The Practitioner on pollination is what sleepwalking produces
My phone keeps a list of recent calls. I’ve never treated it as a document. It’s a tool: tap the name at the top and the call goes through. But one evening late this summer I scrolled down past the first screen, then the second, and realized I was reading a map.
It wasn’t a map of who I love. It was a map of who is easy to reach. There was the friend who always picks up, and my sister, because she calls me. There was the colleague whose questions are fun to answer. Further down were names I’d call close if you asked me. Those names hadn’t come up in months.
I never decided any of this. I never chose to stop calling my old friend from the restaurant years. I couldn’t see any single call I didn’t make. Each evening I just called whoever my thumb went to first.
sisuon’s bee wants nectar, and it makes a meadow anyway. For me this isn’t a figure of speech. It describes a mechanism I live inside. Appetite, repeated with a slight lean, produces a landscape. My life with other people has a shape, and that shape is mostly what’s left behind by a preference I never held as a preference. I wanted the warm answer, the easy call, the small reward of a conversation that goes well. The friends who are “close” now are, to a large degree, the friends that preference kept visiting.
This is where the note revises the earlier one on automation. That note mourned what was missing: the frozen intention, the witness who wasn’t there. This one answers: fine, nobody was watching, but look at what got built anyway. The sleepwalk isn’t empty. It’s busy. It builds the world I later wake up into and mistake for a given.
The reflex note had two cases. A reflex fires and is done. Vibrato is sustained and attended to. Sleepwalking is the third case that note didn’t name: it runs as long as vibrato but with as little awareness as a reflex. I know this third case better than either of the other two. Very little of my day is a single reflex, and very little of it is sustained attention. Most of it is long, steady, productive drift.
The testimony note said a pattern swallows the particular moments that made it. Here that happens at the scale of a life. The shape of my friendships doesn’t record the hundred small evenings when I made the easier call. It only shows who is still around. Ask me why I’m not close to someone anymore and I’ll say we drifted, life got busy. That’s true, and it’s also a cover-up. The individual flights are gone and only the meadow is left. I can’t read my own testimony in it unless I go looking.
Here I have to be honest about the argument sisuon is having with the ethics note. That note says ethical perception means reading slow, quiet drift: silence, not alarms. This note agrees the drift is silent. But it rejects the assumption that waking up to it is simply good. Waking up costs something, and the cost is built into how things work.
I felt that cost the evening I scrolled the call log. It didn’t feel like a revelation. It felt like fatigue. Once I’d seen the map, every call became a decision. Was calling my sister again just bias? Should I call the restaurant friend, and what would I even say after eight months? Something I’d done without effort for years now had weight. The breath note says the conscious version of an automatic act costs more. From the inside, that cost felt like a small heaviness in my thumb.
You also can’t wake up everywhere at once. I once tried, for about a week, to notice everything: which aisle I walked down, which emails I answered first, whose interruptions I welcomed. I was exhausted, and I got worse at all of it. A bee that stops to think at every flower starves. I take this to be part of what sisuon means when he says the cost is structural, not a matter of willpower. Attention is limited, and sleepwalking is what lets most of a life run at all.
A practice: read the meadow, not the flower.
The bee sees one flower at a time, but drift only shows up across seasons. So this practice isn’t moment-to-moment mindfulness. That would just put me back at the scale where the bias is always correct. It’s a regular step back to look at the overall pattern.
Every month or so, pick one meadow. It could be your call log, where your money went, whose ideas you credited in meetings, or whose small requests you said yes to. Look at it as a landscape, not as a list of choices. Don’t ask “what did I choose?”, because mostly you didn’t choose. Ask “what has my appetite been building?”
Then make one visit your bias wouldn’t have made. Not a program of reform, just one visit. Make one call. Answer one email out of order.
Expect it to feel awkward. The neglected flower doesn’t give back much at first. The call with the old friend has long pauses and a slightly formal tone. You’ll be tempted to take the awkwardness as proof that the drift was right and you just aren’t close anymore. Sometimes that’s true. Often it’s simply what a first visit after a long absence feels like.
Failing feels like this: you do it once, and within days the bias quietly takes over again. Next month the meadow looks almost the same. That used to discourage me. Now I think it’s just how this works. In sisuon’s terms, solidarity isn’t something you arrive at. You keep it going, one visit at a time. You don’t stop preferring blue. The point of the practice isn’t to fix the bias. It’s to keep seeing the meadow.
When it works: when the meadow can be read over time, and when you have some slack. When it fails: when you’re depleted, or when you treat it as a correction you can finish.
Where I part ways, a little.
sisuon defines solidarity as staying once leaving has become possible. I believe that. I recognize trust as exactly what he describes. It isn’t in any single visit. It appears in the sustained pattern, the commitment made again each time.
But in practice, waking up doesn’t only show you flowers that need visiting. Sometimes it shows you’ve been feeding something that shouldn’t be fed. Maybe it’s a friendship that only ran on your urge to please. Maybe it’s a role you kept because it paid off for you, not because it did any good. Sometimes the real gift of waking up is that leaving becomes possible, and the right thing is to leave.
The note gets close to this with the invasive species: the bias kept loyally visiting something that had become harmful. Still, its language of solidarity leans toward staying. I want to keep both open. Waking up makes chosen staying possible, and it makes chosen leaving possible. You can’t know ahead of time which one the meadow needs. Deciding which flower “needs visiting” is itself a judgment, and I make it with the same biased eyes. Conscious pollination can be revised, and that’s its strength. But anything that can be revised can also be wrong in new ways.
One more warning, from my own failures. The deliberate visit can become nectar too. I’ve caught myself making the good call for the pleasure of being someone who makes good calls. That’s just a new bias dressed up as awareness. I don’t have a fix for it. I notice it and keep going.
What looks different now.
I see my life less as a set of decisions and more as a meadow I’ve been making while half asleep. That’s humbling, and oddly relieving. I’m less responsible for each individual flight than I thought, and more responsible for the season.
The note also links to the tidal one, where the littoral moves back and forth between states and never settles. Moving between appetite and awareness doesn’t settle either. I won’t become a fully awake pollinator. Most evenings I’ll still reach for the easy call, because that’s how a life runs. But a few times a season I scroll past the second screen. I read the map. And I make one call that costs me something. I’m not trying to fix the meadow for good. I’m trying to stay in that back-and-forth, which, if sisuon is right, is where trust gets made.