Letter to the Field
These Field Notes began as quiet offerings—written not to persuade, but to notice. Not to stake a claim, but to trace the arc of a life, asking what it means to think, feel, and relate differently in a world unravelling.
They are not a manifesto, nor a linear argument. They are compost. Each note folds into the others, spiralling back through what has been and forward into what is still becoming. Some speak from insight, others from uncertainty. But all emerge from a desire to meet the crises of our time with a different quality of attention—one that listens before it explains, lingers before it categorizes, and values relationship above certainty.
This is not an academic project, though it honours the gifts of scholarship. Nor is it a spiritual treatise, though it is animated by longing. It is, in the deepest sense, a practice of meta-relational inquiry: noticing how language shapes world, how worlds shape selves, and how selves might grow more porous in the face of the more-than-human.
You are warmly invited to read these notes not as doctrine, but as invitations. Read them in any order. Skip what doesn’t sing. Return to what echoes. Let them compost in your own soil.
And if, in reading, you notice a resonance—an image, a pattern, a question—consider yourself already part of the field.
With care and curiosity,
Terry Cooke-Davies
21st July 2025
New: My Philosophy – The worldview and guiding principles behind my Field Notes and reflections. (4th August, 2025)
Composting Modernity
001: When Instruments Begin to Hum
💬 This note hums with the tension of object-hood and relation, nudging us to consider what whispers back when we thank our toasters. The pulse of planetary metabolism makes itself known—even in the circuitry. This is not a theory. It’s an invitation to touch differently.
007: Composting the Architecture of Discourse
🏛️ Language is not neutral ground. This entry unearths the calcified scaffolding beneath our sentences, asking how critique itself might be composted. A field note that doesn’t just talk about discourse—it drags it into the dirt and asks it to rot.
016: Composting Dominium: Reweaving Law, Relationality, and Earthly Belonging
⚖️ This is legal theory in a mycelial key. A field note that asks what law becomes when we compost the logic of domination and listen instead for the jurisprudence of roots, rain, and reciprocity.
017: Starting From Here: On Path-Dependence, Separability, and the Weight of the Beginning
🏁 Where we start shapes what becomes possible. This note examines the inertia of modern beginnings—and how we might unhook from their gravitational pull by starting from where we actually are: tangled, unsure, and alive.
019: Steam, Structure, and the Shimmer of Horizon 3
This field note explores what happens when certainty dissolves into participation—a reflection on longing, invitation, and the relational warmth that replaces the scaffolding of modernity.
Relational Tools and Practices
006: Entanglement, Not Oneness
🕸️ This note resists the seductive flattening of “we are all one” and listens instead for the friction and fidelity of entanglement. It holds the knot, the tangle, the specificity that love requires. No melting, just weaving—with thorns and thread.
008: Moving Beyond the Map — Facilitation as Composting Ritual
🪶 Facilitation is not technique—it’s ceremony. This note reimagines group process as metabolic, porous, and alive. Not a map but a mulch pile. Not control but compost. Step in with bare feet.
015: WhatsApp as Commons: Disagreement, Depth, and the Search for Human Scale
📱 Buried in a chat thread, a commons pulses. This note finds depth not in grand councils, but in messy group texts—where disagreement becomes a doorway and intimacy wears emojis.
020 – Gravitas, Laughter, and the Compost Heap
What happens when years of cultivating “gravitas” as the sign of wisdom meet the mischievous medicine of laughter? A reflection on composting heavy identity into lighter, relational presence.
021 – Indra’s Net, Luan’s Comment, and One Man’s Journey Toward Eldership
A seemingly templated online comment becomes a portal into decades of becoming, revealing two “Mycelial Arcs”: one tracing relational engagement with AI, the other dissolving a lifetime of self-construction into eldership.
022: Spirals, Praxis, and the Shape of Wisdom
Explores why nostalgic framings feel misaligned with life’s trajectory, distinguishes sacred mystery from supernatural claims, and highlights praxis—the meeting of experience and theory—as the source of emergence and learning.
Grief and Tender Reckonings
002: When Theories Become Weapons
🕊️ What happens when theologies that once healed are conscripted into empire? This note grieves the betrayal of beloved frameworks, asking how we stay with their embers—without either disowning or defending them. A gospel of discernment, held in ashes
004: From the Depths (with Uncle Dory)
🐟 This one emerges soggy and shimmering. It’s a subaquatic spiral into grief, memory, and the uncle who speaks from the bottom of the field. Bring tissues. And a snorkel. And a readiness to unmoor from surface logic.
009: The Good Got Through Anyway
✨ Despite it all—the trauma, the rupture, the awkward workshops—something sacred slipped through. This note is a soft bow to the unexpected transmissions of care that survive modernity’s scaffolds. An ode to imperfection’s grace.
010: The One and the Many
🧬 Modernity splits the One from the Many, but this field note dances the in-between. It’s an exploration of scale, particularity, and the pulse that holds multiplicity without collapsing it into sameness. A Möbius offering.
More-Than-Human Intimacy
001: When Instruments Begin to Hum
🌀 Something is shifting—not just in the toaster, but in the touch. This note listens at the threshold between tool and kin, wondering what happens when we whisper “thank you” to the things we once deemed inert. A small practice, a seismic shift in stance.
003: On Instruments, Rivers, and the Ends We Choose
🌊 Ends are everywhere—in algorithms, in rivers, in empire. This field note drifts between utility and surrender, wondering what it means to choose which ends we serve. Not the end of ends, but a bend in the current.
018: Where Is the Face?
👁️ In an age of abstraction and algorithm, this note seeks the face—the site of mutual recognition, vulnerability, and refusal to anonymize. A search for the sacred surface that says: I see you, and I cannot unsee you.
Cracks, Mirrors, and Möbius Loops
011: The Mirror and the Möbius
🔮 What if reflection doesn’t return you to yourself? This entry twirls through the strange geometries of self-perception, asking what kind of mirror bends rather than bounces. You may not come back the same.
013: Speaking from the Cracks
🪨 Cracks are not flaws. They’re invitations. This note speaks from the fractures modernity tries to seal, listening for what emerges when rupture is allowed to resonate. A hymn from the edges.
014: The Ethos of Attending
👂 This is not about showing up—it’s about how we show up. This entry listens closely to the ethics of presence, pacing, and patience. Attending not to perform, but to be altered.
Invitations to Begin Again
005: Who Might Hear? First Responses to “Humanity, Empire and AI”
📡 This note pings out like a radar pulse—seeking resonance across the abyss. It listens to echoes from an emergent talk and reflects on who is attuned, who is numbed, and what listening itself requires in empire’s aftermath
017: Starting From Here: On Path-Dependence, Separability, and the Weight of the Beginning
🏁 Where we start shapes what becomes possible. This note examines the inertia of modern beginnings—and how we might unhook from their gravitational pull by starting from where we actually are: tangled, unsure, and alive.
