Beyond setting the stage for a scientific revolution, the discovery plants seeds for an essential conceptual revolution. After all, our society and culture have always co-evolved with breakthroughs in science and technology.

Doctors were staring right at the physical interstitium and dismissing it as unimportant because of the ways they had been trained to see. In the same way, our dominant culture’s hyper-fixation on individualism and competition means that our inherent interdependence (with each other and the natural world) is ignored. Kinkeepers, bridge builders, and the many others who serve as the connective tissue of our communities go unappreciated and unpaid.

As the polycrisis accelerates, it’s more and more obvious that we can’t solve our current problems with the tools and mindsets we used to create them. Recognizing and tending our interconnection is one critical and missing ingredient!

However, as Kimberlé Crenshaw writes, “If you can’t name a problem, you can’t see a problem — and if you can’t see a problem, you can’t solve it.” In pursuit of collective survival and thriving, we need more language and metaphors to help us perceive and understand webs of relationship, and what it takes to move resources and information through them. We need different models for leadership, learning, parenting and humaning.

Jennifer Brandel learned about the physical interstitium shortly after its discovery. (Read that origin story here!) She published an essay in Orion Magazine and reported a story for Radiolab- giving a name to Interstitionaries. She included a call to action at the end of each piece, to which more than 800 people (and counting!) have responded.

Ariel Brooks and Christine Lai answered the call early and enthusiastically. Informed by hundreds of survey responses from self-identified Interstitionaries, Ariel, Jenn and Christine volunteered time and energy to build a relational container for Interstitionaries that facilitates connection, support and shared meaning-making. You can learn about some of our 2025 experiments here.

Meeting so many amazing Interstitionaries — and getting to read, think and talk about relationality in many forms — has only increased our excitement and resolve. We are birthing Interstitia, a networked support system that will serve as:

• A living relational infrastructure, rooted in trust, attentiveness, and relational intelligence, activating connections among Interstitionaries and Interstitionary networks; and

• A learning organism, designed to notice, name, develop, and amplify nuanced interstitial approaches that enable coherence and coordination across fragmented systems.

If you’re still reading and excited to go deeper, hooray! We love meeting others who are as excited as we are about these ideas. Here’s some additional recent thinking and writing from our collective!

• Are You a Hexagon Person? by Jennifer Brandel || There’s a certain type of Interstitionary that we’re noticing more of in the world: they connect and triangulate people, resources and ideas both on the ground, where they live and also in the ether - in wider communities of practice, sectors and spaces that are not geographically bound. And that toggling between altitudes results in massive connective powers. (Fun fact: the physical interstitium is hexagonally shaped!)

• Is Your Community Immunocompetent? by Ariel Brooks || What if our neighborhoods, towns and cities could develop the equivalent of a kick-ass immune system — one that helps us stave off infection, recover quickly, and resist cancerous ideas sweeping through? Drawing on the physical interstitium's role as the body's immune highway, this piece makes a case for "social immunocompetence" — our collective ability to use relationships and community bonds to heal, protect, and recover together.

The sooner we recognize our interdependence in all of its forms, the faster we can build the bridges to ensure a resilient future in the face of existential crises. We hope you’ll join us!