Navigating and participating in this inquiry

Since this inquiry draws on collective experience and aims to contribute to it, participation is genuinely welcomed at every level. At the bottom of each page there is a space for responses and reflections, all of which are read and taken seriously. A Hylo group has also been set up for more sustained exchange — a place for sharing resources, raising questions, and building threads of conversation that a website alone cannot hold. If you are new to Hylo, or curious about why it was chosen, you can read more about it here.

There are three areas of practice around which this inquiry revolves: mapping, studying, and dialoguing. Engagement is encouraged in each, and especially in dialoguing.

One orienting note: the aim throughout is not particularism — not the drawing of sharp lines between what belongs and what does not. The categories below are offered more as centers of gravity than as demarcations. What matters is less which category something belongs to and more what it opens up, what threads it makes visible, what connections it allows.

Within this inquiry, mapping means attending to the language, meanings, and concepts that already exist — and developing new ones — to help orient and make sense of the re-rooting process. The aim is to provide a common enough vocabulary that people can better name their experiences, build shared threads, and find one another across different contexts and conversations.

Most, though not all, of the mapping happens through semantic networks. A semantic network is a map of connections between related meanings and concepts — a way of getting a grounded orientation to a particular territory of thought before moving more slowly through it. They are not meant to be exhaustive, but to open inroads. The full collection of semantic networks, organized by category, can be found in the library.

The categories currently being mapped are as follows:

Frameworks

Frameworks point to conceptual structures that help make sense of what is shifting and why — sensemaking orientations for framing and shaping whatever is happening. There is no single framework that holds everything, nor could there be; frameworks are both contextually emergent and contextually applied, and part of the work here is attending to which frameworks travel well in which situations. One example particularly relevant to this inquiry is wayfaring — a way of thinking about movement, attention, and knowledge that follows lines rather than surveying from above.

Trajectories

Trajectories name suggested or ongoing movements of significance — pointing less to stable structures and more to form in motion, to the directions through which things are changing. One example, which runs close to the heart of this inquiry, is the movement from a representational idiom to a performative one: a shift from understanding knowledge as a picture of the world to understanding it as a participation in the world's ongoing becoming.

Phenomenologies

Phenomenologies attend to the texture of lived experience. They work around a particular image or metaphor, naming the vocabulary needed to get a felt sense of what a condition or moment is actually like from the inside. One example is deluge phenomenology: an attempt to map the feelings, languages, and orientations that accompany the sense of living through something overwhelming — feelings of drowning, of not knowing where to start, of the ground giving way.

Methodologies

Methodologies name specific ways of going about practices — orientations for how to proceed rather than what to find. Much of this inquiry is concerned with exploring and developing methodologies suited to open-ended learning. The building of semantic networks is itself one such methodology.

Places

Places are specific communities, projects, or locations experimenting with re-rooting in practice — ecovillages, intentional communities, and other sites where the questions this inquiry holds are being lived rather than theorized.

Paradoxes

Paradoxes name the genuine tensions that have to be navigated rather than resolved. One example is the paradox of embedded agency: the difficulty of changing the conditions one is simultaneously shaped by and dependent upon.

Complements

Complements are creative pairings or generative tensions that tend to travel together — concepts or orientations that illuminate one another and resist being held apart. One example is belonging and creative collaboration.

Themes

Themes are cross-cutting tendencies that do not yet fit neatly into any other category — emerging threads that seem important enough to name but whose full form is not yet clear.

Studies are intentional and sustained engagements with a particular text. Each season, this inquiry aims to hold one seasonal study — a practice of reading one book over the course of a season, roughly ninety days, at one's own pace. Seasonal studies can be undertaken individually or collectively, and are intended as much as occasions for dialogue as for reading.

Studies need not be seasonal, and anyone is welcome to undertake one. The invitation is to go deeply into a text, to inquire into it carefully, and to produce some kind of reflective or creative output — whatever form that naturally takes. It matters less what one reads than how one reads.

Dialogue is, aspirationally at least, the heart of this inquiry. More than mapping and studying, the aim here is to get talking — to speak both generally and phenomenologically about how to go about re-rooting, what it feels like, what it requires, what gets in the way.

One way to contribute is through the comments below each page. A more sustained form of dialogue takes place through the Hylo group, where ongoing discussion is encouraged. Beyond these, the inquiry also holds space for online and in-person dialogical practices — experiments in different ways of speaking and relating that go beyond the need to be right and re-center attention on the quality of being present together.

While much of this inquiry follows an open-ended learning pathway, more sustained engagement might also involve applying for research funding. Two areas are of particular interest:

Regenerative livelihoods — attending to how people are finding or building ways of living that are both economically viable and regeneratively oriented.

Regenerative knowledge bodies — exploring how knowledge might be produced and held differently, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches.

If there is another research thread or opportunity where you think this inquiry might be a useful partner, please do not hesitate to reach out.

This inquiry aims to align itself with the natural seasons rather than with academic or clock time. Each season carries its own texture and quality of attention, and the inquiry tries to honor that — pausing at the turning points to reflect, to take stock, and to orient towards what is coming.