Academic enough to cite it. Feral enough to remix it. Tender enough to trust it.

📷: 35mm photo taken by me in Norway

A friend called me last night (literally last night) and said,

“I read your latest essay—I didn’t realize you were so nerdy.”

Lol. Okay, she didn’t say it exactly like that, in fact she was very complimentary, but this is way better for the story and kind of the subtext for me.

Then I said something like,

“Oh yeah, I’m secretly an unhinged academic weirdo.”

Again, not exactly true. I hated school, until I found one that supported misfits like me. And that took 30 something years so… what I’m interested in is making certain ideas slightly more accessible and digestible, because they are often hard to decipher, even for me and I’m a feral learner.

Then she asked,

“Did you make those grid and ocean logic terms up?”

And I was like… yes and no. No, because they’re rooted in a million other people’s thoughts, philosophies, lenses, and frameworks.

But also yes, because I named them in this specific way as a means of distilling what I kept feeling in my body, my creative process, my relationships, and my attempts to live with integrity inside a world that often rewards disconnection and distraction, among other zombie-like ways of being.

I’m not claiming to have invented something new. I’m simply participating in an evolving conversation and offering language that helps me make sense of this moment, and maybe helps you do the same.

I’ve been immersed and influenced by these conversations for years thanks to my pal Dr. David Tripp, Michel Foucault, Audre Lorde, Jack Halberstam, Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Rainer Marie Rilke, Mary Oliver and the broader ecosystems of queer theory, trauma healing, mysticism, somatics, recovery and lived neurodivergence/CPTSD.

Also, thanks to a fuck ton of therapy, and maybe most importantly for me, recovery from the compulsion to check-the-fuck-out using alcohol. Which admittedly did keep me alive until it tried to kill me.

But with lucidity and time, practice, grace, and a lot of support, I was able to become more embodied and regain the trust of my inner compass/connection to my inner ocean logic, but it’s a def daily process.

I defined these terms for myself simply as a working frame to hold the tension between internalized systems of control (grid logic) which I was aware of even as a kiddo, and the nonlinear, intuitive, emergent truth I’ve been learning to trust all my life (ocean logic).

But after that call with my friend, my wheels were turning at like 150 mph, and I got curious, and did a little sleuthing.

I’m doing a lot of reflecting/writing on this framework, and I care deeply about naming influence and honoring lineage. Not out of fear, but because it’s the right thing to do and it’s why this work exists at all.

I’m so grateful to every single person who came before me and now influences me. Any right or privilege we have is built on the work of others and I don’t take that for granted for a second. I consider all these people dear friends. Even the dead ones—especially the dead ones (so much easier to get along with lol.) Just kidding.

So… on that note, while sleuthing, I discovered that Italian philosopher and professor Ermanno Bencivenga came up with, and has written about what he called Oceanic Logic:

“To bring up the metaphor that made me give this logic its name, all waves are modes of the same ocean, and the same with each other… the only identity in question is that of the ocean with itself.”

Distinct entities (waves) are understood as expressions of one underlying unity (the ocean.) Which… yeah, offers a striking intellectual parallel which I think is super awesome. I’m still exploring his work, but what I’ve glimpsed so far reflects something I’ve sensed for years.

He explores how dialectical tensions—reason vs. passion, subjectivity vs. objectivity—can be dissolved not by picking a side, but by revealing the deeper relational thread that already unites them. His work touches mysticism, metaphysics, and the limits of traditional logic. It resonates deeply and I can see now that I’ve been building on it all along.

If you’ve been reading/listening from the start of this little unhinged space, you know by now that my version of grid and ocean logic, let alone anything, isn’t meant to be a fixed definition or capital T truth. It’s a living, evolving framework or thing or whatever you want to call. It’s rooted in practice, not dogma.

A personal and political lexicon shaped by years of study and just as many years of unlearning, undoing, failure, loss, and getting hella lost all the time. It’s informed by philosophy, yes, but also by poetics, queerness, trauma work, music, psychology, social justice, and the embodied wisdom that shows up when we slow down and listen.

I think these terms matter and are helpful because they can help us name invisible forces. By naming grid logic and ocean logic, we start to see what was previously hidden, normalized, or unconscious.

As I’ve said before, grid logic gives language to rigid systems of control: optimization, binaries, dominance, productivity-as-worth, capitalism, white supremacy culture, colonial reason, linear timelines, and disembodied knowing.

Ocean logic makes visible the quieter, often-dismissed wisdom of the body, intuition, dreams, nonlinear knowing, emotion, relational truth, multiplicity, emergence, and spiritual depth.

Naming is a spell. When we name a pattern, we break its hold. We gain choice.

As Carl Jung said:

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

Or as Christine Langley-Obaugh said,

“We repeat until we repair.”

Ocean and grid logic terms can help us unhook from internalized systems. These frames offer a way to notice when we’re unconsciously operating from stories that don’t belong to us.

Grid logic can show up as perfectionism, productivity obsession, scarcity, needing to “make sense.” Also, emotional bypassing via rationalization, and urgency, either/or thinking, and shame-based motivation.

BTW FUCK SHAME. Just saying. Become shameless. Shameless doesn’t mean careless. It means being rooted enough in your worth that shame can’t hijack your truth.

And remember, Guilt says:

“I did something bad.”

It’s our inner knowing offering us information and giving us chance to reflect and adjust accordingly, make amends, or whatever is needed.

But shame says to us:

“I AM bad.”

Etc you know that voice and that is garbage and not true. Please believe me. Know and see the difference. Guilt gives an opportunity to course correct. Shame erodes from the inside out.

The goal isn’t shame but discernment.

Ocean logic helps us pause before defaulting to old maps, decisions, knee jerk reactions. It helps us pause and choose a response. It orients us to values like curiosity, presence, nuance, and consent. It builds nervous system safety in decision-making and expression. These aren’t just ideas, they’re survival adaptations. At least for me.

They also create space for multiplicity. Ocean logic makes room for contradiction, paradox, and complexity. It allows us to hold more than one truth at once—which is fucking essential we all learn how to do in my opinion.

It also accepts uncertainty as fertile ground. Values presence over resolution or conclusions, and asks us to live the questions (à la Rilke) instead of racing toward answers.

Do you know that quote? It’s so good. Here you go:

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

Hell yeah. Amazing, right? Told ya.

Maybe most importantly, they offer tools for self-inquiry and decision-making. All of this is essential for learning, unlearning, becoming, relational repair, and post-capitalist dreaming.

This binary is a mirror and a compass. For instance, when you’re stuck, overwhelmed, dissociating, or trying to figure it all out, you could ask what’s operating here:

Is this grid logic or ocean logic?

Do I think and/or feel this because it’s true for me?

Or is this an old habitual way of reacting?

Am I telling myself a story about this person/place or thing?

Where did I even learn this story?

Is the story even mine? Or is it conditioned?

Is it true or perception? Or both?

And even if it’s real for me, is it serving me and my way of being in the world any longer?

Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe both, but the point is that the question can open up new pathways. It can help you slow down. Drop into your body (if it’s safe) or notice what you need to do to care for yourself. It helps you choose aligned, resourced action instead of reactive performance. It will inspire you to ask deeper, truer questions.

Ocean and grid logic also unite the personal and political—a sweet spot I live for. These terms are not just internal, they are social technologies. Grid logic is the logic of the state, the corporation, the colonizer, the algorithm.

Ocean logic is the logic of dreams, mother-nature, kinship, community, poetry, ancestry, and erotic knowing. Audre Lorde!! Listen to that episode if you vibe with this because she’s a fucking angel that preaches aliveness.

By using these frameworks, you can align your healing with collective liberation, building bridges between inner life and outer change.

It helps me to remember that healing my nervous system is political. If my nervous system isn’t regulated I’m fucked—and not in a hot way.

In creative, relational, and community spaces, these terms offer a nonjudgmental way to name dynamics without shaming. Create shared understanding without jargon. Give others permission to name their own pace, truth, and knowing. It can also enable group discernment and cultural repair. This is especially powerful for folks reclaiming voice after erasure, masking, or code-switching.

Lastly, let us not forget, and let us be crystal clear— they are not always opposites.

They’re a dialectic. It’s not about resolving the tension, it’s about working with it.

Grid and ocean aren’t enemies. They’re a rhythm, a tension, a relationship. Not either/or—but also/and.

Ocean births the vision and grid builds the container. But a container can also be a prison so let’s look at that shit on a case-by-case basis and with eyes and hearts wide open.

Remember, there is no one-size fits all to anything and anything, even these ideas, can become traps if we let them.

Ocean logic teaches how to feel. Grid offers form and boundary. When balanced, and not oppressive, othering, or violent, they can generate real magic and structure that breathes. Logic that listens. Power that flows. This isn’t just a personal insight—it’s echoed across lineages.

I’ll wrap up now with some examples for you because you know I LOVE a good example or quote:

My most recent (unknown until last night) inspiration Ermanno Bencivenga, in his philosophical work on Oceanic Logic, which as mentioned above explores how oppositions like reason vs. passion or subjectivity vs. objectivity aren’t meant to be resolved, but re-understood as distinct expressions of the same whole. It’s also like Ying and Yang, actually.

Waves on the same ocean. People describe our consciousness this way as well. We come to earth, we become a wave/human body, then when we die, we crash into shore and return to oneness with the ocean. And repeat. Until you don’t. That’s one way to look at it.

Gloria Anzaldúa, in Borderlands/La Frontera, speaks to this through mestiza consciousness—the ability to live in contradiction, to hold multiplicity without shrinking. She writes:

“The new mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity… She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode.”

Love that. Pluralistic mode as she describes is the ability to hold multiple truths, perspectives, and cultural identities at once without collapsing them into one dominant narrative.

It resists binary thinking and instead moves fluidly between ways of knowing emotional, spiritual, intellectual, embodied. It’s the refusal to flatten your identity, or reality into a grid. In essence: pluralistic mode is ocean logic in action.

Another of my favs bell hooks shows us where ocean logic lives in Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.

Dr. Tripp introduced me to this one and it hit hard. She reframes the margin as not just a place of exclusion but a chosen site of resistance and possibility. Possibility! I love possibility.

“Marginality is much more than a site of deprivation… it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.”

This is ocean logic. It refuses the illusion of safety through control. It values lived truth, complexity, and the power of presence. This isn’t about playing small. It’s about standing in the creative power of the edge.

bell hooks shows us where it lives: in the margins, in the body that resists assimilation, in refusal as a form of love, and in Black feminist thought.

Let us never forget the queers learned how to protest from Black folks. I’m truly sorry for the harm we’ve caused—as white people, we have a long, violent history of taking and erasing. I’m doing my best to stay accountable and not center guilt, but action. I’m still learning. I definitely don’t always get it right, but I’m doing my best one day at time.

You’ll soon learn that I love Alan Watts, and his translations of Taoist thought for Western ears is legendary and reminds us:

“To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.”

So instead of grid logic vs. ocean logic. It’s more like: grid + ocean → something alive, integrated, and emergent. In dialectical thinking tension is creative, not destructive, contradiction is part of the process, and the interaction itself is what transforms.

I’m going to focus on how this takes shape in art and the creative process one of these days so stay tuned if you fancy that kinda thing.

I’ll wrap up by saying that grid logic without ocean becomes domination, disconnection, over-control. Ocean logic alone can drift into diffusion, ambiguity, and lack of grounding.

But when the two are in conversation and held with care, humility, and breath, we find something more whole. When held in a dynamic relationship they can create something real, humane, and alive.

The point isn’t to transcend polarity. It’s to learn to live inside it. To let it stretch us open until something deeper than resolution begins to emerge: a kind of listening, a kind of presence, a felt kind of logic that doesn’t need to explain itself to be real.

This is not a war. This is a dance.

References and Lineage

bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (South End Press, 1990), especially the essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.”
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987).
Ermanno Bencivenga, “Oceanic Logic” in Theories of the Logos (Springer, 2017).
Alan Watts, The Way of Zen (Pantheon, 1957); also from various lectures and writings including Still the Mind and Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life.
Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tzu, translated by Stephen Mitchell (Harper Perennial, 1988).
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Stephen Mitchell (Vintage, 1986).
Fannie Lou Hamer, quote: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” (Widely attributed in speeches and archival footage.)
Audre Lorde, various works including Sister Outsider and “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.”
Michel Foucault, works on power/knowledge including Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality.
Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Duke University Press, 2011).
Gloria Steinem, Revolution from Within and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions.

Also deeply influenced by the broader traditions of:

Queer theory
Somatic and trauma-informed healing
Mysticism, recovery frameworks, and decolonial embodiment practices

…and, always, the lived wisdom of those at the margins.