i am a prototype

I became an archaeologist of my soul. It’s hard manual labour. It commands you to be gentle in your excavation. It asks you to investigate with curiosity and remain hopeful when it seems like all you’re digging up is more fucking dirt. There is so much power in that dirt though. Shifting it out of the way, clearing that space; eventually, it reveal

No one can love you enough. Build a shelter for the flies and the wasps instead. Make houses for the rats and the owls and the bluebirds. Sit for hours in the shade and watch how these tiny citizens move, floating or drifting or scrabbling over stones, swooping or creeping in rings of shadow, rings of light. Make space inside your liquid heart for

• If you cycle through this feedback loop ferociously for ten years, you will end up with a well-designed life. It will not look like you imagined it would. It will have unfolded around you, and you will struggle to wrap your head around how you ended up where you did.

• You will have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit.

Humans are messy, and it can be dangerous to deny our common fallibility by drawing up lines that separate and divide. Right side? Wrong side? Mostly, we are the mess in the middle, dazed within a fog of unknowing, stunned by life and amazed by it too, and all the more beautiful for it.

Your DNA has never existed before in the history of the universe and never will again. Don’t play small.

Our humanness is not given to us. Instead, it requires our participation in its construction and realisation, which often comes about through collapse or calamity. We rummage through the chaos of our inner worlds, through our multitude of selves, to discover what we are, what we wish to be, and our authentic relationship with the world. This proces