Tapping into Your Roots

Ground, reflect, sense, infer

AI promises extraordinary speed and scale.

In seconds, it moves from ideation to creation, from fragments to polished prose, from wandering questions to precise responses. Once pointed in a direction, it can be endlessly productive.

But while it excels at productivity, it has almost no capacity for the personal work of growing in wisdom and discernment. It has no central ballast that helps it determine what deserves our attention in the first place.

It’s easier than ever to build something with AI, but harder than ever to pause and ask what’s worth building. It’s easier than ever to be productive but harder than ever to discern our deeper purpose and tap into our creative potential.

This paradox has shaped our work over recent months as we’ve built a library of Generative Practices. Each week, the library grows through contributions from practitioners sharing how they combine human agency with ancient wisdom in their AI use. These practices span individual reflection and collective collaboration, organized into maps.

Based on where you are in your journey with AI, there are different places to start. In future essays, we’ll provide you with a “Map of Maps” that helps you identify the best entry point into the library of Generative Practices.

But for now, we want to share what we have found to be the most important of the practices: finding your true north, your deep roots. And to do this, we want to start with a story.

The Mycorrhizal Networks of Knowing

We used to think that trees stood by themselves. We weren’t aware that they were holding each other up, or that they could communicate with each other. We didn’t know that there were “mother trees” who watched out for their kin, and trees that used their mycorrhizal networks to send warning signs across miles of forest when a fire was near. We weren’t aware that they could distribute extra resources into their root systems in the direction of trees that needed a bit more support.

But then, scientific researchers discovered something profound: trees can do all of those things.

There is power in a forest that can send its nutrients across vast horizontal distances in any direction, but there is wisdom in a forest that knows exactly when and where and why to send its nutrients in one direction. This is the innate discernment of the mother tree, this deep knowing and understanding of what is most important, of what is most true.

No matter where you find yourself on your journey with AI, we’ve found it essential to start with—and to regularly return to—the roots of human discernment—the mother tree. The people who tap into this personal and collective wisdom won’t diffuse their energy everywhere, but instead will thoughtfully preserve their agency and activate their creativity in the directions that are most generative.

This is why the mother practice is one of discernment. We’ve broken this out into four discernment practices to help you tap into your deep roots:

Ground

Reflect

Sense

Infer

When you’re able to harness AI from a rooted place of discernment, you’re able to tap into a state of flow that can propel you forward. Discernment clarifies purpose, and purpose enables flow.