the beach in the off-season: no tourists, just us and the wind and the water and the huge imaginative permission of an empty shore. We imagined ourselves as explorers heading across the sea into the unknown. Sometimes we were sea gods, like Marvel’s Sub-Mariner or Prince Namor. Boys at the edge of the known world, inventing themselves from salt air and comics and friendship.

Brian died a few years ago from cancer.

So the text needs a pause here.

For Brian.

The beach was not empty back then. It was a mythic training ground, and we were not simply hanging out. We were rehearsing the old archetype of crossing: the shore as threshold, the sea as unknown, friendship as vessel.

And now here I am again, older, marked by loss, still standing at the edge of the unknown, still listening to wind and waves talk.

There is a tenderness in that I don’t want to explain away.

The sea kept the old frequency.

The High Priestess thread deepens here because hidden knowledge is not always buried in esoteric symbols. Sometimes it rises through place; sometimes the oracle is memory. Sometimes the body returns to a shoreline and finds a younger self still there, still imagining, still unburdened by the need to monetise, brand, niche, teach, package, or justify the imagination.

Just two friends in the off-season, making worlds out of wind, waves, and empty horizon.

That may be part of today’s medicine.

Not to become more imaginative.

To remember that imagination was already native.

By the time I left the beach, the morning had become something other than the morning I planned. I missed the sunrise and found the field. I asked for an archetype and got a listening practice. I walked toward becoming and found being already under my feet.

The waves were talking even then.

Maybe they have been talking all along.

Episode #422: Why My Blog Is Still My Home on the Internet

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In this episode, I take the Soulcruzer podcast out of the studio and into the fields.

What starts as an experiment in mobile podcasting/vlogging turns into a wandering meditation on labels, blogging, AI, morning rituals, and the strange abundance of media tools we now carry in our pockets.

Show notes:

 Why I still think of myself as a blogger first
– Podcasting, vodcasting, and the pressure to become “multimodal”
– The problem with labels: “When you label me, you negate me”
– soulcruzer.com as the central hub/home on the internet
– Wisdom Walks as thinking time
– Walking, motion, and changing perspective
– The “barefoot philosopher” approach to everyday philosophy
– AI as an extension of cognition rather than just a productivity tool
– The “soft cyborg” and the library of Alexandria in your pocket
– Morning reality tunnels and the sacred space before breakfast
– Coffee, barefoot grounding, and choosing what enters your mind first
– Indie blogging, platforms, Substack, distribution, and the open web
– Why these episodes may stay loose, minimally edited, and stream-of-consciousness

Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcast.

Choose Your Reality Tunnel Before Breakfast

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I am beginning to think the morning is far stranger than we give it credit for.

We talk about mornings as if they are mainly practical things. Alarm clocks. Showers. Coffee. Breakfast. Getting dressed. Checking the weather. Remembering where you have to be and what you have to do.

But there is another morning underneath that morning.

Before the day becomes a list, before the phone starts singing its little songs of demand, before the world gets its hooks into you, there is a softer moment. A brief threshold. A little gap between sleep and identity where consciousness starts assembling itself again.

You wake up, but not all at once.

First the body returns. Then the room. Then the name. Then the obligations. Then yesterday’s unfinished business lumbers in wearing its boots, acting like it owns the place.

And somewhere in that first fragile window, before breakfast, before the algorithm gets a chance to install its theatre in your nervous system, the world is still unclaimed.

That is the moment I’m interested in. The luminal space between sleep and waking up, what researchers call hypnopompic. It’s the state between sleep and full waking, when the brain is surfacing but has not yet settled into its ordinary frequencies. It is soft, strange territory. Dreams are still close. The wall between inside and outside has not finished hardening. And it doesn’t last. Within a minute or two the world reassembles itself.

Why am I interested in this space? It’s definitely not because I want to optimise it. God save us from turning every sacred human interval into a productivity hack. I’m not trying to become a more efficient machine before 7 a.m. I’m interested in that moment because it may be one of the few places in ordinary life where freedom still enters quietly.

The morning isn’t just the start of the day.

It’s the first act of world-making.

You don’t simply wake up into reality. You wake up into a version of reality. The question is, who gets to choose the first version?

The Tunnel You Wake Into

Robert Anton Wilson used the phrase “reality tunnel” to describe the way each of us moves through the world inside a particular model of what is real.

A reality tunnel is not the truth. It’s the lens through which truth appears.

Your nervous system has one. Your family gave you one. School gave you one. Your job, your class, your country, your media diet, your wounds, your desires, your fears, your habits: all of these helped construct the tunnel you walk around in.

Language is part of it too. The words you use decide what you’re able to notice. Call the world hostile and you will find enemies everywhere. Call the world alive, and suddenly the trees, birds, weather, strangers, pavements, and passing moods begin to speak. The tunnel is partly made of grammar.

This is why the first few minutes matter more than they appear to.

If I wake up and immediately reach for my phone, I enter a particular tunnel. In that tunnel, the world is urgent, fragmented, reactive, competitive, comparative, and elsewhere.

Other people’s opinions arrive before my own thoughts.

Headlines set the emotional temperature.

Notifications decide what matters.

Before my feet have touched the floor, my attention has already been outsourced.

And this is not some moral failure. I do not think we need another sermon about being weak-willed around our phones. The machines are designed to get there first. The feed knows that waking consciousness is porous. It knows the doorway is unguarded.

So when I talk about a morning ritual, I am not talking about self-care as decoration. I am talking about attention defence.

I am talking about protecting the first reality tunnel of the day.

The Algorithm Wants Breakfast Too

There is something strangely intimate and strangely violent about the default modern morning.

You wake.

You roll over.

You reach for the glowing portal beside the bed.

Maybe you tell yourself you are only checking the time, which is one of the great lies of the age. Then a message appears. Then a headline. Then a notification. Then a photograph from someone else’s life. Then a complaint, a crisis, a joke, a war, an advert, a trend, a memory, a demand.

All before you have properly inhabited your own body.

By breakfast, you may already be living inside a world made of other people’s urgency, algorithmic outrage, comparison, commercial desire, fragmented attention, ambient dread, and borrowed opinions.

You may not have chosen any of it directly.

But you let it through the gate.

And I say this as someone who is not anti-technology. I live in the digital world. I write on the web. I think with machines. I keep company with the glowing portal as much as anyone. The digital world is part of the world now.

The question is not whether it enters.

The question is whether it enters first.

Order matters.

The first thing you give attention to begins arranging the furniture of the mind.

Inbox first, and the day becomes an obligation.

News first, and the day becomes a threat.

Social feed first, and the day becomes a comparison.

But body, breath, room, sky, kettle, notebook first, and the world shifts. More local. Less manufactured. Less hysterical. More available to wander.

It’s a small shift, but small shifts are how reality tunnels get redirected.

Ontological Hygiene

A morning ritual is a form of ontological hygiene.

A grand phrase for a very simple act.

Before you step into the day, clean the lens through which the day will appear. The question is what version of reality you are stepping into. Who or what gets to set the emotional temperature first? Whether you begin from fear, noise, and borrowed urgency or from body, breath, and chosen language determines something essential about the day you are about to enter.

A morning ritual is not a performance of discipline. It is not a smug little theatre of self-improvement. It is not about becoming the kind of person who rises at 5 a.m., drinks ice water, journals in perfect handwriting, and has conquered the inbox before the rest of us have found our socks.

It is more humble than that.

It is a rinsing of the lens.

It is a pause before the world starts shouting through you.

It is a way of interrupting the automatic installation long enough to say:

Maybe that is one tunnel.

Maybe the world of alerts, outrage, tasks, and dread is one possible world.

But before I enter it, I am going to stand here for a moment and choose how I see.

A Twenty-Minute Reality Tunnel Ritual

Here is the version I am playing with.

It takes about twenty minutes. You can make it longer if you want, but I wouldn’t make it precious. The point is not to design a lifestyle. The point is to create a clean threshold.

First, keep the portal closed for five minutes.

Do not touch the phone. Do not open the laptop. Do not check the inbox, the news, the messages, the feed, or the weather app.

For five minutes, let waking belong to you.

Sit up. Feel the room. Notice the body returning. Notice whether there is still some dream-residue clinging to the edges. Do not fix anything yet. Do not improve yourself. Do not start managing the day.

Just notice the fact of being here again.

This is the first act of sovereignty: not letting the portal name the world before you have even entered it.

Then touch the local world for five minutes.

Open a window. Step outside if you can. Stand barefoot if the ground is kind. Put the kettle on. Make coffee or tea slowly enough that it becomes an act rather than a reflex.

Name five real things before you touch the digital world.

The light at the window.

The click of the kettle.

The ache in your shoulder.

A bird beyond the houses.

The smell of coffee rising from the cup.

This is remembering that reality has temperature, texture, weight, and sound. The world is not only information. It is also floorboards, steam, skin, breath, and sky.

Then write the tunnel for five minutes.

Open a notebook and answer one question:

What kind of world do I want to practise seeing today?

Not: What do I need to achieve?

Not: How do I become impressive?

Not: How do I crush the day? Which has always sounded to me like a terrible way to meet the day.

Ask instead what kind of world you want to participate in.

A world where I move slowly enough to notice.

A world where I do not confuse urgency with importance.

A world where my body is allowed to have a vote.

A world where I can begin again without drama.

A world where ordinary things are still allowed to be sacred.

This is where language becomes practical magic.

Not magic as delusion. Not pretending the bills do not exist or that the inbox will not eventually need answering. Magic as deliberate patterning. Magic as the art of choosing the words that shape what the mind is prepared to see.

Words are not merely labels placed on reality after the fact.

Words are part of how reality becomes available to us.

Write the tunnel before someone else writes it for you.

Finally, choose one reality anchor for five minutes.

A sentence. An image. A gesture. A word.

Something you can carry into the day.

Body before browser.

I do not have to live inside the first story that finds me.

Today I practise looking before labelling.

The day is allowed to be ordinary and still sacred.

This is not an affirmation in the plastic sense. I am not talking about standing in front of the mirror performing spiritual customer service on yourself. I mean something simpler. A handrail. A touchstone. A sentence you can return to when the day starts pulling you into another tunnel.

When the message arrives, when the news flares, when the old anxiety knocks, when the work tunnel opens, you return to the anchor.

Not to escape the world.

To remember that no single tunnel gets to claim the whole of reality.

The Breakfast Test

By breakfast, ask one question:

Whose world am I in?

If you have already checked the news, email, WhatsApp, social feeds, and three unrelated apps before your first mouthful of toast, you may already be in a world someone else engineered.

That doesn’t mean the day is ruined.

It means you have noticed the installation.

And noticing is where freedom begins.

If, before breakfast, you have touched the body, the room, the morning air, the notebook, and one chosen sentence, then you have had a say in who is speaking when the day begins. The world may still rush in. It probably will. But it will not be the first voice.

The ritual is not a wall against the world.

It’s a doorway you have chosen to stand in, consciously, before the day decides for you.

And once you practise choosing your morning reality tunnel, you start noticing tunnels everywhere.

Workplace urgency.

Consumer desire.

Political outrage.

Family expectation.

Productivity.

Cynicism.

Despair.

Even spiritual improvement, which can be just as hungry and demanding as the rest of them.

You begin to feel when a reality is being installed in you.

That feeling is the beginning of choice.

You do not have to reject every tunnel. A reality tunnel is not automatically a prison. Sometimes it is a useful map. Sometimes you need the work tunnel, the admin tunnel, the practical tunnel, and the get-things-done tunnel.

The trick is to remember that it’s a map.

Not the territory.

Not the whole sky.

Before breakfast, the world is still a little unclaimed. The phone has not yet been named. The inbox has not yet demanded it. The feed has not yet fragmented it.

There is a small gate there, almost hidden in plain sight.

Stand at it.

Choose the tunnel.

Then make your coffee.