1.
The heat wave. Many days above 30ºC. Nights not cooling down.

Then: the thunderstorm. The amplified sound of clattering rain on the roof. The one we share with the birds. It is a living house after all.

And through the open windows, the rain flows into the cracks between the pine floorboards.

We’ve been living here for more than 15 years now. The garden, the house, never really finished. There’s always something to repair, always some project waiting. I guess that’s the cost of keeping things alive.

Are we already part of the place or still only visitors?

And: am I part of the map or merely the cartographer?

The visitor: the one who lives in a place without being part of it. Doesn’t leave a trace. The house, the garden, the surroundings...mere commodities.

The inhabitant dweller: dwells in their own traces. Here to stay and add a layer in the thick book of history of this specific place. And to see the shaping of the place happen through the stains of time and the stories that survived.

The place starts to grow on us and that place then, grows into meaning.

2.
The next morning: rising early to get some writing done. The old house, a heat trap. So I open all windows and doors. A warm breath entering the premises.

And then: My attempt at drawing a map of the past season, in the garden and on these pages.

Spring: that season of perpetual growth. And growth was on my mind. Growing this newsletter, yes. But not really in a quantitative way.

I guess that mindset already defines part of the dweller’s realm.

The visitor holds the mechanic worldview. Nature as a device we can take apart, rearrange and reassemble to our likings. Every place interchangeable. Come and go. And everything, then, becomes seemingly predictable: order, growth, future.

And then there is the gardener, who understands that nature has no chaos or true order. We’re tending something living, something always in motion. Adapting and working on a terrain where change is part of the system.

3.
Maybe 9 am. The wet grass still full and green and setting seeds. And lots of white clover in bloom. The humidity. The gaps in the forest and the sun already peeking through.

Into the vegetable garden.

The nightly rain shower plus the heat and my own compost mix. The perfect seed bed for pioneer weeds. Nettle, yarrow, dandelion, even willow. All flourishing, claiming their spot.

We could learn from the life of seeds. Their patience. Until the right conditions are there. And then it emerges. Growth at plant speed. Both above and underground. Into the dark soil and up to the bright sky. Shadows and light.

All plants, Maeterlinck wrote, have the magnificent ambition to overrun and conquer the surface of the globe by endlessly multiplying.

The garden is neither completely tamed, nor completely wild. It is a sort of co-authorship. Sometimes the garden decides and sometimes it is me taking the decisions.

And in the vegetable garden, it’s me taking the lead. So I take the old, trusty hoe and start weeding.

4.
High noon. The sun singled out in the midst of a sea of blue. No clouds.

The background buzzing from the apiary getting louder and louder. A frantic sound of activity echoing from the hives into the garden.

The almost exponential growth of a colony, a reinforcing feedback loop, until they reach a threshold. The hive bursting at the seams. Then: the swarm, the release.

The old queen leaves, together with probably half of the colony. In the hive a new queen-daughter is born. She inherits the house, the place, the memory, a bit of old comb.

The system resets to a scale it can maintain. And then it begins all over again; the infinite cycle.

But no swarm today. Many young bees in their orientation flights and rush hour on the bee highway above my head.

5.
Later that day. A bit of work to pay some bills. Between the garden and the writing and the university work, I am trying to set up this micro business. A little video studio that makes content that aligns with my values: a few good clients, sustainable content, well crafted.

Being a freelancer in 2026: high competition, AI-slop and cost-cutting. So there are essentially two options: scale up and compete aggressively, or lower standards and work cheaper. That’s what I call the Great Drift.

But I neither want to lower my standards, nor do I want to grow to a size that is unsustainable. Then I’d rather quit. Same with these writings.

And if I treat it as an experiment, failure is simply part of the process.

6.
Then: the sun is finally descending the horizon. Long, moving shadows. Tree silhouettes drawn in dark-black chalk on the floor.

Maybe suckering the tomatoes in the greenhouse real quick.

That old greenhouse that we rebuilt this year. The same mechanism that trapped heat a hundred years ago. Glass, patience and the art of the trap, that’s all that’s needed.

The idea that growing is embedded in the fertile realms of the past, the knowledge and traditions. All those things that are part of the material, the labor and love for the work. The long now. The Miel heirloom tomato inherited from an old neighbor.

7.
That moment when the air starts moving again. Colors shifting hue. In the little food-forest orchard, in the half-shade, underneath the apples and the pears: blackcurrants, redcurrants, gooseberries. Dangling ripe fruits. Ready to harvest. The slow, layered growth of the canopy and the understory.

I pick a few berries and let the chickens do some harvesting, too. They happily queue for the buffet, the high doses of vitamin C.

Light fades into twilight.

And then: the large-flowered evening-primrose opening its flowers in real time.

I could easily witness this every day and not get tired of it. Slow growth, slow wisdom. The cycling of the days and the seasons.

I think that’s why gardeners are philosophers.

8.
End of day. Stowing away the garden tools.

In the barn: that huge pile of poplar logs waiting to be processed.

It’s interesting to see how the wood shifts colors as it dries. From fully green and dark haze fading into a brownish grey texture.

And then there are the tree rings.

We can learn to read the tree by studying the width, color, and symmetry of the rings. Determine tree age, and the weather conditions of any given year. A record of what used to be here: the wet years, the lean years, the cold.

Wide Rings: optimal growing conditions, plenty of rain and sunlight.
Narrow Rings: Stress or harsh conditions, severe drought, cold, or lack of nutrients.

And every single annual ring is divided into two distinct zones that show the shift in seasons: earlywood and latewood. And in winter: no growth at all. Only dormancy.

I count about 17 rings on a poplar log. They were just planted when we started living here, some 15 years ago. That’s 15 years of watching that tree grow. Now it made room for the oaks and wild cherries underneath.

A summer’s work for a winter’s night.

But all of this work can wait. Tomorrow.

9.
The comfort of the sofa. Windows wide open again. A faint waxing crescent moon entering the room.

Leafing through Plato’s Philebus. The main question of the work: what is the good life? Is it a life of intellect, devoted to knowledge and insight or a life aimed at joy and pleasure?

In a 1897 edition I found online, the editor compares the work to a gnarled and knotted old oak-tree abounding in unexpected humps and shoots, adding that it still contains much sound timber.

Which, I guess, is another way of saying that the work is not straightforward. Rather it’s a collection of diverse observations and dialogues, with seemingly no direct connections.

But Plato also seeds an idea: the existence of both: limits and limitlessness. The finite and the infinite.

And out of that, over the centuries, emerged our notion of how the world works. One thing against the other.

Light against shadow. Inside against outside. Order against entropy.

However, that is a faulty read of Plato. Plato’s exact words contain nuance:

The first is, I say, infinity; the second is finitude; from these two arises the third, which is a mixed and completed existence; the fourth, finally, is the cause of this mixture, and the generation to which it gives rise.

How we live, and how we grow: not one singular far end of a spectrum, a dualism, but somewhere in between. And we can be conscious about it: the limits we choose.

Plato came to the same conclusion regarding the good life: neither only pleasure, nor only knowledge, but both.

10.
Standing outside in a landscape turned dark and black, waiting for the ducks to finish muddling around, before I close the pen.

And me, trying to reconnect the stars.

I have an intuitive view of the whole of these dots, these faint points like glow worms up on the firmament, which we trace back in our own minds to a map of reality.

A reality that has been mapped over and over through ancient civilizations until now, who labeled the stars and used them to navigate. It is part of that old escapade of trying to climb out of the fur of the animal to see what is outside.

To catch a glimpse of the bigger picture.

The star-map, like the rings in the poplar log, is drawn from the inside.

The same steps every morning, the same every evening. The change in landscape in slow time. And, from time to time, fixing the clouds, catching a little scene before it goes, and maybe sharing it.

The ducks are in. I close the pen. The same as last night, and not the same at all.

Tomorrow that cycle starts again.

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In the Archive

This seasonal map draws from the following pieces published in Season 2: Spring 2026. Each title links to the original.

Permanence The Living House · A Bit Of Old Comb · Glass, Patience, and the Art of the Trap · What Used to Be Here · Reconnecting the Stars

Commons The Marvelous Life of Seeds · A Way of Earning a Living · Fixing the Clouds

Perennialism The Infinite Cycle · Why Nature Has No Chaos or True Order · The Canopy and the Understory

Succession The Garden Decides · The Cost of Keeping Things Alive

Ecotone Why Gardeners Are Philosophers · A Change in Landscape

Liminalism The Authored Threshold · The Limits We Choose

The images used in this essay were taken from The Oak: A Popular Introduction to Forest-Botany, 1892 and Timber and Some Of Its Diseases, 1909, both by H. Marshall Ward. Public Domain.

A Note on the Commons I am keeping The Perennial Workshop open to everyone because I believe we all need these tools to rethink our thinking. If these writings offer you insight and value, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the workshop.

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The little vegetable plot. In the greenhouse: salads and fennel, a little cucumber. And outside: broad beans, peas, sugar snaps. A few potatoes, the early ones. And so we reap that first little harvest of the season.

And of course those peas. A bit of work. One has to top and tail and peel those peas, each one of them. Repetitive, but rewarding. Full of sugar, full of taste, direct from the fields into the kitchen.

But there is something to say for these repetitive tasks, whether it’s peeling or weeding or pruning or trimming the hedges. Which reminds me.

In the front yard we have this typical beech hedge and it had grown so rapidly that the branches were hanging down in a kind of mourning sadness. An abundant sadness of lush, green, thick growth. It occupied way too much space on the street side.

So I get out the ladder, and the hedge trimmer.

All of these seasonal tasks which one has to do with at least a minimal amount of attention, but still just not quite enough to stop the mind from wandering.

While the hands work

And so the mind wanders.

To work in the garden. All of those actions that are repetitive and meditative.

When I think about it, most gardening practices allow for contemplative thoughts.

But it’s not an intentional act of sitting down and deciding: now I’m going to think about this topic. Instead: the thinking just happens.

And what does one think about when one works in the garden? Well, first of all, of course, one contemplates the garden work itself: what are the most efficient ways to get rid of the bindweed, to remove the invading mugworts in the border or not, could I somehow improve the rotational scheme of the vegetable beds? All that practical stuff.

But eventually these thoughts have been thought, and the mind wanders to the bigger picture. What’s the meaning of the garden? And what’s the importance of growing some of our own food? And how does this garden relate to nature?

The garden itself, I think, is often the topic. It is after all our passion, our hobby horse.

A shelf of hobby horses

Steckenpferde in German, stokpaardjes in Dutch: the hobby horses.

There was a time in my life when I would buy every old gardening book I could find at flea markets, thrift stores, wherever.

And most of these books are practical: how to start a garden, landscaping, garden maintenance, gardening techniques. And what I noticed is that even the technical manuals (especially the technical manuals) somewhere have some degree of philosophizing in them.

For example, one book I have in mind, I think from the late 1970s, is a little work called 134 Garden Designs, by a German gardener, Hans Schiller. It has a sort of philosophical treatise as its introduction where the author discusses the history of exactly these hobby horses.

He traces the word back to Laurence Sterne, who in 1759, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, translated the Latin De gustibus non est disputandum into there is no disputing against hobby horses.

And he finds the spirit of this idea in an aphorism by Nietzsche, who wrote that whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, adding that this holds true for everybody: statesman, businessman, official, or scholar.

I should mention that a hobby horse is not the same as a hobby. A hobby can be any store bought, ready-made, routine activity. A hobby horse is probably that one thing one spends the most time in life thinking about. A passion. Moments of immense euphoria alternated with deep disappointments, great expectations and that feeling of impatience to get started.

A bit of work, a bit of thinking

I’m halfway through the hedge by noon. As always, more work than anticipated. Sore muscles already. Over lunch I’m leafing through some of the other books from my collection.

In one of the practical manuals, the 1972 Elseviers Garden Book, the authors turn the introduction into a lyrical ode to the diversity of gardens and our ever returning quest to create Eden.

They commence by paraphrasing Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774): that simple luck of harvesting the cabbage, which isn’t only the object cabbage, but also all the time and care spent in cultivating it: all the days, the beautiful mornings of seeding and planting, the loving evenings of watering and watching the cabbage grow.

Not to forget, I might add, the future prospect of having the privilege of enjoying the tasty result of that process in a simple, self cooked meal.

How well off is he, write the authors, who possesses a little piece of land, and can give shape to his dreams! In the evening, then, the gardener leans over the hedge, pipe smoking, philosophizing with the neighbor about the contentment of the little garden. A garden, that takes away the bitterness of everyday life.

The old, technical gardening manuals confirm that a gardener must obey both: the meaningful work, embedded in knowledge, skills and laws, and that ongoing search for contemplation, contentment, silence and rest. A bit of science and a bit of philosophy, combined in the practical ideal of the gardener-generalist.

And besides, isn’t the inverse of my initial statement true, too? Weren’t many great writers and thinkers gardeners?

Tolstoy was a beekeeper. Karel Čapek wrote science fiction novels but also a popular book on his own garden. John Ruskin designed his own gardens and managed a woodland. And the Epicureans kept a working garden on the edge of Athens, which doubled as a philosophical school, where they grew their own vegetables. The philosophy and the planting, never separate things.

From the top of the ladder

But I am catching myself again in that thing I tend to do: throwing a lineage of thinkers on a heap and expecting something neat to emerge, like the leaves and branches piling up underneath me, as I’m balancing the ladder, trying to trim the top of that still overgrown hedge.

A bit of drizzling rain. And thoughts turning into new thoughts.

The Epicurean garden. It just might be the original, real life knowledge garden. A garden which then found its way into the journals, the commonplaces, the waste books, the collections of aphorisms and maxims.

Thus I might argue that the philosopher-gardener should cultivate two gardens: the one behind the house, and the one in his mind.

My own attempt in collecting these thoughts is this newsletter, these writings, the Perennial Workshop. That’s how my world works: the practical is never separated from the philosophical. And so I see these paragraphs in my essays lingering, and floating, and mingling from the concrete to the abstract, from the blooming flower in the borders to the hopefully blooming ideas on these pages. From the present reality of having to clean the overgrowth in the woodlot to that thicket of historical fragments I read and collect.

A “second brain” might be a modern word for it. Or a “digital garden”. But I prefer to call it simply a knowledge garden.

The knowledge, cultivated in that second garden, isn’t absolute, just like the first garden isn’t absolute either, but it’s a little ecosystem.

And that ecosystem holds together my own thoughts, my own ideas, the things I’ve read, the things I’ve experienced, the things I see and describe and how all of it connects: the seasons, the days passing by, the view from the woodlot path on a foggy morning, when the sky slowly clears and the sun behind the oaks and ashes for a minute sketches a golden glow over the familiar landscape. The cold dew drops dripping onto the skin when brushing against the trees.

It’s possibly the best remedy for cognitive fragmentation: that modern illness of a modern world, where all aspects of our lives feel separate, random, scattered even.

Twilight

So I thought once more about what this place could be, or what it should become. The Perennial Workshop has mainly grown into a space for literary nature writing. Which I think is good.

But it is becoming more and more clear that I’m tending two distinct but deeply connected gardens, and I’m writing about both.

The one where the bees and the chickens and the ducks roam. And the one with the roaming thoughts and ideas. Both kept wild.

And both gardens produce a unique harvest and beauty that I think are worth sharing.

And nothing gets lost, I think, as I pile up a heap of leaves and branches onto one of the dead hedges in the woodlot.

The twilight setting in. The front yard, with the unkempt lawn and the woodpiles and the now trimmed hedge and the Bigarreau Napoleon, the cherry tree with the faint yellow and light reddish fruit. Ripe and ready to pick. Another job waiting to be done.

But first: shelling those peas and some broad beans and then preparing some dinner.

Yet another task to let the mind wander a bit more.

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In the Archive

Further reading on the garden as a place to walk, to work, and to think:

A Change in Landscape: A slow walk through the homestead
The Bocage Patchwork: On the second garden, and the life at the edges
Fixing the Clouds: On idling and the practice of looking closely at what passes

Inspired by: a shelf of old gardening manuals, among them Hans Schiller’s 134 Garden Designs (1977) and the Elseviers Garden Book (1972)

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Open the kitchen door and then you hear it: a continuous sound of waves filling the aether with that particular calming white noise, cancelling out the silence.

But the silence is replaced with something better. A sound of memories.

The meditative hum as a trustworthy companion, telling stories about the importance of the constant, of consistency and the art of being present without being present.

The poplars live an ephemeral existence. Planted for their fast growth, a crop to be harvested after 15 years maybe, then shipped to China and turned into throw-away cardboard boxes.

Part of our woodlot has been that kind of poplar plantation. We sometimes fell a few for firewood. But the tree makes a great canopy species. Poplars grow high fast but they don’t tend to block the light. So the sun still hits the forest floor. And underneath those poplars, other trees and shrubs and plants proliferate.

The morning routine: get up at 5:30 and start writing.

If I put it like this it almost feels like a productivity hack.

But I’ve come to value the routine. Witnessing the seasons each day. Now, dawn is slowly highlighting the garden. The still dim colors shifting hue as the sun starts to rise. An early bee already foraging the flowers of the wild sage.

I call the Perennial Workshop a start-up. That’s because I try to treat it like a job. Even if it doesn’t contribute to paying the bills.

To be honest: I’m not a marketeer, nor a salesman. A bad networker, too. And after more than half a year of writing, I have a hard-earned 95 subscribers. For some this might be a tiny number. I think it’s a lot.

A newsletter on nature, observations, systems, patchworks and the braiding of thoughts and ideas. The incarnation of the unmarketable and the far end of a niche that hasn’t yet been named.

But I needn’t feign humility. Neither do I need to assume I’m alone out there. I know there are many like me. They are called writers. Because that’s what we do. Put words on a piece of paper.

Our work is witnessing the seasons each day. Painting, with a few strokes, the scenes that matter. The little bee, returning every morning as long as the flowers last.

We seem unable to stop ourselves from doing things simply because we know we can do them.

Erich Fromm: social psychologist and philosopher, with a few sharp things to say about growth and our obsession with efficiency and quantity.

From The Revolution of Hope (1968): “If we are only concerned with input-output figures, a system may give the impression of efficiency.”

But this focus on output and efficiency hobbles the most important thing we carry: our creativity. Routinized thinking. Bureaucratic minds. The imagination narrowed to what can be measured.

The antidote: a return to the humanistic tradition. The end goal of any endeavor should not be efficiency but personal growth, joy and reason. “Because it is beautiful, good, or true.”

I notice that my writing is turning more and more into a sort of spontaneous process. Somewhere among all the writers and thinkers that have shaped my thinking, my own voice starts to emerge. And it’s more free, and without constraints. Less overthinking. I like it.

That makes me wonder: how many other writers are conscious of their writing voice, of how they sound on paper.

Because I do think we can steer and learn how to make our voice our own. And as always it’s part being conscious of it, and part just doing it...the writing itself.

Insist on yourself; never imitate, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life’s cultivation.

The personal voice, of course, is a braid. The way we write is only part of it. What we read, what we collect, where we live and what we’ve been through and the lenses we use to filter our observations.

In that same essay, Self-Reliance from 1841, Emerson urges us to avoid conformity and false consistency at all costs. Rather, we should follow our own instincts and ideas.

What I must do, Emerson wrote, is all that concerns me, not what the people think. And: There is no penalty to virtue; no penalty to wisdom; they are proper additions of being.

The vegetable garden. Maybe 400 square meters. A worn chestnut fence to keep the ducks and the chickens out. Individual patches of approximately 4 by 1 meter.

Peppers, eggplant, onions, cabbages, carrots, sweet corn, garlic and all kinds of leafy greens. A colorful quilt is emerging. The garden growing towards abundance.

An image from the now. But couldn’t that same image be from a hundred years ago? And even more: could that same patchwork not be imagined to exist a hundred years from now?

In 1904, a German gardener named Arthur Janson wrote a sort of manual on how to grow all vegetables for one household on 300 square meters (0.07 acres) for the entire year. Add staples like potatoes or grains and 1000 square meters (a quarter acre) might be sufficient.

300 m2 isn’t much. Janson’s solution: thoroughly use every patch of available soil.

The trick is, then, to never leave a patch of soil uninhabited. We should be able to grow at least three species in the same spot, in the same year. After the field salad comes cucumber, after cucumber winter cabbage. No barren patch of soil, never.

Permaculture pioneer Bill Mollison rediscovered exactly this in 1983, adding that “one gross error that we have all made is to try to occupy too much land, and not really develop any of this land we have”. In sprawling layouts, “the amount of success decreases as you extend”, whereas a tightly bordered, fully occupied and stacked approach ensures that “almost everything you do works”.

“You can think big and have a thousand head of cattle, or 2,000 chickens. Or you can make a very good living and go around the world once a year on half an acre.”

From time to time a certain temptation takes hold of my thoughts. To make the entire thing more accessible. More linear. More convenient.

What about shifting to pure practical gardening advice. Or maybe beekeeping. I know a lot about that. Or simply another newsletter about writing. Mono-topic is the prerequisite.

Anything to make it straightforward and marketable and discoverable.

Growing one cash-crop on one large, open field.

Wouldn’t it be nice to make a living, or at least part of it, through writing?

I treat my personal philosophy the same way I treat everything else: the writing, the thinking, the skills I try to learn.

I like to walk the ecotone. The border landscapes.

The result, then, might look scattered. But it isn’t.

The Perennial Workshop draws from three main streams.

The perennial philosophy in the Huxleyan sense: the idea that certain truths recur across cultures and centuries, independent of any single tradition.

Ecological thinking, in both its social and natural dimensions.

And the philosophy of complexity, the systems thinking that looks for connections and patterns before drawing conclusions.

The Perennial Philosophy distinguishes between eternity-philosophers and time-philosophers.

For time-philosophers everything that exists is temporal. And this goes in two directions. Either everything moves towards the future, where everything will be new and different and better. Or everything comes from a long-lost past, where everything was different and better and the old way.

For time-based philosophies, the ultimate justification is everything except the now.

Subscriber growth. The idea of a start-up. Dreaming of publishing a book. The urge to prove something to a non-existent future self.

The answer of the eternity-philosopher: the good isn’t located in the future or the past.

The 5:30 mornings, then, aren’t “investments” in future growth. They are the thing itself.

So I’ll just keep patching up a few newsletters with a bit of self encouragement. Fromm’s humanistic tradition, the non-conformity of Emerson, the density of the vegetable garden, the eternal now and even the fast-growing poplars making room for what grows underneath.

But maybe there’s another logic to be found. Far simpler, and to the point.

Vanity, some would say.

Boethius, around 523. Imprisoned, later sentenced to death, sitting in his cell waiting for his trial.

It is Lady Philosophy who finds him, struck silent. Not lost to vanity but suffering from something far more ordinary.

And when she saw me not merely silent, but completely speechless and mute, she gently laid her hand upon my chest and said: There is no danger: he suffers from lethargy, the common disease of a deceived mind.

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In the Archive

Further reading on non-conformity and embracing slow returns:

Reading the Fog: An antidote to fragmented thinking
Reconnecting the Stars: On ancient light and the practice of looking up
Why Nature Has No Chaos or True Order: On slow growth and long knowledge

Inspired by: Erich Fromm, The Revolution of Hope (1968) · Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance (1841) · Arthur Janson, Auf 300 qm Gemüseland den Bedarf eines Haushalts ziehen (1904) · Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual (1988) · Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (1945) · Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (c. 523)

The Artwork: Julie de Graag (1877–1924) was a Dutch graphic artist and printmaker known for her precise woodcuts of plants, animals, and natural forms. Image source: Rijksmuseum.nl

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The sharp thorns that still hurt two days later and the peculiar, sweet almond-like scent.

The three golden rain trees next to the terrace are coming into leaf. I have planted them way too close. I might have to remove one, I think. But not this year.

The salvia, the wild marjoram, the agastache. They are happily and carelessly flourishing in the warmth. Showing signs of blooming already. A lot of wintercress spreading around. And motherwort like always.

Two wild ducks arrived. Suddenly, simply there. Sunbathing next to the pond.

I have no degree in ecology. No master in philosophy. My background is the arts. But I am first and foremost a gardener.

Most gardeners are philosophers and the same holds true for beekeepers. Because we are engaged in topics that involve natural systems. We might not always name what we see, but we witness the patterns every day.

And many of us move from desk to garden, from screen to soil.

If you’re reading my newsletter, chances are you can recognize yourself in this. Work, not as a career, but as a means to facilitate life.

We might like our jobs, perhaps even find meaning in them. But it is not where we place our identity.

The real interest lies in what doesn’t pay us. At least not in a quantity that can pay the bills.

So we follow what interests us.

Robert Louis Stevenson, in An Apology for Idlers, praised the truant. That student, who decides to skip classes and embrace the world as a teacher.

Many who know all about some one branch or another of accepted lore, Stevenson observed, prove dry, stockish, and dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life.

But the truant idler has been a great deal in the open air. And while he might not have the same deep knowledge on any singular topic, he has dipped into it and skimmed it over to excellent purpose.

The generalist, then, starts with the broad perspective. We climb upon that mountaintop, look down into the valley, and understand that it’s somehow all part of the same story.

Being a generalist, and doing that hard split between work and life, can feel alienating in a world where the majority conforms to a different routine.

But it doesn’t need to be a paradox.

Nescio comes to mind. You might or might not have heard of him.

Nescio lived a double life. His real name was Jan Hendrik Frederik Grönloh (1882–1961). A businessman by trade. He worked for most of his life at the Holland-Bombay Trading Company in Amsterdam, a firm specializing in exporting goods to India. That’s how he earned a living.

But his real calling was writing. He decided to make that split. The writing on one end, the trading on the other.

In 1918 his first collection of novellas was published. He sold 300 copies in the first ten years. Only after his death did his work become more broadly known.

Nescio wrote about a certain nature, about recurring characters, Japi and Bavink and Koekebakker, and about Amsterdam in the early 1900s, the would-be Bohemian artists who lived somewhere in an attic room with a small wooden stove that was burnt till it was broken and a little bit of food they could afford each day.

And they used to sit somewhere in a park on a bench and observe a bit, without any expectations. Or better, with expectations that would never be fulfilled.

Longing for something but not knowing what to long for.

And this literary legacy of Nescio proves that he was not living for his work, but for something else, too.

Nescio only wrote short stories. Little novellas. Maybe 10,000 words each. All he wanted to do, he said, was fixing the clouds with some words. To capture a freeze-frame, a snapshot of a landscape on a bit of paper. Nothing more.

That humble perspective. To capture a few good scenes. And to be content. Isn’t that worth pursuing?

They call these weekly essays a newsletter. And I do see them as letters. Letters to you, the reader. And letters to myself. But my writing is not about the news.

The letter talks about what’s on our minds. Our day-to-day struggles. The little things we learned.

Or the horse-chestnut in the front yard, full of flowers today, next to the mixed hedge and the old rhododendrons. The one that emerged from itself fifteen years ago, after the previous owner felled the immense chestnut on the property, before we started living here.

And all of that, then, is the contemplative life. Or at least an honest attempt.

So it simply means I write and I put it out there, share it with you, and maybe, if the energy is there, I might share a note or two, some thoughts that I find worth adding to that infinite library of words called social media.

But social media must never become an obligation. If the urge to post some status update becomes a sort of forced obsession, or a necessity for compulsive subscription growth, then I would prefer not to.

And if that means to stay small and keep working in the margins, that’s fine too.

I find my consolation for writing in the act of writing itself.

The periods of my life where I’ve been engaged in writing always have been the most lucid ones, the ones where ideas and connections and insights seemed to reveal themselves along the way.

Seneca wrote in his letters to Lucilius:

We ought neither to write exclusively nor read exclusively (...). One must do both by turns, tempering one with the other, so that whatever is collected through reading may be assimilated into the body by writing.

Seneca is talking here about the ancient practice of keeping a commonplace book.

Carrying a little notebook, jotting down a few lines. And as time moves on, an archive is formed. A unique and personal collection of what we’ve read, what we’ve observed and felt and learned. A way to make sense of all the chaotic information that the world decides to throw at us. A map to navigate the fog.

Seneca continues:

We should be like bees, as the saying goes: first they fly about and choose the flowers best suited for making honey, then distribute what they have collected throughout the hive, and as our poet Virgil says, let the sweet nectar fill the swelling cells and lucent honey flow.

And then the notebooks, the entries, the entire thing, start to turn into a sort of spontaneous literary work of self-assembled patches, quotes and passages: a cento.

This is, for example, how Robert Burton wrote his Anatomy of Melancholy, with topics shifting from “the doctrines of religion to military discipline, from inland navigation to the morality of dancing-schools” as John Ferriar observed in 1812, adding that Burton was generally overwhelmed by the bulk of his own collected materials.

The turmoil, chaos, the loss of destination. The world that seems to revolve around crisis and fragmentation and meaninglessness. The pressure to follow along. To stay informed at all times.

It seems so typical of the now. But all of this is nothing new.

Burton wrote in 1621 about the overwhelming stream of news that flooded him every day: the “war, plagues, fires, thefts, murders, battles fought, shipwrecks, piracies and fresh alarms.”

He, too, had to find a way to cope with all of it, to muddle along.

The best he could do, Burton found, was to step back from it a little. Maybe to note a few observations. And to live quietly, in solitude but on his own terms.

I have still lived, so I now continue, statu quo prius, left to a solitary life, and mine own domestic discontents (...) I did for my recreation now and then walk abroad, look into the world, and could not choose but make some little observation, non tam sagax observator, ac simplex recitator, (not so sagacious an observer as simple a narrator), not as they did, to scoff or laugh at all, but with a mixed passion.

The pristine doesn’t exist. Nescio was well aware. After World War II, his nature diary added the ruins and the rubble to the willows and ditches of Amsterdam.

And I think, in my own nature diary, I should not refrain from painting the rubble too. The asphalted road, behind the front yard, past the chestnut and the wild hedge where a streetlamp with bright fluorescent orange light takes away the night sky every evening.

And past the street, across the meadow, on the other side of the Gete and the corn monocultures. When the wind blows it carries the rumbling noise of cars.

The two wild mallards still sunbathing, careless and free. But our two runner ducks don’t seem to mind.

I have the feeling that the wild ones don’t have the intention to leave yet and that they already seem to feel at home in our garden, with the pond and the feeder and the high grasses.

They are most welcome.

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In the Archive

Further reading on idling, dividing, and the contemplative life:

Reading the Fog: On finding direction without a fixed destination
The Living House: On inhabiting a place, and what it asks of you in return
A Bit Of Old Comb: On Inheritance, Place, and the Art of Staying

Inspired by:
Robert Louis Stevenson, An Apology for Idlers (1877) · Seneca, Letters to Lucilius (c. 65 AD) · Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) · Nescio, Dichtertje, De Uitvreter, Titaantjes (1918)

The Artwork:
Reijer Stolk (1896–1945) was an artist, printmaker and inventor who designed the original cover of Nescio’s Dichtertje, De Uitvreter en Titaantjes. Image source: Rijksmuseum.nl

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But that entire premise forgets to take one thing into account: life. And life, by definition, is uncertain.

Tolstoy, who had little patience for rigid plans, wrote in The Kingdom of God is Within You: “If a man, before he passed from one stage to another, could know his future life in full detail, he would have nothing to live for.”

Nora Bateson frames it differently. She asks: “Does this thinker seek to make a plan? Employ a strategy? Find a solution? Or interact with a context?”

We are trained to only see linear shapes. Straight lines moving from A to B. A playbook of instructions to follow into a future we can fully control.

Sampling the Quadrat Part I

So let’s leave that big plan for now, and head into the garden.

Spring is the right time for this. In ecology there is this practice called quadrat sampling. A 1x1 meter square frame is set out, often at random intervals. The “content” of that square area is studied to estimate population density and species richness.

My own lightweight equivalent of this is to walk the garden with a camera. Take some top-shots from different spots and build a small inventory of what’s emerging.

I find these images fascinating. They look like a diverse mess of shades and shapes. Almost abstract paintings. Chaos on a small scale.

I do recognize some of it: ground ivy, some wild garlic, a single self-seeded teasel, grasses I can’t name, Geranium maculatum spreading around. All of it entangled, overlapping.

The Paradox of an Orderly Mess

We are conditioned to believe growth is this linear journey from disorder to order. Unformed to finished. Messy beginning to clean result. But it’s also the reassurance we give ourselves when things feel scattered: just hold on, order is coming soon.

But that is not how nature actually works.

The universe is inherently messy, nonlinear and turbulent, Donella Meadows observed. It doesn’t rest in neat equilibria.

We tend to compress our findings into what we call natural laws. They soothe our minds with a sense of order. But the cosmos itself does not know the human construct of laws. What we call order often exists only in the mind.

The same is true for chaos, also a human concept, and nature is equally indifferent to it. Thoreau observed in 1854 that “our notions of law and harmony are commonly confined to those instances which we detect” while true natural harmony involves “a far greater number of seemingly conflicting, but really concurring, laws”.

It is not chaos or order. These are merely the ends of a spectrum. And in between: an infinite amount of gradations. An orderly mess. And we are continuously shifting somewhere in that vast space: between an unsolvable riddle on a page full of hieroglyphs and the lucid, readable map with clear directions.

We are always somewhere in between, on our way.

Sampling the Quadrat Part II

So: I’ve captured all these quadrat samples of my garden on camera. What’s next?

Once I’m back inside, I load these images into my computer. Study those quadrats on a big screen. Patterns start to emerge. I might use a plant recognition app, or even my old plant determination book.

I begin to see what repeats. Which plants keep appearing together. What the diversity actually is beneath that apparent tangle.

I can make informed estimates about what percentages of specific species are growing in my garden. How much of it has invited itself and how much of it is offspring of my own seeded and cultivated plants. What communities can I identify: annuals, perennials, pioneers etc.

The images of painted chaos, the page full of hieroglyphs, suddenly transform into quite a different thing: a page from a book, that tells a valuable and meaningful story. Not a book of ready answers, but a map for interpreting what is happening in that patchwork of ground.

Giving Direction

But while a journey is never linear, we still need a sense of direction.

If you’ve read other pieces here, you’ll recognize this image: the Gardener and the Mechanic. The Mechanic holds a Newtonian view. The universe is like a clockwork: we can take it apart into its components, reassemble it at our will. In this version of the story, order is perfectly predictable: an assembly line in a factory.

The Gardener’s story is older. The Gardener knows that tending something living means working with constant change, not against it. Heraclitus discovered this twenty-five centuries ago: you cannot step into the same river twice. The reason is simple: both you and the river are eternally changing and thus never the same.

But the river remains a river. It still follows its flow. Direction persists. It’s the substance that is always changing.

No total chaos. Not perfect order. But direction.

That, at least, is how I treat my endeavors. This newsletter is a good example. It is not a quick fix. Not a copy-paste strategy of some existing success formula. But an attempt at an honest, personal approach of letting a system emerge.

I didn’t start with a business plan, or a rigid manual.

But neither is it merely a random act of jotting down some thoughts on a piece of scrap paper.

So let me tell you how I actually tend the Perennial Workshop.

Sampling the Quadrat Part III

If Perennial Workshop is where I test my ideas, then the garden is my main laboratory. This quadrat sampling is one of those very experiments.

The real value only emerges over the years. When we can look back, and see trends and patterns over time.

This means returning to the same spots every year, around roughly the same period, and taking these overhead pictures of the garden floor.

It can be as simple as making a spreadsheet where we collect the data of each year, noting which species appear and how many of each.

Over time these quadrat snapshots turn into a true pattern catalogue of my own garden. These quadrats will never have a final destination. Every year I capture another variation of that seemingly chaotic whole. But over the years they start telling a long term story that reads like a chronological account of this specific place, of this garden. A story I happen to be part of.

It becomes a tool for long term prognosis. But also for long term stewardship.

I propose we treat all our endeavors with the same care and patience. Return to the same spots. Build a record over time. Let the pattern emerge from the accumulation rather than forcing it into shape too early.

Which is how I’ve come to think about writing and knowledge-building in the same terms. And it turns out I’m not the first.

A Perennial Tree of Growth

In the thirteenth century Ramon Llull constructed 16 Trees of Knowledge. They were part of his Arbor Scientiae: an ambitious encyclopedic work designed to classify and organize all medieval knowledge. He took the idea of a forest. A living organism. And turned it into a highly categorized, interconnected system of knowledge management.

Even more: he rigidly mapped the logical structure of his system onto the biological anatomy of a tree: roots, trunk, branches, twigs, leaves, flowers, fruit.

So let’s see if we can recycle a bit of Llull’s ideas into our own practices.

The Roots

The roots are the invisible part. What grows underneath. They need input, nutrients, compost to grow and flourish. It’s embedded in every essay I write, but you won’t necessarily see it.

Audio memo transcripts (lots of audio memos), small field notes, random thoughts and fragments of memories, quotes from books I scribble down, unsorted research, images from the public domain: all of it collected and added to my “vault”. This vault is operated through a thought collection and note taking app called Obsidian. I use it for everything: from collecting ideas to writing my drafts.

None of it organized, yet.

The Trunk

To Llull, human thought was essentially combinatorial. We take a finite set of foundational concepts and link them together to understand the infinite complexity of the universe.

The trunk is where combinatorial thinking happens in practice: a field note from the garden brushing against a theoretical fragment, a quote from a book linking unexpectedly to a voice memo from three weeks ago.

One could argue that another invention of Llull is AI, which he prophesied through his combinatorial thinking machines (I wrote about these in the Malleable Self). I do use AI for research, mostly Notebook LM, fed with my own input.

It does work as a helpful pattern recognition device.

AI remains a machine. A very complex one, and an adaptive one. Not the same machine we know from the 20th century, like an automobile or a dishwasher. It’s quite another incarnation of the mechanical. But a machine it is. It works through proximity: calculating the distance between the word “tree” and the word “forest”, finding patterns in what tends to appear together. That makes it a useful device for extending one’s own thinking.

But the AI never witnessed a forest awakening in early spring. It doesn’t know the terrain; it just knows how to draw maps with a speed we haven’t witnessed before.

The Branches

These linked ideas need direction. For me, this happens through the three main branches of my newsletter: the Ecotone (the braided, reflective essays), the Pattern Catalogue (Systems thinking as invented by Nature), and this section called the Perennial Grower (the documenting of my own practices).

These categories have their own biome, but the ecotone is always there: zones of overlap, where branches meet. A beekeeping observation finds its way into a systems essay. A historical source turns up in a practical note. A philosophical theory gets entangled with the brambles in the woodlot.

The Flowers

Take care of the tree and it will gift you with flowers. To me, the flowers are the questions each branch opens; not answers, but the productive uncertainty that blooms when ideas meet.

Every essay I share is an opening, not a conclusion. A flower offered to the reader, but also to myself: something that makes visible what I don’t yet fully understand, and in doing so, points me toward where the fruits might be.

It’s in the tending. All these pieces together form the flowering canopy. Not a carpet of conclusions, but an invitation to keep looking.

The Fruits

But the fruits are what we truly want to harvest. And a fruit tree won’t yield fruits the first year after planting. We have to be patient.

Every piece we write, every research note we add, becomes part of a map of our own thinking process. And the more we learn to braid these thoughts, the more meaning emerges out of it.

This only works with daily practice: returning to the tree, adding to it, tending it. But even more: it urges us to take what I believe to be a true ecological stance: one of long term thinking and long term horizons.

Writing then, becomes in the first place an autotelic act: creation for the sake of creation. Creation to nourish our future selves.

The Seeds

Ideas mature into essays, essays into series, series into something that begins to look like a body of work.

But the tree isn’t linear. The fruits hold the seeds for future trees. What they grow into is unpredictable. But we know they will grow. That’s a direction. Maybe a public knowledge garden. Maybe a book or a new series. Time will tell.

Sunlight hits the forest floor. One of the seeds germinates. Something new starts rooting.

Next spring I’ll be back in the garden with the camera. Same spots, same overhead angle. Looking down at the soil layer: the invisible part of the tree.

The quadrats will look different again, new communities forming, old ones shifting. Another frame in the long story of this specific patch of ground.

That’s all I’m trying to build here, too.

Ecosystem, not empire.

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In the Archive

This node connects to:

• Escaping the Mental Monoculture: Rethinking our thinking

• On Ecotone and the Art of Stitching: How ‘edge thinking’ can re-link our ideas.

• When Nature’s Calendar Breaks: A meditation on shifting seasons.

Embrace the Patchwork

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Every entry we make into our diaries, our notebooks, or our notepads accumulates into something larger.

We might not yet have drawn the lines between the pieces. But the map exists already, as a model in our minds, even without us knowing.

As we trample through that rough outback of thoughts, a desire path slowly appears. A few routes we seem to be taking over and over again. Suddenly, an unintended patchwork of connection starts to emerge.

At the beginning of this journey called The Perennial Workshop, I proposed a framework of “Cornerstones” as its foundations. Six building blocks for a simple life through complex layering; loosely coupled, as systems thinkers would say. Each part strengthens the whole, yet no single part is indispensable.

Now, at the turn of a new season, I have deliberately taken on the hat of the cartographer. The idea: to navigate through the diverse patches of my writings and draw that map of common threads. And I will use the three dominant Cornerstones of this season as a lens: Perennialism, Succession, and Ecotone.

■ Perennialism ■

Perennialism:

Prioritize skills, habits, and assets that compound over years: health, craft, knowledge. Prefer long horizons, durability, regenerative returns.

There has been no era in human history that has not had the lucidity to reflect upon the true nature of matter and time: that they are cyclical.

I discovered that this cyclical nature manifests itself through the many sources I quoted.

I found it in the work of Sir Albert Howard, who in 1940 described the complex mechanisms of compost and soil: “death supersedes life and life rises again from what is dead and decayed.” (Soil as Archive)

Forty years earlier, Maeterlinck echoed that idea in his observations of bees, who “like ourselves, obey the nameless lord of the wheel that incessantly turns on itself, and crushes the wills that have set it in motion.” (Towards Winter Rest)

And of course, I found it in my own life too.

In the orchard, when an apple falls from the tree onto the ground. As it starts to decompose, it “becomes truly part of another universe that feeds an entire network before it becomes part of the soil.” (The Patchwork: Orchard)

In the apiary, where I discovered that the bees sustain “a small, circular water-harvest system inside the hive.” Their warm breath condenses inside the cluster, rises to the ceiling, and returns in drops of water the bees can harvest. (What the Bees Know About Water)

Nothing from nothing.

That, then, is the oldest variant of the same thing. Lucretius, writing somewhere between 99 BC and c. 55 BC, observed that “everything breaks apart to form the basis of something new”. (The Compost of Thought)

Growth is cyclical: the seasons.

So is matter: a heap of compost.

Or life: a swarm of bees.

That Perennial thought, then, seems to have found its way almost seamlessly into my writings and the processes behind them.

The compost heap as a collection of ideas: “mental notes, scraps, and half-formed thoughts.” (Soil as Archive) “If the writings grow too wild, I’ll prune them, just like my hedges. Tossing the clippings on my compost heap. Let them turn into fertile soil for another season.” (At The Hedge)

■ Succession ■

Succession:

Accept that life has seasons: growth, consolidation, release, renewal. Design for all four. Accept both dormancy and disturbance as part of the conservation strategy.

I found the best summary of succession through the words of Frits Schumacher, paraphrasing the I Ching (The Book of Change): while everything changes all the time, change itself is unchanging.

Later, Jacke and Toensmeier return the concept to nature. In a forest, “at any stage, fire, wind, lightning, the plow, or another disturbance can set it back to an earlier phase.” (Letting Your Garden Grow Wild)

Disruption, then, is not the enemy of the system. It is part of its grammar.

I witnessed that in my half-dug pond, abandoned one rainy afternoon. The unfinished hole colonized itself: “marjoram and hemp-agrimony mingled with mugwort and thistles. (...) A fascinating collision of the wild and the cultivated.” (On Ponds, Digging, and the Things We Leave Unfinished)

And I witnessed it in the apiary, where the season that determines whether a colony survives winter is not winter at all. It is July, when the first long-lived winter bees are born. “Resilience is built in the margins we overlook, the quiet seasons, the moments that don’t feel urgent. It’s built when things are going well, not when they’ve already fallen apart.” (Towards Winter Rest)

Succession, then, seems to be closely related to the idea of resilience. If disruption is built into the nature of things, how do we build lives that can cope with eternal change and entropy?

Do we design our lives by imposing order on the world, or by learning how to live gracefully within its turbulence? Of course there is no exact formula. The answer, as always, lies in the in-between. “When life feels chaotic, we add structure. When life becomes brittle, we add diversity.” (The Ascetic and the Yeoman)

And that, too, shapes how I approach this newsletter. “I make sure my writing is guided by the seasons. I make sure it has places where ideas can rest. I let it move at its own pace. That way I can keep going without fatigue. And maybe, as a side effect, build a body of work worth tending.” (At The Hedge)

■ Ecotone ■

Ecotone:

Seek diverse inputs and perspectives; connect with ideas and domains outside your comfort zone. Encourage cross-boundary exchanges; heterogeneity as default.

One of the most important observations to emerge from my writing practice was the realization of what my writing actually wanted to be: an exploration into the realm of ideas and how they connect. What I now call Rethinking our Thinking.

Reading Nora Bateson’s Small Arcs of Larger Circles played a big role in this epiphany. She described the opposite of the braided approach, a lineage of thought she calls mental mono-cropping: “generating ideas in singular fields that are bred to be resistant to cross-pollination.” (Escaping the Mental Monoculture)

Murray Bookchin describes the process from the perspective of ecology: “in nature, balance and harmony are achieved by ever-changing differentiation, by ever-expanding diversity.” (On Ecotone and the Art of Stitching)

Digging through my own memories revealed that I have been living inside the ecotone for a long time without thinking of it in those terms.

I can trace it back to when Griet and I made a series of road trips to document abandoned border landscapes. We witnessed decaying billboards, empty customs infrastructure. But also the return of nature: trees pushing through bursts in the concrete, shrubs and brambles taking over.

I witnessed the same phenomenon at the woodland edge: “In summer, when nature is exhausted from long spells of heat and drought, the edgeland seems to be just that bit more resilient.” (On Ecotone and the Art of Stitching)

And as I was cutting back a hedge, I remembered that growth and cutting back are “not opposites but variations of the same theme.” (Letting In the Light)

Finally, I discovered it in my own writing and in this newsletter, which has always refused to stay on one side of any border.

“Our conceptual ecotone is that stitched space where disciplines, ideas, and contexts get connected, providing the necessary friction for new thoughts to emerge. Dynamic unity through diversity.” (On Ecotone and the Art of Stitching)

It only felt natural, then, to turn the idea of the ecotone into a tagline for The Perennial Workshop:

Rethinking our thinking across systems and seasons.

For people who don’t fit neatly into one field and don’t want their thinking to either.

Liminalism

Liminalism:

Spend time at your learning edges; try small, safe-to-fail experiments regularly. Maintain explore/exploit balance; institutionalize experimentation.

There is one more thread running underneath the three Cornerstones explored this season. It is Liminalism: the threshold, the in-between state, the doorframe.

It is the mode in which Perennialism, Succession, and Ecotone are all practiced. Indeed, The Perennial Workshop will always be home to the small-scale experiment.

That research seems to be bound to the realms of the in-between. Between the old and the new. Between the theoretical and the practical. Between paying the bills every month and the vernacular life of the homestead.

The idea settled early in the season: in dealing with change and uncertainty, the best self-help book out there might not be a ‘self-help guide 101’ but a theoretical work on Systems Thinking. (On Resilience and the Art of Balance) The homestead has always been my personal laboratory for testing exactly that kind of thinking.

Take the apiary: every beekeeping season is a new series of small trials: allowing swarming, testing different hives to find what works best for both bees and beekeeper, staying curious and continuing to learn about the biology of bees.

A handbook teaches the principles, but not the patience. That only comes with experience. (Trusting the Process: Doing Less to Achieve More)

Often this means picking up an idea, leaving it fallow, and returning to it years later.

That’s the story of the pond: it began without a plan, abandoned to the rain, resumed years later with more knowledge.

By launching The Pattern Catalogue, I added another dimension to this: my own experiment in learning in public.

Another bridge between digging the soil and mapping out systems. And between seeing the detail and the whole.

I had witnessed this movement before, observing a buzzard in the woodlot. It hung low, tracing my steps, locked into the granular detail of the terrain. Then, suddenly, it found an airflow. It just tilted its wings and went up into a circling spiral of rising air.

“Learning to navigate the vertical means being able to see that the landscape is made up of many different patches and patterns, different meanings and different relationships.” (Navigating the Vertical Axis)

■ Commons ■ ■ Permanence ■

Commons:

Shared stewardship. Share your surplus: knowledge, tools, skills. Shared governance of key resources and knowledge.

Permanence:

Place and rootedness. Ground yourself where you are; learn your context, build local anchors, grow relationships. Optimize for local fit; context beats universals.

Now, then, let’s shift our sights from the past to the future.

One curious finding brought to the surface through this retrospective is that two Cornerstones are somewhat underrepresented: the idea of the Commons and the concept of Permanence.

This is interesting because spring for me is all about growth. Not growth in the form of the unlimited idea of expansion, but exactly that dive into the limits of it.

Growth through engagement and connection with others. Sharing and exchanging workflows and insights. Being inspired by what other writers have to tell. Contributing to their conversations as well.

But also growth as a sort of anti-acceleration. The rootedness of the local. Growing in depth toward one specific place. The idea of the long now.

Let these two Cornerstones, then, become the centerpieces of the upcoming season and of my writings over the next four months.

The season is closing. The map is drawn. What remains is to walk the next one.

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In the Archive

This seasonal map draws from the following pieces published in Season 1: Winter 2025–26.

Perennialism On Perennialism: Soil as Archive · Towards Winter Rest: A Field Study in Resilience · Patchwork Edition 2: The Orchard · What the Bees Know About Water · The Compost of Thought · At The Hedge

Succession On Succession: Letting Your Garden Grow Wild · On Ponds, Digging, and the Things We Leave Unfinished · Towards Winter Rest: A Field Study in Resilience · The Ascetic and the Yeoman · At The Hedge

Ecotone On Ecotone and The Art of Stitching · Escaping the Mental Monoculture · Letting In the Light · Patchwork Edition 1: Bocage

Liminalism Trusting the Process: Doing Less to Achieve More · On Ponds, Digging, and the Things We Leave Unfinished · Pattern Catalogue 003: Vertical Literacy · On Resilience and the Art of Balance

The images used in this essay were taken from the marvellous Picturesque America; or, The land we live in. 1872. Public Domain.

A Note on the Commons I am keeping The Perennial Workshop open to everyone because I believe we all need these tools to rethink our thinking. If these writings offer you insight and value, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the workshop.

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I am fascinated by fog. It sets a sort of boundary onto the landscape, creating a cinematic intimacy. Nature transforms into vague shapes and silhouettes; a single, seamless whole.

Walking through the fog forces us to focus on our own steps. It forces us into the Now.

The fog, then, diffuses both our sight and our thoughts.

In 1621, Robert Burton observed this dual nature in his Anatomy of Melancholy. He writes that a “thick, cloudy, misty, foggy air... is unwholesome, and engenders melancholy”. Yet, demonstrating the paradoxical nature of the veil, he also notes that some scholars “suppose that a thick foggy air helps the memory.”

This is the paradox of the fog. We get lost in it, but at the same time it confronts us with ourselves and our thinking. It forces us to see more clearly.

That fog, to me, represents the dualities of modern life quite well.

Society has a tendency to focus on specialization and the singular topic. We compartmentalize our lives, our work, and our interests into separate, rigid categories.

Information is available in abundance, but we somehow lack the coherence to connect its layers. We suffer from Cognitive Fragmentation.

We can frame this fragmentation through the Stoic principle called the dichotomy of control. There are the things we can’t control (the overload of fragmented information) and there are the things we can control (how we deal with that information, and how we decide to connect it).

This is the fog I’m talking about. And we seem to be roaming in that clouded reality.

But here’s the question: what are the practical steps to navigate this fog?

To find our way, we need to rethink how we think. And as it turns out, learning to navigate the mind is a lot like learning to navigate nature.

Three Ways to Read the Fog

If you want to learn how to read the physical landscape, I recommend the work of Tristan Gooley. In The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs, he provides us with the proper tools to recalibrate our compass, when lost in a fog.

It comes down to this sequence of actions: Stop searching for the destination. Read the micro-map. Practice vertical escape.

1. Stop searching for the destination.

Only by accepting that we are lost, and thus without a destination, we can truly start to learn. Indeed, being lost is part of the process of learning. It sets the recalibration process in motion.

The art of being lost was actually embraced by the Stoics. The destination lies in the future and our external goals. But these are things we do not have control over. So clinging onto a fixed, final destination generates panic, not progress.

2. Read the micro-map.

Only when we accept this, we can start looking for a new map. In this case a micro-map of the specific and immediate. We can focus on what we still can see: the grasses below our feet.

By reading which way the tallest grass is bent (by recent winds) versus the shorter grazed grass (by prevailing winds), we can orient ourselves without a horizon.

Let’s translate this to the realms of re-learning and thinking. When our thoughts feel fragmented and clouded, we should focus on the immediate signs in front of us. What is working today? What small patterns are still visible?

This means focusing on the Now.

In the words of Marcus Aurelius:

Neither what is past nor what is to come need afflict you, for you have only to deal with the present. Now, this is strangely lessened, if you take it singly and by itself.

The map reveals itself when we start navigating toward the individual steps of our goals, not the goal itself.

3. Practice vertical escape.

All these little steps add up. They are the small patterns that rebuild and reconnect our bigger picture: the vertical escape.

But we need to alternate between looking at our feet and the sky. From the singular to the whole.

To predict where the fog might end, we need to keep monitoring the horizon.

If we can spot thinning patches or signs of a blue sky, we know the fog is clearing. It means we’re heading in the right direction, and we’re navigating calm and steadily out of the fog.

Seneca describes this sensation of breaking through: when a balanced mind accepts the present, “the soul looks forth from lofty heights and laughs.”

Focus on the details on the ground, but never lose sight of the broad overarching patterns. The fog above you will clear.

All of these, then, are steps for learning.

The Road and the Destination

I admit the fog inhabits my mind too. Take this newsletter, for example. Isn’t my scope too broad? Do people really want to read about both bees and ideas? Maybe I should write about gardens only.

All those uncertainties trouble my vision. In the honor of Burton I could baptize this the Melancholy of the Mist.

But I found it helps to return to those three steps.

Stop searching for the destination. Read the micro-map. Practice vertical escape.

Every new skill I learn starts in the mist. Every new endeavor feels like an isolated quest. But the more I keep walking the more the total map starts to reveal itself.

That map runs from the apiary and the garden through ecosystems, a bit of multimedia work and some history and philosophy. Those aren’t separate topics stapled together; they are the traces I follow. The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts.

And the fun thing is, the longer this chain of connection grows — the knowledge, the skills, the insights — the easier it becomes to navigate uncharted territory.

And that, then, is true for everyone.

A Personal Braided Map

We each carry a specific mix of habits, knowledge, obsessions, and half-finished ideas. Most of us just haven’t learned to read the connections between them.

That is what rethinking our thinking is about: learning the language of the ecotone; learning to navigate the mist. Your mix can become your personal, braided map.

In the end, we all face the same choice: we can either learn to read its traces and navigate the fog, or we can remain eternally stuck inside its hazy labyrinth of division and separation.

To understand these steps, to use the words of Marcus once more, means understanding that nothing can “stop the course of reason, or hinder a thought from running in its natural channel.” And like “a cylinder on a smooth descent”, we start to move steadily, focusing only on the immediate contact with the ground, while trusting the larger forces to do the rest.

You cannot out-think the fog. You must out-feel it.

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In the Archive

This node connects to:

• Escaping the Mental Monoculture: Thinking through systems and seasons

• On Ecotone and the Art of Stitching: How ‘edge thinking’ can re-link our ideas.

Inspired by:

Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) · Tristan Gooley, The Walker’s Guide to Outdoor Clues and Signs (2014) · Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (+/- 170 AD) · Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius (+/- 62 AD)

Embrace the Patchwork

If these thoughts spoke to you, subscribe to The Perennial Workshop and follow my search into Rethinking our Thinking across Systems and Seasons.

Subscribe now

This newsletter, then, stubbornly refuses to fit into a niche. It objects to the fact that the modern world forces people into narrow, singular, and constructed identities. Real life doesn’t work that way. Real life is complex, layered, a system of systems. And yet we keep trying to live inside intellectual monocultures.

However, I’m well aware that by refusing the singular message, it might be harder for people to grasp the benefits they gain from reading my work.

My writings are, among other things, about systems, nature, gardens, bees, creative work, ideas, and slow growth. Sometimes I zoom out. Sometimes I’m in the fields.

It’s about grasping both: the tangible everyday life and the more abstract.

It’s the collision of all these worlds that makes the process of thinking valuable and interesting to me. They are what keep me inspired and motivated to write this newsletter.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. Substack is a world of niches: quick discovery through single-topic newsletters. That’s fine, I don’t need to compete. However, I do believe that it’s important to have a core message, a mission statement, so to speak.

So I set out on a quest to define what brings all my writing together (beyond my own worldview). Indeed, what is the problem I’m helping to solve for the reader?

I drafted it into a new tagline.

The thinking itself becomes a central part of my work. How can we adapt our thoughts to recognize the ecotone — the fertile borderland — to connect the individual fragments and patterns of our thinking?

The Divided Mind

To rethink our thinking, then, is to confront the reality of Cognitive Fragmentation. We are conditioned to operate within the boundaries of a landscape of “specialism” and “isolation.”

It tells us to navigate a complex, unpredictable world by following a linear, single-direction path.

I propose that in order to move toward coherence, we must learn to inhabit the ecotone: the “border zone of knowledge” where old insights and new research overlap to build a framework that can hold complexity.

In fact, I already explored the ecotone in a previous writing called ‘On Ecotone and The Art of Stitching’. In there, I discussed Nora Bateson’s concept of Mental Mono-Cropping — our stubborn habit of generating ideas in singular fields. This monocultural thinking, according to Bateson, produces a “zombie-like,” and “homogenized perception” resistant to the “cross-pollination” essential for evolution. What she actually points us to is the importance of transcontextual research. Or how I would phrase it: the importance of braiding ideas.

Education, media, and social structures present overlapping patterns of compartmentalization. Why just one concept of birth, marriage, death, friendship, work, economy, right, or wrong? (...) Evolution prefers diversity. Specialized and separated, the ideas that so badly want to twist and frolic around each other are captive.

—Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles

We could argue that the truth of a system is found in the “interconnections of learning” between its supposedly separate parts.

This, then, provokes another observation. If we are to connect our thinking, we must understand that this embraces both what Wendell Berry calls the ‘Rational’ and ‘the Sympathetic’ Mind.

• The Rational Mind: The Mind that focuses solely on “the empirical methodologies of analysis and experimentation and the attitudes of objectivity and realism.”

• The Sympathetic Mind: The Mind that leans toward wholeness. “It is moved by affection for its home place, the local topography, the local memories, and the local creatures.”

The separability of the Rational Mind, says Berry, is not only the dominant fiction but also the master superstition of the modern age.

Ecology as a Mental Model

It is Alan Watts who provides an additional interesting connection.

We somehow started to treat the ‘human person’ as isolated and disconnected from all the other things that surround us. We’ve built an invisible wall that separates oneself from what Watts calls the ‘alien universe’ — the environment we inhabit.

Increasingly, the world around us looks as if we hated it. Yet this particular feeling of personal existence is a delusion.

But, as I’ve argued before, we are not apart from nature. Even though we seem to be living that way. And by studying the relations between all living beings and their environment, we can learn quite some interesting insights.

Therefore, if I could recommend one singular step to learn to rethink our thinking, it would be this: study Ecology.

We might view Ecology as the science of the Sympathetic Mind. It could function as a bridge between the Rational and the Sympathetic.

Indeed, a formal definition of Ecology could read something like this: The study of life from the individual organism to populations, communities, ecosystems and the biosphere, and how they all connect.

However, we would come to the conclusion that these insights challenge our common worldview. We would come to understand that everything is connected and that, to use the words of Alan Watts once more, the individual organism and its environment are a continuous stream, or field, of energy.

Let me, to close this short epistle, return to the garden, more specifically, the apiary. The bees possess the marvelous quality of embodying the very connections we struggle to see. Throughout their lives, each individual bee takes on several tasks, from cleaner to nurturer to guardian and forager. No one tells them what to do. There is no overseer controlling them. Still, within their own ecosystem, they seem to embrace the whole.

The bees understand that the collective intelligence often outperforms the solitary mind. Their resilience and adaptivity, then, spring from their ability to transform various inputs and information into diverse solutions.

But there is more. Their calling to pollinate implies that the bee cannot live without the flower and that the flower cannot live without the bee. Indeed, they are both part of that complex and adaptive system called nature. And it’s good to remember that we’re part of it as well.

To draw a new moral from the bees and the flowers: the two organisms are very different, for one is rooted in the ground and broadcasts perfume, while the other moves freely in the air and buzzes. But because they cannot exist without each other, it makes real sense to say that they are in fact two aspects of a single organism.

—Alan Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Reality

I write for those who don’t fit neatly into one field and don’t want their thinking to either. If these thoughts resonated, I’d be grateful if you passed them on to another reader who might benefit.

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In the Archive

This node connects to:

• On Ecotone and the Art of Stitching: How ‘edge thinking’ can re-link our ideas.

• When Nature’s Calendar Breaks: A meditation on shifting seasons.

Inspired by:

Nora Bateson, Small Arcs of Larger Circles (2016) · Alan Watts, Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Reality (2007) · Wendell Berry, Two Minds (2002)

Embrace the Patchwork

If this mosaic of thoughts spoke to you, subscribe to The Perennial Workshop and follow my search into Rethinking our Thinking across systems and seasons.

Subscribe now

Observations from the Borderland

Here in Belgium, autumn has arrived with a certain suddenness. It feels almost refreshing after the long spell of summer. My favourite seasons are the in-betweens, those transitional periods when every small change outdoors still delights. One of my routines is to open the kitchen window first thing in the morning, stars still shimmering, and take a few good breaths.

Later, a faint sun started to appear, so I thought I'd better take advantage of it while it lasts. I went outside for some fieldwork, pruning the hedges at the edge of our little garden. The ground was already covered with reddish-yellow leaves, as if nature couldn’t wait to retreat. I suppose it needs the rest, too.

Yet even in the chill, the borderland was full of life. Late bloomers held firm, offering nectar to the bees. Tansy, with its recognisable, herbaceous smell, always pulls me back to childhood. Tall, yellow ragwort, beautiful but poisonous. The big, conical flowers of field bindweed, that eternal strangler, its rope-like stems like nature’s tripwires, making me stumble and curse.

Above me, a group of swallows occupied the airspace. After years of absence, they’ve finally returned. I like to stand and watch their playful flight. With swift movements, they circle around, like little combat pilots snapping mosquitoes mid-air. I once read a single swallow can eat up to fifty thousand insects in a week. Aerial pest control, free of charge. Before winter arrives, they’ll leave too, back to Africa.

Learning from the Edge

Back to the hedges.

I’ve always had a weakness for border landscapes. There’s more going on here. More diversity. More surprises.

Science has a name for these places: ecotone - the transitional zone between two ecological communities. Ecotones matter. They increase the dynamism of living systems.

Ironically, our human-shaped landscapes create more of them: farmland meeting forest, cities pressing into fields. But let’s be honest, that ecotone in front of me is just an overgrown hedge in need of trimming.

And yet I can’t help it: I’ve come to think of the Perennial Workshop as an ecotone too. A borderland where ideas meet and mingle. Scraps, notes, reflections, research. Hopefully, something worth reading.

On Taking Your Time

Umberto Eco said the best part of writing was the research. The years before a single line. He spent eight years investigating Foucault’s Pendulum before he wrote it. Yes, eight years.

I do love that research phase. Wouldn’t want to skip it. Though I have to admit: I once spent three months staring at a blank page, convincing myself I’d forgotten how to write. Turns out, I was just avoiding the real work.

Montaigne once wrote “I am myself the matter of my book,”. Which, I guess, is another way of saying: when you look closely enough at yourself, you find everything else too. And still, the universal wisdom in his writings is still relevant as ever .

And then there is Italo Calvino. I’ve been re-reading ‘If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller’. It feels written directly for you, and also for no one at all. His essays praise multiplicity, lightness, and openness. Not a closed system, but a dotted border like the hedge: full of edges, full of possibilities.

Patience, circling, lightness. They remind me writing doesn’t have to be neat, or quick, or even finished.

The Hum of the Superorganism

Then, of course, the bees.

At the edge of the woodlot, half in the hawthorns’ shade and half leaning toward the open field, stand my hives. Between gardening chores, I sit there, watching.

Bees doing their tiny, individual jobs. Foragers staggering home with clumps of pollen sticking to their legs. Patrolling guards, staring down wasps. Builders chewing wax into comb. Nurses hunched over brood cells like midwives.

Here’s the thing. Alone, these tasks are nothing. Together, they are everything. The colony as superorganism (The Germans even have a word for this: Der Bien. Not the individual bee, but the hive-entity itself.).

Maybe that’s what a newsletter is, too. Not one heroic essay, or one single-minded vision. But a linked collection of thoughts and notes. Many small jobs done reasonably well.

The Importance of Diversity

So I am building this Substack like a hive, on the borderland of my thoughts.

Some essays will be more theoretical. That’s the Macrocosm, I like to call the Observatory. Here, I examine the main principles of the possibility of self-determination and resilience.

Then there is the Microcosm: the Field Guides. These are the practical translations of the Observatory: observations, actions, small implementations.

However, more often than not, Observatory and Field Guide start mingling together, forming the braided network of my thoughts. Theory and praxis. Each edition is a node in a larger picture. Linked together, these nodes form an interconnected web of research on resilience, adaptivity, and agency, drawn from the things that populate my mind: beekeeping, nature, creative work, craft, technology, systems.

Writing is, in part, learning to craft a focused essay: the individual node. But there’s even more: all of our writings are part of a living network holding our concepts and ideas. Over time, a constellation forms: a map of the principles we live by. A living guidebook to consult whenever necessary, guarding the consistency between what we believe and how we act.

The incarnation of a superorganism.

A Practical Aside

Structuring my newsletter this way makes the daily writing routine far more enjoyable. I’m not on a factory line, stamping out identical posts. Instead, I move from theory to practice, from frontend to backend. Each essay with its own rhythm and pace.

Each one links to the others, forming the body of work.

I never expect one piece to do everything. Shorter field notes provide breadth. The essays dig deeper. I’m working with roles, not quotas.

And, like any good gardener, I collect seeds and I keep a compost heap. Fragments, quotes, half-formed ideas: they all go in the seedbox. If the writings grow too wild, I’ll prune them, just like my hedges. Tossing the clippings on my compost heap. Let them turn into fertile soil for another season.

That’s the small, sustainable ecosystem I envision.

Toward Fertility and Resilience

Which brings me to the larger word. Sustainability.

Usually it means panels on a roof, or a car with a plug. The consumer’s version of virtue. But I think of hedgerows and hives. I think of resilient, diverse and interconnected systems. It's the difference between looking for short-term, economic gains and long-term, sustainable investments.

Even a weekly newsletter shouldn't become pure production. It shouldn't demand the same thing of me every week. Indeed, the writing itself should keep me engaged and inspired. That then, is the sustainability I'm talking about.

So I make sure my writing is guided by the seasons. I make sure it has places where ideas can rest. I let it move at its own pace. That way I can keep going without fatigue. And maybe, as a side effect, build a body of work worth tending.

Circling back towards the self, in the spirit of Montaigne. Taking my time, like Eco did. Always lightly, as Italo Calvino urged.

So this is what I’m trying to build here. Not a content machine, but a small ecosystem.

Slow growth. The hedge thickening year by year. The bees, guided by seasons.

Collected at the edge of the fields: where bees, words, and seasons meet.

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It is clear that there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. — Jorge Luis Borges

Dear Reader,

Meanwhile, outside: a freezing haze settles on the bare branches of the trees surrounding my garden. Flocks of birds, busy and chattering, leaping to and from the feeder in front of the kitchen window, seed-picking their way through winter: starlings, blue and long-tailed tits, sparrows, and one little robin scavenging the fallen bits on the frozen grass.

Beehives standing idle in the clearing of a small woodlot. The bees clustering, waiting, and remembering the possibilities of spring to come. What better teacher of patience and slowness than the hive in winter.

The garden is at rest. The beds for next year’s food-growing covered with straw. Here and there, a lost Brussels sprout or a lonely leek surviving, waiting to be harvested.

Nowadays, I often find myself thinking about gardens and the larger systems they embody. Everybody should have access to one. I can think of no better opportunity for increasing the beauty in our lives. But of course, that’s just my humble opinion.

And then: the cozy comfort of simple life. Sitting in front of the fireplace - crackling embers, sparks, and radiating heat - I contemplate the possibility of next year’s garden. Resilient, if I can help it. Not an idyll, but a working Eden.

Sitting there, planning that resilient garden, I realized: I’m not just designing beds and borders. I’m sketching the outline of an entire practice - a possible system for adaptive and resilient living.

A Living Field Map

So, In my Perennial Workshop, I’m drafting a living field map of simple living in complex times. This means investigating diverse aspects of traditional skills and modern knowledge.

Growing food. Beekeeping. Journaling. Woodworking. Repairing. Homemaking.

These, then, can be thought of as a collection of skills each of us can learn and implement. We can treat them as nodes in a network of an ever-developing portfolio of personal assets.

However: It is not my intention to get lost in another romantic version of the past. To stay rooted in the present, I’ll use both analog and digital means - note-taking apps and AI assistants alongside pruning saws and soil science.

What I’m after is a practical system: one that increases agency, resilience, and adaptability. It should lead to a reconciliation between our beliefs and our actions. Because the map is alive, it needs feedback and seasons.

This is important. It is this seasonal structure that can bring back a slow pace and natural rhythm into our modern, fast-rolling lifestyles. It is the seasons that naturally divide the year into four parts. They shape the possibility for four different phases and four different attitudes. They are a framework for a sustainable way of working and living.

The Rhythm of the Seasons

In spring, life seems to be awakening after months of dormancy. I can almost observe growth live in action. The leaves emerging from the barren branches of the willows. Then come the catkins. The pollen. And then the bees. And before one knows it, they’re already off again - swarming their way to an unknown future. Indeed, spring means diving in, headfirst. Getting things going. Even if we’re not ready.

By June, the garden has forgotten it was ever bare. It all explodes: the grass, the weeds, our endeavors. The hives, bursting at the seams. That’s the core of summer. Catching up. Mowing pathways. Damage control. But also: the payoff. The fruits of our labor. The sweet smell of honey at the apiary. The eternal sun, and long shadows. Harvest. Abundance.

And suddenly everything slows down. The call of autumn. It somehow feels quieter outside. Rest returning, occupying soil and mind. Hawthorns loaded with red berries. Birds scavenging the hedges. A few bees still foraging the late-sown green manure. Time to do some maintenance: oiling tools, mending fences, juicing those apples and maybe finally updating that online portfolio I’ve been postponing. Autumn teaches the art of putting by: maintenance, conservation, preparation.

And then, an image of white blankets, covering entire landscapes. A hidden world underneath. The silent apiary. The bees, clustering inside their hives, passing heat from one to another. Flocks of tits, starlings and sparrows occupying the hedges. Long evenings at the fireplace. Reading, learning, reflecting. Plans belong here too, but only if they’re not in a hurry. I try to leave empty space in them, so that spring will have room to arrive. Rest, then, is part of the work. It’s the essence of winter.

Why a Workshop at all?

Because I want a life layered with skills and options, aligned with first principles - not through rigid plans, but through an evolving, feedback-rich system. This newsletter is the logbook: linked notes that accumulate into a map.

I am aware of the risks of system-building: they are bound to fail. Descriptions, by definition, lead to a reduction of reality. As Borges noted so insightfully in “the Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” it is impossible to describe a system - whether it be a language or a logic - without becoming self-referential. This is the paradox of classification.

However, we can make the system open-ended: never definitive, but an ongoing exploration.

The impossibility of penetrating the divine pattern of the universe cannot stop us from planning human patterns, even though we are conscious they are not definitive.

— Jorge Luis Borges

If any part of this found a place with you, I’d be grateful if you shared it with someone who might feel at home in these pages as well.

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And if you haven’t yet, you’re welcome to subscribe. It would mean a lot to have you along for the next season.

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“What’s wrong with a global community that consists of nothing but grass, gazelles and lions? Or a global community that consists of nothing but rice and humans?” … “I’d have to think that a community like that would be ecologically fragile. It would be highly vulnerable. Any change at all in existing conditions, and the whole thing would collapse.”

—Daniel Quinn – Ishmael

Dear reader,

These pages are about bees. And at the same time, they are not. Like Maurice Maeterlinck in The Life of the Bee, I use the hive as a lens: a way to look at larger systems, and at life itself.

As a beekeeper, I’ve seen how a colony works as a complex superorganism. Its health depends on many shifting factors. Every bee has a task that changes over time: nurses, foragers, guards, cleaners, builders. They adapt roles as needed, yet the system holds. Layer upon layer, the hive builds resilience.

The colony also moves through the fourth dimension: time. Winter rest. Spring expansion. Summer abundance. Autumn preparation. This is the story of seasonal succession. It’s not unique to bees. It can be observed all across nature.

The hive, then, represents a four-dimensional model, layered in space and time. Picture it as honeycomb. Each cell is strong on its own, but together they form a structure of remarkable strength. Remove one, and the rest still holds. A framework of support, built layer by layer.

The opposite of such resilience is the monoculture: one-dimensional, fragile, linear. Remove one link, and the whole system collapses. Think of a factory assembly line. Or a field of corn.

Regaining Agency

We can apply the same thinking to our own lives. Do we want to structure everything around one fragile point: a single job (we might not even like it), a single income, a single rhythm? Lose that one thing, and the rest falls apart.

Or we can design a life where each part supports the whole. Where income, skills, and daily practices form a resilient network. Where living itself becomes, as Wagner once put it, a Gesamtkunstwerk; a total work of art.

This means learning to distinguish between what matters and what doesn’t. It means relearning how to provide for our basic needs. Abraham Maslow called these the “Hierarchy of Needs”: food, shelter, rest, health. Everything else, from confidence to creativity and personal growth, rests on these foundations.

Doesn’t it seem strange that we’ve outsourced these fundamental aspects of our lives?

But here’s the good thing: modern tools make it easier than ever to reclaim them. Old knowledge and new technology can work together. It's actually quite simple: grow food, learn a craft, fix what breaks, spend some time outside, slow down… And while we’re at it: take back ownership of how we live.

Over time, these layers form a durable, resilient, adaptive system. Each one is like a planet in its own orbit, distinct yet bound by invisible forces. Together, they trace a constellation: a pattern that only reveals itself when you step back far enough to see the whole.

A Complex yet Simple Framework

I call this approach complex-simplicity.

Complex, because it layers skills, knowledge, and practices. Simple, because it rests on needs and principles anyone can learn.

Each part strengthens the whole, yet no single part is indispensable. Remove one, and the rest holds. In systems thinking, this is called “loose coupling.” It means you can adapt without collapse. It means the design bends but does not break.

And yes, I too, have to keep reminding myself of its principles. To live intentionally. To not let the days be devoured by randomness and coincidence.

The Perennial Workshop: a Framework

What follows are the six cornerstones; the foundations I’m testing and adapting to build a system of agency, resilience, and simple living:

• Perennialism (Time & Continuity):

  Prioritize what compounds over years — health, craft, knowledge, soil. Build for decades, not just days.

• Permanence (Place & Rootedness):

  Ground yourself where you are. Learn your context. Grow local anchors: relationships, skills, and ecological ties.

• Liminalism (Threshold & Becoming):

  Spend time at your learning edges. Try small, safe-to-fail experiments. Stay in the spaces where change begins.

• Ecotone (Edges & Diversity):

  Seek fertile overlaps. Invite diverse ideas, people, and practices. The richest growth happens where worlds meet.

• Commons (Shared Stewardship):

  Share your surplus. Pass on tools, knowledge, and care. Build reciprocity loops that strengthen the whole.

• Succession (Cycles & Renewal):

  Accept that life has seasons: growth, consolidation, letting go, renewal. Design for all four, and you will adapt.

These cornerstones are simple enough to hold in mind, but strong enough to guide a lifetime of decisions. Like honeycomb, each is modest on its own; together they form a structure of lasting strength. Like constellations, their patterns reveal themselves only when you step back far enough to see the whole.

This is the Perennial Workshop: a living framework for designing a resilient and intentional life, cell by cell, season by season.

If this speaks to you, subscribe below and join me as I keep shaping this universe.

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