“Content is anything that adds value to the reader's life.”
Avinash Kaushik
“Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Benjamin Franklin
Landscape in Somogy province, Hungary. Photo: Filip Van Kerckhoven
The audio version of this blog post
Dear readers and followers of A Biosphere Project,
In addition to the 'Musings and Meditations' series, it is my intention to resume more frequent posting in the 'regular' blog as well.
But what is the difference between the 'musings' and the blog?
I've been thinking about that over the past few months and I have been exploring further what my intentions are. In fact, those intentions also shift quite a bit as I evolve in this project, as I learn more about all that concerns the crisis in our biosphere, and sense more clearly what my intentions, possibilities and interests are for the future.
The ‘musings’ are just that: intuitive and spontaneous texts in which I give my thoughts free rein, and allow free association to ensure that from one musing another follows. While musing and meditating, I also feel the connections between all the topics I want to touch on, and the process of free association also creates space for the emergence of ideas that might remain in the background if I had a fixed 'program' in that series of musings. The intuitive freedom of the process is important to me, and does resemble the intuitive process in drawing and painting, which used to be my way of being in the world and engaging in “sense-making,” or trying to find meaning in the world and existence.
The last series of works in my life as a draughtsman/painter was called 'Thinking Out Loud'(2015-2017), a series that I am still very happy with, and which in terms of content actually pretty much announced all of this project.
You can see some of the works from this series, which consists of about 120 works, here on the website.
And ‘thinking out loud’ is similar to ‘musing and meditating’, so you could say that I'm actually doing the same thing with different means. I will also write in the future about that conceptual inquiry in the last ten years of my practice as a visual artist, and how there most of the themes that concern me now in A Biosphere Project were already present as seeds patiently waiting for the right conditions to begin sprouting.
'Thinking Out Loud,' or 'Musing and Meditating,' are ways of letting a kind of 'stream of consciousness' take its course, without trying to exert too much control over it.
Many of the things I want to communicate, and many of the ideas I want to help spread, go rather against what is generally accepted today about the world, about what we consider real, about what we consider possible, reasonable or desirable. I will therefore proceed incrementally, since I don't want to quickly convince anyone of anything. It doesn't work that way. I can come up with endless scientific evidence, even then the chances are that many will not accept it. Research has shown that once people have embraced a story, no amount of evidence will persuade them to let go of that story. Only a more appealing story can get them to do so. So I want to help spread stories that are more appealing than the one we are now collectively living in - something that is actually not that difficult, because our story has now become a very nihilistic story, possibly the most nihilistic story in the history of our species. No wonder we and our environment are not doing so well.
I talk about that scientific evidence, but at the same time I want to weave stories that can come alive independent of 'evidence' as invitations to look at the world and yourself differently. And I want to share stories of others, of visionaries and elders, people who have already lifted a tip of the veil. A bit like art 'works': not through rational persuasion, but through mystery, seduction, revelation, play, poetry and a glimpse of the great unknown at the edge of our consciousness.
And 'musing and ‘meditating is also a personal matter: I want to share from my own perspective, experience and history. I do not want to share mere mental knowledge, because that is not enough. There is an excess of purely mental information already, we are overwhelmed by it you might say, but it does not penetrate our emotional defenses, just because it is all far too mental.
My intention is to share information not only on that mental level, but also on an intuitive, embodied and emotional level, from the heart so to speak, because mere knowledge is not enough to move us to action. Only love can do that, my experience tells me. Love for the world, for ourselves and for our descendants, love for all that lives in our biosphere. That is why the emphasis in the ‘musings’ is also on positive energy and new, exciting ideas and visions that can help us change course, and help us love ourselves again and love our world again.
In the 'regular' blog then, I can further explore certain themes, ideas or figures that crop up in the 'musings'. Again, lots of room for positive energy and new visions, but possibly also more 'alarm bells,' because that also remains necessary. As I told you in this earlier musing, our society seems to flip more and more between unfounded optimism and unfounded fatalism. ‘Everything will be all right in any case’ or 'we are doomed in any case’.
Much of the information about how wrong things are going in our biosphere does not yet reach the media or only insufficiently. And that is why it remains difficult to make people aware of the need for a very far-reaching transformation of just about all aspects of our global 'civilization' (a word that I keep putting in quotation marks because I agree with social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger that we have not really reached the stage of 'civilization' yet).
There will often be connections and crossovers between what I talk about in the ‘musings’ and what is covered in the ‘regular’ blog.
I have created a division into chapters in the scroll menu of the blog, which allows you to navigate through past blog posts, musings and essays collected under some overarching themes.
These chapters are:
'Hope'
‘Old Wisdom and New Stories
'Science and the Emerging New Paradigm'
‘We and the Transitions'
'Visionaries and Elders'
'Favorites'
'Hope' speaks for itself: The posts in this category explore the question: is there still hope? What is ‘hope’ anyway? And most importantly: what difference can one person make? Why would it make sense to do anything at all?
'Old wisdom and new stories': The blog posts in this series all have to do with how man's oldest intuitions are re-emerging in new stories, such as science, ecology, activism, economics, agriculture, medicine, cosmology and systems theory. Humanity is coming home to what it has always known.
‘Science and the New Paradigm’: This series of posts explores new (and not so new but as yet unknown) developments in science that point toward a very different story about the world than the one we are familiar with. Some of these new views are particularly amazing, and may lead to a new paradigm, a new worldview. And we will need that to tackle the great transitions that are needed. More than that, those transitions become almost natural from a new paradigm. Exploring these ideas requires openness, and a willingness to question what you thought you knew about the world and yourself.
‘We and the Transition': This feed shows posts that are in some way about the question of how we personally relate to the profound transitions to come. Transitions in our economy, in our way of thinking about ‘wealth’, work, leisure and travel, food, health, emotional health in times of crisis, housing, energy, and so on.
The convergence of crises often invites two different reactions: number 1: “it's too overwhelming and we can't do anything about it and I certainly can't - the government has to fix it all.”
or number 2: “the weight of the world rests on my shoulders and I must strive for perfection in my personal life and behavior” - which in turn often leads to resistance and dissociation, or despondency and apathy.
These posts will cover perspectives that explore the middle ground. Yes, massive systemic change is needed, but each of us can be part of the change, in more ways than you may realize at this time.
‘Visionaries and Elders’: This feed features posts that expand on the thoughts and views of people featured in the blog and musings, whose lives and work have had a profound influence on me and on the ideas I want to help spread. They are visionaries, people who were or are more than “smart” or “learned,” but who put insight and wisdom into practice and developed ideas that can help us find our way out of the maze and create a more beautiful world.
'Favorites' speaks for itself: in this feed I collect all the posts, musings and essays that are close to my heart for one reason or another, or that I find most relevant to what I want to share.
So in each of these categories you will find musings as well as blog posts and essays. Many posts will recur in more than one of these categories, as there is quite a bit of overlap.
Just a quick note also that the English versions of the blog posts are now also available to read on Substack.
The ‘essays’ are longer explorations of an idea or theme. Long can mean anything: most of the essays I've written so far counted around 4,000 words, but a few were much longer with so far the record holder of 16,000 words, ‘Let Us Not Talk About the Climate Crisis Any Longer (Part Two)’.
The essays and longer blog posts (over 2,000 words) will feature audio versions as much as possible. The audio versions are read by myself.
The frequency of the essays is something I cannot foresee. The writing process is very intuitive for me, and it has already happened that I started what I thought was going to be a short blog post, but then turned into a long essay. As the practical circumstances of my life evolve, it is possible that my output of essays will increase significantly, but the reverse could just as easily be true: I may find that the shorter posts and musings are a better form for my process. I leave it open and follow what presents itself, not only in the musings but also in the blog and essays.
It's really like painting: sometimes you have periods when you are mostly drawing or working in a small format, and then suddenly the need to work in a larger format presents itself: time to stretch canvases and bring out the bigger paint jars.
The essays are more like the larger paintings. A way to represent a broader panorama and go deeper into what comes up in the blog and musings.
Writing is also a craft like any other, and I am still learning about that craft every day, a process that I suspect will never end. It is also an exciting process, changing craft after thirty years, but changes like that keep one young in heart and mind, don't they.
Writing is not the only medium in my new enterprise, photography will also continue to play a role. But I have always been more familiar with photography than with writing, so it feels like more familiar territory.
At the same time as developing this blog, the musings and the essays, I am also preparing for my first photographic project travels. As my research and the blog progress, so do my plans and goals for those travels.
I now see 2026 as a realistic goal for the first journey, and I will continue to report in the blog on the development of my plans and goals with those photographic trips. Those plans may also be affected if I decide to start writing a book earlier. In fact, I find that as soon as I start writing any post, whether it's a ‘musing’ or a blog post or an essay, the floodgates of words open up and I can barely contain the process. So it seems that something in me needs an even bigger ‘canvas’: a book. Something I had resolved to do only after the first project journey, but who knows, maybe it's more “urgent” than that. We'll keep musing and meditating and feeling and following our hearts, and who knows what will come next.
In order not to overload your mailbox, I will group posts in the 'regular' blog and the essays into one or two mailings per month, depending on my output. On the second and/or last Wednesday of the month, you can expect a summary of the posts that appear that month in addition to the 'musings'. Of course, you are free to take a look in the categories of the blog at any time to see if there are any new posts. The frequency of posts in the 'regular' blog has been rather slow in recent months, as life keeps me busy in other ways sometimes, and other aspects of my project sometimes require more attention.
One of the other aspects is a fundraising project I plan to start in the coming months. More on that in a newsletter soon.
So much for this update on A Biosphere Project's blog,
Thanks for reading, and until the next installment,
All the best to you,
Filip
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