Combining is the long-awaited second collection of essays, reflections, poems, and artwork by Nora Bateson.
“Nora Bateson writes like no other—her “ecology of communication” is poetry, observation, wisdom, and rage blended into a coherent narrative that sinks down deep and swirls. I read her words (as a woman, lover, mother, sister, daughter, psychologist, therapist, citizen) over and over, each time feeling more and more alive. Before her pages, I would despair at the lack of anger and dissent in, and at, our institutions; at the vapid acceptance of how we have made things—discourses, structures, and acts of harm, holding up and holding together the status quo.
Reading Combining was like holding my breath and slowly breathing out, all at once. Excitement and relief crashing together into a soothing song, blending and curving with the strength of a spine.
Prepare to go to the places we are not supposed to go, in order to be in the spaces we are truly meant to be.”
~ Taiwo Afuape, Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist, Author of Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma
In Combining—love, humor, curiosity, and vulnerability entwine amidst the trials of a world in flux. As we face the polycrisis, Nora Bateson urges us to swerve from the traditional paths and to dismantle the illusions of fitting in. She beckons us to step into a world where learning, un-cutness, and readiness converge, promising both revelation and revolution.
Like a mole in the garden of our times, velvet, sharp-eyed and half underground, Nora Bateson’s Combining undermines our most precious certainties, offers nourishment, unseen circulation, surprises, mounds, chambers and drainage tunnels for our thinking, living and relating.
Using multiple artistic and literary forms, resisting always the urgent request for answers, checklists and action points, Nora’s work is the embodiment of the Warm Data approach that she teaches. It is the most telling example of what she has named “aphanipoiesis”—that prolific tendency (characteristic of all living systems) for things to come together or coalesce unseen towards vitality.
If ever a book could work overnight, discreetly, very quietly, to change our minds, it’s Combining.
Triarchy Press
→ About Nora
Advance Praise for Combining:
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""Nora takes risks to behave differently, in how she gives us pieces of herself; in how she speaks with clarity about the messiness of being on the edge of destruction, whilst embodying the prayers of our ancestors; in how she brings together that which systems of harm repetitively sever—logic and heart, ecology and psychology, trauma and oppression, science and art. Prepare to go to the places we are not supposed to go, in order to be in the spaces we are truly meant to be.”
Taiwo Afuape, Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist, Author of Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma
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“A masterwork. Please avail yourself of this heartfelt, brilliant, yet entirely accessible guide to the lived experience of complexity. Bateson shows how to engage with our personal and collective challenges less as problems to be solved than as systems calling for understanding, compassion, and harmonious engagement.”
Douglas Rushkoff, Author of Team Human and Survival of the Richest
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“This compilation is full of delicious insights that call us to witness the awe-inspiring breadth of possibilities that emerge from our entanglement. When we loosen our grip and dive into the web of relationships, we will begin to understand the abundance of potential pathways we have before us. As I relaxed into this book I found myself underlining so many parts saying YES! Nora has given us a gift in her Combining artistry that arrives at the perfect moment of our evolution.”
Vicki Saunders, Founder, Coralus (formerly SheEO)
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“Nora Bateson is doing with words what language has no capacity for. I fell in love with it right from the start.”
Bayo Akomolafe, Author of These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home, Global Senior Fellow of The Othering & Belonging Institute
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“Nora Bateson reminds us in this book—and in how she thinks, speaks, and inhabits this world—that our hope lives not in our cleverness, but in our vulnerability, in our wildness, in our feral creativity, and most of all among our relationships, in our animate communications with each other and all living beings. This book is an exercise in living ecologically.”
Rex Weyler, Co-Founder, Greenpeace International
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“I deeply appreciate all the Bateson Family offerings. Nora’s amazing distinctive contribution is evident in this new work, Combining! One can imagine life-at-work, rather than just be told. The imagery in Nora’s writing is an exquisite depiction of Living Systems. We all can grow from this brilliant work of art, poetry, stories and more woven together, magically.”
Carol Sanford, Best-selling, award-winning Author and Podcaster, Executive Producer of The Regenerative Business Summit
Upcoming events
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A Reading by Nora Bateson
10.23 6:00-9:00PM
The reading will take place from 7 PM to 8:15 PM.
AT RICH MIX
35-47 BETHNAL GREEN ROAD
LONDON, UK
