Reflection of a Living Query
Biomimicry was the door. It’s been a field that I have found fascinating for nearly 5 years and honestly, it is what has slowly, one organism at a time, restoring my sanity.
It has taught me that I don’t have to do it all myself. That we don’t have to do this by ourselves. Biomimicry is coined as, “the conscious emulation of nature’s genius.” What a genius she is … between 30 - 100 million organisms that have survived and thrived for 3.8 billion years, are all fitting in not just fitting on. All communicating and knowing when to switch their signal so that the “antenna” of the receiver can hear what the organism is trying to say. Egoless. Effective.
The reason I love this field is that it asks for you to, “quiet your cleverness” and nowhere else in entrepreneurship or leadership have I been asked to defer outside of my humanness. Nowhere else have I been asked to have reverence to the things that inspire me, like:
the natural technology of dandelion seeds taking flight
or termite mounds cooling structures with no AC
or vibrant color made with structure, not toxic dyes.
What if we did get quiet? What if we surrendered to Her, accepting that she has all the answers we seek so desperately and that we all need to become better students. Every day I get to learn about different organisms & their mechanisms of precision, the beauty and grace from which they accomplish their emergent cooperation on this planet.
I have spent a lot of time asking, why haven’t people just deferred to her intelligence? (& of course, indigenous peoples knew this to be the way of life). The very nature around us has figured out optimal communication, zero waste, building for entropy, cooperation and community, structures, and better design principles than we will ever get to. She does everything we are doing, not only better, but with guaranteed success... after all she’s got a little time on us.
The thing I land on is worth & grief. We have to have self-worth to value others, and surely the planet. And that is why this won’t just be an outward march. We will have to march inward, each of us, and get to the bud of if we believe we deserve to be here amongst her majesty. What protest signs will we hold to our own dated patterns that sowed a story that we can control or dominate our way forward? What parts of us need to see these signs so they integrate back into the whole, and don’t work against even our own best intentions?
There is a reason we are terrified to do this work, this is the kind of reconciling that will bring us each to our knees. Because when you start really getting to know your planetary family and how quietly intelligent they are, if you are anything like me, you will have some trouble re-organizing your position in the order of all things, and grief will follow. This wave of growing psychosis is hinged on our collective forgetting ... but, I’m finding so much relief in remembering that all the answers are already here. Hallelujah!
Moving forward I hope that every brainstorm we have which seeks solutions does so with a biological perspective at the table that can help translate the natural world while teaching us our own tricky Mammalian ways.
Let’s come home,