WHAT AWEN MEANS
Awen is a Welsh word. The earliest written record of it appears around 800 CE, in a Latin manuscript called the Historia Brittonum, where it shows up describing a sixth-century poet. The word itself is older than that, but 796 is the first time someone bothered to write it down. It means flowing inspiration or loosely, flowing spirit. The word is widely understood to share roots with both the Welsh word awel ("breeze") and the English word inspiration (from the Latin inspirare, "to breathe in"). Spirit and breath are the same word in most older languages. To be inspired, literally, is to take a breath. In the bardic tradition, awen is pictured as three rays of light, falling at slight angles toward the center. The rays are said to represent three things:
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The understanding of truth.
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The love of truth.
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The maintaining of truth.
I chose this name in part for its poetry; I wanted a name for this practice that spoke to how I want to show up in the work: with inspiration and a commitment to the truth. The tradition understood inspiration as something that arrives from outside you rather than something you manufacture. You take it in, like breath, like weather. I extend that to the natural world, because the same thing is true there. Stand in a place long enough and it starts telling you how it works.
Art does this too. A poem can show you what you were actually feeling about a situation you thought you'd already understood. A song can hold a difficult truth steady long enough for you to look at it without flinching. A painting can name a thing you didn't have words for yet. These are real functions, not soft ones. They're ways of knowing that we cannot access with spreadsheets, and we're poorer for ignoring them. The work I aspire to do sits in a place where that matters.
Strategy is partly a rational exercise — but only partly. Judgment about what's actually going on in an organization isn't fully reachable by analysis alone. Steadiness under pressure isn't a metric you can calculate. Some of what holds a leader together when the conversation gets hard is anchored by things outside the business, a relationship to something larger than the quarter. I want to do work that respects that fact rather than pretending it isn't true.
That's what awen means to me: that the kind of understanding that matters most is the kind that flows through you when you're open to it, not the kind you force out of a model. You don't get there by just being clever. You get there by being steady, attentive, and willing to be moved.