electricity for your soul
Franklin gave us words for the outer power. Now we are creating words to harness our inner power in the age of AI.
why a new language? why now?
When Benjamin Franklin began studying electricity, people could feel the spark and the shock. But they had few words for what was happening. So Franklin gave the force a family of names:
Charge.
Conductor.
Battery.
Positive.
Negative.
The names made electricity thinkable, workable, livable.
Before the names, electricity was something that happened to you.
After the names, electricity became something you could work with.
We are living through another shock now.
AI is electrifying our schools, our work, our relationships, our art, our attention. But it is also electrifying our interiors — speeding us up, numbing us, naming us, drawing off things we do not always get back.
And we have very few words for what is happening inside us.
Happy.
Optimistic.
Anxious.
Depressed.
Lonely.
The electricity analogy only gets us partway.
You carry within you about 38 trillion bacteria, most of them in your gut, participating in a vast chemical conversation with your body. You also carry 86 billion neurons joined in an almost unimaginably intricate web. None of this explains the mystery of a person. It only hints at the staggering scale of the life moving within you.
And to describe that vast, churning, particular interior, Big Mammon tells us to reach for the same few words.
Imagine sending a naturalist into the Amazon and receiving a field report with one category:
Small things.
That is roughly the resolution at which we perceive our own interiors.
We have named millions of things beyond us — species, stars, minerals, galaxies. Yet for the country closest to us, the one we inhabit every waking hour, we have a handful of worn words. Many were supplied by clinics, labs, platforms and machines.
We need a Linnaeus of the interior. But instead of some rare genius doing it all, a commons, a democreacy — where each of us, as fleshient creatures, can participate in the naming.
That is the gap a wellgorithm fills.
A wellgorithm, in seed form, is a new word — and often a face — for something moving inside you.
Jackie might name one of her inner creatures anxiety∫Ice. Her anxiety feels cold, paralyzing, lonely.
Reid might call his anxiety∫Fire. His burns hot — energetic, urgent, dangerously uncomfortable.
This is what scientists call emotional granularity — naming emotions with greater precision. Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work shows that one broad word — anxiety — can point to very different creatures. The more precisely you name them, the more agency you have in tending them.
anxiety∫Ice may need warmth and companionship.
anxiety∫Fire may need cooling, space, or a safe channel for its energy.
Words are organs of perception. New words increase contrast. Contrast increases perception. Perception increases agency. Agency increases what you can do.
Words are power. They change what you can see. They make the defaults, the biases, the hidden assumptions of our culture visible.
That’s why Big Mammon seized control of our words. You want to get help, you want to bill the insurance, you want to get paid — use Big Mammon’s words.
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Once your inner creatures have names, you enter into a relationship with them. You can tend them — plant, pollinate, compost, mulch, fertilize. That’s when a name becomes a wellgorithm — a living practice for cultivating your soul like a garden.
You can share a wellgorithm with a friend. You can animate your words. You can make songs with them. You can interact with them in 3D.
You can even graft the wellgorithm seeds and weeds of other gardeners — borrow their raw materials, a word, a face, and take them in a new direction.
Franklin gave us words for the outer currents. Wellgorithms give us words for the inner currents.
These are strange times. We need a language strange enough, precise enough, and human enough to meet them.
one Garden. two gates.
There are two kinds of wellgorithms.
Grace wellgorithms are grounded in Scripture. They say God, Christ, and the Spirit out loud. They continue the work of the saints, mystics, and desert monks who spent two thousand years naming the movements of the soul.
Nature wellgorithms speak in the common language of human experience. They are for anyone with a body and a wound — the agnostic, the seeker, the doomscroller, the friend of another faith or none. They ask nothing of you but honesty.
These are not two rival truths.
They are two registers for approaching the same mysterious interior: one through experiences we may recognize across our differences, the other in the particular light of Christian faith.
With each wellgorithm you create, you decide whether it goes in the Grace plots or the Nature plots.
There is no neutral language — and this is the sham of Big Mammon.
It makes words such as dignity, ethics, freedom, and agency sound neutral. But their meanings depend upon what we believe a human being is, where we came from, and what we are here for.
So here is what I believe: that the world is Creation, that every human being bears the image of God, that our powers of naming and making are gifts, and that the deepest healing of human nature is found in the grace of God.
Grace perfects nature — gratia perficit naturam. This is my confession. But I will not place it in your mouth.
The more I grow in my faith, the wider I open the door. The Garden is built in the spirit of φιλοξενία — philoxenia, the love of the stranger. That means you are welcome exactly as you are. You are not my conversion project.
Faith means something only when it is freely given. In the Garden, you are never forced. Your heart remains free.
Rock says to “love the stranger without grumbling” — ἄνευ γογγυσμοῦ.
Gongysmos is one of my favorite words. In Greek, gong-goos-moo sounds like a crowd mumbling under its breath.
So, whenever a stranger gets on my nerves — you, for example — I just say
gong-goos-moo
gong-goos-moo
68,000 times, until I feel better or drop dead.
The Garden offers you tools for naming your inner creatures — with a wink, a smile, and a heart full of love and hope — and then steps back. You can take a word, question it, change it, plant it in your own language, or leave it where you found it.
That is hospitality. That is freedom.
As Paul says, if we have any complaints against each other, lavish grace freely, graciously on each other — χαριζόμενοι — just as God in Christ lavishes grace freely, graciously on us.
The English translations often gloss this over and call it “forgiveness.” It comes out so bland in English. In Greek, Paul uses the root word for Grace and tells us to “lavish grace freely.” Different energy. More exuberant.
Big Mammon lavishes labels. It installs its names with dry, clinical, white-coat, stock-photo seriousness — without asking your permission. It defines you. Labels you. Categorizes you. Sells you to the highest bidder in an invisible market.
Big Mammon knows the rule:
GIGO — Grammar In, Grammar Out.
And if your grammar is garbage, your culture will be garbage, too. This is the word stench we awaken to each morning — doomscrolling, cognitive surrender, workslop, meaning-maxxing. This is the stinky language of Big Mammon.
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the naming stays human
One line governs everything here:
The machine does not name your inner creatures for you.
AI can help you give a word a face. It can help animate the word, set hand-written lyrics to music, or carry your vision into forms you could not build alone. When AI helps, we say so openly under the Silvanus protocol.
But the first naming belongs to the person with the body — the one who is fleshient. The one carrying the wound. I may coin a name and offer it to you. But no name becomes yours until you recognize it and say:
“That. That is what I am experiencing.”
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Some wellgorithms are seeds. Some are weeds. Some are mulch. Some are worms.
Worms are the humor wellgorithms. They may be the most important creatures in the Garden. As Chesterton said “Angels can fart because they can take themselves lightly.” Well, he didn’t really say that. But he should have.
Bonhoeffer warned Christians against cheap grace. I would add another phrase — playful grace.
Playful grace asks everything of us — confession, change, patience, courage, forgiveness — but refuses to believe that holiness must be humorless.
It is grace with dirt beneath its fingernails.
Grace that laughs with the worms.
“The best Christian theology has always understood love to be the fullest liberation and has found love best exemplified in play.”
— Alan Jacobs
