2 January 2026

"Seed-Sourcing" is a collective open-writing practice.

These texts are process-documents - meaning they are spontaneous (written in 10 minutes or less) and utterly unedited. They are intended to be read only in the spirit of their context (i.e. - not treated as 'literature', but rather a trace of an immediate arrival in the moment, belonging solely to the shared practice).

Note: All who attend have the right to omit their text from the published post.

ROUND 1

Sofia: The all-seeing “I” (present; observing)

R:

What is real for me?

Two days ago, I visited the Notre Dame cathedral, with Fotia. It is the first time I entered it, after it had burnt a few years ago. There was a mass… it was ending… and there was this apocalyptical organ music playing….

We took some selfies with the Apocalypse, with the second coming… the coming of the kingdom… Why is this exact theme the theme of the entry gates? In Romania also we have churches with a giant fresco of the Last Judgment, on the entire front wall…

What else feels as intense as that? The intense organ music…

Yesterday… walking in the Mt d’Arree… with Sofia, Eli, David, Merce…. The dead trees cemetery… the battle of Archangel Michael with the evil… right there… the cold crystal water flowing on the path… strange… the trees dead, cold, majestic… the stones like ivory… everything blinding me…

The last judgment is me facing my daughter…

The most terrible encounter is to stand in front of a child, your child, yourself as a child, or ‘THE CHILD’…

Why is it terrible? Why is it frightening?

E:

Thank you. Thank you all for being here. 

I propose we engage in a kidnapping party.

It will include an unannounced arrival to the rooms of Petri and Zo - to wrap them in cellophane like toy-store mummies, or like butterflies from another dimension wherein plastic is the sweet stuff of nature and cocoons are finally fully transparent. Fully transparent. I fully transparently want to bring Zo and Petri here to the library. And to cast some kind of virtual spell on Jess and Helena and Tamara and Gosha (and why not Sara and Thomas, too) to enchant them into arriving into the google meet room. 

Imagine a marionette with strings on their fingers who could type.

Or better - an automaton, like the one in Le Musée des Arts et Metiers in Paris. 

I’m sure we could achieve this together. 

And I’m sure it would be grand. 

I know it isn’t personal, these disappearances. I know it isn’t personal, and I should not take it personally - but …

Couldn’t we all learn to take everything personally so that there would be an eruption of great determination to ACT? 

Isn’t that one way? To be so terribly offended that we could not possibly say nothing?

[scene]

When I was in holland, I was standing in line at a Lidl for new years eve supplies. This included a bottle of beer. (I do not like, and have never liked, Champagne.). There were no human registers. Only auto-checkout booths. I understand this is more and more common. However, there was a woman there to stop and card me. She carded me. She asked to check my ID. For a bottle of beer. (I believe the legal drinking age in Holland is 16?). 

I had no ID on me.

I told her I was 41. 

She responded in dutch. I could not understand. She noticed.

So she put her hands on my cheeks very sweetly and said (with all the specialness of a thick turkish accent) “Baby Face.”

I left with my beer. 

What is it to be young? One’s age can be best defined by the flexibility of the spine. 

(The whispered near-rhyming wisdom of all yoga teachers.) 

I have some younging to do. 

[scene]

Fine. If we are the only ones here (string of expletives towards the absent Judases. (Judas should surely be pluralizable.) then we must simply bring our favorite beings in with us. Let us invite a new cohort of the divinely motivated and unarguably committed. The kind of gathering our own commitment clearly merits:

We can each bring two (for now). Me? I would bring … the voice of the sky from yesterday’s sunset. and perhaps, today, Zarina Hashmi (the artist I worked for as an assistant in new york when I was 20, who came from the contested region somewhere slipped between the unsettled borderlands of pakistan and india. Her studio smelled like linseed oil, carbon black and spices. she taught me to cook pakistani food in our lunch breaks. my fingers smelled permanently like chilis and coriander and libraries for over a year..)

I am in a random silly place.

L : Landscapes become intimate in the face of another presence.Landscapes are embodied on their own but become inbodied when integrated by another presence.Human presence is meant to partner with the landscape, to be eroded into its rightful body.

“Landscape is the most ancient presence, the most ancient knowledge. Though could it be that it needs human presence to vessel it and bring what it contains forth into the world?”

Are we drawn to a landscape, or are we called by it?Do we recognize a landscape as a reflection of our own interior landscape, or is the soul programmed to set us up with the landscape that gives us access to our Daimon?

ROUND 2

R:

The three young men in the fire… the friends of prophet Daniel. The flames could not touch them.

What light can I hold in my hand and what courage do I have to enter the msut scathing noises of rupture in my flesh.

I imagine this scene… Archangel Michael… fighting the evil… that could be a nice Marvel moment…

We all go through hell. Daily.

Sofia, do you have moments of hell? Moments when life is cruel, dark, unbearable…

Lies, do you have such moments, when everything collapses?

Eli, do you have such moments, when the flesh turns to glass and it breaks into pieces… and all the pieces are scattered and lost into vast deserts of alien glass pieces… with no hope of reuniting?

David, do you have such moments, when all walls become slippery like a river bottom covered in dark green mushy algae?

Right in this library we have put together all the parts of an incredible machinery. It is made for time travel…. It is complex like a spaceship… this is true….

Matthew McCaunaghey… Interstellar… forsaken his children to enter the tesseract… the dimension where all time is spatialized… where all moments are accessible…

It seems all our monumental movies are based on this model of the hero… the christ… sacrificing his own life for the life of the others…

Sofia… how do I stand before you?

Will I truly deliver the gift I have promised I will give you?

Will I stand in the nature of this technology for time travel?

Will we enter this crucial work, together, here… to roam the mountains in search for the lost pieces of our crystallized hearts?

“What is this world in which kings are poets.”

E:

When I am alone - in cities, trainstations, airports, libraries, cafes… I write anonymous love letters to strangers. I leave them on their chairs, tables and even smuggle them into their open bags to find later. Waiters, janitors, newsstand attendants, crosswalk guards, and yes, even cops … anyone I can watch long enough. 

Sometimes even (if i’m in a not so human kind of mood) for buildings. Or monuments. Or park chess tables. Or parked cars. Or puddles.

This has been going on for 12 years.

It is my longest-standing spiritual practice. 

I want to imagine a life in which I could wear some kind of nun habit, not yet conceived, from an order not yet developed, of a church not yet invented, with a perpetually metamorphing doctrine - so quick in its slippery nature that it cannot be studied, theorized or even really…. known. 

I carry in my pockets (surely the habit would have pockets), a jar of anointing oil. Perhaps a few. (I make them myself). They are like pomades or balms. They have, some of them, various colors. They all smell delicious. Like the child-dream of carnival candy. Or the winning poker hand. Or the declaration of peace. Or the ultimate come-up-ins of the autocrats. Or the swing by the fire in the safest corner of the world. 

I could sit on park benches (the new model of a ‘confessional’). Someone would come and sit next to me (they would know me by my habit - my ulterior mission). And I would hold them. I would hold them. Hold their struggle. Hold their confusion. Hold their celebratory tears. Hold their yearning. With my arms around them. Or their forehead on my shoulder. Or just hand in hand. 

And then I would reach for a jar of the blessing balm (I would know just the one) - and I would press my thumbs into it - and without saying a word - I would lovely lovingly lightly smear a thin layer over their closed eyelids.

Others would see me do this and join the vocation. 

A new kind of nun. 

The park bench order of the blessed pomades. 

The world needs more whimsy. More kindness. More not needing to know who you are or why things happened as they did - just an open invitation for grace. 

I wrote in a line to Dr. Simon O’Sullivan this morning : “The difference between magic and miracle may be only a question of institutional narration.”

Can we have more of both, please?

That’s what yesterday’s sunset told me.

More of both. Magic and Miracle. More of both.

The world could use some more redeeming qualities.

L : Vocation begins with apprenticeship to place.To discover your vocation, you must apprentice yourself to the landscape that has claimed you.The path of vocation runs through the landscape that is made of the same material as you.Your calling grows stronger when you submit to a long apprenticeship with the landscape that can shape you.To find your vocation, you must enter into dialogue with the landscape that understands your inner life.

This does not necessarily mean it is the landscape that raised you.It is the landscape that inhabits you.The one you dream about.The one that speaks to your imagination so vividly that you can imagine several lives lived there.The one you set as a screensaver on your computer.The one that is the setting of your favorite movies.The one that is the setting of your favorite stories.

It is the landscape that calls you.“We can train the muscle of the heart to feel as it wants to feel.”In the same way, our soul is trained to lead us where we need to beto where we can unfold and unravel,and be taught how to use the tools we’ve been given.

ROUND 3

R:

Radu is known to use very pretentious imagery… but can he deliver?

“How do I know you can deliver?

You don’t… but I can…” (this is a scene from Inception - in the helicopter) 

Do you want to know how it feels, the breaking of the trees in the storm, the burning of the roof of Notre Dame, the diabetes needles continuously piercing the face of Eli everyday?

How does it feel?

How does it feel, Sofia, life in school? How does it feel, in the darkest, loneliest days?

The pain of a child is:

- Look, dad, I made a drawing for you!

- Oh, how beautiful! Now get dressed...

The pain of a parent:

(Radu)- You see these work boots in my hands, they'll probably fit ye now my son, Take them, they're a gift from me, why don't you try them on? It would do your old man good to see you walking in these boots one day, And take your place among the men who work upon the slipway. 

(Sofia)- I said, "Why in the Hell would I do that? And why would I agree?" When his hand was all that I'd received, as far as I remember. It's not as if he'd spoiled me with his kindness up to then ye see. I'd a plan of me own and I'd quit this place when I came of age September. (from a Sting song)

E: one hand in the vision, one hand in the usual

Yesterday morning I made love with the sky

simply by breathing. 

Simple as that. 

I want partnerships all over. I want to be giddied by the excitement of those drooling to join the fun. 

David and Tamara felt some resistance to inviting others to join the Wild-Courtship Expedition…. (I do not have an idea of the exact resistances, they are surely valid and worth discussing) - but some part of me wants to fling open the doors and say: ENOUGH ENTROPY! ENOUGH INERTIA! [the truest enemies of love and art and ensoulment] Come! Come, you, who wants the writhing pulse of mystery to be welcomed in your pelvis! Come, you, who wants the tips of the spruce to tickle your traumatized memories! Come, you, who wants the crows to pick off the chaff of boredom! Come, you, who has too many children in the shapes of ideas and needs the unknown to sweep you clean of your doubts! ACTION! Let there be wise-blooming ACTION! Let there be rushing to the cars with full picnic baskets and backpacks of pastels and paints and papers, and fully charged batteries of many-bodied devices for capturing, capturing, capturing (without all the violence of captivity). We will find revelation - those of us who show up to find it.

Let us not limit ourselves to those who are here.

Let us, rather, only limit ourselves to those who excite us with their own excitement. 

The wild is not busy with politics.

The wild is not busy with policy.

The wild is not busy with definitions - only with whatever is happening in the sap now.

What is surging in the blood of our most honest bodies. 

I would rather be a troop of wide-eyed, eager, listening and lucky seekers than a half-footed, elsewhere and scattered gaggle of would-be-fellows following their own path, forgetting that we came together to gather together of behalf of a something larger than any and more beautiful than sole or today’s crisis or the icky-feeling-sluggish burdened-by-being-in-a-world-we-don’t-want-so-giving-in-and-giving-up. 

Surely, we can draft a better option. 

May we welcome all who want to try.

This being-a-grown-up bullshit is heavy because we do not spend enough time investing in our elation. 

More elation will make lighter work of all the illness, and money, and applications, and heartbreak, and panic. 

I just know it. 

(cause that’s what artists know.) 

L : The landscape that calls youis a craft shop, a studio.At first, it might appear empty and abandoned,but it is not.It provides exactly the equipment you need, and there is a master.

At first, you might have no idea what brought you thereYou are just curious. You feel a longing.You explore, you wander. You can’t really tell what is happening, butthe landscape grows on you - you want to be there.There is something about the way it makes you feel.You keep returningbecause of the way it makes you feel;you want to keep feeling it,feel more of it.

One day, you arrive, and at the exact same spotwhere you have now passed multiple times,there stands a workbench.You walk up to it and find a letter there,saying:

You can lay your tools down. There are shelves, and holders, hooks and drawers a toolbox - a place for everything. Every time you visit, bring them and lay them all out. Organize them in the right place, and when you’re done, I’ll teach you how to use them.