Sustainable Future

Falling in Love with Our Colorful, Expert Gaia Might Be the Answer

Gaia, Mother Nature is our home. Our only planet. What if we fell in love with her again? Would we save ourselves?

She’s vastly intelligent. And although I know some people are wary of intelligent women, I fall for her. She’s beautiful in a wild way. Tangled hair, long limbs, and soft touch. Flighty sometimes. Strong and solid like a rock at other times.

I have a confession to make. I’m in love with her. Gaia.

Words are inadequate. They are way too small to grasp her wide open spaces. Her plains of sand, her towering mountains, and her vast open seas. But maybe I can make you see anyway.

And I know, only beautiful words aren’t enough. You’ll feel them, yes. But you might forget them the next minute. So I’ll tell you some amazing facts as well. To ponder over. To think about.

Next time you touch a tree or smell the ocean.

Maybe you’ll feel it too when you look out of your window. When you see a tiny leaf peeking her head from under your terrace tiles. Maybe the birdsong will sound a little louder and penetrate your brain a little more.

Who knows. We might save ourselves by loving her.

This book ‘The Mandala Book, Patterns of the Universe’ by Lori Bailey Cunningham has been with me for years. I open it often and I’m amazed at the vast riches that shapes of nature have to offer us. Patterns. Can’t get enough of them.

Did you know that many human cultures used these shapes, these mandalas, often in their architecture, their art, and their daily lives? Egyptian pyramids, Maya architecture, Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, Hokusai’s ‘Great wave off Kanagawa’. And also modern-day buildings. Nature shapes our world.

Triangles, concentric circles, and waves. And if nature wants more, if she scales up, she does it in fractals. See how cauliflower is shaped? Small shapes added up to one big shape. Fractals! Wow!

It’s not just shapes and patterns of nature that fascinate me. It’s the use of materials as well. We invent new materials for every functionality we want to have. Supple plastics, hard plastics, metal alloys.

Nature uses a ‘structure-trick’. A material such as bone can have completely different characteristics. In the antlers and the legs of a deer, the same materials can be found (mainly protein collagen and lime salt). But because of different ratios, they can provide different functionalities.

Antlers don’t need to carry heavy loads. Legs do. Antlers need to be tough in a fight, though. During the period of growth, nature provides different information to grow the right structure out of the same materials.

Wow! Think of that. And all of it is biodegradable. We can just give it back to nature and it will be shapeshifted into a tree. Or a rock. Time does its work and voila! Pretty different from our cement and plastics that end up in a landfill, never decomposing…

And for the mathematicians among my readers, Belgian biologist Johan Gielis has come up with the Superformula, see below. I can’t really get my head around it, but he found that one simple equation can generate a vast diversity of natural shapes. Innovators, grab your opportunities!

Wow! My fantasy starts to flow again. Numbers and shapes and structures tumble over each others’ little legs. Gaia is playing, laughing, and making an incredible mess that we, humans, have to untangle.

Let’s do it. Let’s untangle the vastly intelligent puzzle that nature made for us to live in. Let’s use our own intelligence and find the ways to live within the boundaries of our planet.

Indigenous people can be our inspirators. Our own inner wisdom can grow and flourish and find many different ways. I’m sure of it. Let’s try!

And if you want to connect, you can find me on LinkedIn or Facebook or somewhere exchanging a look with a squirrel eating nuts…

Thank you, Mike, for adding your wise energy to my words on Gaia.

Further reading

If you want to know how we can untangle our complex human problems, you might like to read this one.