I am especially grateful to: Colin Ashton; Kate Ashton; Emilios Bouratinos; Gianlauro Casoli; Valerie Charlton; Chris Clarke; Satish Kumar; Alice Oswald; Peter Oswald; Shantena Sabbadini; Harvey Schoolman; Patricia Shaw; Rupert Sheldrake, who all provided key advice, assistance and perspective at various stages of the writing.
A special thanks to Minni Jain, who provided continual belief in the project and gave invaluable insight at critical stages.
In 2005 I had completed the one year residential MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College, Devon, in the UK. I would like to thank all teachers, students, staff and volunteers at Schumacher College who shared this journey.
An influential teacher and later colleague and friend, was Henri Bortoft. Henri Bortoft first introduced me to the reality of the living relation of whole and part. His dedication to describe and communicate existence as a dynamic appearing are articulated in his book Taking Appearance Seriously (Bortoft 2012) published two months before his passing away. I owe deep gratitude to Henri and Henri’s wife, Jackie Bortoft, who read through this manuscript on a number of occasions.
My dissertation, supervised by Brian Goodwin, was called Living Ambiguity, Contextual Choice in the Outcome of DNA (Franses 2006). Brian Goodwin was a writer and academic. After Brian’s passing in 2009, I became faculty lecturer on the MSc in Holistic Science alongside Stephan Harding. I would especially like to thank Brian and Stephan, for their collegiality and wisdom.
It was through writing a chapter in The Intuitive Way of Knowing: A Tribute to Brian Goodwin, (Floris Books 2013) that I came into contact with the editor Christopher Moore. Apart from his reading endless versions of the text and pointing the way forward, a particularly poignant moment was when preparing this book for publication. In a moment of turmoil, where ideas seemed scattered in disarray, Christopher remained completely calm, listening to everyone. Suddenly order took hold and the book had arrived at its form in the world. Christopher Moore, thank you!