During our 2026 gathering, a question started brewing around ‘What are the guiding principles for us when we explore a culture of care and kinship? What are the guiding principles that help us clarify if we are exploring this culture from a clear, grounded and aligned place across our different thematic strands and focus?’
After some reflection, we shared a set of principles, or areas of attention, that do and can guide our work, in-person and online.
Yet because of the nature of our inquiry, those principles don’t only guide the ‘how’ of what we do. They form part of the ‘what’ that shapes a culture of care and kinship rooted in radically shared aliveness. They show the posture we embrace, what the German language would call ‘Haltung’, how we hold ourselves together, with what inner stance we step into the world. To an extent, they sit adjacent to the capacities that are the core focus of our work.
When it came to writing up those principles, we chose to use clusters of words. There is a reason for that. If you listen to the metaphors commonly used to describe the finding of shared language, they’re hardly aligned with radically shared aliveness. ‘Capture it’, ‘nail it’, ‘pin it’. Whatever butterfly is fleeting in the room, kill it and store it under glass.
Maybe, cultivating care and kinship demands a certain level of linguistic ‘sfumatura’, a gentle haze around concepts, so that, instead of capturing, we simply gesture, indicate, invite, hint towards something which is in the fog of becoming. This is all the more important as we come together in diversity, with different languages, upbringings, socialisations and ways of thinking and engaging with the world. For the vast majority, English is not our native language. Thus we mostly feel that we would express ourselves better in a different language.
What we’re learning as we continue the journey through our inquiry is that terminology matters, including, of course, the language we use. Not only the principles themselves, but how we choose to speak about them.
What follows, then, are five areas of attention for the way we come together.
- Courage. Bravery, daring, agency. The willingness to go where others might not, but also to step up, speak, or act, if the situation calls for it.
- Presence. Attention, perceptiveness, embodiment, sensibility. The capacity to be here, fully embodied, attuned to what is actually happening with our wider ways of knowing.
- Hospitality. Plurality, diversity, More-than-human. A commitment to make room for other people, other worldviews, and the many beings, manifestations and energies beyond the human who share the field with us.
- Commitment. Shared responsibility, showing up together. Everything is interconnected and indeed intraconnected, including our resolve. It is not about any single individual, but the collective, and the individual as part of the collective, and the collective as part of the individual, as it forms over time.
- The long arc. Ancestors, future generations. A way of situating ourselves in time that reaches back and forward beyond our own lives over many generations, to act as future ancestors, upholding legacy.
To paint a culture of care and kinship, then, this is what should be present. Not as sharp lines, but looser shapes in the air. Qualities of the atmosphere. Vibes, even. Which, after all, is also what a culture is, and marks aliveness.