Well, friends, we’re in the weeds now.
After seven chapters of introduction to The Inner Gathering, along with an infographic, it’s time to write one more introductory chapter and get on with it. That introductory chapter is the one where you explain to the reader how the book is structured, how they might approach the reading of it and the using of it.
But there’s a problem.
As in the case of any creative work, I can see the structure of this work shifting in the midst of making it. Indeed, the entire scope of the work is expanding. I still think this book is about the Inner Gathering—and I’m confident everything we’ve created so far will make it into the final work—but I think it’s about more than just the Inner Gathering. I think the Inner Gathering may be the way out of and through the great human predicament, but we haven’t even talked about what that predicament is yet. I might say it like this:
From the moment of our first wound, our lives become a pain management project, and the Inner Gathering is inviting us into a different kind of project. A better project. A truer project. A healing project. A wholing project. A humaning project. In other words, life before the Welcomer is like existential oxycontin, and life after the Welcomer is what happens when a bone mends back into something stronger than it was.
All of that to say, I’m going to be sending some curveballs your way. We’re going to explore the nature of these two “projects,” and I think these coming chapters could be the actual introduction to the book, with the chapters you’ve already read representing more the meat and potatoes of the book, so to speak. Just a morsel of the meat and potatoes—a lot more to come on the Inner Gathering—but the meat and potatoes nonetheless.