FUTURE

Can You Happily Combine the Mundane with the Mighty Magic too? Eureka!

Doing mundane shopping, I understood space

One thing you must know about me before you start reading this story: I’m a quantum groupie. I’m one of those wild women who try to embrace deep wisdom and make sense of it for real life use. A feral, sophisticated woman. Combining complexity with simplicity and living a mundane life worth living.

Often, I have my hands in the soil. I’m a permaculture person. Growing food. Restoring ecosystems. Swimming in oceans to understand her better. A soil and sea person who needs to write to understand life.

My husband Mike is a truck driver gone soil and sea person too. He reads and observes to understand life. And together, we understand more.

We live temporarily in places where we can contribute to the current transition of societies and economies. A bit like nomads. Returning to our mum, daughters, and grandsons in the Lowlands in summer.

Summertime is family time. Campfire and music time. Play time.

I’m one of those wild women who try to understand deep wisdom and make sense of it for real-life use. Feral. Sophisticated. Combining complexity with simplicity

Quantum Physics

A soil and sea person. This image entered my head the other day and it describes us beautifully. Or should I say soil, sea, and space persons? Space is definitely the most important ingredient of life.

After all, like quantum physicist Richard Feynman reminds us, even a tree is initially created in space. Sunlight falls on CO2. The carbon gets separated from the oxygen and lands in the hard structure of the tree, the bark. The other part stays in the air, in space. Providing healthy breath for animals, including humans.

Photosynthesis is a natural process. A mighty magic process.

Anyhow, today I had a revelation, cycling to the cheese shop through space. It happens to me nowadays. Ideas just fly into my head when I need them most. It’s how I find my lost car keys. And how I deal with the difficult task of reducing our possessions to more space than stuff. So we can go in September to Greece.

What’s the revelation?

I think I now understand the link between the mathematical Superformula and compassion. I think I understand how blowing air into a hole can change the world for real.

Nature knows all. And I just saw another small glimpse…

Grief and Anger

The Netherlands, where we live in summer, is a cycling country. We cycle everywhere. It’s a great way of being. It goes fast enough to bridge a distance and slow enough to notice details.

Greeting other cyclists and pedestrians along the way.

The cheese shop is half an hour's drive. A nice break from my keyboard. Wind on my cheeks. Birdsong in my ears. It beats Queen on earplugs anytime. Cycling across the bridge over the river Meuse, I ponder about another dimension. Time.

The river is calm now. The farmhouses and river shores are visible again. A few weeks ago that was completely different. The Meuse had turned into a violent water mass after torrential rains harrassed our South and parts of Germany and Belgium.

Many human and animal lives were lost. People became homeless. And I was angry at our leaders for fighting the river instead of learning from her. And adapting our human ways to her wisdom. Grief and anger colored my poetry. And I wrote about natural sponge solutions. Combining wetlands with clever engineering.

But by now, the Meuse is calm again. And my compassion goes to the farmers and citizens cleaning up the leftovers. I bend over the railing of the bridge and connect my awareness to the river’s.

I imagine myself floating on her surface. I love floating on water. I love being part of calm Nature and feel her wisdom seep into me.

I think I understand how blowing air into a hole can change the world for real

Cheese and People

The owners of the cheese shop are a social couple. They travel to market stalls in our area. And on Fridays, they open shop. They always accompany their cheese with kind words. And shared laughter.

Today, a young man is cutting my cheese. I ask for goat’s cheese and a cut of brie. We chat. I expand my awareness to include him and we smile. I like him. He has dreadlocks and many tattoos. Body art in all kinds of shapes.

Eureka!

Cycling back home, my clear moment of insight happens. Not a lightning strike as some people describe it. More like a calm ray of light entering my brain.

The impact is strong though and makes me wobble. I step off my bike. My brain feels fuzzy. Is this the truth I was searching for?

He has dreadlocks and an arm full of tattoos. Body art in all kinds of shapes

Let me give you some background. Mathematicians, ecologists, and technologists have been explaining me patiently about a relatively new kid on the block. The Superformula. This one mathematical formula for all shapes of Nature has been suggested by Johan Gielis around 2000 and is already used in some applications. I want to understand properly how it will change our world. And it eludes me all the time.

The Superformula and the Gielis Transformations are not a theory of everything. Science so far has been busier with the smallest and the biggest than with the mundane. These Transformations are practical mathematics based on how Nature shapes our world. So we can use that knowledge to create our human systems in better ways. Use Nature’s wisdom in architecture, farming, water cleaning, mobility, medical devices, virtual reality, and decentral value systems.

And what I saw today is a huge puzzle piece for me. It ties in with many other puzzle pieces. Before now, I couldn’t write about the Superformula. I saw some shadows of its potentiality, but I couldn’t feel it. Yet.

And without feeling, never a good story.

When Johan started to explain the Superformula to me a while back, he used the analogy of blowing air into a dot with a bicycle pump. The circle blows wide and can take all shapes. The dot, the initial organism taking in the air, stays in the middle. Inclusive growth. Emergence.

A flower with many petals, a starfish, or even a spiral emerges. What’s the big deal, you say? Why do we need a formula for that?

Well, the revolutionary characteristic of the Superformula is that we do not need steps to make progress. We do not need static opposites. We can use poles like Nature does. And motion in space. We can create a rainbow of diverse colors that merge instead of jump. We do not need straight lines and sharp edges anymore like Pythagoras told us.

But after that, the real meaning was lost on me. I’m not a numbers person, you know, I’m a sensitive words person. It sometimes got me into bank account trouble. One zero more or less is just a piece of space to me. But it can make a huge difference when it comes to money!

However, I have one skill that brings me miracles. Wonder. Curiosity. So I looked for other dots to connect to the Superformula. The evolutionary theories of Lynn Margulis about symbiotic bacteria that create by inclusion got my imagination going. And Alan Rayner’s explanations about natural inclusion helped me too.

Alan said to me: “It’s more of keyhole, Desiree, than a key.”

And there and then, on my bicycle, I understood what he meant. A keyhole more than a key. Space in a hole. More than matter itself. Symbiosis.

Life is all about space. Supergeometry and compassion. About atoms embracing instead of colliding.

Compassion

And if you think I’m some kind of Einstein, think again. I’m not. It’s not even a special insight. My indigenous trainer Jon Young has been showing me how indigenous animal tracking works and how we can communicate with animals via awareness. My zen-teacher Myrke told me all about inclusion and paradoxes.

It just didn’t register properly with me until now.

What’s my big insight, you ask? Some people say compassion is all about trying to step into another person’s shoes. But of course, that can never happen. You can only have your own perspective. My unique body, mind, heart and soul are all I can use to understand the world and connect to other people.

So, what happens when you create compassion? You suck air into your organism (breath into your body) and you expand your awareness to include another person. In that combined field between two or more animals or people, something happens. Wordless information, invisible energy is being transferred.

And something new, something more than the sum of the parts, emerges.

This big insight also shows me what happens physically when facilitators ‘hold space’ for a group. Nothing woo woo about it. It’s about expanding my personal awareness to include the whole group with myself in the center. Exchange happens and creates new insights. I bet many of the leadership trainers I work with already knew this.

I just didn’t. Yet.

Magic and Technology

So, in this tiny moment in time, on my bicycle between the cows in the field, smelling the fragrance of summer, I feel the immense implications emerge. What if we, humans, would be creating our technologies with space and symbiosis?

Nature has been evolving for 3.8 billion years when the first bacteria started to use symbiosis. Human technology is much younger. A toddler. It needs loads of energy and solid matter. Nature, however, uses structure and information to create functionality.

I never really understood the ‘information’ part of this biomimicry technology. But I do now. It’s just space. And atoms embracing each other more than colliding.

My imagination runs wild. I laugh out loud, standing next to my bicycle. Other cyclists stare. I don’t care. Could this be the end of the current technology of opposites? Zeros and ones? Could adding space and symbiosis be the answer to our ethics problems? Could it be the end of blockchain slurping so much energy? And perhaps, in the future, we do not need cables at all?

Nature uses structure and information to create functionality

One small step, or rather no step. One formula can be a quantum leap for mankind. Technology and compassion merged for a minute in my brain.

I get onto my bicycle again to bring my cheese home. Enough insights for one day. Mouths have to be filled. Dinner for the family. We definitely live in interesting times…

You can find me somewhere on our beautiful planet, with my hands in the soil and my eyes focused on the stars. Contact via Abundanism.com and Linktree. Thank you, Mike, for adding your wise energy to my words.

© Désirée Driesenaar