The answer I got back from the question I carried this morning…
Tuesday. Early morning walk. The question I carried out with me was this:
What is already true in me that I’ve been pretending I don’t know?
The answer came fast. That’s how you know it’s the real one. You ask and the thing just stands up.
I’m not a niche-down person.
I’ve known this for years. And I keep learning it again, which means I haven’t quite accepted it yet. The Narrative Alchemy pivot was the latest version of the same story: find the through-line, package it, make it easy for people to classify. There’s a real idea underneath Narrative Alchemy. I believe in it. But when I turned the whole blog toward it, something happened that I should have caught earlier. I got bored. Not mildly bored. Bored in that way where the writing goes hollow because the person writing it has quietly left the room.
I was posting because I was supposed to be posting.
You can always tell. The blog knows the difference and apparently so does the traffic, eventually.
Michael Moorcock‘s first novel is called The Golden Barge. A man leaves his village to chase it. He glimpses it on the river, something in him recognises it, he drops everything. And the whole of his life becomes the pursuit. Every time he draws close, the barge rounds a bend and disappears. He keeps going. More adventures, more distance from where he started, always the barge ahead of him, just out of reach.
The fact that this novel has surfaced again — the title itself, not just the metaphor — feels like something worth noting. Not coincidence exactly. More like the kind of thing that happens when you’re paying the right quality of attention.
I’ve thought about that image for years. This morning I walked with it again.
Narrative Alchemy was the latest bend. I came close enough to almost touch it. I could see the gilding on the hull. And then it went around the corner, as it does. As it always does.
The strange thing is I don’t feel defeated by that. I feel something more like recognition. Like the barge is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The question beneath the question is always: what function am I actually here to perform?
I’ve been a warrior. West Point, the Army, the whole formation in that tradition. That chapter is done. I came out of it and moved into the healer work — coaching, mindset, and helping people with their inner landscape. That was real, that mattered. But underneath both of those there has always been something else. Something I’ve given less oxygen.
The shaman.
Not as a label. I’m wary of the labels right now; the cards said so this morning, and I feel it. But as a description of a function: part healer, part explorer, part storyteller, and part magician. Someone who wanders. Who is always in between villages, carrying stories from one place to the next, arriving somewhere and people making way because they want to hear what’s been seen out there in the world. Some want a story. Some want something more. In exchange, a meal. A place to sleep. And then gone again.
I’ve been domesticated. Robert Anton Wilson’s phrase: the domesticated primate. I became one and didn’t fully notice. Or noticed and didn’t do anything about it.
The shaman doesn’t stay in one village long enough to build a personal brand.
There’s a war going on online about AI and I’ve been caught in it sideways.
You can see the sides forming from a long way off. On one side: the people who are in it, building with it, finding what’s possible. On the other hand, the people who have the pitchforks out, who call it slop, who unfollow when they catch you using it. Underneath both positions is the same existential anxiety, expressed differently.
I find myself softening my enthusiasm when I can see the pitchfork crowd gathering. Which is a bad habit. Because honestly, I think AI is the closest thing to the Library of Alexandria I’m ever going to touch. I grew up living in libraries. That was always the dream. And now the library fits in a conversation window and knows which shelf to start on. That’s not nothing.
But I also don’t want to be a missionary for it. I just want to use it. The way I use my phone. Without a manifesto.
What I’m trying to get clear on is the difference between using a tool and playing a platform’s game. They look the same from the outside, but they feel completely different from the inside. When I was optimising Narrative Alchemy content for the algorithm, I was playing the game. When I’m on a wisdom walk and the thing that happens to capture it best is a voice note that goes through Claude, that’s just the atelier working.
Document, don’t perform. There’s the line.
The cards pulled the Queen of Cups this morning. Re-listen. Reawaken. Not: plan more, build the system, write the manifesto and post it on a Tuesday. Just listen.
So that is the instruction for now. Not silence. Not inaction. But a particular quality of attention. The pathfinder doesn’t plan the path from the kitchen table. He walks.
I’ve been spending too much energy on the architecture. WordPress, Typefully, the IndieWeb connectors, and the workflow that syndicates the thing to the right places. That’s all real, and I’ll figure it out. But the error is when the system becomes the thing you’re working on instead of the thing you’re working through.
Stop optimising the net. Get in the water.
The philosopher is back at the root. Everything else — writer, teacher, healer, magician — is still there, still running. They know what they’re doing. But the root function is clear again, clearer than it’s been in a while.
What is already true in me that I’ve been pretending I don’t know?
This. This is.