The Journey So Far, part two.

Slow Heat

Part one of this review ended on a question: what forms, when you decline to force the form? This part is the answer that formed over the winter, between November 2025 and February 2026, when the Athanor had no programme to run; only a name and the fire of Wednesday conversations. The claim that the furnace metaphor simply worked is the kind a writer should distrust, so what follows lets the dates do the arguing.

The first thing was a change of register. October’s writing was diagnosis, aimed outward at structures. From mid-November the posts grew longer, arrived less often, and turned their attention from what was failing to what was forming. The heat had been turned down to where the work could actually happen.

The Second Apprenticeship

The winter’s first contribution was a better account of who the work was for. In November I wrote about the two apprenticeships. The first is the one we all know: it trains us to succeed in the world as it is measured, through exams, credentials, careers, and legibility to systems built for scale. It is necessary and compelling, yet only half the story. The second begins quietly, often in the cracks between meetings: “the apprenticeship of emergence, of who we might become, not just what we were trained to do.” It has no institutional home, curriculum, or formal rite of passage; it lives in a third space, outside the walls of the first.

This redrew October’s portrait more carefully. The people gathering at this fire had completed their first apprenticeship, often with distinction; the second had begun for them whether they had named it or not.

“We realise that we have become highly competent in a world that cannot see the whole of us.”

That sentence, from late November, has since done more work in subsequent conversations than anything else I wrote during that time.

The Fool’s Permission

December asked what acting on any of this would cost us, and answered: the willingness to look foolish. The fool of the medieval court was licensed to speak truth through humour and play, living at the edge, revealing the cracks in certainty.

“Stupidity is passive; foolishness is a craft. One narrows the world, the other opens it.”

I claimed the licence and used it, setting out my own foolish view of work, a set of boundaries to explore, and a laboratory to explore them in.

Play, I have come to think, is the word doing the work in that post, although I did not give it that much heft at the time. The fool’s licence is the player’s licence: a bounded space in which the ordinary rules are suspended, so that things can be discovered rather than performed. Everything the Athanor had refused in November (the schedule, the curriculum, the predetermined outcome) is what play refuses by its nature. The practice would later build on that idea deliberately, but that winter it arrived dressed as self-deprecation, which is perhaps how the important ideas prefer to travel.

The laboratory was agriculture, a subject I have listened to at 05:45 most mornings for twenty-five years without ever farming an acre. “Farmers do not act directly on the harvest; they act on the conditions that make a harvest possible.” A week later the metaphor came home to the idea of allotment: individual plots, shared ground, knowledge passed over the fence, the olive press as a common resource. I used the metaphor then set it down, but it remains the best description of how the practice now handles what it learns, although I could not have told you that in December.

The Alchemist’s Vessel

Then, in the shortest days, the theory started to take shape. Conversations as Ecosystem argued that conversations are developmental. They have childhoods of abundance and play, adolescences of identity and heat, adult phases where divergence and convergence balance, and old ages of precedent and protective politeness; they can mature, calcify, or renew.

Organisations rarely fail for lack of intelligence or effort; they fail because their conversations stop developing. And then the sentence the whole winter had been revealing:

“Our conversations are our Athanor.”

The vessel was never the website or the idea of a programme; it was the quality of the conversation itself; everything else followed from it: the smallness, the rhythm, the curation of who sits at the fire, the refusal to scale. “Transformation is not an act of will. It is a process of attention.”

Alchemy in Earnest

The start of the new year sharpened the framing, with some help from the weather. January’s news was hard power in every register, and the writing’s response was to treat it as climate rather than crisis: something to read and dress for, since it could not be managed. Against that background, the idea of alchemy started working for a living. The sequence was laid out: nigredo, the necessary decomposition; albedo, clarification by subtraction; rubedo, reintegration at a higher level. The frame is fractal, the same at the scale of a person, a group, and a society, and it gave the practice its grammar of patience.

Roger Martin’s funnel gave it an increased definition. We have spent decades perfecting the conversion of heuristics into algorithms while starving the other end of the funnel, where mysteries become heuristics, with the result being an economy productive in exploitation and sterile in exploration. The work of this place, I argued, sits at the mystery end: “the economic inefficiency of being approximately right is far preferable to the sterility of being precisely wrong.”

Value followed a week later, through Kurt Lewin’s two regions and James Scott’s mētis. Region Alpha is the world as it can be measured; Region Beta is the world as it is lived, where beauty, fairness, and trust reside, known by their absence more than their presence. Mētis is the knowing that comes from being embedded in particular places and relationships, the kind that cannot be shortcut without being destroyed: “We can buy a building, but not a culture, and acquire a company, but not its trust.” Reading those two posts back, the offer of the practice started forming in plain sight: the holding of the space between the measured and the lived, on behalf of people who must answer to both. And the line we now use for the relationship itself, attributed to Camus, appeared in the new year post:

Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.

Presence, and a Seed

February made it concrete. The Alchemy of Presence drew on a Thursday group that has met since the beginning of Covid, over five years of “online meetings that explore and test, physical gatherings that complete and transform”. The conditions it identified have become the practice’s working checklist: voluntary participation, rhythm, a sufficient degree of ritual, small scale (around eight, plus or minus two), and a kairos relationship with time that lets things emerge when they are ready.

And then, almost in passing, the seed. “I am convening a small group experiment: two or three practitioners, each with a client or two, meeting online and physically over a six month period.” The sentence carries more weight than its placing suggested. Practitioners, with clients, for a fixed period: the room I described in part one as a workshop with members had quietly acquired a different shape. I barely noticed at the time; it matters more in hindsight.

What the Fire Is For

A week later I finally asked the question I had been circling since August, which is what the Athanor is actually for. The answer turned out to be that it sits outside any notion of purpose: it exists as “a space to host possibility”, and kin to the thin places of Celtic folklore where the boundary between states wears through, places where mysteries become more tangible.

The moment you define the possibility, you have moved from alchemy to project, and whilst both are needed, the mistake is to let the second colonise the first. The post closed with Hennig Brand, the alchemist who boiled down everything he owned in search of gold and instead got phosphorus. “Not what he expected, but unexpectedly valuable.”

The working answer to the purpose question was a single sentence, setting the terms for everything the spring would do: “the Athanor will be shaped by what we bring to it, not what we expect of it.”

Which raises the question the third part of this review takes up. If the vessel is the conversation, and the work is shaped by what we bring, then everything depends on the quality of the material. The experiments with AI, the tools, the unlike minds, the practice and its pilots; all of it follows from that one dependency, and the spring was spent finding out what it demands.

We do not provide answers; we distil them from what we bring to the conversation.