Holding and Letting Come. Synchronicity and recursive learning

Let deeds, not words, express

Thine exceeding loveliness.

P.B. Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy

(A suggestion from Francesco Varanini)

Vignette # 1 (Year 1970)

My older sister and I belonged to a generation of girls who had watched their grandmothers sew and had been forced for short periods to sew together in a corner of the kitchen. They had long, white linens to fray and would then group four or five threads horizontally into a series of small "curtains" open to the void. This was my favorite stitch, in Italian, an "orlo a giorno," although I doubt that I ever had the honor of finishing the edge of a tablecloth in that way. I wasn't good at it, and I lacked perseverance. But when at the nuns' school I attended, I was forced to do a "little sewing project" to pass the compulsory school exam on practical skills, I chose to embroider blue leaves on a red linen placemat for my "tea with girlfriends." I don't think I ever had tea with a friend there and then, certainly not with my classmates at the time. We were too busy going to the bathroom to roll up the long, heavy skirts of our school uniforms to show our knees and so enjoy the admiration of the male students at a nearby clergy school. And soon, very soon, the following year, freed from the yoke of the uniform, we would become "rebel girls" in many ways, but certainly also in the politics of the 1970s. So, the brilliant red of that first and last sewing project now stands for a declaration of audacity, the pleasure of challenging conventions and proceed in my own way. Or, seen otherwise, an exercise of that critical thinking that later became even uncomfortable, the signal that I was not going to be part of the big picture.

Vignette # 2 (Year 2000)

None of my female ancestors had an easy life. Certainly not my paternal grandmother, a peasant, whose fingers were too swollen from arthritis to embroider delicately. But she cut and sewed with her Singer pedal machine to have us children wear clumsy slips and panties from mattress covers…

During hard times, I think of her. And when I think of her, austere and inflexible, always straight as a spindle in her black widow's dress, she reminds me of Atrope, one of the Moirai, the goddesses who weave the destiny of humanity in Orphic Hymn N. 59 (Ricciardelli, 2000: 154-57). Evidently, she is called so because she arrives with a non-escapable legacy at the end of mortal life, when the work of Clotho, who weaves destiny, and of Lachesis, who distributes it, is completed. "Tropic" is a term D. Haraway (Gane, 2006: 153) uses for language , our flexible, rounded, performative instrument, to try to come to terms with the three “atropic” goddesses. Hymn N. 59 is the only one written by Orpheus himself, as if to say that when faced with destiny, the prayer must come from a recognized poet, equipped with a most effective chant. But how could the three goddesses listen to us? They are already doing it by ongoingly transforming fate into destiny. They are intent on weaving and, according to Plato, as they turn the circles of the universe, Lachesis sings of the past, Clotho of the present, and Atrope of the future (Ricciardelli, 2000: 459-60). They are intensively immersed in an experience of synchronicity.

Vignette # 3 (Year 2025)

It warms my heart to read Kelly’s story and see the Tree of Life embroidered by her great-grandmother (Seesee-Anisah, 2025). It must be – again! - a case of synchronicity because I use the image of the Tree of Life to name the non-machine language LTL in my course Miniatures of Evolution. A representative of the Language of the Tree of Life is a tree with four branches; the last one being dedicated to our human and wider-than-human ancestors who have inspired us during the process of writing our personal theories of evolution. In Galanti, 2026 I have shown how the first “new” term - is formed by “abduction” in “no perceptible time” (Aristotle, An. Post. I XXXIV, 89b11), in a “flash” (Peirce 2021: 440), with experiencing and understanding becoming simultaneous (Gendlin 1994: 386). But this moment – by all means a moment of truth with its bodily correlate of intense satisfaction – this moment is perhaps enough for our wise ancestors to whisper a suggestion that can lead to an experience of “ecological conversion” (Langer, 1994). How come our ancestors have this power? My assumption is that they are all survivors, and by being survivors they have elaborated trauma that has become a wise survival strategy strictly connected to their niche environments. Human beings instead - creating through fire and steel always new conquered environments - utterly lack such a primordial experience of connection, unless they belong to a First Nation Country. In the west, we fail where all other critters have managed to come up with something to pass down to their offspring: a safe environment where to exercise the power to become brave.

Vignette # 4 (Year 2024)

The tree of life that represents LTL is a “mother tree”. Although I have borrowed this expression from Simard (2021), my emphasis is not so much on what happens between roots and mycelium, but on what happens in the trunk of the tree. The trunk protects and builds trusts between two forms of life that had separate existence as a cyanobacterium and a eukaryote, 1,6 billion of years ago. A mother tree with her hardened shell hosts the commune-action (communication) between the roots and the leaves to allow the necessary exchange of necessary nutrients. And does so in “no perceptible time”, because plants are highly sensitive living beings (Gagliano, 2018) but do not have animal perception: they communicate through chemistry, ultrasonic acoustic signals, bio-electrical signals.

Perhaps you might have noticed here how my mother-tree epistemology works: I have re-created in the mother tree the non-perceived time of abduction, and this is also an instance of abduction, understood as a “non-method” to let a new idea emerge from two “old” ideas (Bateson, 1984, Florez, 2014, Peirce, 2003,). In a more formal presentation, I would be able to show that I have formed this new idea by having the middle term “in no perceptible time” link human creative processes and tree creative processes. Thus, it may appear that by calling “abductive” the process in the trunk I am superimposing a human-only construction to a non-human living process, indulging in the most undetected form of anthropocentrism, very popular among scientists such as Darwin. But no, my kind of abduction is dialogical, it is “from” and “for” a mother-tree, as it amounts to giving back with gratitude what I have received as inspiration. However, I am not going so far as to declare that the trees I interact with have a desire or a will to interact personally with me. I am acutely aware that my role as a Western thinker does not allow me to say—as Gagliano, 2018 does—that mine are not metaphors. However, in some circumstances, this role allows me to say that mine are not just metaphors. In what circumstances? In those where the metaphor receives confirmation in a space-time that I experience as different from the space-time in which it was created. The story of the premise "Evolution = trust in the environment" is precisely a story of independent confirmation. In Galanti 2026, I described how I created it, sitting on a bench waiting for "the return of the sun." We were in the chronological time of 2024, and it was only in 2025 that I stumbled upon—by chance reading an author whose name unfortunately I soon forgot—the Indo-European root deru leading to old English words such as “tree”, “truth” and “trust” (Watkins, 1978). After this discovery, I let the past lend authority to what has been a serendipitous process of layers of meanings. I do not construct my texts deductively from an etymology exactly because I want to give myself the power of experiencing that knowledge, episteme, might be a recollection of what I knew “when I was a boy and a girl and a shrub and a bird and a mute fish that darts out of the sea", (Empedocles, 5th century BC, [FR. 142)

A serendipitous process of discovery of layers of meaning is what I call recursive learning, one that has led me to formulate the “first annex” to my personal theory of evolution, the concepts of epistemic independence and epistemic resilience in Galanti, 2026.

One may ask whether my “second annex” - the mother-tree epistemology – is a feminist epistemology. Recently, I resonated with the expression “Mother Earth feminism” employed by Ketonen-Oksi & Wikström, 2025. So, yes, if feminism is at ease with motherhood and generativity, I am in for rewilding a feminism of nurture, not as post-humanism but as a re-humanism. I borrow this expression from Dr. Lyla J. Johnston, scholar and musician of Navajo, Cheyenne, and European lineages (Johnston 2022, Jamail, 2023), but I think it qualifies very well also the work of women scientists who have elected trees and plants as subjects of their inquiry (Simard, 2021, Gagliano, 2018) and descend from First Nations (Kimmerer, 2013). My epistemology for a mother-tree comes with a “fleshy” project of freedom from machine languages and the mainstream metaphor of the “web of life” as a neuronal mapping of an anthropocentric brain network or -even worse – of a high-tech stream of internet.

Vignette # 5 (Year 2021)

In my spiral space-time, there is no time for imagining the future first and then stepping into action. This is a point of tension with some futurist approaches, and the tension increases if it leads to a distinction between “short term” and “long term” futures. If any future is genuinely unknown, how would I know that one is closer than another one? It seems that reference to futures would have to become not an act of a wild imagination, but a sort of domesticated planning on a bureaucratic agenda.

In my approach, action derives from curiosity to see if a hypothesis is good enough to be taken as a regulative principle or must be discarded. So, action creates future by rearranging our lives to accommodate a context to verify the hypothesis, and persevering until a context “with a good fit” is found. But while wanting to step into action is linked to seeking “to express with deeds” how a metaphor works, the following arrangements do require planning ahead.

Mine is a policy of small steps, which helps us feel better right away, protecting it from the risks of coming to nothing by planning too big. Perhaps my Focusing and TAE practices shuttling between words, images, and bodily responses, helped me understand what I could do immediately and what I should postpone back in year 2021. Then, during the second wave of COVID-19, I decided I wanted to start home composting with worms. I had watched a boy on YouTube demonstrating how, but I resisted the urge to get in my car to drive 30 km along the ring road near Rome, to buy them from the only dealer who was open. It was my chance to avoid immediately derailing my ecological conversion by making it unsustainable for the environment with a car trip. Now I'm very happy I resisted and lined up all the steps before proceeding with my plan. My worms are still with me and still regenerate the soil under the trees I plant or under the saplings I help grow, as a mother-tree helper. But I've changed the kind of composting bin two times and moved them at least four times to protect the critters from the summer sun or curiosity from my neighbors. I only allow myself a plane trip in February, which is the month my grandson Lorenzo, in the US, was born. Fortunately, it's also one of the months when earthworms go into hibernation. And even this synchronicity gives congruence and perseverance to my idea of directly accessing the future with one regenerative practice at hand. Our present is borrowed from future generations. It is a simultaneous experience of trusting the flux of time on Earth.

Resonances with futurist methods

If the future that can be experienced now wears the face of our descendants, it makes sense to ask if one can still use tools of futures literacy such as Causal Layered Analysis (Inayatullah, 2004), to enhance or complement the process of creating the metaphors that reconnect us to nature.

Here I propose a backward CLA, spiraling from the highest layer, that of metaphor, with a level of maximum personal freedom and less impact to a level of less personal freedom but greater possibility of impact, when meeting resistance to change in politics (my understanding of “litany”). In my vision, CLA becomes “micro” as it is a self-reflective practice that adds systemic impact to personal action. Although I have not seen this kind of analysis in futurist literature yet, I think it responds to Inayatullah’s (2008) intuition that our reflective self may have the answer to the future. It also answers Principles 7 and 8 of the regenerative futures analysis in Camrass, 2023.

In retrograde micro-CLA , we are invited to progress from one layer to the other, letting go of unexamined assumptions (UA) that undermine the chance to be effective at that level. At the top level, a restriction of the metaphor that introduces the scientific concept of “entropy” (yes, entropy, not “negative entropy”) prevents the functioning of “regeneration” as a buzzword. The retrograde path rests on three phenomenological moves that can be developed practicing the “resolution” found in the layer above. As Gendlin (1973) shows, the suspension of judgment (phenomenological reduction) cannot and must not involve the suspension of all beliefs in a world external to consciousness. Rather, it involves suspending judgment on the propositional truth-value of one’s tenets and on the “prehensions” that theoretical language makes on the flux of life. It involves an “holding and letting which is something like holding a frame but allowing whatever comes to come within the frame” (Gendlin, 2018: 214).

As I have already said a lot about the first layer, I will now progress to the first kind of suspension of judgement, noticing that all three “reductions” can be regarded as a form of ethical control on the use of performative language, to release the “prehension” that tropic language makes continuing to hold metaphors as if they were real aspects of “things in themselves” and not wonderful tools of human language in its poetic aspects.

I) The first “bracketing” revolves around the difference between “the frame” that we hold. It could stem from an ontology and be an “apparatus” or from an epistemology and be a “tool”, a difference that invites a brief historical excursus. Miniatures is re-humanizing epistemology grounded in a treatment of the relations between theory, practice, meaning and truth that finds echoes in a principle of verification put forth in the Vienna Circle (1924-36) whereby the meaning of a statement is given by the method of its verification. Before becoming later “meaning as use in a context” according to the "second” Wittgenstein, Vienna Circle ideas came close to those put forth in the US by the operationalist, experimental physicist P.W. Bridgman, whereby: “A physical quantity is defined by the series of operations and calculations of which it is the result” (Hasok, 2021).

It seems then that physical quantities and existential, self-regulating concepts have in common their becoming definite and therefore explicitly definable not at the beginning but after a process of going on with them. This means that contextual, operational, experiential definitions of terms are grounded in an implicit hermeneutic circularity of the process, whereby terms (horoi, endpoints or “boundaries” indeed) have previous and following versions of “themselves” (Instance of Itself – IOFI- principle in Gendlin, 1997). But in the context of finding nurturing meanings, the explicit definitions containing the term “to be” are ontological statements that can be postponed for ever or, at least, until they become more like exclamative marks, if the hypothesis that has led to the experimental stage finds confirmation.

By drawing heavily on a “radicalized” ontological interpretation of Niels Bohr’s mental experiments, post-humanist author Barad is not satisfied with epistemology: quantum indeterminacy is "semantic" and "ontic”, not at all a weak epistemological “uncertainty” (2007: Pos. 50). Interpreting a statement like the operational one above as establishing an ontological condition for the existence of physical quantities, they read it as saying “A (quantum physics) physical quantity IS (the agential cut resulting from) the series of operations performed by the measuring apparatus capable of resolving the indeterminacy”. The ontological overcoming of the dualism between the knowing subject and the known object abolishes any pre-existing limitation to their unrestrained “intra-action” and so leaves no room for an epistemological solution. A human being holding a frame, stripped of the painting (map) within, which had served only to reach the land of experiment has too many degrees of freedom for quantum entanglement or quantum indeterminacy. Nothing could arrive, and so the experiment would end sooner or later. Expected results might arrive, a light determined as a wave or determined as a particle by the types of cuts in the frame. But an unexpected result could also arrive, a living being, a presence not yet foreseen and linguistically formulated. There would be no cut or co-agency, but the acceptance of an otherness, ethically respected in its being a "Being-in-itself" that has so far escaped the clutches of (human and post-human) prehensions.

II. As to the second “bracketing” in the table above, I must refer to my reading of Bateson, 1984, a grandiose construction of evolution from the very wise assumption that two descriptions are better than one. However, the idea of an interplay between two stochastic systems - creation-of -the-new and adaptation-to-the-old - seems irremediably outdated to me. The other two descriptions - learning through reinforcement conditioning and zigzag between process and form - instead contain gems. But if Bateson is right with these last two descriptions, then the social system and the economic system are held together by a system of double binds, which thwart paradigm shifts or the very popular adagio that “we have to change mindsets”. What becomes possible then must be feeling the double binds, our entanglements with a broken system that point to the Marxian construct of “alienation”.

III -The third move isn't a suspension of judgment, but a reframing of one's feelings of alienation, helplessness, anger, fear, and pain. All these feelings contain truths that can emerge in groups facilitated with Joanna Macy's tools from the "Work That Reconnects." as I now do with my latest version of Miniatures. Joanna Macy (2021) is one of my cherished ancestor teachers. Her practice is inclusive, a safe place where to become brave, and attracts many young climate activists after or during periods of burnout.

Resonance with Benasayag’s thought

This article was ready to be submitted to Stultiferanavis.it when the interview witBenasayag & Ponzo, 2026 appeared in the online magazine, prompting me to add these additional considerations.

I should point out that, having never read Benasayag myself, I rely solely on the interview to note a remarkable consonance of thought between Eugene T. Gendlin's experiential phenomenology and the philosopher-psychoanalyst's thinking. The consonance begins with the use of gerunds to designate a philosophy of process rather than stable entities (for example, “carrying forward” by Gendlin, or “estar siendo” by Benasayag), continues with the common goal of preservation of becoming (and here Benasayag could have acknowledged Aristotle), and culminates in the emphasis on “situation”, the relevance of the unrepeatable, the undefined, that Gendlin would call “unpatterned implicit intricacy”. Should I take this last conceptualization as an "independent" confirmation of my concept of epistemic independence, introduced in Galanti 2026? When I introduced it, I wanted to highlight wider-than-human life situations as an integral part of the emergence of an individuated, non-propositional knowledge of some use to create futures in our troubled times. I'm therefore struck by reading that for Benasayag, David Abram's "wider-than-human," popular among post-humanists in the “more-than-human” version, is the relationality that inhabits the present. Meaning is diffuse, and communication between beings of the same species is not a monopoly of humans.

Also, I cannot help noticing a notable absentee in Benasayag’s interview. It seems that when the postwar Heidegger abandoned philosophy and became a critic of humanism the Bergson-Merleau-Ponty-Abram-Gendlin-Benasayag “lineage” came to replace his thought without much suffering. To the point that Benasayag prefers to cite Husserl rather than Heidegger even on the question of concrete time, where Heidegger expressed himself with Sein und Zeit (1927).

How so? Why did Heidegger start the movement away from humanism? If Sloterdijk (2001) is right—and I have no hesitation about this - it is the animal nature of human beings that Heidegger cannot accept. And because in every taxonomic definition by common genus and specific difference, it is precisely the animal that is mentioned, the German philosopher stops philosophy, declares Plato guilty, and goes on to poetize. What a pity.

Isn't it the philosopher's task to unravel and remake the web of concepts to save becoming from its capture in fixed forms? With abduction in Miniatures of evolution, we can learn precisely this, to redefine ourselves starting from our epigenetic memory, because for Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, and of course Darwin or Margulis as well, featherless bipeds had ancestors. We were never alone in the tree of life, although of course when we lost our wings we had to climb down from the trees. Disoriented, after the descent, we probably found relief in the light of the clearing (Lichtung). How could we not understand this all-too-human transition?

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