The catalogue

A tentative kind of weird manifesto for the possibility of a future unpsychology

The life of world and mind is multifaceted, evolving, ever-changing, flowing, poetic, discoverable, mysterious, personal, collective, ecological, connected, disconnected, uncontainable, free, constrained, creative, loving, violent, gentle – and always contextual.

The world of mind and life we live with is one in which the uncontainable is contained, boxed within language-bound boundaries, their scope restrained by limitations of human imagination – and a fear of that which tries to fly free. Pinned down to be understood within frames of meaning and belief.

Our mind is catalogued. All our minds are…

The mind of world and life is constrained by the cultural predilections of human communities, societies and civilisations. The mind is held in time and place by the expectations, assumptions and intuitions of humans whose own minds require boxes and certainties and particular words in particular orders, in order for their institutions, organisations and nations to be sustained.

The words hold the key – are seminal. The words in the mind, are spells that conjure meaning and action; turning to mayhem, or else to relationship and belonging.

Boxes and boundaries give the semblance of belonging. They pretend to connect. They play at ecology. The words and thoughts are channeled down well-worn pathways, ending up in familiar, dangerous places.

The metaphors matter. Our minds and worlds are not machines, but living landscapes. We are not broken down, brain-divided, trauma-inflicted inevitabilities. Rather we are emerging, changing, mutually learning pieces of consciousness. We, and our cultures, are not lines of development and advancement, but waves and clouds and forests and burgeoning, interconnected, interdependent cities, technologies and ecologies.

When we are digging in the garden, or crafting pots, or writing poems, or surfing waves, our minds and bodies (extraordinary things that they are) respond to the tiny adjustments and requirements of the lives we are living. When we are in relationship, we are tender, and loving, or sometimes hateful or cruel – and each of these states is worth paying attention to. The wider, systemic contexts matter too. How can we carry on living our own ordinary lives – touched by privilege and/or inequality – when the patterns that are supposed to connect… well, don’t?

We can ask: what are the acorns that hold our potential. What are the ghosts and alter-egos that mirror our self-hood. What are the minds that flow, and grow, and connect, and relate, and grieve, and learn? Where do the collective winds come from, that blow our humanity this way and that? How do we – together – shelter from the storms that face us? Where is mind and world and life in all this?

These words and questions, stories and metaphors are at the heart of what we have come to call unpsychology. In systems, organisations and cultures – families too – the category, the label, the box, the development, the direction, has become the thing. Meaning made easy by constraining, measuring and targeting it. Relationships made linear by pathologising and policing our bodies and behaviours – the ways we ‘function’, or not - in this demanding, conflicting world of ours.

Madness. Gender. Sexuality. Neurodiversity. Class. Colour. Ethnicity. Disability. Illness. Belief. How would it be imagine minds without the categories and boxes we are given – that we give ourselves? How could a world emerge that was layered so finely that everybody’s experiential life was brought to life – and mind?

What could we imagine from the inside-out and the outside-in that might keep our world learning, our souls full, our minds flowing freely, out in all directions? Through the layers. Deep in Time. Humble and horizontal, with nowhere to go except out to meet with and learn from each other – and the world.

Curious. Playful. Uncontainable. Free.

Another Year - a reflection

It’s a little strange, I sometimes think, that humans are so often reaching for ‘meaning’ in life, or searching for some path to ultimate ‘authenticity’ or redemption. I’m not talking here about the the thirst for knowledge as such – the hours painstakingly examining phenomena in labs or dig sites or ecosystems – nor the urge to create and imagine beautiful and moving art and music, but the need, it sometimes seems, to be saved.

It’s understandable, I suppose, in relation to the troubled, broken times we live in to think we need ‘saving’, but it’s easy to mistake difficult times for ‘end times’, and past times for ‘golden ages’, and then reach for some admittedly cleverly worded metaphors, formulations, theories, paradigms and belief systems that are purported to take us there.

It has always been so, I guess, but now the digital ecosphere is full to the brim with essays and podcasts and publications (yes, alright, like Unpsychology), in which writers and thinkers set out their philosophical wares – and yes, we’re supposed to pay for them. Platforms like Substack are literally set up to make this transaction – “an economic engine for culture” was how it first described itself, though it has softened its marketing a little since (https://substack.com/about). Ideas, therefore, are now officially at the heart of capitalism.

The title of this piece is Another Year, and how this relates to the paragraphs above might not seem immediately obvious. I suppose that what I am thinking about right now is that time passes and life turns, and we humans find ourselves in new places – or even in the same places geographically – and the very ordinariness of this can take the edge off the ‘big ideas’ and debates that are happening out there on the ‘web waves’ and the increasing doomscrolling spirals of social media.

Then, of course, many of us could find ourselves in circumstances we never imagined ourselves to be in. There might be personal tragedies, or atrocities and emergencies on a massive scale – like the genocide in Gaza; but just as some people are living with this disconnection and loss – sometimes for decades – others are opining, finding polarities, digging around for the information/disinformation that will justify this position or that.

The place that Unpsychology (the idea and the publication) was born out of was that there is truth (as in there are things that happen and occur that can be shown to be true with evidence), and there is context (as in how the things that are true emerge, and are then prioritised, analysed, framed and experienced). Truth and context are related, and the ways they are in conversation with each other revolve around the metaphors and assumptions dominant in cultures.

Such a dynamic exerts its pull on both individual and collective experience. So there are no polarities as such, but there are cores of truth and ecologies of communication. This isn’t a contradiction, but it is a conundrum, because belief (based on those cultural metaphors and assumptions) can blow the whole relational shebang out of the water.

My context for this end-of-year set of musings is that both last year and this have ended with the reality and experience of personal loss and change. My Dad died last year and there was, of course, all the practical and emotional stuff that goes with the loss of a loved one, within the boundaries of my own cultural understandings and assumptions, of course. Around the same time, I also retired from my main job last December and have been finding new ways of living and working since then – good ways, mostly, it has to be said. Then a couple of weeks ago an old friend of mine, Karl Statton, died suddenly: not an old Dad at the natural end of a long life, but a contemporary the same age as me, who was vibrant and loving; a fierce but gentle humanist and music lover.

Everything that this carries brings me closer to experience. That’s what I am trying to say in this piece, I think. What worries me about the tendency for some (not all) writers, thinkers, academics and politicians to be constantly opining - about the state of things and how the ‘machine’, or the ‘divided brain’, or the ‘deep state’ or some kind of retreat from a kind of indigenous ‘grace’ or some kind of ‘spiritual crisis’ are at the heart of the ‘meta-crisis’ or ‘poly-crisis’ – is that there’s never a time when sitting down and touching the real and simple complexity of reality seems to enter in.

Or otherwise, when reality is touched – through meditation or some other (ordinary) practice – it seems to require some kind of complicated interpretation, framing or model-making. The experience itself, it seems, is never enough.

At a meta level, this means, tragically, that experience can be ignored and set aside – even denied. Why, otherwise, would the deaths of tens of thousands in Gaza (and in other genocides in the world and over time) be allowed to continue? Why would the climate crisis still be the subject of to-and-fro transactional bartering – or even denial – as the reality of its effects become ever more stark and clear? Why, given the evidence at the time, and even stronger evidence emerging now, that vaccines are among the most effective ways of controlling and preventing a virus like COVID, did some of those who are and have been most eloquently opinionated about the state of the world, fall for the conspiracy myths? Why would queer and neurodivergent children (and adults) still be denied and marginalised – their psychological and educational needs unmet – in the name of some ignorant, throw-back belief systems?

I haven’t got a clear understanding of all this. That is to say, I can’t get why intelligent, articulate people whose academic credentials give them cultural credibility and kudos, opt for such non-rational sets of frames. I can only surmise that they value above all else their own voice and opinions (‘freedom of speech’, it’s now often called), believing, perhaps, that their personal genius or spiritual insight will lead them to discover the one thing, the one connection, the one theory or belief system that will bring us humans to salvation.

Yet, another year passes, and there is no sign of the meta (or poly) crisis abating. No sign of there being some kind of glorious developmental path that humans can individually or collectively follow to reach a place of insight and enlightenment.

Another year, though, and human beings – other life forms too – are living their ordinary lives in line with the ebbs and flows of their biology, psychology, culture and community. And at its best, humanity in these times is a great thing. Not a better thing, necessarily, than other communities and ecosystems of lifeforms, but we have better health, knowledge and potential now than at any time in our history. The truth is that we don’t need to return anywhere to rediscover our ‘nature’ or ‘spirit’. That path is itself an ‘untruth’ – a fallacy of some golden age that never was. Unpsychology, therefore, doesn’t take us ‘back there’, but tries to stay – always – in the here and now.

Learning, always learning, and leading ordinary grounded lives.

When we live our ordinary lives and, crucially, are allowed to live them ordinarily by those who hold power and make and have made the decisions that have led us here, we have the potential to be… well OK. And that’s enough – or should be. Yet, in the world today, there are too many people who live with the pain of meaningless loss and losing. Free from oppression, brutality and discrimination, we might simply be able to have love and hold solidarity for each other, living out our beautifully diverse and creative lives. And that might mean something…

At the end of the day, when we lose someone we love or we approach our own personal ending, wouldn’t it be great if we were able to face this with a sense of thankfulness and gentleness, alongside the pain and grief? With community and loved ones around us, bringing us soul and solace for these deeply human, very ordinary changes and transitions? We don’t need big words and ideas, but we might need to stay close to the ground and to each other in order to traverse these difficult times.

In truth, there’ll be another year, and another and another, and none of us will see them all. So, this one’s for my Dad, Ian Thorp, who saw ninety-one of them, and my friend, Karl Statton, who saw sixty-eight, and who were among the best of us…

Soul Manifestos introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has been well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

In the meantime, these pieces are written in a similar style to the original essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing over the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE, and find the full series as it grows HERE.

Soul Manifestos 2024/25

#08 : Ecologising

Note: a longer early version of this piece first appeared on Medium at https://medium.com/21stcenturysoul/tools-for-troubled-times-9b446e8366b, March 24, 2019

This cultural pattern is linear, so not a pattern at all, just a line leading to the sky. Whether the concern is fame, wealth, influence or spirit, or ‘loving oneself’, or yoga positions, or political power, we hold a fantasy that we ‘make it’ through our own hard work, and/or the benevolent intervention of a loving universe.

This pattern that is not a pattern is a problem. This linearity – a world of disciplines, cause and effect, input and output, resources, growth – is a big problem – for me, you (‘I’ and ‘I’), the Earth and all the other ‘singularities’ out there. The line goes up and out, and our journeys are tracked with words like ‘goal’, ‘growth’, ‘development’, ‘stages’, ‘advancement’, ‘solution’ and ‘success’.

A problem in the pattern that is no pattern always has to have a solution. It must always carries a knowing, a certainty, a reason ‘why’. And yet:

There is no why to ask.
We are why. ‘We’ includes inclusiveness,
We are crooked trees, in our forests
While ‘why’ resumes there is an answer,
Erasing necessary ambiguity.

(Nora Bateson, 2016)2

The act of re-engaging ‘mind’ with and within its evolving contexts (i.e. Earth and the crooked systems that have emerged from and within it), is an active process — so a ‘doing word’ is needed: Ecologise.

Q: what do we all do when we ‘ecologise’?

We place our minds within ever-shifting ecosystems (which exist in relation to a myriad of other ecosystems) and we pay attention — in the closest, most forensic, mindful way possible — to what emerges and changes in, around and through this complexity – this meshing mind and world.

Then we notice the ways in which our interdependent frames connect and relate, and through this come to a kind of understanding of the ever-changing relationality of our human ‘being’, and an awareness of what human life might begin to mean in amongst all this other (non-human) life and non-life.

Ecologising includes the dimensions of the human relational world – psychology has that piece right – but the social self is only a partial vision: a human-centred version of a much more interesting whole. Ecological relating is multi-dimensional and reaches out in all directions; and human beings are not at the centre of things.

I am saying here that we have to place ourselves differently in the schema before we can ever get to a point where we can see the pattern rather than the line; to start to act as if we are truly all within and part of that pattern. The spiritual intuition is that we are all connected. Connection is all well and good, but like most human-based schema it connects ‘I’ – the human being – with some other transcendent version or imagined extrapolation of ‘human’ (gods, God, universal consciousness, Gaia), rather than looking around to the material Earth we live upon and the lifeforms we share it with.

Placing ourselves differently in the world – ecologising in other words – might be a prerequisite to living differently in relation to the Earth and its systems (including human systems). This mind-shift requires humility, discipline, imagination and grounding – it’s all too easy to get caught by spiritual bypassing and political expediency – wherever you sit on the spiritual and political spectrums.

Ecologising requires interdependent thinking and integral practices. It asks us to see the world and its lifeforms as part of our own complex human ecology, not as ‘out there’. Not to see us as ‘us’ and everything else as ‘other-than’, but to sense the diverse and beautiful experiential worlds that all of us contribute to the pattern. And it invites us to connect, entwine and integrate the imaginal creations of our minds – our stories, poetry, music, art – with science, technology and the other more ‘material’ knowledge, within this ‘ecology of mind’, as Gregory Bateson terms it.

One ‘ecology’ we should seek to be intimately familiar with is that of our own body. We experience the world through our embodied perceptions, and it is through our embodied sensing of others that we relate to the world: to the other humans in our close-in circles and wider spheres, to the immediate ecosystems that surround us, and to the wider biosphere.

All this is ever-changing, ever-evolving. The way we perceive and experience this ecological self, is via what David Abram called “the body’s silent conversation with things”. He wrote in ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’ that: “The sensing body is not a programmed machine but an active and open form, continually improvising its relation to things and to the world. The body’s action and engagements are never wholly determined, since they must ceaselessly adjust themselves to a world and a terrain that is itself, continually shifting”.3

Our bodies senses interdependency, and this - when brought to mind - is how we experience our relationship with the world. Or, conversely, when we fail to tune in to the body’s moment-by-moment engagements, adjustments and adaptations to what is around us – and crucially with the diversity of what it might mean to be in a human body – we again swallow the myth of this ‘pattern that is a line’, coming to believe that there is one kind of privileged body and mind that is to be striven for.

We are all now living with the cultural, economic, industrial and ecological consequences of this pattern that is not a pattern; the privileged self that is not an ‘I’. These times are terrible and scary, and have carried us to the edge of global disaster. However, we can remind ourselves of a state of mind that can be held in our diverse and different minds and bodies – that of ecologising. So, as we step purposely towards the next rung of the ladder to climb, or the next stage of the quest to conquer, we could perhaps stop and remind ourselves of the infinitely more complex reality: the interdependent ecosystems – frames within frames within frames – that offer us the widest possible contexts for human and other-than-human life on earth.

Soul Manifestos introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE. You can find the full series as it grows HERE.

Soul Manifestos 2024/25

#07 : Transitional

“In the transitional zone / between earth and sea, / soul and spirit flow / through rock pools and reefs / seaweeds, lightly rooted, / are fed by the daily ebb and flow, / ripped by storm tides / soul flows out to sea / and spirit fixes tight to land; / the sky is always silver / once the storm is through.”

Transitional, poem by Steve Thorp, from PoetryMix 2, Raw Mixture, 2019

If we could pull back from cultural certainty, we might experience the ebbs and flows of the world; the natural currents, rhythms and connections that underpin everything we are and everything we do. And we might begin to understand that these fundamental, inexorable forces – which have been there before humans emerged and will be there when we are gone – are utterly separate from the concerns of human beings.

That’s not to say that human concerns are unimportant. They are important to humans; and they are important to the non-human world in as much as we have affected the wellbeing and integrity of the planet and its non-human lifeforms. And they are important in that understanding our ‘nature’ – as evolved relational lifeforms with a capacity for deep communication and understanding – might (or might not) help us get through the next tricky bit of the human journey.

We owe it to ourselves to focus on what we can do together in the wider contexts and frameworks that the world presents us with — both in ‘natural’ and ‘manufactured’ form:

Natural: we live in a world we evolved to live upon. We are animals that learned to fly and make meaning — but animals still. We live embedded in our lands and the natural phenomena of Earth. Whenever we are in our natural ‘ecosystems’, we have the invitation to ‘lean into’ the Earth – to be reminded of our natural inheritance; to be part of these deep patterns and systems.

Manufactured: we live in a global civilisation created by humans – for better and for worse. Some of us are privileged to live in parts of the world where the better has come to outweigh the bad. However, we all have to live within the context of the consequences that humankind has created in recent decades – the climate emergency being the foremost, but not the only challenge we face.

In this transitional zone, imagination and creativity ebbs and flows. If we are lucky, we get to live soulful lives with plenty of love and, yes, grief – the essential ingredients for learning how to live within our limitations. These two – love and grief – require us to embrace vulnerability, hesitation and uncertainty. These are the tools of a well-lived life leading, paradoxically, to joy and engagement. They ask us to be gently curious; to examine and value the lives and motivations of others; lead us to the heart of our compassionate nature.

The task is not personal growth, but the sustenance of curiosity and mutual learning – what Nora Bateson calls ‘symmathesy’.2 Sometimes wounding and trauma get in the way of learning and healing might be needed, though suffering leads to compassion and wisdom too.

There is more than one kind of trauma, of course. The collective traumas of the Holocaust, colonialist exploitation and genocide and those we face in our ‘climate minds’ or ‘ecological selves’ sit alongside the personal traumas some of us suffer in our personal histories.

That’s not to underplay the effects of personal trauma, but it might be important to recognise that facing suffering with compassion and gentleness and finding meaning in vulnerability, hesitation, uncertainty, grief and love, can sometimes get us through. Together. Maybe this is all that can get us through.

All these traumas and teachings are enmeshed in much broader contexts. How it plays in my life is not the way it will play in yours. Coming to know ourselves well enough to live with the personal and collective traumas we face is a soulful life practice. Healing and searching might be clearly necessary for some of us, as we learn to overcome the internalised and external obstacles in our current lives and our historical experiences. However healing paths can become addictive and circular, keeping us exploring the endless depths of wounding that lie in the cultural labyrinths of our self.

At some time, we have to settle, and face up. To accept that this is who I am. That these are the things I do in the world; these are the things that have happened to me; that these are the contexts and ecosystems I am embedded within. That all this matters. And to understand the simple wisdoms of love, mutuality, presence and care.

Soul Manifestos introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it soon with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE. You can find the full series as it grows HERE.

Soul Manifestos 2024/25

#06 : A paradox of self and soul

1. Self and soul

The soul calls individuality to itself – claims it as birthright – creates an entirely unique ‘self’ to represent it in the world. Paradoxically, this self is not special in any way, or above or beyond another. That is to say, each person – self /soul – is special, but none has any more value than another.

Every self is interdependent with every other self; every soul with every other soul, through the common truths of life and existence. ‘Self’ is an other-than-human thing too. If we accept that we are interdependent, interrelating selves, then this includes relating to the individuality of the other myriad lifeforms we encounter and engage with throughout our lives.

In these breaking times, it is more important than ever to be open to this deep truth. Life can seem cheap and transient. Or else, some lives are infinitely more valued than others. Human empires have been created and recreated, sustaining the falsehood of ‘civilised’ and ‘barbarian’ selves, and these distinctions and the inequalities that stem from them leach poison into the politics and ecologies of our times.

The challenges that lie ahead for humans are perhaps greater than any we have faced before. Maybe we could meet them if we were able to draw the best from our individuality and collectivity? There would inevitably be deep shadows cast, and endings to be faced, accepted and mourned. More often though, these days, it seems as if the possibilities for redemption are fading fast.

2. The tree

In a garden was a tree I spoke with one summer – a few weeks after my Mum had died in 2018. This tree had smooth peeling bark that it shed in wide parchment-like swathes. It was the only tree – the only ‘self’ – I could have spoken with in this way at that time. I would not have been able to share these words with any other being:

I will write this poem on your smooth skin 
and in that way speak to you 
Then speak to me; tell me what you grieve for; 
tell me your slow and ancient longing 
 is this your voice, or mine? 

If soul calls individuality to itself, and self, in turn, is about connection, then the paradox of soul-making (if we can still speak of such a task) is held in the tension between the two positions, creating for each of us an ecological mesh in which we are all held (me, you and Tree), and in which we all evolve, grow, develop and die.

My mum was an old woman when she died, but her time was not the slow time of the tree — nor even the flickering animal quickness that we humans find difficult to follow, and often overlook. These small selves we fail to notice live alongside big selves we are in awe of. At our worst, we dismiss the essence of self that emerges at the heart of all human and other-than-human life – whatever we might name them. Yet, how can we be changed, how can we grow to truly know ourselves, if we do not engage with all other ‘selves’ as if they are soulful?

When an old woman dies we feel loss and grief (perhaps even some relief). When a young person dies before their ‘time’ the grief is harder. But a tree or a bird? We don’t know what the tree feels or does when death comes upon it after countless years, only that it dies as the old woman does – ceasing to exist as an individual self.

All dead lifeforms leave something behind. This might be a ripple of memory or a mystery of soul – or something as mundane and tragic as a pile of rubble, or as ordinary as a handful of rotted wood and soil. So, be a slow soul with tree, a quick soul with bird. Be an individual and be the connection. Sit in your place in the web and talk to the world: “Speak to me and tell me what you grieve for; tell me your slow and ancient longing”.2

3. Paradox

Love can be selfish and inward looking. If we love our families but not our neighbours; if we love our home but not the Earth; if we love humanity, but not the other-than-human, then our love and grieving will be partial and self-centred, and our dying will continue to be fearful.

In order to grieve the Earth, we need to learn to love it. And love is as much about connection, attachment and embeddedness, as it is about emotion. It is also about intimate knowledge and discovery — making conscious again what we once knew as children (“children know they are made of the same stuff as grass”, Jay Griffiths memorably wrote3), and what we know deep down as humans who evolved to live and love upon this planet.

Yet, we can treat it (the planet) and each other with such brutality. Or some of us do; those whose strange versions of morality and normality mean they claim the right to plunder, judge and kill with little regard for inevitable outcomes, nor for the lives of other humans and other non-human beings.

These are the men who crave and build empires, those giant entities of human folly, power and destruction. The paradox is that these men are human too and, to some extent, we allow and enable their behaviour. They are capable of ordinary, soulful lives, yet choose to separate out their own selves and souls (and self-interest) from the selves and souls of others. They twist, subvert and break the Golden Rule, with impunity, it seems, as if they had never even heard of its simple, beautiful mutuality and reciprocity.

That is to say, we live in a world of paradoxes and inversions in which the human mind is twisted against itself, and the natural, relational norms of humanity subverted and despoiled.

Soul Manifestos introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE.

Note: Since I wrote this piece - itself an update of a previous post – my own father died (at the end of September 2024). He was a very old man, not a far-too-young-to-die man like Greg Gilbert (the main subject of this piece) and his death was not unexpected, but his dying adds context to my reflection. I decided not to change the piece, to leave it as it is, but responded directly to my Dad’s death in my last post HERE and so it’s there in the background…

Soul Manifestos 2024

#05 : Love makes a mess of dying

I came across Greg Gilbert’s work when he was lead singer with Delays, a Southampton based indie band, somewhere in the mid-noughties. His voice was distinctive and beautiful, and the band made intelligent, moving pop music — including two albums, Faded Seaside Glamour and You See Colours, that I consider to be among of the best of the decade. After four albums with the band, Greg increasingly focussed on creating visual art as much as music. Then, in 2016, he received a diagnosis of stage 4 bowel cancer with secondary lung. He had two small daughters, and a fiercely loving and articulate partner, and their story is poignant and moving.

2019 saw a further creative chapter in Greg’s story with the publication of a pamphlet of his poetry, Love Makes a Mess of Dying,2 which is heartrending, truthful and beautiful. All through, he carried on painting and recording his experiences on social media, until his death on the 30th September 2021.

The reason I am writing about Greg is that, in his art and poetry, and through his life, he connected dying with love and pushed neither away. We all need to die, and wouldn’t it also be great if we could learn to die and grieve ‘wise’ (as Stephen Jenkinson might say)  bringing together the lessons of life with the inevitability of death — both for us humans as individuals and as cultural, collective beings?

However, things don’t tie up nicely, and Greg’s story didn’t just finish when he died. He left a grieving family – including his brother, Aaron, who was also his best friend and collaborator in the Delays. Greg died a public death – not in a big, iconic way, but there was an outpouring of love and recognition for his life and art on social media and beyond from many people, who like myself, had followed his band and story.

His wife, Stacey Heale, struggled massively with the loss, of course, but also with the double-binds and emotional knots, dead-ends and imbalances she found herself subject to. She has chronicled this journey over the past years on social media and now in her new book, Now is Not the Time for Flowers: What No One Tells You About Life, Love and Loss, published just a few months ago.

As Greg’s own book title said it, “love makes a mess of dying”, but dying also makes a mess of love, connection, expectation and obligation and all the realities that emerge starkly when the person who was dying, dies. It is often the people left behind who have to deal with the mess, of course, and we are forced to face death, in our own ways, whether we want to or not.

This imperative to face death isn’t a new concern. You might think we’d have got it right by now, this dying and grieving business, but, as Stephen Jenkinson points out, somewhere along the way, in this culture at least, we have become death-phobic: “It isn’t pain, after all that is unendurable. It isn’t living that is undoable. It is dying in a death-phobic time and place”. He goes on: “Death phobia…is not culture. It is anti-culture. It multiplies wherever culture is under attack, especially when it is failing from within”.

Greg Gilbert wasn’t immune to this fear - none of us who have grown up with this cultural phobia can be – but I think he tried to face it; to bring dying into the centre of the room. “I need to get my gods in order, they have grown unruly…”, he wrote; and, as if in reply, Stephen Jenkinson suggests: “Try it this way: What if your dying is an angel? And what if your dying job, should you choose to accept it, is to wrestle this angel of your dying instead of fighting it?”

As I was writing this, I found out that Stephen Jenkinson himself is now facing his own muscular angel. Having been writing, touring, teaching and speaking for years on the ways we can face death – individually and in our families and culture – he is ill and dying too, and faces the contradictions and challenges that this grounding truth brings. In a moving letter to his subscribers at the end of May 2024, he wrote:

“When someone tells you news that he/she has told five hundred before you, it comes across as barely news. It’s rote, and it’s your turn, and that’s it. Part of the disease-brief protocol I was told: “There’ll be good days, and bad days.” Which has turned out to be rigorously, unspectacularly, allopathically true.”

To hear that terminal illness is an ordinary, allopathic reality from someone who has been articulating his rigorous, unspectacular spiritual truths for many years is somehow comforting. He is not reaching for miracles, but recognises that to simply practise – in the form of blessings and love sent virtually and in person – has merit and is to be welcomed.

I do wonder whether he still thinks about wrestling the angel – it feels a very energetic thing to do when physical energy is at such a premium! If so, then such an act might involve a recognition that grief is something we all can do – together – whether we are the person dying or one of those around them as they die. Grief is there within us as we prepare to lose someone, and also if we are the person who is to be ‘lost’. Grief is the sharp reminder that might be important to to stay in the room; to stay with the love and the pain:

“Whatever tricks I tell myself to deaden before dying —
That I’m alone, that alone is the essential state — comes
Undone at the sight of love and I’m afraid, not of dying,
But of leaving a mess for love.”

(Greg Gilbert, 2019).

Soul Manifestos introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it this year, in an anniversary edition with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content also mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE.

Soul Manifestos 2024

#04 : The Crucible of Context

The alchemy of soul-making take place in the crucible of context. In cultures where the ‘ecological’ is still an integral part of the understanding of the self, a practice of soul-making perhaps has more ease than in places where we have lost, or are losing, our connection with Earth. However, there are few places these days where humans are free of the enticements, demands and brutalities of market-capitalism, neoliberalism and increasing authoritarianism; so ‘soul’ can be lost – with tragic results – in indigenous and post-modern societies alike.

Soul-making is an attempt to find ‘soul’ – to be soulful in life – even in the places where this might seem to be hopelessly difficult. It is not a ‘developmental’ task – nor concerned with ‘growth’ in economic , spiritual or social evolutionary senses – but one of lifelong curiosity, mutual contextual learning and collective  ecological and social engagement.

Soul-making recognises that humans change as we grow; that there are transitions between different parts in our lives that we have to negotiate. Childhood. Adolescence. Early adulthood and, possibly, parenthood. Perhaps then there are periods in which we might experience a mastery of craft or vocation, and periods that are barren and frustrating. Dead-ends in life, or worse. Then, for some fortunate enough to reach it, ‘Elderhood’, which might or might not hold learned wisdom, but can also be a time of attenuation, diminishment, loss and endings.

The point is that we  can and will live in all these places and times with or without ‘soul’, with all the consequences of this for our wellbeing and happiness. Throughout all this, we carry the shadows, wounds and vulnerabilities of our humanity, but we may learn – if we are lucky and spend time paying attention to these things – how to face them and integrate them more fully and authentically into our self – or ‘soul’.

This  crafting — ‘soul-making’ — may be how we can become more ourselves as human beings, as human animals, as inhabitants of Earth, as lifeforms who evolved to live on a small blue planet somewhere in some place in a vast universe: “We are significant — insignificant; a centre that is no centre. We are jewel, starlight and spinning dust”.2

The context for soul-making is also the world we make for ourselves — not just one we were evolved to live upon. This ‘world’ of humans is dominated by a particular political and economic system that emerged over the past few hundred years. It has brought great benefits for some humans and great trauma and pain for many others. This ‘system’ is not a natural condition for humans, any more than any other cultural system or civilisation has and will be, and it will give way to another in time.

The world is now faced with the greatest of challenges that has emerged from this systemic, complex and interwoven set of emergencies — with the scourge of human-made climate change at their heart. This ‘hyperobject’ of a crisis (to utilise Timothy Morton’s concept) dwarfs all the other crises that humans have faced and created. Psychologically, we seem to be unable to face it and the consequences it is already bringing, let alone those that will come to dominate our lives in generations to come.

Whatever emerges, we will need the capacity  to face the future and to develop the understanding and resilience to live human lives in this Brave New World. This will require great imagination, creativity, connection and a deep trust in our own inherent soulfulness, in order to create a bridge to whatever we can craft for our lives to come.

This cannot be an individual task – but individuals will have to take it on. Those of us who have faith in the future, and in the capacity of humans to ‘make soul’ individually and collectively, will have to start and sustain this work (with no guarantee of success), guiding others gently towards their own personal ‘acorn’, and to the collective, transcontextual ‘soul’ in the world –  to re-discover, as James Hillman might say: “the reason we are alive”.

This is, of course, a profoundly spiritual task. Not the flickering spirit of light and transcendence, nor the by-passing of the troubles in our collective and personal psyches with quick fixes and easily appropriated cultural beliefs, but one that requires grounded and spirited, Earth-centred labour undertaken with internal honesty and external service.

Next time in this series: Soul Manifestos #05 - Love Makes a Mess of Dying

Soul Manifestos 2024 - a new series

Introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it this year, in an anniversary edition with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content also mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE.

Soul Manifestos 2024

#03 : Soulmaking for broken times

‘Soul’ is a powerful word. The moment we utter it — this rounded, soft little evocation— we are flooded with meaning. In speaking it, if we are not careful, we place ourselves in one camp or another. The materialists who say that there is no ‘seat of the soul’ in the physical body. The spiritual and religious folk who claim that being human is to have experiences of a self beyond our self – a mystery inviting faith, ritual and worship.

This, however, accepts the premise of a polarity that demands that we take sides...

There are mysteries: phenomena to be inquired into as future knowledge unfolds. For spiritual folk, these mysteries testify to the existence something beyond the here-and-now — proof of different ‘realms’ and energies beyond the scientific ‘method’.  Something ‘sacred’. I feel drawn to track something more existential than these narrow, sterile materialist vs non-dual polarities allow. To steer from naive constructions that claim to integrate science and spirit using magical misreadings of  ‘quantum’ physics and related ideas. Deepak Chopra has a lot to answer for…

The word ’soul’, however, might be the closest we have in our language for a particular experience of ’self’ — one that holds mystery and integrity; is authentic and  connected. One that feels like ‘me in the world’. When something is ‘soulful’ we don’t mistake this experience for anything else. And when we are trapped within the opposite experience — that is, when ‘soul’ is said to be lost or missing — then life is as bad as it gets. Then we are in the psychological and spiritual wasteland, irrespective of outer circumstances.

Nevertheless, the circumstances many face in these broken times are difficult and terrible. And people can still be ‘soulful’ as they face hardship, seeking new ways of living with each other and the Earth – though this is not a given. Perhaps, though, this task is what soul-making is about — the ways we can live authentic lives in times that are decidedly messed up? And maybe ‘soul making’ must also be about influencing circumstances as best we can – to alleviate suffering and make good the conditions for thriving collective living.

What, though, is a ‘soul’ to be made? A thing? Something tangible or mythical?

These are the questions that James Hillman asked and set out to answer. They are intractable questions in times where science and religion seem embattled, and world-views fundamentally divided. And yet Hillman writes, in the first line of his masterpiece, The Soul’s Code: “There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow”.2

What more is there? Well, there is – according to Hillman – fate, calling, character, story and “a reason I am alive” that speaks: “…to the feeling that there is a reason my unique person is here and that there are things I must attend to beyond the daily round and that give the daily round its reason, feeling that the world somehow wants me to be here, that I am answerable to an innate image, which I am filling out in my biography”.

Soul, in this reading, is the innate image of each one of us. We might think of the nurturance and growth of the original ‘acorn’ of our self — this mythical seed of potential and motivation — as a first strand of soul-making.

There has to be more – we know this now. Soul – authentic living – is about connection, being human, being animal, being in the ecology we evolved to exist within, and living with all that this existential mystery implies. However, we are in grave danger of losing something integral and essential: our place in a complex, evolved and ever-changing ecology of earth and mind. Over centuries of colonialism and relentless fossil-fuelled growth, expansion and exploitation, the thread of life is fraying.

So, ‘soul’, even as it might be experienced as ‘innate image’, must also be embedded within and interdependent with a ‘deeply interwoven’ mesh that holds us all, as Timothy Morton puts it. This mesh, though isn’t just for holding or framing, but allows for much more complexity, imperfection, unpredictability and change: “‘Mesh’ can mean both the holes in a network, and the threading between them. It suggests both hardness and delicacy … By extension, ‘mesh’ can mean ‘a complex situation or series of events in which a person is entangled”3

What our theories have allowed, over recent years, are stories of life that have become, on the one hand, increasingly and reductively biochemical and linear; on the other, caught up with Gods and gods whose word and authority (interpreted through self-appointed priests, clerics, mediums and channellers) justifies any action — including the soul-breaking exploitation of Earth, its lifeforms and peoples, and the appropriation of mystery into a literal adherence to spiritual tenets.

Soul-making might be a theory (or story) that could be so much more than this. It might allow for the human self to be regarded and experienced with complexity; through the inherently social make-up of the human species and the love, altruism and cooperation that represents the evolved best in all of us. Through the inherently ecological embedding of the human species in the world we live in and share with the other-than-human. And for each one of us, through the original acorn (Hillman’s simple metaphor) of individuality that carries our potential , mythology, story and truth.

Next time in this series: Soul Manifestos #04 - The Crucible of Context

Soul Manifestos 2024 - #02 in a new series

Introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it this year, in an anniversary edition with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content also mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade. You can find the Series Introduction and first ‘chapter’ in this new series HERE.

Soul Manifestos 2024

#02 : A Question of Dying

The answer may have nothing to do with our life on earth, nor have recognisable reference points, even from the most ancient human wisdoms and spiritual traditions. If I was to hazard an answer to this question, I might say that ‘soul’ resides, and is made, only in the present – the eternal now – and that this might be as far as I can get without anthropocentric or devoutly religious speculation, neither of which I wish to embark upon.

What then does ‘good’ dying really mean, if soulmaking is to mean anything within the transcontextual interactions and understandings we will need to address the most urgent tasks facing us?2 There are multiple contexts in which to consider this – here in this precarious, transitional time in human (and other-than-human) history here on Planet Earth.

In any case, these questions arise from pseudo-spiritual assumptions and a turn away from the genocides and trauma through which many humans (and non-humans) die. When I read Stephen Jenkinson’s writings in Die Wise and elsewhere,3 it’s easy to accept the assumption that what we are dealing with is a natural spiritual process – with purpose and meaning – a question with individual and cultural answers. However, sometimes death is something cruelly and brutally inflicted upon individuals and whole communities through the purposeful violence of other humans.

There’s such a contradiction in this – a rupture in the belief that death should be regarded as part of the ‘whole’ and ‘holy’ life task of soul-making. Yet, it’s those who live who get to write words about dying – even if we have suffered along the way. The voices of the dead are always lost to us. We can’t ask them how they feel about it!

Death and dying have always concerned writers, poets, theologians and psychologists. There is a recognition that the end of the individual human self is an important dimension of ‘soulmaking’ (aka spiritual life). However, regardless of everything else that happens around us, the self (social, ecological and original) will cease to exist in a matter of time. All of us, whose experience of existence is held so personally, has to come to terms with and go through this experience.

Here lies the collective, connected complexity of ‘soul’. Whether we regard ‘soul ‘as something real and tangible, or otherwise deeply metaphorical, there is something essential to be faced in the death of our shared experience of life. We are all faced with the inevitability of this ending. Previous civilisations all crumbled and died, much as we as individuals one day will be gone. There are buildings and lost dwelling places – cities even – hidden in the depths of forests, lakes and oceans, covered over by the unrelenting growth of ‘nature’, and the unremitting march of time.

Within this connected experience of the death of self and soul, there are ecological implications, unique to our epoch of human history. Never before have we been faced, as a globally self-conscious species, with the sure knowledge that humans have caused the collapse of the ecosystems that sustain us.

Which humans though? The world is literally controlled by oligarchs, billionaires and neo-liberal corporations, politicians and generals. Furthermore, the decisions to ignore the ravages of climate disaster, and to minimise and deny the colonialist exploitation and genocides that have gone alongside it, have been made in boardrooms, war-rooms and parliaments over the centuries.

This is a stark psychological and political anomaly that separates the majority of humans – largely altruistic, relational, complex creatures that we are – from many of the humans that rule and control us; a society of altruists governed by psychopaths, as George Monbiot has put it.4

Faced with such challenges, we need multiple ways of seeing. We need ‘all kinds of everything’ in terms of relational ‘doing'. That’s why ethical, secular ‘soulmaking’ might be such an essential task – albeit one with many dimensions and contradictions. In such a frame, the challenge of the personal death is brought together with the probable end of the civilisation we have come to experience as ’normal life’. This is a crucial ecological insight that acknowledges an eternal truth, that life and growth depend upon death and decay; and civilisations end and fall just like every spark of life that has ever emerged.

But there is so much grief in this realisation. So much human pain.

This existential truth carries a seed of soul within it – if soul carries the mutuality and humanity of the commons – that also essentially includes other-than-human life. If life is precious – if soulful life is a birthright, then death is both a teacher – “an angel to be wrestled with”, as Stephen Jenkinson might put it5– and an sign that all life is precious, even if its meaning is sometimes opaque and obscure. Mysterious in the sense of not yet being known…

Next time in this series: Soul Manifestos #03 - Soulmaking for broken times

Soul Manifestos 2024 - a new series

Series introduction

In 2014, I published a book of short poetic essays, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy1. The book, illustrated by my longtime collaborator (and daughter) Ruth Thorp, is currently out of print but has continued to be well received over several editions. We are hoping to re-publish it this year, in an anniversary edition with a new end-piece essay to acknowledge the changes in context over the past decade.

Since its publication, I’ve written more about ‘soul’ – as metaphor, as idea, as experience, as ‘self’, as ecology of mind, as collective psyche. Versions of some of these pieces appeared on my Medium platform, but have now been reworked for this new Unpsychology Voices series. As background, you can also find a couple of longer keynote essays (Making Soul? and On soul, therapy and transcontextuality) here on Unpsychology, together with some responses, counterpoints and source pieces by guest writers, Nora Bateson, Chris Robertson and Susan Holliday. Their words and ideas, and particularly those of my fellow Unpsychology editors, , and , have had a profound impact on my own work, writing and practice.

Looking back/stepping forward

Back in 2014, in the introduction to Soul Manifestos, I wrote:

I am suspicious of grand visions and theories, but trust imagination and simplicity as tools for good. Some of the people I most admire give small beauties to the world, and live their life with small rhythms and patterns. Here, I have tried to write of a simple, grounded intelligence, and of ways we can work together to integrate such small wisdoms into a practical activism for the future.

and continued:

…these small manifestos are written for wonder, wisdom, joy, love, openness and engagement, and for the common-wealth, common good and the good earth. And they are written against oppression, destruction, ignorance, literalism, certainty, determinism and the hypocritical justifications for continuing on the same path we have been walking down blindly for the past century or two.

Looking back at the book now, there are some things I notice.

My faith in the poetic and literary voice and image, and my trust in the visions and best-in-class, ethical materialism of science, were strong in those pages and remain so for me still. Since then I have discovered newer voices that attempt to bring these things together in exciting, illuminating and very different ways (Carlo Rovelli2 and Nora Bateson,3 in particular, come to mind, but there are many others). These people and their work carry the potential for something truly integrative and ecological, that keeps a clear perspective on what is possible – without throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and resorting to literal certainties or descending into conspiracism.

Looking back on the book now, there were also areas that could have had more elaboration, and it is on these corners of the human experience that I hope to focus in this new series of short essays. These pieces are written in a similar style to the original small essays in the book – short, poetic and personal – and their content also mirrors the concerns that Unpsychology has been addressing in the past decade.

There’s nothing definitive about any of these pieces. They explore more than illuminate, I suspect, but I’d welcome responses and pieces that might elaborate upon or provide counterpoints to these words and experiences.

To begin with, below are the final words in the book, Soul Manifestos and Pieces of Joy, published back in 2014. They seem like a good place to start again with now…

Soul Manifestos 2024

#01 : Beginnings/Endings

When my Mum died early in June 2018, after being ill with Alzheimers for a number of years, her dying held deep sorrow, but also a sense of relief. She was a wonderful presence, but her lingering death was hard on her, on her family and particularly on my Dad. The distress felt by those who loved her was partly to do with her loss of ‘self’ and the deterioration of her mind so that, in the end, she had no recognition of anything or anyone. There were flickers of her mischievous personality, but these were all too rare, and her decline was not benign. She suffered greatly, and so did her husband of six decades, to the point where he would return in so much distress, from his daily visits to her care home , that he self-medicated with alcohol.

Her death coincided with my preoccupation with other endings too. In particular, the climate emergency that threatens us with a different kind of dying – a social and cultural one in which the world and human civilisation we take for granted will change beyond all recognition.

Mum’s dying, and this contemplation of more extensive, existential loss, led me back to ‘soul-making' – a practice I’d been working with these past few years but had, ironically, felt more and more ambiguous to me the deeper I found myself in the practice! I realised, however, that these experiences of loss offered me a further piece of the ‘soul-making’ puzzle: how to become ‘soulful ‘in life – practising to live with deep engagement and joy – through facing our dying with understanding and courage.

Dying – ending – is the final chapter of ‘soul making’ – one that brings it all together, at the scale of the individual human or other-than-human life-form; but also at a wider, collective level too. The final act of every life, every story, every day – is the relinquishment of life – a kind of trust in absence.

So, how does ‘soul’ die in its making? And more specifically how does ‘soul’ that has been crafted over a lifetime, make sense of its own ending?

It’s a dilemma. While we are alive, we can all sometimes feel a little bit immortal. It’s hard to imagine another state of being (or non-being) that isn’t this one. We all know we will die, the evidence is incontrovertible, yet getting our heads around it is one of the most difficult things we can do in living – until, perhaps, we are faced with its reality in front of us in the shape of a dying human (or other-than-human companion) and the end of their particular life. Though, in time, our memory may still fade a little and we might feel a little bit immortal again – living on, until the next time.

There’s another dimension too. The temporality of life – all life – is one thing, but we (thinking self-aware, reflective creatures that we are) can extend the fantasy of immortality, and being in control of time, to our species, civilisation and culture. This happens, even though the vast span of time in which we humans have lived for a relative eye-blink of a moment, is pretty relentless. Eventually all species will die. Humans, as a species, will die. The planet, as a complex ecosystem of life-forms, will die.

And on and on and further out…

I often find it difficult to accept that those who argue that human consciousness represents ‘the universe becoming aware of itself’, can really believe this to be true. Surely, they misunderstand, or ignore, the utter vastness of the universe, and the insignificance of human lifeforms in the wider scheme of things? They may understand something that I don’t, but either way, death is not a thing that responds well to human fantasy. It is relentless and ultimately answers all our human questions. Yet, if ‘soul’ is to be made, albeit ever-changing and incomplete until the end, then death is the act that completes it.

It’s hard to see how my Mum’s soul was ‘made’ by the death she had. Seen through the eyes of those who loved her, there was only desolation and pain – a lack of soul, or something being lost. However, something diminishing doesn’t mean it’s goes completely (until it does of course). Mum’s gradual and awful attenuation nevertheless still has a mystery about it.

Where is she? Where did she go? Was she still her ‘self’ until the end?

The speculation is subjective. It comes from within each of our lives. Mum was a living, soulful part of a transcontexual ecology of mind – and then she wasn’t. She remains as a ripple in our lives, and as an ancestor in the ecological, trans-generational contexts of our times – but as a living soul, she has gone. And this is where this story begins. With the death of a loved one – an ordinary/extraordinary happening that most humans will experience. The loss itself is part of the making of a soul. Then the soul is made – incomplete and unfinished perhaps – and the spark blinks out as we die.

Next time in this series: Soul Manifestos #02 - A question of dying