Becoming Signal Spotters
As the start of an ongoing series emerging from our collective practice of signal spotting and co-sensing; we are tracking a living record of what is beginning to take shape across Coralus and the wider world.
We are on the trail of something here at Coralus.
How do we find ground when the ground is shifting? How do we track what is emerging when things are moving so quickly? What does it look like to collectively sense the future together?
Our world is sending signals constantly—subtle ones and catastrophically visible ones. “The beauty and the terror”, Rilke wrote. And he added: “Just keep going. No feeling is final”. At Coralus, we have been co-creating the conditions to show up to this moment in all of its wild complexity: with our exhaustion, our fierceness—and everything in between.
“Coralus is a self-organizing community reimagining how capital—social, financial, creative—can flow more freely through a system trying to transform itself,” writes contributor Jenn Brandell. We call it rehearsing the future.
Spotting signals. Co-sensing. Noticing.
You have likely already felt it. The conversation that goes somewhere unexpected. The song lyric that keeps humming. The surprising connection that leads to an invitation, a Pod, a collective garden. These are the breadcrumbs. And slowing down enough to catch them—before rushing to interpret—is the practice we are exploring right now.
We are not on the trail of solutions; we are after the collective capacities that widen our apertures of attention to traverse the unknown together. We’ve been tracking signals for ten years at Coralus: in our ventures, our pods, our gatherings, and our calls. Now we are building not only the inner muscle, but the outer community to catch them—so we can sense together what is emerging, what is possible, and how we are already co-creating the future.
This is not a small thing Coralus has been practicing. It is the thing.
For this issue, we invited contributions from Coralus practitioners, artists, writers, energy workers, you name it, each with a unique practice of signal spotting and co-sensing. Forty of us gathered in March for the first of three collective experiments, following and sensing the signals together. Every piece here was born from that call. Each one a different frequency, a different way of tuning in.
We’re continuing for the next two months. You are warmly invited.
Read. Watch. Listen. Sense.
What do you notice is emerging in the field between us?
THE CORALUS EDITORIAL FIELD
Danielle Cadhit, Vanessa Reid, Vicki Saunders and others signal spotters from the Coralus Field
Inside this Issue:
The Artifacts, creations and insights that emerged from our call
Jennifer Brandel & Ariel Brooks, self-identified “Interstitionaries” have been tracking signals across many communities. In Transducing and Translating the Signals, they offer a name for the moment when kindred spirits realize they’ve been sensing the same thing in different languages – they call it transducing. What looks like coincidence is actually translation: the field speaking through multiple mouths at once.
What if we met the Metacrisis with deep humility and curiosity? Azul Carolina Duque and Kara Sievewright invite us right into an engagement with the Metacrisis herself in their visual and audio story. What is this time trying to show us, and teach us? What if we met her, and ourselves, through a different lens altogether?
What happens when we attune to our natural surroundings, the more-than-human world, the cycles of season? Vanessa Reid’s I am Noticing captures a collective poem that emerged from a co-sensing call, tracing the subtle signals, tensions, and possibilities unfolding in the field.
Jessica Keats practices a deep galactic listening, an attunement so patient and spacious that something finds you, rather than the other way around. In Weaving Together the Voices of Coralus, we are invited to listen slowly, the way you might walk into a wild forest you’ve never entered before.
Stacey Mareroa-Roberts reminds us in Wise Salt Calling and in its companion piece, My Reset as Embodied Experience that this work begins in the internal waters—that leadership, real leadership, starts with the tide-like process of claiming voice: do they get me? And then, slowly, where am I being called to lead?
Wayfinding and Coralus Maps:
What does it look and feel like when a community is in deep transition and it appears on the outside that “nothing is happening”? In Flying Low: wayfinding in the unknown, Vanessa Reid names it as The Weirds and sits down with Vicki Saunders to pause and notice, illuminate, and map the invisible work Coralus has been doing all along: co-sensing, signal spotting, gestating the field, orienting to the emerging new world.
Every organization has an origin and evolutionary story. This one begins not with a founder’s vision but with a question: what does the field actually want? In The Coralus Story: From Inception to Activation, Penelope Fridman traces Coralus from its earliest map—drawn before SheEO even had a name—through a pandemic pivot and into its tenth-anniversary reckoning. What the maps kept revealing, year after year, was that connection is not the soft stuff. It is the strategy.
Dive in with a series of explorations of Coralus’ internal and ever-evolving maps. There is her written article, an explainer video on how to read a map and a lively podcast conversation that add colour to the story.
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A Living Invitation into the Coralus Way
We set out to capture Coralus at a threshold moment—happens when people dare to build something that doesn’t yet have a map. But here’s the truth: you don’t capture emergence. You court it. You create conditions for it. You listen like your future depends on it and then, you let it surprise you.