There are systems that do not merely run—they write. Systems that, in the process of unfolding, revise their own architectures of possibility. These are recursive systems: culture, language, the cosmos. Each evolves not only through time but through the transformation of the space from which futures can be drawn. They are not mere sequences of change. They are forms of becoming that alter the conditions for becoming.
Culture is one such system. It does not simply record history; it rewrites the possibilities of meaning through what it remembers, performs, and forgets. Every ritual, rebellion, inheritance, and rupture reconfigures the symbolic matrix that shapes future action. Culture is recursive: what it expresses feeds back into what can be expressed. In this way, it becomes a poetry of shared imagination—layered, unpredictable, and alive.
Language is another. Its grammar is not fixed—it shifts with use, play, drift. Every new utterance, every emergent register, each subtle semantic drift, acts upon the system that made it possible. Language expresses meaning, yes—but in doing so, it also reshapes the meaning potential of the system itself. It is not just a tool for description; it is a field of continual invention. Language writes not only the world, but its own possibility of writing. It is recursive poetry in motion.
And the universe—when we shed the mechanistic lens and view it relationally—is the most expansive of all. Stars forge atoms, atoms coalesce into molecules, molecules form life, and life reflects upon the stars. At every turn, the universe actualises potential in ways that reshape what potential can mean. The cosmos writes itself through material and energetic expression, and in so doing, sculpts the structure of what may come to be. Evolution—cosmic, biological, cultural—is not merely the movement of forms. It is the transformation of the space of possibility itself.
To see these systems in parallel is to glimpse a deeper unity. Whether in the biosphere or the mythosphere, in grammar or in stardust, we find this same recursive dynamic: instance reshaping potential; expression transforming what can be expressed. Life, mind, and matter converge as recursive poems—each a becoming that rewrites its own grammar of emergence.
We are not only readers of these systems. We are lines within them. And perhaps our greatest act of participation is to write—consciously, lovingly—into the poetry that is writing us.