“I don’t know.”
Throughout my life, a relationship with the more-than-human world has allowed those three words to remain open. Not as an absence of understanding, but as a generous source of mystery, attention and discovery.
Many of us move through our lives accompanied by a growing sense of urgency. Pressures accumulate. Decisions demand attention. We feel required to resolve uncertainty, establish what is happening and determine what should happen next.
Our capacities for knowing are important. Yet, in becoming so focused on answers, explanations, predictions and certainty, we have lost touch with another essential capacity:
to remain present within emergence itself.
The more-than-human world reminds us that life is not something we stand outside of and observe. We participate within its continual and mysterious unfolding.
The space between not-knowing and knowing is not empty.
It is alive with emergence.
The work
My work restores and reintegrates our innate sensitivity for emergence, so that both certainty and uncertainty can be met with greater presence, discernment and compassion.
The Space Between holds a body of my work, arising from decades of living with the words “I don’t know” in open relationship with the more-than-human world of which we are all a part.
Within this space, knowing and not-knowing remain fluid in a living, continually unfolding relationship, allowing emergence to become more perceptible.
Through immersive experiences and guided practices rooted in story and the more-than-human world, I create conditions that help people, communities and organisations to remain in relationship with uncertainty, complexity and change without being overtaken by the pressure to resolve them prematurely.
This is not a rejection of knowing, certainty or action. It is an opening into a wider field of awareness from which each can find its place in the full regenerative capacities of life and our existence within it.
Here, we can stay with what is unfolding a little longer.
Long enough for something otherwise unseen to become perceptible.
Long enough for familiar assumptions to loosen.
Long enough for relationship, understanding and response to emerge in forms that knowing alone cannot reveal.
Why it matters
Urgency, control and certainty have become dominant ways of meeting change.
Sometimes urgency is real. Often, however, the demand for immediate resolution narrows our attention before the nature of what we are encountering has had time to reveal itself.
When this happens, uncertainty becomes something to overcome. Complexity is reduced to what can be readily explained. The pressure to act can separate us from the wider relationships of which every situation is a part.
The work of The Space Between reintegrates an openness for emergence.
As attention widens, pressure no longer occupies the whole field of experience. Different relationships become visible. Imagination returns. We become more able to discern what is being asked of us, including when action is needed, when something needs more space to unfold, and when our wisest participation may be to let something be.
Uncertainty does not disappear.
What changes is the space from which we meet it.
The wider field
The pressures we experience are not ours alone.
They arise within cultures that privilege speed, control and certainty, and within social, economic and organisational systems that often separate us from one another and from the more-than-human world of which we are a part.
These habits shape more than our individual lives. They influence how communities respond to difference, how organisations navigate change, and how societies meet the profound social, cultural and environmental realities unfolding around and within us.
When uncertainty is experienced only as a threat, the field of possibility narrows. We reach more quickly for familiar explanations and established responses. We can begin to presume that every difficulty requires our intervention, and that to care is always to act.
Yet life is not inert, waiting for our direction. It is continually unfolding through relationships, processes and regenerative capacities that do not originate in us.
Reintegrating a sensitivity for emergence restores our awareness of this wider field. It reminds us that we are participants within life, rather than standing outside it as its observers, managers or authors.
From within this wider awareness, we may become more able to sense what is changing, attend to what is easily overlooked, and recognise the limits as well as the possibilities of our own involvement.
Sometimes we may be called to act decisively.
Sometimes to listen, accompany or protect without determining what follows.
And sometimes to step back, release the presumption that our input is required, and allow something to unfold in its own time and way.
Letting be is not an absence of care. It can be an expression of care rooted in attention, humility and trust: a recognition that life possesses wisdom and regenerative capacities that our intervention may interrupt as readily as support.
The work is not simply to help us produce better responses.
It is to restore our relationship with the living field from which action, restraint and allowing can each emerge and find their place.
Ways into the work
The work is open to anyone drawn to explore what it may offer within their own life. It can be experienced individually, in groups and communities, or integrated into the work of organisations and particular fields of practice. Each form remains rooted in the same underlying relationship with emergence.
enki
A guided deep-listening journey in story, open awareness and the more-than-human world.
enki creates a threshold through which the habitual pressure to know can begin to soften. It offers a direct, felt encounter with a wider field of awareness and with the emergence already moving within and around us.
It is a complete experience in its own right, and the beginning of a longer journey for those who wish to continue.
The Lemniscate Journey
A longer arc of guided practice that carries the opening created by enki into daily life.
Through a rhythm of roaming, nesting and deepening, The Lemniscate Journey cultivates a more embodied relationship with uncertainty, knowing and not-knowing. Over time, the guided structure begins to fall away, allowing the practice to be reincorporated into life in a form that is personal, responsive and continually unfolding.
Residencies and gatherings
Immersive experiences held in relationship with particular places, communities and questions.
Residencies create time and space to step outside familiar patterns of attention, enter more deeply into relationship with the more-than-human world, and explore what becomes possible when uncertainty is not immediately reduced to a problem requiring resolution.
Organisational collaborations
Bespoke experiences for organisations and communities navigating uncertainty, complexity or profound change.
Rather than arriving with predetermined answers, I create conditions in which habitual assumptions can loosen, less visible relationships can become perceptible, and more imaginative, compassionate and discerning responses can emerge.
Installations and commissions
Immersive, place-responsive works for cultural spaces, exhibitions, museums and public settings.
These works invite audiences to encounter emergence not only as an idea, but as a lived and participatory experience.
In particular contexts
This practice can be integrated into many of the places where we are learning how to live, build, change and die differently.
I work alongside those already immersed in these contexts, bringing story, deep listening and the more-than-human world into relationship with their particular knowledge, experience and questions. Within the built environment, this can open the processes of imagining, designing and inhabiting place to the living systems, histories and more-than-human relationships in which every building participates. In relation to ageing, dying and loss, it can create space to remain present where certainty and control recede, and where mystery, grief, love and life’s own unfolding ask to be held rather than resolved.
The practice does not arrive with answers for these fields. It enters into relationship with what is already present, offering a different way of listening and allowing less familiar possibilities and forms of understanding to emerge through the encounter.
Across each context, the intention remains the same: to restore a sensitivity for emergence, so that we can better discern when to act, when to accompany, and when to let life unfold in its own time and way.
About Alex
I am an artist, storyteller and facilitator, born and living on an Island.
My work has been shaped by a lifelong relationship with the more-than-human world and by decades of holding the words “I don’t know” in open relationship with life.
As a younger man, I was an activist. Over time, I began to recognise that, whatever I was arguing for, I was often using the same habits of urgency and presumed certainty that had contributed to the imbalance I wanted to change.
I stopped pushing from a place of already knowing and returned to the Island. There, I remembered a different practice: one of listening, participation and not-knowing.
From this relationship grew enki, first as a story for me to learn from, and then as a story for me to share.
The value of this work has since been revealed through decades of professional practice and through periods of profound personal and organisational uncertainty. These experiences have exposed the limits of urgency, control and certainty as dominant ways of navigating change, while deepening my trust in the capacities that become available when our grip on knowing begins to soften.
I have seen these capacities hold in the presence of complexity, fear, change, grief and loss.
They do not remove what is difficult.
They allow it to be met within a wider field, where presence, discernment and compassion remain available.
Experience and standing
My work has been commissioned by organsations including UNESCO, the Royal Society of Arts, Museum of Tomorrow International, Museum of Discovery, BMW Foundation and Blue Earth Summit.
It has been experienced by more than 3,500 participants across leadership, educational, cultural and community settings.
I am a UNESCO Futures Literacy Fellow, a Hawkwood Fellow and Co-Principal of The Emergence Academy.
Through The Space Between, I work with individuals, communities and organisations seeking ways of meeting uncertainty and profound change that do not depend upon prematurely knowing what comes next.
An invitation
Not everything that matters can be known in advance.
Some forms of understanding emerge only when we remain present to what has not yet taken shape.
The Space Between creates conditions in which that presence can be remembered and practised.
If this work resonates with something you, your community or your organisation are encountering, you are warmly invited to reach out.