Greetings from a sunny Stockholm 🌞 🇸🇪
What I’ve been up to
My brother, sister and I scattered the ashes of our parents, 16 years on from their passing, at a beautiful woodland close to where we grew up in South London. I read these chapters from one of my mother’s favourite books, The Prophet
I wrote a new blog post to expand lunarpunk lore: Beyond Privacy: The Seven Darknesses of Lunarpunk, on the Darknesses of Privacy, Attention, Suffering, Eros, Plants, Soul and Light
I attended the Liberating Ways of Looking retreat at Gaia House with Kirsten Kratz and Yahel Avigur, based on the teachings of the late Rob Burbea in the brilliant Seeing That Frees
I participated in an integral facilitation intensive with Zen teacher Diane Musho Hamilton
I completed the excellent Rust course on Educative in preparation for learning CosmWasm
I’m half way through the Capra Course on the Systems View of Life and KERNEL KB7
I continue to enjoy working on Dandelion. 33 organisations sold 3547 tickets worth £185,594 in the last 3 months – use Dandelion to host your next event
Life as Practice course notes and retreat
I finished teaching the first Life as Practice course 🎉
The course notes are in a rich, commentable Google Doc. You can view a rough import of the doc for free, with comments and links disabled. Pay £99 and receive:
Lifetime access to the full, linked and continuously updated Google Doc with 700+ links
Membership of the Life as Practice Telegram group
A coupon for £99 off any future live edition of the course (i.e. your money back if you end up taking the course)
I am also delighted to say I have confirmed a fantastic venue in Cornwall, UK for the first in-person Life as Practice retreat, 28th April – 5th May 2023. Save the date for now, and expect another email soon with more details.
Books I read
I finished three excellent books:
Unbound: A Woman’s Guide To Power by Kasia Urbaniak (highly recommended for anyone interested in the topic of power)
Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power by Carolyn Elliott
The Children's Fire: Heart song of a people by Mac Macartney
I’m now reading Alan Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety.
Knowledgegraph
Since last time, I’ve shared 34 items to my knowledgegraph. Some highlights:
Films: The Last Forest and The Art of Life
Plans for the future
Life Itself’s Embodying Collective Transformation November residency
I’m hosting an event on Panvala’s new Stamps initiative on 17th Nov, on redirecting billions of dollars of advertising revenue to communities
On 6th Dec, I’ll be in Bristol to speak at the Psychedelic Research Society (details TBC) and attend the UK’s first ReFi Spring event
The Tent of Seven Doors: The School of Myth Summer School with Dr. Martin Shaw
Offerings from friends
Anna Ling released her beautiful first single ‘Nothing is Lost’ from her upcoming album and The Odd 910 (Jade Wade) released their first album
Hannah Close is running a crowdfunder for Islandness in the Anthropocene: A Documentary, exploring islandness, ecology, identity and belonging
Cami and Jamie relaunched the site for Digitalis web design and development. I can also highly recommend Studio Wolf
See upcoming events on Dandelion facilitated by people I recommend
With love,
Stephen
[Affiliate link] Focus, clarity, memory, mood: my favourite nootropic is Mind Lab Pro, which I’ve used since 2018.
So wonderful to see what you've been up to, Stephen. Also went to traditional dream factory recently for a friends' gathering and heard you'd popped round there too. How was the Gaia house retreat? Had a couple of friends there too who're doing a long personal retreat at Gaia house at the mo. Nice to see crossovers continuing
Great recommendations! Definitely will be looking into the books too. Shadow and integration are so so important while building communities ground up and setting ourselves for mush more conscious decision making. Today's colonial extractive economy has been born out of unintegrated, and suppressed shadow. Great to see this work in the open!