Where Heart Meets Heartland

“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.”
— Bill O’Brien

This is a small wager dressed as a retreat. The wager: that in a moment of accelerating machines and fraying trust, the most generative force in the world is not a sharper argument, a bigger platform, or another room of experts trading takes — but a small circle of unlikely people who come to genuinely trust one another. Not a network. Not a deal. Coherence.

AI is mastering intelligence; the attention economy is mastering distraction. The next chapter won’t be authored by algorithms or institutions. If it gets written at all, it will emerge the way a murmuration of starlings turns — no leader, no agenda, thousands of small beings attending closely enough to move as one. For three days in Medora, North Dakota, a handful of people will gather where the prairie meets presence to practice exactly that. Are you in?

What this is not

It isn’t a conference. No keynotes, no panels, no lanyards, no decks waiting their turn. Nobody comes to broadcast. We won’t hand you an agenda and call it transformation. What happens will be shaped by who is in the room and how present they are willing to be — which means it can’t be promised in advance, only prepared for. That open-endedness isn’t a gap in the plan. It is the plan.

Two communities that shouldn’t make sense together

We are two streams that, on paper, don’t belong in the same room — Nipun and Greg. And that is precisely the point. One is rooted in the overlooked heartland (Emerging Prairie & TEDxFargo, where 200+ volunteers build what they call a love letter to their community). The other is rooted in the global heart — ancient wisdom traditions (ServiceSpace, twenty-five years of circles, retreats, and gift-economy experiments). Collectively, our communities are conservative and progressive, rural and urban, builder and contemplative; and we are convening not merely to ideate, but to go beneath the surface to reveal something more potent: a shared field that is coherent enough to respond to today's challenges with uncommon creativity and courageous kindness.

What three days might hold

We’ll circle up around our lived experience of the world as it actually is — and what each of us senses could bend the collective arc toward more community and care. Evenings by the fire for the unscripted turning-point stories we rarely tell out loud. And the land and culture as teachers, not scenery: a meal under open sky in the badlands, a private evening at the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, music from local legends like Cowboy Lyle.

Come a day early for an optional local immersion — the Medora Musical, mountain biking and hiking through Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a round of golf, and an interactive dinner with former U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp — in a landscape that has taught generations that interdependence isn’t an ideal. It’s just how you survive a prairie winter.

Who is in the circle

A retired four-star admiral. A law professor. A cooperative pioneer. A fifth-generation farmer. A marshmallow artist. The president of North Dakota’s largest foundation. A maker who crossed an ocean to be here. A technologist from Silicon Valley. Each carries a different way of seeing; all are willing to set the role down and simply attend. (See the People tab for the growing list.)

Questions we’ll hold together

• In a moment of accelerating intelligence, what is wisdom asking of us?
• How do we shift from broadcasting at each other toward genuinely attending to each other?
• What can we know together that none of us can know alone — the signal beneath the data?
• What is your 5% — the part that is genuinely yours to do, so the rest of the field can carry the rest?

Offered in gift. All participants cover their own travel costs, but beyond that, the offering is carried by those who came before you. Participants are always welcome to pay it forward, but you are invited on the simple idea that your presence is the greatest gift you're offering to this collective field.