Reader : Writer : Roamer
Working with Men on The Art of Being Governed, Just Enough.
Most people stumble into their life's questions by accident. Mine arrived partly through family lineage.
My ancestor, David Ramsay Hay, published work in 1856 on harmonic proportions in art and architecture — the idea that beauty follows mathematical ratios found in nature. My grandmother was an important figure in New Zealand's Anthroposophical Movement. I knew neither of them.
Yet for forty years, I've been questioning "the rules" whilst working within them, testing whether they are right, whether they help or hinder the flourishing human being, One way to picture this is through the harmonic ratios that appear in atomic structure, planetary orbital mechanics, chemical bonding patterns. They're not aesthetic preferences. They're structural solutions to a fundamental problem.
That problem: how do systems maintain coherent structure while preserving dynamic autonomy?
It's the same question whether you're looking at peripheral peoples evading state control, starlings in murmuration, middle managers navigating organisational dynamics, or designing personal health protocols. Not all can be described in mathematical terms and nor should they but the mathematics of equilibrium — that φ-ovoid sweet spot between rigid order and chaotic freedom — appears at every scale to help explain our experiences, not to give answers.
This repository exists because after four decades of investigation across surveying, anthroposophy, organisational consulting, and harmonic theory, I've accumulated notes and textual maps worth sharing. Not selling, not gatekeeping — sharing. The research artefacts are here, freely licensed, for anyone who finds them useful in navigating their own terrain.
Start by reading widely and deeply.
Based on that the primary tool is conversation — extended dialogue with an AI interlocutor, thinking out loud in real time, the process recorded and published unfiltered. Not because the conclusions are always right, but because the method is as useful as the outcome, sometimes more so.
AI interlocutors are not neutral. They carry embedded assumptions, tend toward certain framings, and shape the inquiry in ways that are not always visible in a polished summary. Publishing the raw exchange as well as the conclusion makes that influence auditable. You can read the work as research and as evidence simultaneously.
I'm Stephen, in my seventh decade, currently living for six months of the year in a self-built solar-powered truck and trailer unit in New Zealand; the other six escaping the cold for warmer climes. No medications, which may be more good luck than good practice.
Background: Bachelor's degree in Surveying. Author of Flying Blind, MBA in Strategy and Innovation. Thirty years letting Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy seep into my thinking, my feeling and my willing.
Current research interests: Mapping φ-ovoid geometry across scales; understanding murmuration dynamics as field-based phenomena; testing health optimisation protocols systematically, using the power of AI-based research to examine world events.
Daily practice (most days): Morning Pages, Muay Thai and Muay Boran, 5km walks, Pilates and dumbbell work, tracking health metrics with 7-day rolling averages. The body is a laboratory. Health protocols are governance experiments. Sounds like a health-nut, in reality the opposite. I still enjoy a beer, a good whisky and food. Point and eat in foreign realms is the key to a varied diet.
I've consulted with organisations for decades, but I was never comfortable with the consultant's promise to solve your problem. I'm better at seeing patterns across domains and making them visible. Surveying and cartography, not navigation. I make the terrain legible, you traverse it.
The trailer life is literal peripheral existence — maintaining autonomy at the edge of systems. Practising what I research, to the best of my abilities.
All content here is marked CC0 1.0 Universal. It is a public domain dedication allowing re-users to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes, with no restrictions. You don't even have to give attribution. Free is, free.
The Collections of Chats hold the extended work — AI conversations of 2000 to 40 000 words, chunked into readable pieces but continuous in argument. Each collection is a sustained investigation of one theme.
Field Notes are the opposite. Short form — stories and essays written in my own voice, without the conversational scaffolding of an AI exchange. Complete in themselves, word pictures of the ordinary.
Books and Articles are just that: a collection of books and articles that I have either written myself or recommend.
Knowledge advances through open sharing, not proprietary gatekeeping. If these maps help you navigate your terrain, use them. If you improve them, share the improvements so others benefit. If you want to let me know, that would be appreciated but not necessary. That is how a cartography (cartology? cartosophy?? – the wisdom of maps) of the soul works.
The mapmaker is the map.