The Travels, an Update - A Biosphere Project Blog

In which is told why the planned travel project will not proceed as I had envisioned two years ago, what will follow instead, and how that relates to my growing fascination with the ways in which we perceive (or do not perceive) the world and, in fact, create it through our way of (not) looking.

And in which is also told why I now intend to give priority to writing one (or more) book(s) in which I want to examine the signs on the wall for a new worldview, and why that is so relevant for what we call 'ecology' and for navigating our way through the many crises we face.

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“As you start to walk out on the path, the path appears.”

Rumi 

Farm near Bovec, Slovenia. October 2025

Blog posts of 2000 words or more are accompanied by an audio version, read by me.

Dear friends,

About two years ago, I announced my intentions regarding the project of the Travels.

You can read or listen here to the blog post from October 2023 about this.

In short, the travel project was conceived as an exploration in images and words of the state of our biosphere, particularly in Europe.

It was intended as a nomadic exploration of the four corners of Europe, in four journeys. Conceived as an exploration of the beauty that still remains, the valuable biotopes that we must protect, but also the extent to which our living environment has already suffered from our presence, and the way in which our relationship with the biosphere has been completely thrown out of balance.

The intention was also to visit and portray people: pioneers of a different way of being, a different kind of civilization in terms of agriculture, economy, mobility, and so on. Trailblazers for an ecological civilization

An excerpt from that blog post:

"I want to show places, but also people: those who are already victims of a changing climate or a damaged biotope, but also those who are already working on a new path and a new vision for the future, a new world. Those who are pioneers in the aforementioned new forms of agriculture, community, and economy. Those who are committed to preserving our biotope and our shared body, and those who are thinking about far-reaching changes in our worldview.

But the main character will be the world, bearing in mind Wallace Stevens' quote: “The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself.”

I have been a photographer as well as a painter all my life, and I will use the medium of photography as well as the word to portray our part of the world from the perspective I have just described."

I concluded the blog post by stating that the first phase would consist of research, a lot of research.

“I want to learn more about all the countries I intend to travel through, from the perspective I have outlined above. I want to learn about people and processes that are already making a difference: researchers, scientists, activists. Pioneers in regenerative agriculture, artists and authors, thinkers and doers. People who are trying to develop new models in all those areas of human society that affect the well-being of our shared body, the biosphere. And that's pretty much all areas, as I described in the essay ‘Let Us Not Talk About the Climate Crisis Any Longer (Part 2)’."

And as I already indicated in my very first ‘Statement of Intention’ in 2020, I did not know where my journey of exploration would take me.

Now, two years later, it is time to take a step back and try to get an overview of where my search has taken me so far.

And indeed, once more it is not quite what I had expected or anticipated.

I certainly started the research as I had planned, and I investigated the possibilities for the first journey, which would take me north. I planned to travel along the coast of Norway all the way to the North Cape, and from there either going to Iceland or heading south via Sweden and Finland to end up back in Belgium via northern Germany. I looked at possible destinations in light of my project and wanted to visit both cities and nature. I inquired about people I could visit along the way, including the aforementioned scientists, activists, and people involved in innovative ecological practices in all possible areas of human activity.

But as I progressed, I noticed that the focus of my attention in the research for the travel project was shifting more and more to other domains. Domains that had been on my radar from the start of the project, but which gradually became the real center of my attention and search, I realized.

My attention shifted from researching the possibilities for the travels, possible destinations, identifying potential conversation partners and experts in the areas that initially seemed relevant to me, exploring the possibilities that photography would offer me in this context, to researching something broader and deeper: the worldview that has brought us to this place, that lies at the root of the disrupted relationship between humans and the biosphere.

That interest was part of the project from the beginning, as you know if you have followed the posts and especially the Musings, but it gradually became the actual subject of my inquiry.

I gradually noticed that the original starting point for the photographic travel project fascinated me less than it had at first.

The photographic travel project was a logical idea when I decided to stop painting: given my lifelong love of photography, it seemed appropriate to use photography to contribute to raising awareness of the many ecological crises we find ourselves in.

But after a while, I couldn't help but notice that my true passion was shifting more and more towards the realm of metaphysics, philosophy, philosophy of science, and the ways in which we construct worldviews and how these, in turn, shape and even define us. In particular, the increasing overlap between philosophy, spirituality, and mysticism on the one hand, and the latest science on the other, began to occupy almost all of my attention.

Another issue I had to address was making choices, something that has never been my strongest suit. I realized that I had taken on too much: a complex photographic travel project, a blog, plans for a video blog and a podcast, and plans to write a book, something that had surfaced as an intention about a year ago.

I realized that it was all too much, that I was overburdening myself and putting myself under too much pressure in too many different areas, while I was also busy looking for ways to find supporting members and sponsors for my project, as about a year and a half ago I also decided to take unpaid leave from my teaching assignment at the academy so that I could devote myself full-time to A Biosphere Project (a tip: if you're still looking for a good cause to support, without delay you can visit the project's support page!).

Over the past few months, I have once again gone through a period of soul-searching to determine what is really most important to me, what my real goals are at the moment, and also—not unimportantly—what my heart currently desires most.

And the outcome of that search is that, for now, I want to focus fully on further research into the aspects of worldview and metaphysics that determine our current trajectory, as I now believe more than ever that without a change in worldview or paradigm, we will not succeed in changing course and will continue to choose the wrong solutions that will only cause more problems.

I feel supported in this by none other than Donella Meadows, the famous author (together with her husband Dennis Meadows) of the groundbreaking work “The Limits To Growth” from 1972, which predicted our current stalemate with extraordinary accuracy.

I quote Donella (Dana) Meadows on the issue of worldviews:

“The ancient Egyptians built pyramids because they believed in life after death. We build skyscrapers because we believe that space in the center of cities is enormously valuable. (Except for the vacant lots, often near the skyscrapers, which we believe are worthless). Whether it was Copernicus and Kepler who demonstrated that the earth is not the center of the universe, or Einstein who hypothesized that matter and energy are interchangeable, people who have succeeded in intervening in systems at the level of paradigms have achieved a leverage effect that totally transforms systems.

You could say that paradigms are more difficult to change than anything else in a system, and therefore this point should be lowest on the list, not second highest. But there is nothing physical or even slow about the process of paradigm change. It can happen in a millisecond for a single individual. All that is needed is a click in the mind, the scales falling from the eyes, a new way of looking at things."

Donella Meadows saw as early as the early seventies, at the time of the Club of Rome report, that our current trajectory (which is speeding like a fast train towards self-destruction) is a logical consequence of everything we believe about ourselves and about the world. And she drew the correct conclusion in my opinion: that we must change our way of thinking and completely reboot what we believe about the world and about ourselves. But to do that, we first need to become consciously aware of what it is we believe, because like water for a fish, our worldview is often invisible to us because it functions in the background as our 'road map', our plan, our certainty that we never question and that passes for 'common sense'.

Donella Meadows also saw that a paradigm shift that changes personal experience or even the world can take place in a single moment, like a “click in the mind”.

I will therefore continue my path in that direction: trying to contribute to the spreading of information and ideas that point towards the new worldview that is emerging, and that will be very different from the worldview we are used to and in which we feel at home, like the aforementioned fish in water.

Paradigm shifts rarely happen without a struggle, and the one that is coming will be of the same magnitude as Galileo and Kepler's insight that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

But even more than that: I would like to help spread that information in a way that appeals not only to the brain, the ‘mind’ (which in our culture still mostly means the left brain hemisphere). I would like to provide ‘tools’ or instruments with which that information can be experienced in a more embodied way and integrated into the whole essence of our humanity. Because purely mental information is not enough to truly transform us: we need to be touched in our hearts and in our bones. Those aspects of our being that have long been atrophying in a culture that largely denies their existence need to be addressed: intuition, heart energy, embodied love for ourselves and our world. If that sounds sentimental or woo-woo, that proves my point. We have become so estranged from ourselves that we generally no longer feel who or what we really are, and that is so much more than robots of flesh and blood.

I now intend to also put this information and these tools into the world in the form of a book (or several books), and that will be my focus in the coming period, alongside continuing the blog, the musings, and the walkie-talkies. You can expect a separate blog post about this soon.

I now feel that, from my perspective, this is more urgent than photographically portraying the processes, people, and initiatives as I originally had planned for the travel project.

Not that these initiatives and people are unimportant, on the contrary. They will be a central aspect of the transition that awaits us.

But I now believe that none of the initiatives currently being taken in agriculture, industry, trade, transport, and so on, will happen quickly enough on a scale that is large enough, as long as there is no fundamental shift in our worldview. From our current worldview, we simply do not have the necessary insights and perspectives that enable us to even guess what is possible.

The pair of glasses that is our current worldview keeps too much information out of our field of vision. The “solutions” we constantly come up with are results of our old worldview and will mainly cause more problems. We view everything that happens through a lens that only allows a fraction of the information we need, and in addition to this lens, we also wear a kind of blinders and headphones, both of which filter out the vast majority of what can be seen and understood.

It is well known that our eyes can only perceive a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, and that our ears can only perceive a fraction of all sound frequencies. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that our current cognitive potential is only capable of perceiving a minimal fraction of all possible lines of thought about the crisis of civilization we are going through.

We will have to think things that we do not even realize yet can be thought. That is how far the transition will go.

Does that mean the travel project is off the table?

Yes and no.

In the form I originally had in mind, it will probably no longer take place. Although, never say never, so I'm leaving that open.

But I suspect that I will continue to travel in any case.

As I mentioned in my previous statement of intent regarding the travel project, traveling is kind of in my blood. I have always loved to travel, also on my own. And several of those solo journeys were life-changing experiences. More than one of those journeys felt like a kind of portal, and once I had passed through that portal, there was no turning back, it seemed.

My brain works differently when I travel, and I am more alert and observant. My intuition is more acute, and I get a lot of energy from the beauty and contact with other resonances of other regions I travel through.

You can get an impression of some of my previous journeys since 2005 on the page with my photographic work. A number of those photos can also be found on the page with the photo gallery for donors.

In case you were not aware yet, if you choose to become a sponsor or mecenas for A Biosphere Project, you can choose three or six photo prints from this gallery each year, respectively.

Another tip if you are still looking for a good cause to support.

So I am also going to explore the possibility of traveling in order to work on my book. I find it hard to imagine myself sitting at a desk in a room for years writing on a computer. I suspect that would not make me very happy, and it would not be very inspiring for the whole process either. I will therefore explore whether and how I can travel in order to work differently and better on that new child that apparently wants to be born, a book.

In light of the many ecological crises we are going through, some people argue that we would all be better off not traveling anymore.

I beg to differ. Travel is an activity that has a significant positive return for humanity and our development. Like almost all of our activities, it has a certain energy footprint and causes a certain amount of pollution. But that “footprint” is not the worst compared to many other things we do in our biosphere, other things that give little or no positive “return” for the energy investment (such as eating meat).

Of course, it also depends on how we travel and for what purpose.

I have long wanted to write a more in-depth article on that subject, which I hope to share later this year.

Let me leave the final word on that for now to Anatole France : “Wandering and traveling restore the original harmony that once existed between mankind and the universe.”

Or Rachel Wolchin: “If we were meant to stay in one place, we would have roots instead of feet.”

And last but not least, St. Augustine: “The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.”

Like traveling, I suspect that photography will also continue to play a role in A Biosphere Project.

I do not yet know exactly what form that will take. I may travel and take photographs while working on the book. I may take photographs separately from writing the book.

In my photographic work, recording beauty has always been important. And as photographer Chris Jordan pointed out in the first Musing, beauty may be the only thing that can save us. Or rather, the renewed recognition of the sacred nature of beauty.

When I photograph, I don't really strive for a very recognizable “style”. I like it best when I feel that the photo takes itself, and that a piece of the world or an event naturally becomes an image.

Photographers in whose work I see this happening include Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mario Giacomelli, and André Kertész. It is photographers like these who have always been my greatest inspiration. But in my recent explorations into the history of photography, I noticed that nature has rarely been the main subject of photographers to date. There are exceptions, of course, such as Ansel Adams or Mario Giacomelli. But I feel that there is still a lot of room for capturing the great mystery that is nature, and by extension, the world.

And I suspect that I will continue to follow this path in the future, in addition to creating one or more books and continuing the blog.

I would also like to write a more extensive text about this in the near future, but it remains to be seen whether I will have time for longer texts and essays once I have started working on the book. To be continued, then.

With some irony, I note that I am writing this post while... traveling.

I am currently in the Julian Alps, in Slovenia.

I am spending two weeks traveling around Hungary and Slovenia, and my path has brought me to these Julian Alps in the far west of Slovenia, near the border with Italy. This is also where I recorded Walkie-Talkie #5 a few days ago.

It is a beautiful region, and this short and somewhat unexpected journey has reminded me once again how important traveling has always been to me. The majestic splendor of these Alpine peaks has a hypnotic effect on me; I can sit and stare at them all day long without feeling the need to do much else. Like the ocean, high mountains have a certain effect on our nervous system—at least on mine, and I suspect on that of many people. Perhaps because these are the landscapes that most radiate a kind of primal energy, reminding us of our origins and our only true home.

Also, the high peaks of the Alps or similar mountain ranges make us experience space itself differently, shaping, as it were, the space itself between heaven and earth. That space where, according to Shakespeare's Hamlet, there is more going on than we generally believe or consider possible: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

The space between the mountain peaks also resonates differently due to the presence of Earth literally rising up and, as it were, moving toward space. And the space between things may be precisely what we need to pay more attention to now.

The space between things (I use the word “things” with some reservation, as you know if you've seen Walkie-Talkie #5) can make us look at everything differently, and in the empty space we may find the answers to questions we haven't even asked yet (but will ask when we take off our glasses).

So yes, I think, or rather I know, that I will continue to travel. Although it will not be exactly what I had in mind two years ago.

But as Rumi said: “As you start to walk out on the path, the path appears.”

I will therefore continue to follow the path that beckons me, wherever it may lead. And I welcome you to follow me along this path, and share some of the discoveries that await there.

Thank you for reading and/or listening, and until the next episode.

All the best to you,

Filip

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