Restoring relations together
An invitation to explore perception, meaning, and ensouling the social as a community endeavor

An appeal to the idea of “restoring” amid the unraveling of our social fabric may evoke a range of impressions. To some, it might call to mind returning outdated and ill-conceived institutions to their former state. To others, reviving a mythic “lost” past or traditional values. More might even see rebuilding consensus among the usual players. These meanings, however, all point to the past. A retrospective feeling.
There is another perspective on “restoring,” oriented out of and within the present, that may offer helpful insights for addressing our contemporary circumstances. This “restoring” refers to the experience of understanding hitherto unapprehended, living relations in ourselves and the world. Unseen connections felt for the first time. Immediate experience revealed and deepened by itself.
Recall a moment when something familiar appeared brand new. Maybe you thought, “I hadn’t noticed that before,” or “I have a completely new relationship to it.” Whatever you experienced, you only just noticed. Yet it was there all along, unintelligible, until you developed the capacity to see it. Its idea needed to be known first.
This “restoring” is like a more comprehensive perspective. Not reliving the past, but grasping the present whole. The difficult co-worker becomes an exhausted parent and dedicated colleague. The feeling of envy, an illusory self-image and guidepost for healing. The sun, a cosmic process and being. Restoring doesn’t negate our existing connections, but expands and clarifies them through the discovery of new ones. All relations are embraced—our warts and blessings alike.
The experience of restoring is akin to the experience of originality, the felt surprise of a new insight, idea, or intuition. The “new” enters into the world this way as a living metaphor with total certainty. Once recognized, we can distinguish our mental experience of innovation, which follows mostly from actively reassembled (past) experience, from genuine creation, which springs from a spontaneous (present) source of human experience. Originality announces itself as a dynamic many-in-one, like Homer’s elusive and shapeshifting “Old Man of the Sea.” It has a sure, poetic quality.
Why attend to restoring in community now? The world is alight with crises, and perceiving one- or many-sidedly, together or alone, mirrors how we navigate them. Whether in politics, markets, and culture—or more intimately in nature, work, relationships, self, and spirit—our shared narrowness and wholeness charts the course. We all hold unique yet incomplete perspectives of the world, and by consciously tending to our perception together we can experience the fruits of many-ways-of-seeing. When wholeness is set as a shared destination, we encounter a collective ability to work from both our life-affirming qualities and a peace made with their shadows. Like artists, scientists, and botanists train each other to be like themselves, we too can ensure that the cultivation of perception is a community-wide effort that trains people to become themselves, preserving the individual’s freedom out of and within community.
Many paths lead to this experience. For restoring relations, an aim is to cultivate a different mode of thinking by gently engaging with and perceiving everyday life as it manifests in our thoughts. A gravel path, feelings over lunch, the movement of a seagull. This type of thinking relies on a receptive capacity innate within every individual. Restoring is less analytical and judgmental—and more relaxed and transparent—than our everyday, hard-willed thinking. A soft tending to our thoughts’ unfolding, like delicate omelet making. Acts of contemplative perception.
These acts reveal the world, including our attention, as ever-becoming in meaning and reciprocity, new pathways and possibilities. Amid these sensations of abundance, we still remain tethered to our woes and previous understandings of the world—nothing is erased or negated—yet our problems offer to remake themselves. Newfound relations heighten our capacity to experience more feelings more distinctly, which enliven our perception of what was once motionless with vitality. Like Jeremy Bishop’s photograph showing the Earth’s unseen rotation, they reveal the intrinsic movement always there, just undisclosed to our perception.
Choosing to engage the world restoring-ly is a challenging task to take up individually, let alone in community. Socially, we face countless structural and ideological influences opposed to integration. Individually, we encounter all our unique habits of thought, memories, prejudices, and preconceptions that constrain our perspective, many of which are painful to accept and separate ourselves from others. Even as we work with these experiences, we risk developing an inflated sense of self and a disinterest in others. Delusions of purely material and immaterial natures abound. Irony, however, is a trustworthy companion. It keeps us in good, modest spirits as we work on the quality of our attention. So can community.
My goal for “Restoring Relations” is to collaboratively research these themes and others, including epistemology and language, psychology and politics, race, class, gender and sexuality, ecology and economics, and religion and spirituality. I strive to approach all things from a place of deep interest, awe, gratitude, and reverence—and I want to do the same with topics explored on this page. I’m also interested in reporting on concrete initiatives that respond to the question, “What can we do together from a basis of restoring relations?”
Where is all this coming from? I’m inspired by “Goetheanism,” an approach to knowledge developed by poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that marries subject and object through the careful use of the imagination. This participatory approach to science goes by many names and has connections to various traditions and fields such as transpersonal psychology, participatory theory, phenomenology, integrative medicine, esotericism, shamanism, Zen Buddhism, spiritual science, and more. What fascinates me most is a turn toward direct human experience.
Reflecting on humanity’s response to global challenges, the philosopher and poet Bayo Akomolafe raised this question in his essay “A Slower Urgency”: "… what if ‘crisis’ is the ‘wrong’ way to think about the challenges we face?” Akomolafe recognizes the connection between the style of our thinking, our concepts, and our capacities. We perceive a crisis by recognizing something catastrophic. By “slowing down” together, as Akomolafe advises, we can restore relations within that something, develop new connections and concepts, and act out of them in original ways. Hidden then within a crisis lies an invitation to develop original capacities that can heal and prevent their recurrence. Rewording Akomolafe’s question to echo the spirit of this page: "… what if ‘crisis’ is the ‘preliminary’ way to think about the challenges we face?” What thinking can come next? Our world is filled with invitations.
If you are interested in collaborating, please reach out:
You can check out my latest post here for a taste of what I’m up to: