Building in the Spaces Between: Field Notes on Creating Magic Together

Adventures in Building with Heart, Wisdom, and Community to Create Something Greater Than We Imagined

Temple of The Heart, Burning Man 2023 - Jamen Percy

Building in the Spaces Between: Field Notes on Creating Magic Together

If you've ever found yourself standing in the spaces between - where sacred met scalable, where ancient wisdom danced with modern tech, where ambitious vision intertwined with emergent possibility - welcome home. This was a place where your questions belonged, where your curiosity found kindred spirits, where your unique perspective enriched our collective exploration. Together, we would venture into these fertile spaces between, discovering how they birthed innovations that surpassed our individual imaginings.

Two years of building temples in the desert. Deep dives into permaculture and plant wisdom. Twenty years of crafting everything from enterprise products to startup dreams, from social movements to digital communities. Each experience taught me something profound about how we created things that mattered - and often, how they grew to surpass our original vision in unexpected ways.

Here's what I learned: the most extraordinary innovations happened in the spaces between. Between vision and reality. Between the sacred and the scalable. Between ecological wisdom and cutting-edge tech. Between what we aspired to build and what emerged when we stayed open to possibility. It was in these intersections - where temple building met team dynamics, where natural patterns informed product development, where ancient wisdom guided community architecture - that we found the keys to building better.

This Substack was my exploration of those spaces between. It was for builders who'd felt the tension between holding a vision and letting it evolve. For creators who'd wondered why some aspirational projects soared while others got trapped in their own ambitions. For leaders searching for ways to keep innovation alive while nurturing the souls of their teams.

Each week, I would share honest stories and practical insights from my somewhat unconventional journey. We would explore how desert temples illuminated the art of building together, how ecological principles transformed how we approached innovation, and most importantly - how to navigate the delicate balance between vision and emergence, between aspiration and adaptation.

You would find field notes on:

• Building communities that thrived beyond their original blueprint

• The art of holding vision without becoming its prisoner

• Creating team cultures that nurtured both direction and discovery

• Weaving ecological wisdom into technological development

• Understanding the deeper patterns of how we created together

• When to stick to the vision and when to let it evolve

This wasn't another "here's how to run better standups" newsletter. It was for the curious builders, the meaning seekers, the pattern spotters who believed we could create products with heart and communities with staying power. For those who wanted to build not just to a vision, but beyond it.

To building better - not just with blueprints and roadmaps, but with heart and wisdom, with ancient knowing and future dreaming, with room for magic to emerge in the spaces between our plans. Because that's where the most extraordinary innovations were born: in the fertile ground between what we envisioned and what wanted to emerge. Join me as we explore these spaces together.

To building magic in the spaces between,
Ajesh

P.S. Coming up: How permaculture's wisdom revolutionized my approach to building AI systems, and the wild tale of creating 101 films in 101 hours in Mumbai's resistant arts scene. Because sometimes the best building insights come from the most unexpected places.