Ships Are Designed To Take Us Places
Powered by emergence, built to regenerate our personal and professional being, come take a voyage on the STEWARD-SHIP
🔬 If We’re All Just Making This “Human” Stuff Up, Then There’s No Limit To Our BEING
If you know me, you know my superpower isn’t just optimism—it’s osmosis.
I tend to always be reporting from the edge of interconnection, surrounding myself with technologists, philosophers, regenerators, visionaries, biome whisperers—and somehow, without trying too hard, I soak up the good stuff and alchemize it into something... a little higher (deeper, or broader) than the base substance it started as.
If I were a cell part, I’d be the mitochondria: quietly energizing, amplifying, accelerating, and elevating everything behind the scenes. Or the semi-permeable membrane, vibing with a holistic discernment on possible connections. Maybe both.
Like my BEING (which can be both statically established, AND dynamically emergent), it all depends on which arrangements of 1s, or 0s, light or dark, part or whole, I am at any given arrangement of time and space I attune to.
The point is- each of us, in our TRUE NATURE, is a cell, or an entire ship, with all the parts we need to tune in, tap in, and turn on to the particle and the wave functions simultaneously.
If there is one thing my late mentor Perch DuCote instilled in me (and something I align with another mentor of mine, Stephen Sondheim) is it’s that it's never EITHER, OR, it’s always AND.
Indeed, we are quantum beings - both separate and interconnected. Knowledge that might get us through this end-stage capitalistic epoch of divide and conquer, and bridging those perceived gaps.
That all being said, this latest Substack isn’t a hot take. It’s a ticket to take a ride.
Brought together by a weaving of research, lived insight, whispered truths, and the voices of those who remember we’re part of something much older—and more beautiful—starting with how we RELATE.
Because here's the cosmic joke:
We’re all just making this human stuff up as we go.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t have a compass.
In fact, when we align with nature’s wisdom, compassion, and awareness (and augment that with our AI), we don’t just survive the chaos of existential crisis—we become midwives of emergence.
🌍 The Orientation: The Weight of the Present
At every existential turn, many of us are overwhelmed, exhausted, and paralysed. But this can be a reminder that we a not lost, just wandering, without direction.
We’re living in what some call a polycrisis of breakdowns—a perfect storm of climate collapse, social unraveling, institutional distrust, technological superintelligence, billionaire’s hostile takeover, and too many tabs open in both browser and brain.
“We are all connected, to each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe, atomically.”
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yet beneath the weight, there’s a deeper longing.
To belong.
To be part of something that feels like it matters.
To feel the web—not as something we’re caught in, but as something we help weave.
🕸️ The Navigator: An Invisible Web Beneath It All
At the root of the crisis isn’t just bad policy. It’s disconnection. All problems arise from being too connected, not connected enough or connected in the wrong ways as Anne-Marie Slaughter discovered.
Richard Wagamese would go further to say, we belong to “every person… every blade of grass, rock, mineral and creature.” The world isn’t a machine—it’s a living system of relationships.
From Community Weaving:
“Weaving is not a metaphor, but a method.”
And when the threads fray—between self and nature, between head and heart (and let’s not forget the other brain, the gut)—everything starts to unravel.
The answer? Not another blue or red pill.
A deeper relationality.
A choreography of connections.
🌐 The Compass: The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
As Capra & Luisi remind us in The Systems View of Life, linear cause-and-effect won’t solve complex problems. We need to see the whole—the nested systems within systems, relationships within relationships.
“The understanding of life begins with the understanding of patterns.”
Transformation doesn’t just come from the center.
It also comes from the edges, the intersections where disciplines, generations, and species collide and collaborate. Like the pattern of a torus, they are interconnected because the center is nowhere and the circumference is everywhere.
We don’t need any more answers, we need to live inside the quintessential, unfolding question of how to relate to our multidimensional BEING.
Methodology of the EMERGE experience
🛏️ The Direction: Our Inner Ecology
This shift isn’t just external.
It’s deeply internal.
We are systems too—full of contradictions, creativity, and latent wisdom.
When we do our inner work (shadow, trauma, embodiment), we become more trustworthy stewards of outer systems.
From The Book of Living Systems:
“Our inner ecology mirrors our outer ecosystems.”
When we heal in here, the world starts to shift out there.
🌾 The Journey: A Place That Gets to the Heart (and home) of the Matter
Place isn’t just scenery. It’s a collaborator.
From How to Build a Regenerative Village:
“Regeneration begins by listening to the land.”
We don’t scale ideas. We root them.
By creating islands of coherence — localized spaces of trust, intention, and relational density — we model the next system.
When people gather with care, rhythm, and story in a specific place, the system learns to hum again.
🌌 Our Captain(s): We Are The Ultimate Algorithm
From the EMERGE experience:
“The AI-augmented human leader uses technology to enhance awareness, wisdom, and compassion.”
AI won’t replace us if we augment it to remember who we are.
Let it run the spreadsheets.
We’ll tend to the soul systems.
Let it offer answers.
We’ll ask better questions.
Stewardship isn’t about control. It’s about connection.
It’s not about processing. It’s about participating in its unfolding.
🎟️ This Is Your Ticket, This Is Our Time - To EMERGE
So, where do we find a place to experiment and experience all this? A place to slow down, tune in, and build new patterns of being.
We ground people in place, presence, and participation.
Weaving together:
A Sense of Place → grounded in land and ancestral story
Social Intelligence → trust, empathy, co-creation
Inner Growth → clarity tools, language integration
Regenerative Stewardship → aligned with nature’s design
This moment of uncertainty, powerlessness, and existential dread is not a glitch.
It’s an opening.
“We are not separate from the system. We are the system emerging.”
EMERGE is our way of reclaiming the commons, not just in space, but in story, relationship, and responsibility. It’s a call to embody what regeneration actually looks like in action.
Sense of Place: We gather in Eremito, an ancient monastery in the Umbrian hills, chosen not for luxury, but for legacy. These lands carry the frequency of stillness, reverence, and ancestral memory. Here, we root.
Deepening Connections: We design for intimacy—through story circles, shared rituals, communal meals, and the kind of silence that speaks. You won’t be networking. You’ll be remembering what it means to belong.
Unfolding True Nature: We don’t just teach clarity, we create space for it to emerge. Through practices of shadow integration, personal reflection, and co-mentorship, participants rediscover the self they forgot beneath performance.
Becoming Stewards: EMERGE is not about thought leadership. It’s about embodied leadership. You’ll experience biomimicry as a way of seeing. You’ll prototype regenerative action. You’ll leave knowing how to lead like a forest, not a fortress.
Stop optimizing for survival.
Start organizing for regeneration.
Come shape what it means to be a steward, through the power of emergence, to regenerate our personal and professional BEING.
Welcome aboard the Stewardship. A vessel of wholeness (holy-ness), where our beloved J. Krishnamurti or Yogandanda has said time and again, “You yourself are the teacher, the master, the guru, the leader - you are everything!”
