Parallel Play
The Spiritual Underground is the art, culture, and creative practice strand of this work — the place for people whose faith, attention, and making live a little outside the standard rooms.
It is built around two ideas that arrived slowly and deliberately, in conversation, over years of trying to find language for a way of being with God that didn’t require performance, certainty, or fluency in inherited forms.
You do not join this. You recognise yourself in it.
“Low-demand faith is the recognition that faith can be practised outside ritual, standardised religious practices, and cultural norms. It is the understanding that our relationship with the Divine is often alive in the ordinary moments of our lives, not only within formal acts of worship.”
Spiritual Parallel Play is following your own curiosity into something with monotropic depth — going all the way down into one thing — and discovering God already there, beside you. Not directing the search. Not correcting it. Just present, the way one child is present beside another in parallel play: each absorbed in their own thing, recognised simply by being near.
The world calls this kind of depth a deficiency. God made it. A hidden treasure★ who created the whole world to be found knows exactly what the joy of finding feels like — better than a world that never built the hiding place. The recognition this work deserves was never the world’s to withhold. It belongs to the One who designed the capacity for it, and who delights in what gets excavated and carried back into the light.
At first, this is simply lived — immersed in the fascination, not yet named as devotion at all. The growth is in the noticing: learning to recognise, inside the depth, that the relationship was there the whole time. And once that noticing is learned in one place, it doesn’t stay there. It permeates outward, until attention itself becomes a way of finding God anywhere, not only in the original interest.
This is not the opposite of ritual. Ritual repeats the same form many times until awareness of God becomes constant. Spiritual Parallel Play goes deep into one thing until that same awareness is reached by a different road. Both are trying to arrive at the same place. The world built infrastructure for one of these roads, and forgot the other one existed.
Inspiring the Sufi: A Neurodivergent Practice in Parallel Play is the named, public example of this work — fifty Names of Allah, each paired with a song from somewhere in the world, each held alongside a written reflection. One practice, fully documented, freely available to wander.
If you work in faith, the arts, or culture — and any of this meets something you are already trying to make room for — I am open to expressions of interest. Programming, residencies, collaborations, conversation. No pitch deck, no form. A short, plain note is enough.
For quieter contact — reflections, occasional letters, news about the book — Sanctuary First on Substack.