Why do we need spaces like this?

At the root of our current predicament lies a crisis of perception. The predicament we face is not a singular issue but an entanglement of crises, ecological devastation, social fragmentation, and existential disorientation, arising from the same underlying patterns of thought. It is not simply that we are facing climate breakdown, political polarization, and economic instability that we can find isolated solutions for, rather, these are symptoms of a deeper rupture in how we perceive and relate to the world.

The modern paradigm, shaped through capitalism, has conditioned us to see ourselves as separate individuals navigating a world of discrete problems to solve, each demanding a technical solution or an upgrade, including ourselves. This modern impulse to fix, to solve, to master, while powerful in certain contexts, has reinforced a fragmented and extractive way of relating to the world and to ourselves, severing us from the relational webs that sustain life, deepening our alienation from the planet, from one another, and from meaning itself.

This approach assumes that complexity can be simplified, that contradictions can be neatly resolved, and that transformation is merely a matter of better strategies and solutions. But what if the roots of our challenges run deeper than the problems we are trying to fix? What if the very ways we have been taught to think, learn, and act are entangled in the patterns that sustain the crises we seek to solve?

To step beyond this cycle, we see the urgent need to cultivate educational experiments that do not merely transfer knowledge but that transform the very ways we perceive and relate, fostering our depth: Our capacity to sit with uncertainty, to hold paradox, to listen beyond immediate solutions, and to attune to the relational, the systemic, and the unseen—an education that does not deliver clear directions and answers but deepens our ability to dwell in the tensions of our time.

Similarly, activism that relies on the familiar strategies of opposition and resistance, implying the creation of enemies and allies, while often necessary, can also become trapped in the same reactive loops it seeks to disrupt. If we are to move toward something genuinely different, we need a form of engagement that is not solely defined by the crises of the present but by the possibilities of a different orientation to life itself: Shifting from ‘what should we do in reaction to this?’ to ‘what is possible from here?’ This is an activism that does not seek to impose predetermined solutions for already known problems but instead seeks to compost our habitual reaction, to nurture the conditions for new ways of being, relating, and imagining to take root.

These shifts, toward an education that deepens rather than reproduces, and an engagement that composts rather than merely reacts, are at the heart of the larger transformation we sense is calling. It is not a call to retreat into passivity but to move beyond the pull of reaction into a deeper form of engagement in which we open ourselves to the possibility of a different way of knowing, a different way of responding, a different way of becoming in relation to the world. It is an invitation to meet the world’s unraveling with curiosity rather than with delusional certainty or debilitating terror, to cultivate an openness to what wants to be born rather than reproducing familiar patterns of compulsory control. A call to shift from extraction to entanglement, from fixing to listening, from urgency to deep attunement.

It is something we cannot do on our own, the shift needed is deep, embodied and experiential. We need each other, to call us out in one moment and to hold one another in the next. This requires deliberate spaces where we get opportunities to mutually support and watch each other grow in the unique and beautiful ways that we are called to, where we can unlearn our habitual perception and behaviours with the help of each other and practice a different orientation of engagement. One where uncertainty is not a threat but an opening, where discomfort is not a barrier but an invitation, where we are not the architects of the future but its humble tenders.

It requires repeated opportunities to learn to lean into what emerges when we lovingly hold space for the complexity of being and becoming together. It is from these spaces, we think that true transformation can emerge, not as a solution imposed from above, but as a fractal unfolding from within and between us all.