Becoming Strange Attractor

According to Wikipedia, a strange attractor is “a value toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system.” These strange attractors are emergent patterns that arise out of chaotic systems, recurring fractal vibrations in the unpredictable cacophony of the void.

Under Pressure

I was carried by Kenny’s Room on my run today – a mixtape created and shared by one of the participants in Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains. It gorgeously weaves together a soundscape of words, vibrations and songs around the desire to root in love and the sacred during this time of Quarantine.

Collective Presencing

The beating pulse of my last six weeks has been the Embodied Book Club at the Stoa, where a group of us have been reading Ria Baeck’s Collective Presencing book. Since I started my “self-directed masters”, reading and breathing Collective Presencing has been the greatest and most surprising gift: there was a strange synchronicity to how I was becoming-with it, where the chapters I read would mirror my lived experiences and insights. Reading it has also left me feeling transformed in a way that’s hard to explain: I’m exploring new sensing muscles/organs/capacities that I haven’t encountered before. This is simultaneously a homecoming to something I’ve always known, and leap off an edge into a vast new potential space that I’ve never known.

Midwifing

An expression of my commitment to my soul’s calling is to try to write in this journal every day.

A Soul-Directed Masters

*[An “About” Page Written in November 2020]*

This is a container for the cultivation of a “soul’s calling”. 

I’ve called it self-directed masters as a pithy way of naming a sovereign space, a carrier bag, for the open current of ideas and phenomena that intrigue, implicate, scandalize and transform me. As a designer, I’m seeking to create spaces for collective emergence and fluid becoming. In order to do so, I believe that we have to find ways to hospice with tenderness what needs to collapse and die, so that it may compost into potential for new ways of being-in-the-world.

Commitment to Calling

This marks the beginning of my journey to capture reflections on what I’ve been naming my “self-directed masters” –  a permission space I’ve gifted myself to devote to unadulterated learning and self-actualization. Perhaps you ask: why do you need permission to learn Cheryl?