We are what we repeatedly Choose to be.
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We are not one thing.
This website is a doomed-to-fail attempt to represent the whole of what I feel is valuable and important, the way I feel most authentically called to do it.
We are what we do, and we become what we repeatedly choose. That said, this website, my work, and the many ways it bleeds out onto the pages of life, through public speaking, poetry, client work, education, philosophy and consulting cannot be easily ringfenced, especially by the narrow stiles and hedges by which we have tried to manage our fields of human learning and understanding.
I spent my life very arduously invested into questioning and paying attention, in listening to the spaces between the notes, and reading the context between the lines. I had an intuition that all knowledge is part of all other knowledge and this website and all my related work represents my current effort to articulate that in the service of the one big question:
Where do we go from here?
Our cleverness and creativity have far outpaced our wisdom, and all the gifts that we enjoy have costs, we have been ignorant of. These affect our wellness and our prospects for reaching our potential, for Actualizing. All my work, all my projects, are aimed at addressing that need; a new paradigm of wisdom and philosophy required to survive and even flourish in the present moment.
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
Horace Mann
Who is Rocco?
I am better defined by my Why, than by any other description. I believe we are here for a Reason, I believe our past suffering was inevitable, given the inevitable journey we took to get here, and all the preceding causes and effects which define it. But further suffering is something that can become avoidable. I believe we have a potential destiny that we can fail to pursue if we cannot get past this confounding moment, and transcend our very human weaknesses. I believe there is a signal, the signal of Life, which every being is uniquely calibrated to receive and follow, and this signal defines for each of us, according to our kind, our arc of Actualization. This is true for each person, each relationship and especially our whole species.
I believe we are standing at the threshold of an impossible moment, the ending of a great packet of intentionality, and as it is with each of us individually, the human race has had exactly the experiences we needed to extract the essence from, to take us forward into an incredible future, but to do so, we have to grow up and let go of the way that carried us here; we have to let go of Story.
All our ‘isms’ and our conventions, our rules and economies of status, money and attention, our ways of collaborating and co-existing, are the result of iterative stepping stones we took to get here. We did not make these selections consciously and diligently, being that we were always guided, until now, by impulse, immature faith or naivety. And now, there is a lot of chaff still obscuring the kernel of essence in each of these things. Our lack of discernment and understanding and our unawareness of the place we keep making our choices from, have lead to dysfunction across media, politics, government, enterprise, religion, spirituality, education, medicine, food production, relationships, parenting and every other field of human existence we have a belief or a system for.
The project of our time now, is to submit ourselves to the necessary threshing, which is what we are witnessing in every domain of human experience and endeavor right now. To get through the neck of this next difficult moment, we are going to have to let go of a lot of our psychological baggage, we are going to have to face our very human weaknesses and vulnerability and we are going to have to let go of our small ideas of right and wrong, good and bad, and with it all of our sanctimony and childish ideas about virtue.
Naturally there is not one single or only way to address this, so I work across many mediums, in many contexts at many levels of engagement.
Among other things, I am a poet, a writer, a philosopher, a teacher, a healer, a leader, a mystic and an innovator, engaged in a serious game of philosophical and spiritual entrepreneurship, with the purpose of speaking the voice of Maturity and Reason into the reality of the present moment, explaining how we got here and why it cannot carry us forward across the threshold of this impossible moment, both as individuals and as a species, what better might look like and what we would need to do, to lean that way.
Foremost, above all, I am a husband, and a father, and I want to make sure that when my wife and my child look me in the eye one day and say “what did you do?”, my answer will be, boldly and honestly: “Whatever it took!”
When my child looks me in the eye one day and asks "what did you do?", my answer will be, boldly and honestly:
"Whatever it took."
