About this place
Memory of Connection did not begin with a theory, but with an experience. With the loss of something I did not yet quite know how to name. I was trying to understand what happens when the connection between people becomes damaged. What makes us capable of losing ourselves in our encounter with another? Why can love become a place of both growth and destruction? What happens when reciprocity disappears, boundaries begin to blur or recognition is withheld?
I wrote to make sense of what I had experienced. At first, I stayed close to the experience itself; later, I began moving further beyond it. Because the longer I wrote, the harder it became to contain the questions that emerged within the boundaries of a single relationship. The same concepts kept resurfacing in psychology, philosophy, parenting, technology and eventually in the way we have structured our society.
Empathy. Recognition. Reciprocity. Boundaries. Attention. Inner life. Again and again, they seemed to reveal something about the space in which human beings are truly able to encounter one another.
Gradually, a pattern began to emerge.
And increasingly, I found myself thinking about a forest. A tree appears to stand on its own. Above ground, we see a trunk, branches and leaves: a distinct and bounded form. But beneath our feet, the story continues. Roots make their way through the earth, reaching into a world of fungi, organisms, water and nutrients. What appears separate above ground turns out, beneath the surface, to be part of a much larger network.
I am because we are.
This does not mean that the individual disappears into the whole. Quite the opposite. A tree needs to be able to take root in order to grow. Connection, too, requires boundaries, individuality and space. But no one comes into being outside of relationships. From the earliest days of our lives, we are shaped through our encounters with others and with the world into which we have arrived.
I believe the same is true of a society. The health of a forest cannot be located in any one place. It emerges from the continuous interplay between soil, water, climate and everything that lives within it. The soil nourishes the forest, while the forest, in turn, shapes the soil. What is added or taken away in one place can have consequences elsewhere. Sometimes those consequences are immediately visible; sometimes they remain hidden beneath the surface for years.
We, too, live within such an ecosystem. Our inner worlds, our relationships, our culture and our institutions do not exist independently of one another. Society shapes people, and people shape society. What we give our attention to grows. What we normalize changes the way we relate to one another. What we lose in the space between people eventually becomes visible in the world we create together.
It is from this understanding that Memory of Connection has continued to grow. The texts on this website therefore move between different layers of human existence. They explore love and trauma, desire and boundaries, empathy and shame, parenthood and power, technology, sexuality, misogyny and civilization. Sometimes a text begins within the inner world of a single person. Sometimes in the encounter between two people. Sometimes within the structures of a society.
Beneath these different subjects, the same question increasingly returns:
Which qualities of connection make particular forms of human and societal functioning possible — and through which mechanisms?
Connection, in this sense, is not synonymous with closeness, harmony or love. Destructive relationships connect people too. My interest has therefore increasingly turned towards the conditions under which connection can contribute to human flourishing: reciprocity, empathy, recognition, boundaries, responsibility, attention and the capacity to continue seeing the other as a person in their own right.
The Empty Middle, The Sacred Middle and The Lost Middle also emerged from this inquiry. They move from the inner world to the space between people, and from there towards the society in which those encounters take place. They are not parts of a finished system, but different perspectives on the same landscape.
Memory of Connection, then, is not a collection of answers. It's a place where I try to make visible the connections between things we often consider separately. A place where personal experience can grow into a psychological question, a psychological question into a philosophical one, and a philosophical question can ultimately reveal something about the world in which we live together.
Because anyone who truly wants to understand a forest cannot look only at the trees. We must also learn to look at the soil in which they take root, at what nourishes them, and at the often invisible connections that hold the whole together.
And the same is true of us.
The memory of connection begins here
