The Soul-Based Manifesto
(Found folded inside a teacup, beneath a sleeping fox)
1. This is not an empire.
If you came here looking to scale, conquer, or dominate, you may want to turn your boots around. We’re not paving roads. We’re growing gardens. We’re making maps with no legend, and that's on purpose.
2. Your nervous system is not a business plan.
If it burns you out, makes you shrink, or demands a version of you that feels like a costume... it's not the right shape. We build slow and strange here, in a way your breath can keep up with.
3. Success is a spell you write yourself.
Not inherited. Not reverse-engineered from someone’s 6-step plan.
It might look like a small business. Or a quiet offering that changes someone’s day. Size isn’t the measure. Neither is income. Resonance is.
4. Creativity is not a luxury.
It’s a tool. A survival skill. A compass. If you’re here, your work is more than a transaction; it’s how you think, feel, connect, and make sense. We create space for that even when it’s weird. Especially then.
5. The goal is not visibility. It’s integrity.
You do not owe the algorithm your face. Or your sparkle. Or your trauma. You are not a brand. You are a builder of meaning, of moments that feel like truth. You get to choose how and if — you’re seen.
6. Productivity is not morality.
Rest is not a reward. Slowness is not failure. There is nothing sacred about being busy for busy’s sake. We believe in compost. In dormancy. In choosing what matters over what performs.
7. We remember the why.
When it all gets noisy, we return to the root: why did you want this? Not the numbers. Not the niche. The feeling. The freedom. The whisper you couldn’t unhear. That’s your compass.
8. We honour the real you.
Neurodivergent. Highly sensitive. Multi-passionate. Unconventional. Mysterious. You don’t need to be fixed, simplified, or explained. You need tools that meet you where you are, and pathways that don't punish your differences.
9. We resist the machine.
The one that chews through meaning and calls it scale. The one that flattens work into content and people into brands. We’re building beside it, beneath it, beyond it with moss in our pockets and stories on our tongues.
10. We build what fits.
Not what’s trending. Not what’s easiest to sell. We build what aligns. What moves through us. What we want to wake up to tomorrow. This isn’t a strategy. It’s soul architecture.
—-
A raccoon rolls the scroll closed and places it gently in the drawer marked words to live by. ❤︎
Penned by Val Cline, keeper of Esby’s drawer and curator of this curious corner of the internet.
↦ Share it with care, please quote with credit. The moss remembers.
If this kind of work speaks to your bones —
There’s a drawer creaking open. Esby waits with a card and a kettle.
A Bit About Me
I’m Val — a longtime systems-questioner and creative guide who’s spent decades exploring how we create, connect, and stay true to ourselves in a world that often pulls us off course.
I’ve run small, purpose-driven businesses. I’ve worked inside big, complex ones. I’ve studied how people make meaning — and why so many of us end up disconnected from it.
One of my earliest businesses grew from a simple question: why are the systems meant to help often the ones that harm? That question still drives me.
I’m here to help people like you — curious, thoughtful, a little defiant — create work that fits. Not by squeezing yourself into someone else’s model, but by returning to what matters, and building from there.