Some threads we’ve been sitting with at MSB Â lately: each one, in its own way, asking us to stay present to what matters most, even when the ground is shifting.
The Song of the Cedars (as read in this episode of Emergence Magazine) stopped us in our tracks. Author Robert Macfarlane, mycologist Giuliana Furci, composer Cosmo Sheldrake and lawyer César RodrÃguez-Garavito travelled deep into an Ecuadorian cloud forest and co-wrote a song – with the forest as co-author. Not metaphorically. They are now pursuing legal recognition of the forest’s moral authorship. What moves us about this isn’t just the audacity of the legal argument, it’s the posture underneath it: that real creativity is always collaborative, always entangled, always listening. That the most profound things we make emerge with the world, not from our isolated egos. That feels like something worth carrying into every coaching conversation.
We came across the marvellous Harry Baker (@harrybakerpoet) headlining at the UniSlam 2025 Grand Finals, performing a poem whose first line alone is a kind of gift: “May you always picture where you are as where you’re meant to be.” In a world that constantly tells young people they should be elsewhere, further ahead, further along – this is a radical act of presence. It’s what we try to cultivate too: the capacity to arrive, fully, where you already are. We loved it- watch here on instagram.
Jayce Pei Yu Lee’s moving, brilliant animation, created in response to the unfolding crisis in the Middle East and shared with the Presencing Series 2026 team, asks the question so many of us are holding right now: how do we stay connected to the work of serving what wants to emerge, while surrounded by collapse? Assembled from archive scribings, with an original soundtrack by Liz Yu-Jung Li, Â it is the smallest, most honest gesture of a practitioner-artist who doesn’t look away. That refusal to look away, while also refusing to be paralysed – Â this is something we return to again and again in our work.
And finally, Patricia McKernon Runkle’s poem “When You Meet Someone Deep in Grief“ is  a quiet, precise guide to being alongside another person’s pain without fixing, rushing or collapsing the distance too fast. It reads like a field guide to coaching itself.
Forests that co-write songs. Poets who give permission to belong. Artists who create through uncertainty. Poems that teach us how to witness. These are our people. This is the company we want to keep – and the conversation we want to be part of.
Tell us what’s resonating for you right now, in the comments.
