Inside the Athanor

We are approaching the end of October, and the intention is to get The Athanor lit and working as a small group in November. This post is an indication of what's on my mind as to how this will work and what is expected of those of us in it.

Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, it's a commitment. It isn't a fire to warm yourself by. It's one that we need you to help keep alight. It will ask for your time, attention, vulnerability, and reciprocity. It is not something to dabble in.

At a time when everybody's busy, it will ask for around 6 hours/month of your time in conversation with others. If you have more time, there is lots of things that we can do. The work we've done so far has shown that rhythm and regularity matter. So, four conversations a month of 90 minutes each.

We are looking for active participation, not passive consumption. Looking after the athanor's work requires our full presence, challenging assumptions, offering perspectives and pushing our thinking forward together, not just listening politely.

If we're doing good work, we'll always be on the edge of things we do not know and do not understand. It will ask us to be vulnerable, not in the current fashionable sense, but in the hard sense of accepting that there are things we don't know that others might. It is not a place for egos.

This isn't a service you purchase where you extract value and leave. It's a community of practice where you contribute to others' development, not just your own. When someone presents their work, you owe them your full attention and honest response. When someone shares an experiment, you help them learn from it. When someone asks for curation, you offer what you know.

I will ask for a small financial contribution from those of you who can, but it is not a barrier for those who cannot. This is not a business, but it does have costs. They are modest, but I want to make sure they're covered. If we can establish that there is something of value here, what we learn on these first projects is something that you can replicate in your own practice.

We will start small. One group of eight, maybe two if that's what is required. But no more than two. The intention is to create a model that you can use for your own practice, not to build a business for me.

Your role is to bring curiosity and a genuine inquiry that you can explore and develop alongside others over the next year. The whole point of the Athanor is transformation. To be ready for whatever changes a rapidly changing world may throw at us, and be in a position to help others as they do the same.

My role in this is to be administrator and curator as well as participant. Unlike many of you, I have the time to do the reading and the research that can help us in our exploration. My personal mental model for it is the café owner of the Café Guerbois, the seat of the Impressionist movement in Paris (but you'll have to provide your own coffee)

Structure. There will be three levels of membership. A free tier which will have access to occasional open posts. A content tier will have access to all the materials that we post on the site. And the conversation tier, which is the small group(s) we're talking about here.

Next steps. The first conversation group of eight is starting to fill, as this idea has gone from seed to seedling. The plan is to start the groups in November, working out how to do this by the end of the year, and running the Athanor group(s) with intent in 2026.