“People who work hard often work too hard. ... May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta, the nap and the pause in all its forms.”
Alice Walker
“While sleeping in a hammock, with the touch of a warm wind we remember why we are in love with life!”
Mehmet Murat Ildan
“I would start a revolution, but I just bought a hammock.”
Zach Galifianakis
Dear readers and followers of A Biosphere Project,
As I announced in July, I took a vacation. A real vacation: no (or hardly any) research, staying away from the laptop, lots of doing nothing, lying in the hammock, swimming and hiking. Being together with my life partner Agnes and with our children and their friends. Enjoying nature here in our oasis in our second homeland Hungary, where Agnes was born. It had become quite necessary to do this: while recovering from surgery on my knee, I started working very hard for A Biosphere Project - a little too hard sometimes, and as Alice Walker pointed out in the quote at the beginning of this post, a break, a siesta and a hammock are then in order!
In France, the period in early September is called ‘La Rentrée’. Returning to school, work, real life. Leaving behind the illusion of an Arcadia that we can enjoy only a few weeks a year. Again, in French, that sounds beautiful, as so many things sound more beautiful in French. It brings to mind a novel, a fable, an old story. A novel like “Le Grand Meaulnes,” or something like that.
No 'rentrée' for me this time: although the academic year has started again in Belgium as well, I am still in Hungary. I am however gradually beginning to trade in the hammock for the laptop...let this be my version of 'rentrée' this year.
I can still be here because starting this school year I am taking a leave of absence from my teaching assignment at the academy, and this for an undefined period of time. I do this in order to devote myself full-time to A Biosphere Project. To research, to write, to muse, to prepare for the photographic travel project.
After 30 years of teaching I am taking a break, to embark on a completely different venture, or rather, to allow it to enter a new phase.
I probably don't need to add that this is fairly exciting ànd scary, and has a lot of implications. But it feels like the right choice now, and I am excited about the time to come.
I am going to start musing again as well, and what place is more suitable for that than the one that appears in the photo at the top of the “Musings and Meditations” in the mailing and on the website: our garden here in Hungary.
I spent a lot of time in this garden again, and engaged in a lot of musing - which is an activity that is indeed compatible with vacation.
This summer, however, the garden was not as green as in the photo at the top of the “Musings” page: it has been a summer of heat and drought in Hungary, as in most of central and eastern Europe. Hardly a drop of rain has fallen since June, and the mercury rarely went below 90 degrees Fahrenheit. Usually in the afternoons it was about 100 degrees Fahrenheit here, and after a few months you start to feel that. I can handle heat pretty well, but after months of continuous temperatures around 100 degrees, with very little cooling at night, you begin to experience that as a heaviness, a hard-to-escape veil of threatening constriction and oppression.
The garden is yellow and barren, the corn and sunflowers are standing dead in the fields all around, and you feel all life sighing and groaning under the heat and drought.
But more on that another time, I'm not going to talk about this summer's bad climate news now. But this summer brought no respite from the progressive disruption of the climate, that was very clear even though I consciously tried not to deal with it too much these past months.
This garden and house have a special energy, and everyone who comes here feels it. Every day we are grateful for the five and a half years already that we have been allowed to be the guardians of this place. Hopefully we will leave this wonderful piece of Earth in even better condition to the next guardians (if we are allowed to continue to receive rain on this piece of Earth).
The house, a 120-year-old adobe farmhouse with walls three feet thick and (fortunately) a natural climate control through the materials used, is not just a 'second home'.
Not only is Agnes really home here in Hungary, but it was intended from the beginning that we would make this place serve the well-being, self-development and spiritual growth of many more people than 'just' ourselves: many of Agnes' courses and workshops take place here.
And the house and the garden are really ideal for what Agnes teaches people: to be much more strongly grounded in the self and in the world, with a very strong expanded ability to perceive energy in the self and in the world. And also a far-reaching growth of the capacity to be able to direct and strengthen that energy for good in the self and the world. After all, everything is energy, and that can be understood in the most literal sense: we are not robots of flesh and blood controlled by selfish genes. We are first and foremost energetic beings, who can strongly influence not only ourselves but also our environment with our energy.
It became increasingly clear to me this summer that Agnes' project and mine are very similar: both of us are trying to get people to perceive and experience reality differently, as energy first and foremost. That is something completely different from perceiving reality as either concepts and ideas, or separate “things” made of matter (we have all been indoctrinated to both of these ways of perceiving since childhood).
Energy is boundary-less, and a world viewed ànd experienced as energy does not allow itself to be divided into “this” and “that,” or “me” and “the other,” or “me” and “the world". It is all one continuum, as quantum physics also teaches us (see, for example, my earlier posts “Five Sigma (You Are Not Going to Believe This)” and “Science and the Emerging New Paradigm”.
My research for the project makes it increasingly clear to me that the root cause of the convergence of ecological and other crises is the totality of our beliefs about reality, and the totality of our beliefs about our place in our biosphere and universe. And as Einstein said, we cannot solve a problem from the level of consciousness from which we created that problem. So I believe that first and foremost we need to adjust and transform our consciousness and perception, something you will already know about me if you have been following this blog over the past year. And this is something that, of course, also ties in with what I did for thirty years as a teacher of drawing and painting: there, too, it's all about perception and consciousness.
A lot of stuff to muse about in the hammock, a lot of stuff in several ways. Stuff to learn, stuff to think about, stuff to muse about, stuff to dream about like the stars, star stuff (because that's what we and everything around us is: stuff made from past stars, in our own case in a form that can consciously think about what those stars actually are).
Stars abound here while musing, because light pollution is much less here than in Belgium, and on cloudless and moonless nights we often sit in the back of the garden at the edge of the forest watching countless stars and the Milky Way which is very visible here.
And all that stuff (of stars and to muse and to think and to learn) has a drawback: I want to share it all immediately. Every time I come across a new piece of information, I want the whole world to know about it right away. I want to spread all that stuff around like a reverse vacuum cleaner, like a leaf blower.
And I have noticed that therefore I try to tell too much at once. Every time I start a musing or a blog post, a whole book seems to want to be born. It's like opening a faucet that I can barely close once I've started. As a result, the musings sometimes become a bit too long and elaborate, something that also began to cause stress since I had set myself the goal of sharing a musing every week.
Stress is the last thing I need, and I suspect for you it is no different.
Therefore, during my musing sessions in the hammock, I decided to actually start what apparently wants to happen: write a book. Something Agnes is also very much encouraging me to do at this point.
I had planned to do that only after the first project travels, but it seems it can't (or doesn't have to) wait anymore. I already have a working title for that book, but more on that in a future blog post.
And then when I do start to write that book, perhaps the tendency to want to tell it all at once in the musings will diminish, and I can keep those musings more concise.
They will also become fewer: no longer weekly, but once or twice a month. Although I'm still leaving that open: if I actually manage to keep the musings shorter, maybe there could be more again.
Other than that, I would like to keep the same pattern: in the blog, in addition to the news about the project, I will continue to chart the problems in our biosphere, help sound the alarm, and expand on ideas that emerge in the musings, including through in-depth lectures by and interviews with great thinkers of our time. In the musings, I want to continue to share new (or old) and often quite surprising ideas that point hopefully toward a different, more beautiful world that awaits us if we begin to do what’s necessary. I want to do so in a way that is light, because we need light. These are difficult times and we are facing very tough challenges, but everything is a matter of perspective: viewed from a certain angle, we may be at the beginning of something very beautiful, which will guide us through all the difficulties to a new chapter in our existence - if we roll up our sleeves.
A bit like the process a caterpillar goes through when it becomes a butterfly: at first extremely destructive, resulting in the total annihilation of the caterpillar; but then wonderful, and with the end result being a beautiful creature: the butterfly.
About that process I will soon share a wonderful talk by social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger, one of those things I have long wanted to share.
We must be guided not by fear now, but by imagination, courage, and love of life.
But to do so, we must also fall in love with the world again. As Mehmet Murat Ildan pointed out in the quote at the beginning of this musing, doing so in a hammock in a beautiful garden is not so difficult (even if it is a bit warmer than he may have envisioned). I realize that it is a privileged position to spend much of the year in such a beautiful place, and I consider it part of my responsibility to turn my being-in-love-with-the-world and the gift of this oasis we love so much into action. Action, in whatever way is appropriate for me and within my capabilities. So at some point we have to get out of that hammock again.
There we go.
Thanks for reading, and until the next installment,
All the best to you,
Filip
