Participating the Transition

On Fresh Light & What Brings New Life

Dear Friend,

My first days of 2026 have been felt through flu. Cold-sweating the transition between calendar years. Slowing movement down to the essentials.

Refreshed commitments float to the surface as I regain my feet. Practical resolutions that mostly boil down to one thing: remembering to pay slow and sensuous attention.

The Lunar New Year arrives in six week and I’m already preparing with the Wood Snake, shedding skins in advance of the Horse’s fire power.

Sometimes it’s helpful to speak what you believe out loud and taste the words for their truthfulness. The body is an instrument of verification. The belly knows what nourishes. The hands gesture a form. Dance. Remember dance?

Garish headlines blare from our screens and the mind insists its opinions upon the world as if we could know, judge, fix, what is happening. The flu is helpful for softening this tyrannical grip. So is Báyò Akómoláfé.

He reminds:

Shake the plots and narratives you’ve become used to; trouble your problems by questioning the questions you ask. We are learning that we are not only fully in Nature, but that Nature is fully in us. We are recognizing just how animal-like the mind is, and just how human-like Nature is. This remembering constitutes a burden on the heroic activist figure and shakes our confidence that we can unilaterally respond to our collective troubles or “save the day.” The way we respond to our problems can be part of the problem and serve to reproduce the same conditions we are striving to escape.

In March, Báyò and Laura Peña Zanatta will be offering “The School of the Cracks“, a hybrid program with several online sessions leading to a 5 day retreat at the Garrison Institute just down the Hudson river from me.

I include it here as a concrete example of the types of spaces, the type of open efforts, that might just bring healing waters to our parched and ailing social ecology. We’re in need of spaces for new adult education. Fixed ideologies won’t get us anywhere but where we’ve been (and there ain’t going back!). So, it’s not just education - it’s exploration. Not directive teaching, but creative ritual space. Participation for all. Relationship as research.

I’ve become less interested in ideas. It’s more fruitful to surrender to the subtle art of sanctuary than trying to impose our “sense” upon the sensory. Bring me closer Oh Beauty! Courage. Intimacy. The Holy no mere idea, but present everywhere within the field of reality attended. The longing is for full participation. We participate the medicine.

Some colleagues and I have been engaging in weekly sessions we call “The Collaboratory”. I look forward to sharing more as that Fire Horse kicks into action.

In the meantime,

I love you.

Jordan