Lately I have been playing with the idea of a pelagic state of mind. It’s my personal name for a kind of holy grail — a way of operating from a place that feels like a perfect balance, or perhaps even a transcendence, of dualisms: stillness and movement, peace and vitality — all of it held at once.
The idea comes from my scuba diving days — that feeling of neutral buoyancy, suspended in the big blue, where awareness sharpens and intuition feels heightened. There’s a sense of being completely at ease, and intensely alive at the same time.
Maybe Kandinsky and the Blue Rider group (Der Blaue Reiter) would understand. They believed blue was the most spiritual of all colours — something infinite, inward, and profound — which feels closely related to this state.
Earlier this year, I started thinking about how to nurture this pelagic state while living in big cities. How to remain aware of the complexity of inputs and outputs around me, and of my own sensitivities within that.
I first described these sensitivities as “feelers” elsewhere, but I’ve been developing the concept since then. A conversation with DeepSeek (AI) and help in categorising my ideas resulted in this mind map
Leave a Reply