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Are we living in the Earth’s dream?

Welcome to the wilderness. My name is JJ van de Vyver and I’ll be your guide on the series where we explore ideas so wild they might just work.

I’ve walked away from everything I was taught measured success – impressive qualifications, high-powered job and playing by the rules – called by the feeling that the way we organise society isn’t working. The stakes are high and time is short. A new future is calling – we need to question how we do things and trust nature to guide the way. Welcome to Wild Ideas.

Today I’d like to share a personal essay with you about the way that nature slowly woke me from my nightmare of burnout, meaninglessness and isolation – to co-create a different future. This is the fifth and final essay of this introductory series, where I’m leading you through my inner world so that we understand one another before setting off into the wilderness together. If you missed any of the previous instalments, you can find them here:

1. What if I can’t find meaning in corporate?

2. What if I was meant to be there when Daddy died?

3. What if Mommy healed her past?

4. Can magic mushrooms evolve human consciousness?

Today’s wild idea: are we living in the Earth’s dream?

The dream

Does the Earth know I’m here? Did it plant these seeds of wakefulness along my path? Stripping away any pretences of immortality when it halted my blood? Bringing me to my humbled knees through the burnout? Glimmering with hope as I overcame my doubts? Showing me what can happen when we work with nature? Connecting me with the souls who taught me to tend my being?

Is the Earth calling to us all?

Am I in her dream now?

Preparing for a journey, autumn 2023

I woke up in the early hours of the morning, the pain on the left side of my back aching worse than the day before. A knowing settled on me… something is wrong. I tried to shake the thought and ease back into sleep – I’d see how things were when my alarm went off. It was the third day in a row with this flashing pain on the left side of my back. I opted for some stretching and a massage the night before because I thought I’d tweaked a muscle, but the pain just kept increasing. At least it was Saturday and I wouldn’t have to cancel any work arrangements to get it checked out.

I called 111, the urgent healthcare line in the UK. I’d heard about it while mapping the five-year strategy of an NHS trust for work, and it was the preferred way to triage how urgent a situation was without calling the emergency line.

A female call advisor walked me through some quick diagnostic steps. Is it worse when I breathe in deeply? Yes. What about with my hands raised above my head? Yes. I could sense her moving along a decision-tree as I sat with my partner in our bedroom above our cosy Oxford street. Outside, parents walked their kids to sporting fixtures and groups of runners worked up a sweat ahead of coffee and croissants.

“We’re going to need you to come in as soon as possible. Based on your postal code, it looks like John Radcliffe Hospital is nearest to you. Can you get there?”

I told her I could drive there.

“Best that your partner drives. Go to the Ambulatory Assessment Unit on Level 4. Avoid eating anything before you can be seen.”

I just remember how slow everything felt: putting on my clothes; the drive to the hospital; trying to find the elevators to level 4; checking in and sitting in the waiting room; the nurses checking my pulse, blood pressure, temperature and taking blood samples to get a better profile of the state of my body. After I was told to come to the hospital my panicked brain raced at the thought of medical emergency, meanwhile the world continued on at normal speed.

First we did an X-ray. The soft tissues of my sore body stood still as the electromagnetic radiation passed through them, reaching the detector on the other side with relative ease through fat, muscle, organs and air. The heavy calcium of my bones absorbed more of the X-rays, causing fewer to reach the detector and creating a light contrast on the image the doctors would analyse. Holding my partner’s hand on our plastic seats in the waiting room, the doctor informed us that my chest looked normal and that he had ruled out a collapsed lung. We would have to do more tests.

It was harrowing to imagine dying on this particular Saturday. My father had passed away suddenly 18 months before and I was one week away from beginning a 1000km walk across Spain on the Camino de Santiago. In large part, the pilgrimage was to be with the grief of losing him. My bag was packed, including the engagement ring I was planning to surprise my partner with when she joined for two of the six-week walk. My time off work was booked, and I wanted to reflect how I was investing my attention and whether it aligned with my life’s purpose.

Next, we did a CT scan. I entered a room dominated by a large donut-shaped white machine, with a bed extending out of its vertical hole. I lay down, instructed by the nurse, who explained they would need to inject an iodine contrast into my blood through the IV in my arm. I’ve never done well with needles and bodily insides – I wonder whether I got that from my dad, who fainted during my birth – so I looked away as they hooked me up. The nurse and attendants left the room and the giant donut started to whir. I could feel the iodine entering my blood, warming my throat, backside, arms and legs as my heart pumped it through every available blood vessel. The bed moved slowly into the machine, where a small panel reminded me to breathe. Inside the CT scanner there’s a tube on one side firing X-rays and a detector on the opposite side picking them up. These spin around your body as the bed moves you in bit by bit. The iodine absorbs more of the X-rays, allowing the doctors to see every blood vessel in the 3D image that results.

The nurse helped me up once the machine stopped and I made my way back to the waiting room where my partner welcomed me into her calm embrace.

A while later the doctor returned with some information brochures. I had what’s called a pulmonary embolism, meaning an artery in my lung was blocked by a blood clot. Blood is typically liquid but can solidify when needed, for example to stop bleeding through a cut in the skin. Somewhere in my body in that last week, most likely in a deep vein within my legs or pelvis, a clot had formed for a reason that wasn’t clear. A piece of the clot had broken off and travelled through my circulatory system before becoming stuck in a tiny vessel in my lung, preventing blood from flowing through its sub-branches and causing the pain that urged me to call 111.

I was sent home with blood thinners, painkillers and a follow-up appointment with a blood specialist to try figure out why my blood was clotting. My doctors had said that, in principle, there was nothing stopping me from walking the Camino. One week later I boarded a flight to Spain with my backpack, engagement ring and swirling feelings.

The dream of death

I know what death is. I’ve seen it take loved ones away, and the finality of their not being here still pierces my heart. I’ve looked for the reasons death found others and created instructions to avoid the same fate: don’t smoke, exercise more, drive carefully… I’ve done meditations where I am on my deathbed looking back on my life. But in all those cases, my death was never today – it was always somewhere ahead.

But today I lay in a hospital bed with a pain in my side accompanied by the concerned glance of doctors trying to understand what was happening inside of me. Can I say this body is me? What was mine to do as the blood in my veins slowed to a halt? I was so afraid, afraid of a painful unravelling of this strange, wondrous life experience. Afraid that I might never step foot outside again. Afraid that my most recent conversations with loved ones would be my last. Afraid that the world would awake tomorrow and continue in my absence.

What remained undone? I’ve been so thirsty for so long – my need for meaning unquenched by the shapes I’ve contorted into for work. It’s like there’s some purpose I’m here to fulfil… some small offering to the world… some fruition of my own nature. And today it dawned on me that I might slip away through death’s curtain without fully realising who I am, without discovering what it feels like to become that person: there just beyond the fears that keep me here.

This path doesn’t go on, summer 2024

By that point in the conversation, I was lying flat on my back upon the black and white wooden beam. The monument supporting me had six such beams, arranged like spokes on a wheel around a circular brick centre. A plaque in the middle commemorated two hundred years of the Oxford Canal. It was built at the modern terminus of the canal: the very end of the manmade waterway originally dug to carry coal to the city1. As I lay there, speaking on the phone with a dear friend named Jo, I realised I had reached a dead-end too.

Jo had experienced clinical burnout herself. She made a point to refer to its medical term “clinical” – not to be confused with the colloquial use of the term referring to the kind of tired that a vacation can heal. As she described what it felt like, I recognised every stage: a never-ending intensity at work, built on a passionate commitment to serve the world; the sudden brain fog, loss of energy and inability to focus; not being able to get up or make concrete commitments; a retreat from social engagement; growing darkness, negativity and fear… Each symptom felt painfully familiar – it was as though she were describing my life.

She reminded me of things I had almost normalised. For three years in a row, I’d spent every Christmas holiday sick – using the break to recover enough to go back to work. I’d returned from the Camino de Santiago ablaze with life and vision, only to find myself back in a pit of despair within two months. We’d recently visited my fiancé’s father and stepmother, and halfway through our visit I was so overcome with emotional exhaustion I withdrew completely. I’d spent a week of leave aimlessly watching series hidden away from the world and hiking a rocky causeway wondering whether continuing to exist was worthwhile.

Jo told me that once she realised she had burnout, she reframed everything. Recovery took more than a year, followed by transformation. She promised herself that she would focus as much as possible on only doing things that were fully a “yes”. She would let go of the word “should” in her vocabulary. Those words really struck me because my whole life was built on “shoulds”: the standards I should meet, the responsibility I should carry, the way I should show up, the version of myself I should continue to be.

If this path was ending, where did it start? My mind raced. I thought this job would be different, I thought I was finally in impactful work. Five years previous I walked out of my MBA programme ready to change the world. I was hot off the topic of climate change and incensed that we had the technology available to transition away from fossil fuels but weren’t doing so because humans disagreed how much the world was burning. I was going to find a way to make meaningful maps of reality so that leaders could come together around our shared interest in a liveable planet. One mentor, after listening patiently to my plan all those years ago, had cautioned me clearly. “Be careful about wanting to be the protagonist in that story. It becomes about you, not the world you think is worth saving.” That caution found me again as I lay on that monument in the afternoon sun talking on the phone.

I was so grateful and crushed by the conversation with Jo. A tear rolled down my cheek as I shifted position on the hard beam; a willow tree hushed nearby in the wind. I lay a stone’s throw away from Hythe Bridge Street – hythe meaning “landing place”. Thanks to this call I had landed somewhere, though it felt like rock bottom. The monument at the end of the canal also sits alongside Castle Mill Stream, which goes on to meet the River Thames and eventually reaches the sea. My journey to recovery also meant learning to flow with life again.

The dream of humility

How will I ever find my way out of this place? It’s been so dark for so long, I don’t remember what inspires me, I can’t recall the things I do for fun. Perhaps I’m too intense or think too much? Or need to meditate more or exercise more or journal more? I’m so tired of the endless self-improvement to-do list. I’m so tired of trying to be someone else. I just want to feel comfortable in my own skin, I just want to be seen and loved. Maybe I’m looking in the wrong places.

My intentions seem pure, are they misguided? I want to contribute, I want to help, I want to make something of my life. Did I approach making an impact wrong? Was it still about me?

I’m not sure the world needs saving. How special do I think I am that I might rescue the planet? How foolish… working myself to death in the hopes that someone else will fill this dearth of self-worth in me. This isn’t working, this path doesn’t go on. There must be another way.

Twisted in knots, spring 2025

I knew I wanted to write; I knew I wanted to help shift human consciousness; I knew it was about our relationship with the Earth. There was a lot I didn’t know. How would I earn income? Why the US and why now? Could we save ourselves in time? It had been almost a year since I learnt that I was burnt out, and I was explaining my next steps to my spouse, her dad and stepmom over lunch. They were my family here in the UK, my home away from home. I hoped I seemed more confident than I was… I wanted their support. I needed some support in this career change: it felt both hopeful and hopelessly naïve.

“And what about your current place of work? Do they know you’ve decided to move abroad?”, my father-in-law asked.

I said I planned to tell the company soon, giving them more than my legal notice to organise a replacement before I left. I was involved in so many aspects of the work, and recruitment was a long process. It only seemed fair and kind to give my colleagues time.

“But what if they don’t take it well and these next three months become really unpleasant?”, my stepmom-in-law asked.

I hadn’t considered that possibility.

“You’ll want to think about it carefully before rushing into a decision. You really don’t need to act from a place of guilt here; these things are contractual, it’s as simple as that.”

I left our lunch with many thoughts. I wasn’t sure if I was acting from a place of guilt and trying to assuage my own feelings. I wasn’t sure how my boss or colleagues would react. I wasn’t sure what would come next in my career. I’d been walking through the desert of my burnout for so long, I just knew I needed to reach water soon. It made sense to move to the US: that’s where my spouse’s job was leading her. And it made sense to try to find the thing I was thirsting for in my work.

One week later I found myself wincing in my chiropractor’s office south of Oxford as I tried to touch my toes. He asked me to perform a couple more movements and report where I felt the pain. “Ok, so what’s going on, JJ?” he asked, anticipating a story was afoot.

I told him I had gone for a run after my family lunch and that my hip had suddenly flared with pain. I added that I had made the decision to quit my job but wasn’t sure when to tell my employer – I felt dishonest that I was now certain about something and wasn’t disclosing it to others.

“The way you’re contorting your spine because of your hip pain definitely makes it look like you’re twisted in knots,” he said wistfully. “As you know, I can help you on the structural musculoskeletal side, but you’ll need to have to look at the emotional side. It sounds like you’ve got a lot going on.”

I drove home somewhat disappointed that this wasn’t just a physical thing we could diagnose and fix. The impossible task of telling my boss still lay before me. The need to act in this uncertainty had not gone away. Perhaps most of all, the prospect of leaving a place where I felt needed – despite the toll – was fast approaching.

I scheduled a video meeting with my boss for Friday afternoon. Friday afternoon arrived; the call started. I told him the truth: I was burnt out and I was moving to be with to my loved one. It meant my work with them would end. He listened, he understood, he supported the reasons for my decision. We ended the meeting. I walked and wept.

The dream of courage

I’ve spent so much of my life listening to other people, valuing their assessments above my own. I know what I must do, but I am afraid. I am afraid that what I want won’t be ok for others. I am afraid of judgement for abandoning the script to pursue the unknown. I am afraid of failing. So, when caring family members ask about my plans, a world of fear and doubt comes out. I abandon my instincts, I tie my thinking mind in knots and my body follows. I invent monsters only to discover they were shadows I projected on a wall.

The closer I get to taking this leap the more my fears rise up. My thinking mind finds reasons to turn back, reinforcing that I am still not worthy. Maybe these fears kept me safe before, maybe this way of being served a purpose when I was small. But something deeper is rising. Some calling that speaks with the wind and the seasons and the tides, with the sun and the moon and the Earth.

I can’t see what lies ahead, only the next step. I have to believe there’ll be another step after I make this one.

The ground speaks, summer 2025

Ironically, it was on a fuel-guzzling flight that I first learnt about the Knepp rewilding project2. I love switching off and digesting a few films when I am unreachable between take-off and landing. The Knepp story begins when Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree, farmers in southeast England, contact a tree expert to understand why an oak tree on their property seems to be losing stability. The remarkable tree man quickly diagnoses the issue and suggests a way forward but is drawn to other oak trees on their 3,500-acre estate that he’s much more worried about. The farmland has been ploughed ever since the ‘Dig for Victory’ agricultural drive during the Second World War, when the German bombing of supply lines threatened England’s food supply. That ploughing, particularly around the oak trees, repeatedly tears up the mycelium connecting the trees’ roots to the nutrients in the soil. It was the first time that Charlie and Isabella’s eyes were opened to the invisible connections in the natural world, and would form the seed of their rewilding project. It also touched on the deep patriotic associations that British farmers have with land use, which would lead others to question and criticise the project.

The couple’s call to nature reminded me of a vision I had before leaving South Africa to study and work in England. In that vision the fields abroad were made of astroturf, a veneer of lusciousness suppressing the ground beneath. Every hedge had been trimmed, the trees coppiced, the waters channelled and the fields shaped to please the eye. A land without predators, without danger, without disturbance. Everything perfectly predictable, controlled and safe. It might be a comfortable life, but not a wild one. And what was I leaving behind? I saw that the red soils of home were drenched in the tears that Mama Afrika sheds for her children and their untold suffering. And yet in that soil much can grow.

When I first arrived in Oxford in 2018, Africa pounding through my veins, I would go for walks through Christchurch Meadow barefoot. I have never been so conscious of my “uncivilised” bare feet, communing with the ground amidst a crowd of rubber soles. It wasn’t long before winter came and my feet were covered too. The next spring, the shoes stayed. It’s funny how quickly we conform to the behaviour of those around us.

I finished the movie “Wilding” on the plane and later picked up the book by the same name. Isabella Tree takes you on their journey, from deciding in 2000 that they would dismantle their farming operation and allow nature to be the driving force in shaping the land. Reading what unfolded opened my eyes to the invisible connections in the natural world too. I was stunned by the role that large mammals, many long absent from England, served in shaping a landscape, and that introducing trundling pigs and grazing deer could create diverse habitats that supported the recovery of endangered species. I was enchanted that the restoration of the shape of a river, as opposed to the drain-pipe architecture of canals, would allow the land to act like a sponge, reducing flood damage down-stream. I was shocked to learn that, at the time of writing her book, releasing wild animals like wild boar and beavers back into the wild without a licence was illegal because of the disruption that these animals might bring upon human entitlements. I was intrigued to discover that, after years of grants to rewild their property, Charlie and Isabella were generating income from eco-tourism and their organic produce, including pork from the organic pig population that had to be managed in the absence of predators. I found hope that their soil was showing considerable recovery in just two short decades of rewilding, holding promise for the diminishing soils and nutrient-poor food grown through modern agriculture’s use of artificial fertilisers.

I went to visit Knepp in May 2025, setting up my tent in the campsite before heading for a long walk around the estate to see what 25 years of rewilding had done. I walked through those fields and forested areas, with wild thickets and overgrown hedges, listening to the sound of birds and looking out for wildlife. I hoped to catch a nightingale or turtle dove, two species that are part of the cultural imagination of the UK but whose habitat has become perilously scarce. They are bouncing back in Knepp. I saw a group of pigs rootling the soil, and deer that peered back before disappearing into the overgrowth. I stood with my spine against the most incredible oak tree and rested in its ancient presence as the sun pierced the afternoon clouds.

I don’t know how else to explain it, but that land felt healthy. It felt alive, vibrant, wild, dare I say happy. The ground spoke, and I listened. My body recognised something in that wilderness that it has not forgotten in recent lifetimes of civilised constraint. It reminded me of wild spaces in South Africa, conserved with the foresight that one day these refuges – sacred arks containing nature’s intelligence – might become scarce as humans cut and hunted and consumed insatiably.

Here was a blueprint for a future in which nature and humans could thrive together. Isabella Tree called it “wilding” and not “rewilding” because it wasn’t about going back to some former way of being, it was about creating a new way forward with nature.

Near the end of their first decade of letting nature drive, Charlie and Isabella faced a conundrum. An outbreak of creeping thistle, a particularly nasty weed, threatened their funding and their neighbours’ farms. Before their wilding journey began, they would have been out spraying weedkiller and chopping it all down. Now, they watched anxiously as it proliferated across their property over three years, threatening all they had co-created. Should they break their rule and interfere to save the project? And then, in May 2009, butterflies started to stream past their windows. Thousands of painted lady butterflies were descending across the property, part of an estimated 11 million butterflies who were making a 15,000-kilometre migration that took up to six generations to complete. Over the summer, countless black caterpillars ate their way through the leaves, spun cocoons, became butterflies and took flight, leaving the creeping thistle decimated. By the next year, the creeping thistle and its threat to Knepp’s future were completely gone.

The dream of wilding

This wild Earth is a miraculous gift. Here we are in our arrogance, trying to solve technologically for food production and water purification and flooding on a planet that has long perfected techniques for sustaining life. It is so exciting to see and feel what is possible when we work with nature, bringing our intelligence in service of her own. There is hope! There is hope to meet people’s needs through nature’s flourishing. There is hope to slow the mass extinction of our fellow earthlings. There is hope for people who yearn to practically create a way forward in these dark times.

If it was possible for biodiversity to recover here, the birthplace of the industrial revolution where wild animals have all but vanished, it is possible anywhere. This incredible task has only just begun, but it’s a start.

We just need to keep our resolve until the butterflies come.

Finding my way, spring 2026

I landed in Washington DC on a Saturday evening in the winter, just after all our boxes from Oxford were delivered. This was it, my new beginning. I had finished the old chapter as best I could: my job ended after I completed my handovers and I left with my head held high; my course was complete and I’d qualified as a systems thinking practitioner; and I became eligible for UK citizenship after years of working in the country, meaning I could return again in the future. With some savings and few commitments, I could create the life I wanted.

By Wednesday, just four days in, I was flat on my back in bed. I had locked myself in an office both Monday and Tuesday and worked all day under the dulling indoor fluorescent light. My strategy was to write an article a week for the next eight weeks – it felt like there was no time to waste in laying the foundations for the new me. And now I was sick, stay-in-bed sick. I was so upset that my plans were already being foiled by my unreliable body.

It took me a few days and conversations to realise the irony of my approach. Free to do whatever I pleased, I ran straight back to what I knew – laptop, indoors, nonstop – and my body drew a line. It hadn’t occurred to me to unpack my bag and boxes and make a home for myself in the new country I’d just moved to. Or to connect properly with the life partner I’d been living away from for months. I just raced back to producing as much output as possible. My body, my inhabited nature, would be silenced no more.

It was a pattern that would repeat several times over the next few months: life upending my plans of how things should be. And each time I got upset for being distracted from my writing by travels or house admin or special occasions or injuries. So angry that I often struggled to be present with the sacred occasions on my doorstep. So exhausted that I became sick and needed bedrest. I couldn’t believe how much I itched to be productive, to have the rush and momentum of working hard and late and churning out lots of stuff. I didn’t feel like I had value unless I was productive, and to maximise productivity there wasn’t time to tend to my needs.

Six months into my new life and I was in the thick of deadlines to deliver things for other people. I was still sorting out my US work authorisation, so all these deliverables were voluntary collaborations. I was working late night after night while my writing lay untouched and I could feel burnout rear its depleted head for the first time since I left the workplace. How is this possible? I’m not in a job anymore, why can’t I get to the things that matter? What’s my excuse for not writing now?

Louise, a mentor and guide I was working with, had to break the news to me. Over several sessions she explained the pattern she saw at play. For years I had operated under the belief that I had to struggle in my work, that money couldn’t come naturally to me. Writing stories, creating a business, putting myself out there – these things were terrifying. They touched on all the pain across my life where it felt like what I wanted to contribute wasn’t wanted. Working late, feeling under-resourced, prioritising other people’s needs – these were all well within my comfort zone. I thought I’d left the system of oppression when I walked out of a paying job, only to discover that the system of oppression was in me.

Louise warned that my own voices of doubt would become loudest as I neared my dreams, finding all sorts of ways to talk me out of making each next step. She foreshadowed that I might look for solace in a new space or a new job, but that it was the work of shifting my identity and aligning with my purpose that held the keys to my long-term sustenance. She taught me to become vigilant of the place I was acting from: that fear would lead back to my comfortable place of smallness, but that on the other side of my fears lay the hopes that I had moved across the world to pursue. Finally, she encouraged that only love, a deep love for the boy who slowly gave up on being himself and looking after himself to stay safe, could invite the lost parts of me back into wholeness of being.

Her words were like spring rain on the dry bushveld.

The dream of care

Ok, it makes sense that I can’t contribute to regeneration and wholeness in the world from a place of inner depletion and fragmentation. It’s just wild to me how normalised this self-neglect, dressed up as productivity, is. From the food that becomes me to the sleep that restores me to the relationships that ground me – why are they the last things I attend to? What would happen if the love started here?

I see now that caring for my own embodied being is caring for the Earth’s body. The same things that make me sick make her sick. But shifting my habits is so, so hard. Most difficult of all is my harsh inner voice criticising me. When I can really share with others on this journey, it is easier to find compassion for all the ways I hurt myself and those around me.

I ask what I can do for my body, and the cells animating me answer, “Attend to us”. I ask what the humans can do for the planet, and the plants and creatures of the wild world answer, “Attend to us”.

I don’t know what’s going to happen. Maybe caring is all it takes.

Is the Earth waking us up?

I’m sitting in the writing salon down the road from our home in Washington DC. Eight months ago I embarked on this essay series and today I’m penning the final words of the final piece. “What does it mean to form part of a greater whole?” This question keeps knocking on the door of my consciousness. What stories in me must give way so I can find vulnerability in my partnership, bring value to the groups I work in, connect with the people around me, tread gently among the life of this planet?

Is this what has been awoken in me?

I lay upon a plastic bed as a great machine scanned my body for blood clots… and dreamt that I, too, will die and it spurred me to action. I hit burnout and could not keep working in search of validation… and dreamt of the humility that might lead me to be of service. My fears screamed and shook me as I stumbled to find my own path… and the dream of courage gave me the strength to continue. I walked upon land returned to nature’s hands and it sung of its own accord… a great oak tree invited me to the dream of wilding. I set out towards new horizons… and discovered that the dream of care begins with my own body and the beings before me, and then ripples out into the world.

I see so much suffering, suffering like mine. In humans, in how we relate to one another, in how we treat other life forms, in what we’re doing to our Earth. It all seems connected: our story of being separate selves, our fears, our loneliness, our cycles of violence, our dehumanising workplaces, our cruelty to animals, our plundered planet… So much hurt for creatures that yearn to be fully seen and fully loved.

And I have so much hope for what could be. I choose to believe that our pain is an invitation to become more than what we’ve been. That it invites us back into connection, back into relationship, away from our self-enforced isolation where we feel in control but nothing grows.

What does it mean to form part of a greater whole?

Earth, if you’re there… Can you wake us from our nightmare of separation and bring us into your dream? Can you save us from ourselves by reminding us that we’re part of you? Reach into each of our hearts and unleash a burning yearning to relate anew? Please… we’ve lost our way in our stories – the thinking mind can be so powerful and so arrogant. Please… there is so much good in us yet to come.

Afterword

Thank you for walking through the wilderness with me. We have explored much together, and the journey is just beginning.

If this work resonated with you, subscribe and share it with others. Help this love to reach the eyes and ears who need it.

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to:

• Jo for your feedback on an early draft of this piece

• Louise for your feedback and creative guidance

• Leigh and Lesanne for encouraging, shaping and holding space for this series

• Phillip-Jan van Zyl for his beautiful piano collection “Spiral” (in the audio version)

• My partner Ash for your love and support as these pieces came to life

• The wild spaces, the butterflies and the whispering Earth

• The many wonderful humans who inspired these words through our conversations.

Further attribution:

• Orihuela, F. (2021) High wind wave in the sea. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/high-wind-wave-in-the-sea-7818611/ (Accessed 30 September 2026).

• NASA (2026) Earthset [Digital image]. Artemis II, 6 April 2026. Public domain; reuse governed by NASA’s image use policy. Available at The Planetary Society, Bruce Murray Space Image Library: https://www.planetary.org/space-images/earthset (Accessed: 13 July 2026).

• Björn Austmar Þórsson (2022) Aerial View of a Landscape [Photograph]. Pexels. Pexels License. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/aerial-view-of-a-landscape-12756665/ (Accessed: 13 July 2026).

• Bars, F. (2024) Picturesque Canal Scene in Oxford, England [Photograph]. Pexels. Pexels License. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/picturesque-canal-scene-in-oxford-england-29678084/ (Accessed: 13 July 2026).

• Chế, V. (2024) Floting [Photograph]. Pexels. Pexels License. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/floting-27582253/ (Accessed: 13 July 2026).

• Van Brandwijk, B. (2018) Green Leaf Tree Near Rocks [Photograph]. Pexels. Pexels License. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/green-leaf-tree-near-rocks-885013/ (Accessed: 13 July 2026).

• Ткаченко, Ю. [Tkachenko, Y.] (2023) Tree Roots on the Ground [Photograph]. Pexels. Pexels License. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/tree-roots-on-the-ground-18238848/ (Accessed: 13 July 2026).

• Music by Marshall Usinger, Moment of Now, Nitzan Rom, DaniHaDani, Mattia Vlad Morleo, Sid Acharya, Kyle Preston as well as sound effects under licence from Artlist (in the audio version)

Wild Ideas is produced by JJ van de Vyver. Views expressed are mine alone and don’t represent my clients or any organisations I’m affiliated with. Nothing here is professional advice of any kind.

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Can magic mushrooms evolve human consciousness?

Welcome to the wilderness. My name is JJ van de Vyver and I’ll be your guide on the series where we explore ideas so wild they might just work.

I’ve walked away from everything I was taught measured success – impressive qualifications, high-powered job and playing by the rules – called by the feeling that the way we organise society isn’t working. The stakes are high and time is short. A new future is calling – we need to question how we do things and trust nature to guide the way. Welcome to Wild Ideas.

Today I’d like to share a personal essay with you about personal development and my tumble down the rabbit hole of psychedelic ceremony. This is the fourth of five essays of this introductory series, where I’m leading you through my inner world so that we understand one another before setting off into the wilderness together. If you missed any of the previous instalments, have a read below:

1. What if I can’t find meaning in corporate?

2. What if I was meant to be there when Daddy died?

3. What if Mommy healed her past?

Today’s wild idea: can magic mushrooms evolve human consciousness?

The night I lost my mind

It was mid-May 2017 and I was halfway through a plant medicine course in the Peruvian jungle. A fellow participant and I were holding ayahuasca ceremony for the first time: serving the brew to the other participants and course instructors from the middle of a round thatched maloca and singing the healing songs we had studied over the past three weeks. It was late at night in the remote Amazonian darkness, and something was wrong.

Other participants were now singing in turn, and a darkness was spreading from person to person. First Enrique, the curandero we’d all come to learn from, went down. Mark, a male instructor who came to his support, collapsed to the floor and called for help. My co-facilitator for the evening attended to Mark and was soon in a bad place himself. I went to help, using mapacho smoke and my breath to assist my peer. He seemed to regain his sense of self, and I returned to my mattress. The curandero, sitting upright again, began to sing.

A thought arose in my mind: Here I am, across the globe from my home in South Africa, isolated in the Amazon jungle 80 kilometres from the nearest town, with a traditional healer I hardly know. What if I’ve been lured here? I don’t know the spiritual domains we’re exploring the way he does. What if he’s taking our souls? If my bead of conscious awareness is taken away from my body, I’ll never wake up again. If I get lost in purgatory, I’ll never see my brother, my dad, my friends… I reached out with my mind for any loved one who might still be awake at this hour. Please, anyone, I need help. This was a nightmare beyond any I’d imagined. What is he singing? Make him stop singing!

Sophia, a female instructor, saw my distress and came to sit with me. “JJ, you’re in the jungle and you’ve drunk a cup of ayahuasca. You’re safe. Breathe. Breathe deep into your body. Can you feel your chest rising and falling? You’re here, with me. Can you feel the ground beneath you? You’re going to be ok. You’re going to understand. Breathe with me.”

I woke up the next morning and burst into tears. I’d made it to the end of the ceremony – just – and retreated to my bed rattled with fright. There was no way this experience could be good for me. How would I ever step into ceremony again with this much fear and mistrust coursing through my veins? We had another ten ceremonies to go! I wanted to go home. I walked from my room across the warm sand towards the raised eating hall, the tremendous sounds of the jungle rising from the green backdrop beyond. I found Mark eating breakfast, sat down next to him and asked what had happened and how I could possibly go on.

This ceremony would turn out to be a pivotal moment in my personal growth. It was also one of the most difficult evenings of my life. To understand its significance, we need to go back in time to contextualise why I was in Peru exploring psychedelics in the first place and then move closer to the present to see how something so frightening could be so fruitful.

A seed is planted

I experienced my first depression during my undergraduate studies, seven years before that night in the jungle, although I wouldn’t have called it “depression” at the time. I knew I was in a dark place halfway through my second year when, despite a visit to my favourite seaside town, the sadness wasn’t going away. I resolved to get myself out of that emotional space, although I wasn’t exactly sure how. As it so happened, I was elected to a student committee a few months later and given some responsibility. The sense of purpose in my position of service carried me all the way through to my final year. Once I stepped down from my role amid long exams and the incredible stress of my accounting studies, the darkness returned.

I finished my accounting degree at the end of 2012. Instead of diving straight into a training contract to qualify as a chartered accountant, I deferred the start date for a year so that I could travel. India called to me for a few reasons, but primarily it was as far away from what I knew as possible. At the age of 22, it would be my first trip abroad. In March 2013, four years before Peru, my dad dropped me off at the airport with my big backpack and Indiana Jones hat, and I boarded a plane.

I spent a month in Rishikesh and four months living with a Tibetan in McLeod Ganj, a hill station in Northern India that is home to the Dalai Lama’s residence and the Tibetan government-in-exile. Everything in India was different: the languages I couldn’t speak or read, the chaotic flow of the traffic, the dilapidated buildings, the belief in reincarnation, the indifference to my accounting qualification. I could be a completely new person unconstrained by the assumptions of my home culture.

In all this novelty, India planted the seed that it might be possible to change the nature of my experience but that I’d been looking in the wrong place. Three moments made this clear.

The first moment was the night an Indian scholar shared a quote with me over late-night tea in Rishikesh. With a sparkle in my eye, I told him I wanted to make the world a better place. In response, Kaustubh shared the words of Rumi, the 13^th century Persian poet and Sufi mystic. “Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” After briefly absorbing the message, I soon went back to thinking about how to change the world. But the quote persisted, following me for a long time.

The second moment came one month into my time in McLeod Ganj when the darkness I’d experienced at university crept back into my emotions. One quiet evening I found myself on a bench looking up at the stars, a sight that had once filled me with an expansive sense of wonder. I lay there feeling an all-encompassing meaninglessness and declared, “What’s the point?”. Here I was in northern India, having changed everything about my life: where I was, who I was with, what I was doing… and I was back in the same emotional experience. The only common ingredient was me.

The third moment arrived during my introduction to Tibetan Buddhism. I attended a week-long course and read as many books as I could about freeing ourselves from suffering. These teachings challenged so many of my assumptions: the assumption that I end at my skin; the assumption that I’m one of billions of separate individuals; the assumption that to change my internal state I need to control the world around me. One idea came up again and again: pain was unavoidable in life, but suffering could be alleviated… and I suffered because I misunderstood how I existed. So then, how did I exist? I got the sense that until I’d dug a bit deeper, I hadn’t earned the right to ask the stars, “What’s the point?” There was more to read and learn.

I arrived back in South Africa after my time abroad with a head full of philosophy and a heart full of hope. Without a better sense of what I should do for my career, I took up my three-year training contract at a major audit firm. It wasn’t very long before the dark feelings found me again.

Drugs are bad

I was well-acquainted with the Afrikaans community’s conservative backbone because I grew up in it. When I returned from India, open and excited about what I’d found overseas, I could sense some people’s suspicion around practices from “the East” like yoga and meditation. One of the books I’d read in Macleod Ganj was The Doors to Perception by Aldous Huxley, where he recounts his experience of a dose of mescaline as part of a scientific experiment in the 1950s. Mescaline is a psychedelic compound found in certain cacti from the Americas and Huxley believed it “gave him unmediated access to realms of existence known only to mystics”1. I didn’t dare raise a conversation around mind-altering plants in South Africa, not with anyone. I knew it was taboo for most others, and at that point it was still taboo for me. This outright condemnation is an acute form of a wider moral judgement that cuts across almost every culture without a living indigenous tradition of psychedelic use.

We can trace the current global legal suppression of these “drugs” specifically back to the United States of America.

In 1955 the Mazatec curandera María Sabina introduced Gordon and Valentina Wasson to mushroom healing ceremony in Mexico2. Two years later the couple published accounts of their experience, most famously Gordon’s article in Life magazine entitled “Seeking the magic mushroom”3. They were both fascinated by the historical relationship different cultures had with fungi and were blown away by their experiences in ceremony with psilocybin mushrooms. Valentina speculated about their benefits for medicine, especially for supporting the terminally ill and alleviating addiction4. Their writing sparked widespread interest in consciousness alteration at a time when researchers and mental health professionals were pushing the frontiers of brain science through experimentation with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD)5.

The counterculture revolution grew in the United States during the 1960s against the backdrop of an increasingly unpopular Vietnam War. Timothy Leary, a clinical psychologist at Harvard University interested in human behavioural change, heard about these curious mushrooms from a friend and made his way to Mexico to experiment for himself6. He later wrote, “In four hours… I learned more about the mind, the brain, and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen [years] as a diligent psychologist”7. In 1967 he encouraged young people to “turn on, tune in, drop out”, warning the country’s leadership that the youth who engaged in psychedelics “aren’t going to fight your wars” or “join your corporations”8. A moral panic ensued and President Nixon declared an all-out war on drugs9. The Controlled Substances Act was introduced in 1970, outlawing psilocybin, LSD, mescaline and dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in the United States10. The UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances in 1971 extended this classification internationally11, forcing the recreational and scientific exploration of these substances into hibernation for several decades.

The legal and moral crackdown on these substances placed a taboo on their use that continues today across most of the world. And it was no different in South Africa, where I put Huxley’s book out of my mind. For all I knew, these wild substances were drugs, and drugs are bad.

An Easter Journey

In early 2015, two years before that fateful night in the jungle, the mushrooms found me. It was halfway through my audit training contract in South Africa, and I was not in a good place. My days were spent working one audit client during normal business hours, returning to the office in the evenings to wrap up another one. My mom was going through chemotherapy to try and shrink a cancerous tumour so that they could safely remove it. My relationship with who I thought would be the love of my life was slowly breaking down, phone call by phone call, over long-distance. Nothing made sense to me.

I had a minor operation and spent a week recovering at a friend’s home, reading The Shack by William P. Young. Drawing on insights from the book, I reached the limits of my reasoning mind. I understood that I was constantly trying to plan for the future because I didn’t trust that things would work out ok if I didn’t control them. And the book helped me see that trust arises out of a relationship of love. So, if I was trying to control everything because I did not trust, and if trust arises out of love, how could I feel more loved by life?

A friend of mine trained as a sangoma, or traditional healer, after high school. He worked in a crystal shop and reached out to invite me to a weekend retreat involving psilocybin mushroom ceremony. It caught my interest, but I had reservations about drugs in general and my state of mind in particular. I was planning to stay in Johannesburg over the Easter weekend initially because a quiet weekend ahead of an impending work deadline seemed like it could do me good. I didn’t accept or decline, and so his invitation remained open and my weekend remained open.

A particularly rough week at work culminated in a conversation where a colleague and I concluded that the human condition might just be one of suffering. As I drove home, I became defiant as thoughts raced through my head. There is no way that we’re alive, as unlikely as that is, to be miserable for 80 years and then die. I couldn’t accept it. And yet here was all this overwhelming sadness around and within me. I drove to see my sangoma friend and the moment I stepped into his shop a calm clarity washed over me. I couldn’t explain it in words, but I knew there was a golden thread tugging me towards the weekend retreat. I told him I would come.

I compiled an email entitled “An Easter Journey” where I detailed the series of events that led me to decide to attend a magic mushroom retreat. I wanted my close friends and family to understand why I was taking this wild leap into the unknown, in case I came back a different person.

I do not know what tonight, tomorrow or Sunday will hold. I do not know what the implications are, what the repercussions will be, what anyone will think, what I will think. And it feels exhilaratingly like life. I am nervous. I am curious. And I am naked… This journey feels like a vulnerable plunging into who I am, what I am and where I am, and therewith the nature of life itself and all the questions around it - love, God and the universe. And despite there being so little certainty around any part of it, it feels like the most resonant step I have taken towards growth in a while.

That weekend, in a field of gold alongside a great firepit underneath the Easter full moon, I participated in two high-dose facilitated mushroom journeys. My facilitating friend abstained from eating any mushrooms so that he could tend soberly to the group. He encouraged us to set clear intentions. We ate Golden Teachers, a cultivar of Psilocybe cubensis, which is a species of psilocybin-containing mushroom. What unfolded those two nights would change the course of my life. Standing underneath the full moon with tears streaming down my face, I experienced being part of infinite love and infinite understanding. At the same time, I knew what it was like to be JJ in everyday life and feel so disconnected from those things.

It is interesting that psychedelics are often referred to as “teachers”. A good teacher perturbates your worldview: exposing you to something that breaks how you understood things and leaving you with just enough to piece your frame of reference together again, different from before. They give you new data that requires a new model. My embodied experience of feeling connected to all of being was so much more powerful than any philosophical idea my mind had ever entertained. I arrived at the conviction that the spiritual domain of our human lives was real and that I wanted to explore it. I needed to find people who had maps of this fundamental, invisible territory.

On Tuesday the 7^th of April 2015, two days after my first psilocybin ceremonies, I wrote the following in my journal:

The mind is silenced by an awe for everything that is fundamentally you and how it fits seamlessly together. When you know you are the sun and moon and stars… as much as you are yourself… you cannot help but marvel and live in endless wonder at what will happen next. You start to live in alignment with the… magic of everything that is unfolding in front of new eyes; eyes that for the first time begin to see.

The aftermath of my attendance was mixed. My parents were just glad I was ok. My long-distance partner was so upset; we didn’t connect for three days. When we eventually spoke, she wondered aloud how my circumstances had become so bad that I decided to turn to drugs… It was a valid way to interpret the events of that weekend.

A friend saw it differently. “JJ, society tells you to sit in a metal can in traffic each morning and drive to the office so you can work all day under fluorescent lights staring at a small screen. You’re encouraged to consume ultra processed food and sugary water, to drink alcohol for loneliness and smoke cigarettes for stress and pop tablets for pain. But… don’t you dare touch those mushrooms that grow naturally in the ground, those are bad for you!”

A whole new world

My friend wasn’t wrong, public perception is distorted. Professor David Nutt, former Chief Drug Advisor to the UK Government, released a research paper in 2010 that found alcohol and tobacco were more dangerous (in terms of harms to users and others) than illegal substances such as LSD, mushrooms, ecstasy and cannabis12. He was later fired for arguing that government drug policy was out of line with scientific evidence13. Psilocybin mushrooms are consistently ranked as the drug least likely to lead to seeking emergency medical treatment, less than both alcohol and cannabis1415. They are also not considered to be addictive, due to the intensity of the mushroom experience and the body’s quick build-up of tolerance after several days of repeated use16.

A current “renaissance” in psychedelic research is producing evidence for a range of potential benefits from using psilocybin mushrooms, including:

• Use in lifting depression for both the terminally ill17 and individuals suffering from treatment-resistant depression18,

• Potential use in breaking addictions, including smoking19, alcohol20 and cocaine21,

• The ability to induce spiritually significant events under supportive conditions, comparable “to the birth of a first child or death of a parent”22.

So, what are these little brown mushrooms actually doing inside the body?

When psilocybin mushrooms are ingested, they catalyse a number of changes in how we attend to the world. The mushroom tissues are broken down by the stomach and intestines, releasing the psilocybin. As the psilocybin is absorbed through the intestinal wall and passes through the liver, it is metabolised into psilocin23, which then circulates through the bloodstream. The chemical structure of psilocin is very similar to serotonin24, a neurotransmitter impacting almost all human behavioural processes including mood, memory, perception and attention25. The psilocin binds with serotonin receptors in the brain, gut and elsewhere, producing a unique set of downstream effects26.

Distinct networks of neurons in the brain become “desynchronised”27, meaning that habitual patterns of firing neurons are disrupted, giving way to new patterns of connection. The default mode network, a part of the brain associated with “our sense of space, time and self”28, is particularly affected by this disruption to habitual patterns29. Other brain regions show increased activity, including limbic functions such as memory and emotion30. The altered state of information processing likely explains a person’s renewed sense of wonder at sensory experiences that are normally taken for granted. The sense of transcendence, sacredness and bliss can be understood as the dissolution of a person’s sense of individuality, as “the boundaries between self and world that the ego patrols suddenly fall away”31. Some of these changes in connectivity last for weeks32 and correlate with the increased neuroplasticity that may contribute to forming new habits.

After the Easter mushroom retreat I started regularly going to Chakradance moving meditation classes. I had been to two classes before, but I had a miserable experience during the second one and stopped going. After my psilocybin experience it was clear that the class did not cause my misery but provided a space for me to encounter the misery I was carrying. I had not appreciated the embodied practice of being with what was inside of me: the difficult feelings around my mother’s illness, the unmet needs in relationships, the unexpressed desire for meaningful work. I had learned to meditate to still the mind, and to talk through ideas about my feelings, but now a whole new world was revealing itself. I was learning to dance with my emotions instead of suppressing or being overcome by them. I was discovering what parts of me I had suppressed to navigate my childhood. I realised it was possible to strive towards wholeness of personality. My inner work had begun.

Ayahuasca Curandero Initiation Course

I was devastated when my mom passed away from her cancer in 2016 and I buried myself in my work. In the process of her dying, I became aware that the doctors could support her physical health through chemotherapy, surgery and eventually pain management, but that our medical system at the time was woefully inadequate at emotionally and spiritually supporting her. My mom came to see her cancer as a kind of teacher: it shifted her orientation to her inner world and opened her up. She found guides and healers who supported her emotional and spiritual journey towards finding peace in herself. Our family watched this miracle of personal transformation unfold. I wanted to know more about the relationship between mind and body, which had for so long been treated as separate in allopathic medicine. I was drawn to systems of medicine that braided our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual dimensions together.

I was introduced to Skye Cielita Flor, a South African woman who had spent four years working at an ayahuasca retreat, training and research organisation in Peru. We discussed her experiences, reputable centres to visit and how to approach doing a course. Soon enough I was applying to be part of the April 2017 cohort at a reputable centre33. I hesitated: diving straight into a six-week ayahuasca training with no prior experience seemed like a big leap. The course start date happened to be the same day as my mom’s birthday… it would be the first without her here. I applied and was accepted.

The ayahuasca training course felt like stepping into Hogwarts: I was suddenly transported to a place where the rules of my culture no longer constrained what was possible. It reminded me of a TED speaker’s reflections following her stays in a rural, spiritual Chinese village, “after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen.”34

The course was based in the Amazon jungle in northern Peru, about 80 kilometres from Iquitos. We were going to study with a Shipibo curandero, a traditional healer from a lineage of indigenous people predating Spanish colonisation. He was supported by two instructors who could translate from Spanish to English and support students. 11 individuals enrolled on the six-week course, mostly from Europe and the United States, while other people cycled in and out of the centre during our time there. We were both students and participants of the Shipibo plant medicine cosmology, taking part in healing practices while learning how to facilitate them ourselves.

We were schooled in three aspects of Shipibo traditional healing.

Firstly, dietas of the trees and plants in the tradition. A dieta is the process of forming a relationship with a plant spirit. For weeks at a time, healers radically restrict their diets (avoiding salt, pork, dairy, alcohol, etc.) and abstain from a range of activities (social contact, masturbation, sex, etc.) to reduce the noise of everyday life and focus their attention on a particular plant in their spiritual cosmology. They live close to the plant, drink a tincture made of the plant’s tissue, contemplate the plant’s essence and teachings, and learn healing songs called icaros from the plant. It’s as if they allow the plant to grow energetic roots into their own bodily system, ingesting healing that they can bring to others35. A Shipibo healer’s powers are believed to be directly proportional to the number and earnestness of the dietas they have undertaken over the years.

Secondly, ayahuasca ceremony. Ayahuasca is a brown, acrid-tasting psychedelic brew made by boiling ayahuasca vine and chacruna leaves together. The chacruna leaves contain N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a powerful psychedelic with a chemical structure also like serotonin that binds with serotonin receptors in the brain and elsewhere36. The ayahuasca vine contains monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) which prevent enzymes in the gut and liver from breaking the DMT down as they normally would37. Neither of these ingredients works in isolation. How the Shipibo people discovered this precise combination out of the tens of thousands of Amazonian plants baffles researchers. Of course, if you ask the Shipibo the answer is simple: the plants communicated it to them. Ayahuasca ceremony involves participants drinking the brew served by the curandero, who sings icaros to impart the medicine of the plants from his or her dietas. The ceremony is both a space of healing and a space for the curandero to connect with each participant to understand their dis-ease and diagnose them.

Thirdly, treatment. Following diagnosis, the curandero prescribes a healing regimen using the jungle as his or her medicine cabinet. This could include drinking ointments, working with particular plants, eating purgatives, fasting, taking vapour baths, making dietary changes and so on.

The course was designed so that over six weeks we would:

• undertake two plant dietas, forming a relationship with and learning from two plants of our choice,

• participate in 20 ayahuasca ceremonies by night in a round thatched building called a maloca,

• learn to facilitate ceremony ourselves by using our dietas, singing icaros and understanding how to create and hold the ceremonial space, and

• experiment with a host of jungle medicines, studiously making notes about each and observing their impact on our states of being.

Early in the experience Enrique, the curandero, diagnosed that my soul wasn’t fully in my body and that I needed “soul retrieval”. While his imagery was quite unnerving, I had come across definitions characterising trauma as a disconnection from one’s body or emotions3839. The curandero’s insight also matched several patterns in my behaviour, including becoming faint at the thought of my own blood or internal bodily processes, low body self-esteem and a recurring habit of bulimia running back years.

Lost in my mind

Halfway through the course on the night I first co-facilitated a ceremony, I experienced a living nightmare. It wasn’t beautiful, inspiring or insightful – just terrifying. How do I make sense of fearing I may never wake up in my body again? What had Sophia done to calm me enough to remain to the end of the ceremony? How would I keep going in the course?

What our instructors helped me to see in the days following that ceremony was this: it was my thought. It arose and I followed it into the maze of my mind. By falling completely into the story, I lost touch with my senses and what was actually happening in the room around me. The group discussed the power of perception, using the example of seeing a round coiled thing in a dimly lit corner. If you take it to be a snake, you respond as if your survival depends on it. But what if it turns out to be a rope? In the ayahuasca ceremony where I thought my soul was being taken away, I had come to take my story as true, overriding all other possible evidence and distorting my perception of reality. I had lost my way in my own mind. I read an anecdote that the indigenous bushmen of Southern Africa slept with an ear to the ground so that they would only react to real dangers (like the footsteps of a predator) and not imagined ones. The whole experience made me realise that my mind had told stories of fear my entire life, and that assuming them to be true could make a hell out of any circumstance.

Over the remaining three weeks I continued with the course, and I’m so grateful that I saw the process through. I learned to ground myself in ceremonies and to return through my senses when my thoughts strayed into fear. I found so much compassion for the events in my life, including losing my mom. I began to perceive the grey space between my black and white thoughts, inhabiting my body and appreciating its beauty and wisdom. I felt the larger purpose of my business qualification that had felt so soulless. Finally, I witnessed people healing their hearts and learnt how this could support the health of their bodies.

On Sunday the 4^th of June 2017, the final day of the course, I wrote the following prayer towards the back of the journal I had kept throughout the six weeks:

Allow me to integrate the totality of this experience,
to nurture my heart, spirit, body and mind…

Help me to trust,
To reside in my heart…

Jurie Jean,
This was all real.

I didn’t know what awaited me on the other side of the course in the jungle, but I knew I’d visited a different world – one I had to hold onto.

The work begins

After returning to my life in South Africa, the tide of old habits slowly came back in: struggling to relate healthily with food, avoiding vulnerability in romantic relationships, the performative song and dance of corporate work. How could I hold onto what had happened in the jungle without the experience becoming an escape from life in its full messiness?

I was guided to see my psychedelic insights as lighthouses illuminating what is possible, shining bright to help me navigate especially in times of darkness. It was possible to operate from love, to trust in that which supersedes rational understanding, to forgive without understanding why something has happened. It was possible to experience all of that in my day-to-day life. However, I’d constructed a life for myself based on a very different set of beliefs. I treated my body in ways that undermined my worthiness to feel vibrant and healthy, reinforcing my shame. I habitually chose long-distance relationships to avoid the vulnerability that comes with proximity, thereby closing the possibility of being fully seen and fully loved. I’d found my way to work environments where I had to be someone else to succeed and had become really good at it.

The real work is slow, gritty, ordinary. It is looking in the mirror that situations reveal about where I am operating from, knowing that it is possible to bask in the sun but that first I need to discover all the ways I’ve collaborated in keeping myself in the shade. It is holding the creative tension between where I am and where I desire to be, making choices from love and not fear. It is knowing that each step towards my potential involves letting go of another part of me that is too small to contain the experiences I truly desire. I have heard this real work called “personal development”, or “inner work”, or “spiritual growth”, and I’m convinced there is little else that allows you to have genuinely new emotional experiences.

As Jung is so eloquently paraphrased, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Facilitation

I came back from Peru ready to support others on their journeys towards wholeness. Ayahuasca, with its cultural and historical context, felt outside of my gift to give. Psilocybin mushrooms, on the other hand, grow across much of the Earth and have spores in a variety of cultural contexts. I thought I understood the phases of a psychedelic experience enough to help friends create a container to travel to the depths of their consciousness and bring back treasures for their waking lives. As I began to accompany people in their journeys, I frequently experienced moments of doubt, wondering whether advocating for the ceremonial use of psychedelics was crazy. And yet each time I witnessed someone come to a profound realisation or weep their grief or recover their compassion or find the peace to sleep, I became convinced that alongside its extraordinary potential in mental health and addiction, psilocybin mushrooms could support what Bob Jesse called “the betterment of well people”40.

I learnt through time that a facilitator’s role has four important aspects.

The first aspect is to ensure that a potential participant understands the workings and risks of psilocybin so that they are not placing themselves in danger. This evaluation should make it clear that there are physical conditions and hereditary mental illnesses that rule out psychedelic use for certain individuals. Psilocybin should not be stepped into lightly, and it is not for everyone. There are many paths up the spiritual mountain.

The second aspect of facilitation is preparing a person psychologically to skilfully navigate the experience they are going to undertake. The word “psychedelic” was coined in the 1950s by combining two originally Greek terms that together mean “mind manifesting”41. A journey can be understood as an acute manifestation of self, a microcosm of the world we construct for ourselves through our perception, beliefs and narratives. A person who earnestly approaches ceremony with a felt intention and an openness to the shift in habitual thinking that psilocybin occasions, could perceive their whole way of being in a different light. In this context, a “bad trip” might be the most profound catalyst for understanding the fear, anger, shame or grief that haunts beneath the surface of that person’s “functional” life. But to do that, they need to see that if their demons are chasing them, it is not that the experience is bad, but rather that they are being invited to ask, “what am I running from?”. When a person can be with whatever arises, there is nothing to fear from encountering themselves.

That’s the mindset in “set and setting”.

The setting for the journey is the third aspect of facilitation. Working in space: a person should be somewhere safe, private, preferably in nature, accompanied by the facilitator to guide them through the experience and help them surrender to what arises in them. Working in time: ceremonies are typically conducted using rituals that indicate thresholds: the beginning, important inflection points and the end. Tapping into our ancestral inclination to acknowledge significant boundaries in space and time can powerfully attune a person to the present.

The final aspect of facilitation is to support a person to integrate their journey back into their everyday lives. That person may have others to talk to or no-one to share their experience with. They may have unexpected emotional reactions to previously mundane daily realities. They may want to make sweeping changes or edge towards better habits. The psychedelic experience is only useful if the seeds of embodied change can take root when a person returns to their habituated environment – the facilitator can help them create ideal conditions for growth. This is an immense privilege and responsibility. It is often overlooked.

Increasingly there are places in the world where accredited facilitators can support individuals on psychedelic journeys. Unfortunately, in most countries the legal status of psilocybin still forces practitioners and participants underground. This makes it difficult to assess the integrity of a facilitator beforehand or seek accountability for the still too-many abuses that occur when a participant is in the midst of a vulnerable journey. A person exploring psilocybin ceremony should only work with a facilitator that they personally trust: these journeys can bring out what is most sacred and what is most shameful in a person. Any red flags or uneasy gut feelings about the facilitator, the ceremony or the substance is cause to pause or walk away. Even when the legal pathways to this work open, a participant ultimately must take responsibility for discerning what is safe for the development of their consciousness.

In 2025, I participated in a legal retreat in the Netherlands42, where psilocybin-containing truffles fall into a regulatory gap. It was the first time I had been facilitated in years, and I was hugely encouraged by the experience. The integrity, love and care poured into the offering reflected the profound personal experiences that had brought each of the facilitators to this work. The medical and psychological screenings, the doctor on site, and the collective experience of the team created an atmosphere of professional safety without over-medicalising the process or downplaying the foundational importance of your subjective experience in reaping benefit from a psilocybin journey. We were prepared thoroughly for the potential profundity of the ceremony, guided caringly and respectfully through it, and convened to reflect on and reinforce the changes we were implementing in our lives because of it. Surrounded by other participants, each carefully held amid their own questions about life, love, change, healing and meaning, I glimpsed a potential future in which psychedelics played a role in evolving the capacity of our species to connect with our selves, one another and the more-than-human world.

On Sunday the 7th of December 2025, the day the retreat ended, I captured the following decision and commitment:

I choose love on this earth.

The journeys ahead

We are living in an extraordinary time of potential and uncertainty. We are witnessing the creaking collapse of the systems that have propagated an unprecedented explosion in technology and prosperity while undermining the conditions for life on Earth. At the same time, we are called to participate in creating new systems to bring us back into harmony with the more-than-human world so that we might save ourselves. There are three reasons why partnering with psilocybin mushrooms could bear fruit.

First of all, most psilocybin mushrooms are saprotrophic, meaning that they decompose dead wood, leaves, dung and other organic matter4344. Fungi are the great recyclers of energy and matter. This cyclical perspective could help us to stop clinging to familiar structures that have ceased serving us and start imagining what we can create in their place. “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people… And you can change it”45. Working with mushrooms can help us to recreate our lives, releasing and drawing nutrients from what came before.

Secondly, psychedelics bring us out of the habituated thought patterns that bind us to old ways of being, allowing us to see the world anew. As Michael Pollan explains,

“Psychologists often talk of two kinds of consciousness. There is spotlight consciousness, which is very directed. We aim our attention at something, and we think about it, and that’s a very powerful tool. And then there’s this other kind of consciousness associated with young children, and that’s lantern consciousness. And instead of illuminating that one fixed point, they’re illuminating everything… It’s as if you’ve cleaned the window, and you can see more clearly… You’re reminded about the world and its wonders in a way you may well have forgotten.”46

Seeing our lives and the world around us through different eyes can soften the grip of our fearful need to control and the system of extraction we’ve created with it, inviting new habits and new creations formed from love.

Thirdly, people who have journeyed specifically with psilocybin report a closer affinity with the natural world following their experience, in some cases reporting this up to two years later47. Researchers hypothesise that ego dissolution causes participants to feel “external unity” when the boundary between them and nature falls away48. It is unclear why this happens with psilocybin and not other psychedelics49. In an age where we routinely overlook the only other lifeforms we’re aware of (in the observable universe!) while taking steps to colonise space and introduce artificial intelligence, it might do us well to shake our hubris and work with nature to become trustworthy custodians of the Earth, and perhaps beyond. The mushrooms seem to remind us of the web of life we’re part of and sustained by.

There are several real hazards we must keep sight of as we spread the conscious use of psilocybin.

We need to invest in the community infrastructure we’ve hollowed out through western hyper-individualism, so that a rich mycelium between people can support them through their times of transition (whether psilocybin-induced or not). If we approach these fungi with the same extractive mindset that got us into this mess, we’ll create more harm than good. Rosalind Watts was once an advocate for the psychedelic movement50 before changing course to cultivate community infrastructure instead51. She writes,

“…when we insert psychedelics into capitalist, materialistic western culture, with no intact lineage to a tradition of grounded psychedelic use and no social structures to support healthy integration, psychedelics may actually amplify the problems we hoped they would solve…”52

We need to find a middle ground between pharmaceutical gatekeeping and unregulated free-for-all, to maximise benefits and minimise harms for individuals, society and nature. Colorado’s facilitated-access model is an early example of trying to strike this balance53 and includes genuine decriminalisation, trained facilitators, licensed centres, flexible settings and explicitly equitable access. It seems unconscionable to require either a doctor’s prescription or wealth to access mushrooms that grow for free in the ground and have been used for thousands of years to guide humans on their paths.

We need to meet the plants on their own terms, a relationship that has been safeguarded by indigenous practitioners for millennia. As Ecuadorian Kuthoomi Castro, someone who has followed the Curanderismo path since childhood, warns,

“[I]t’s not a renaissance for us as indigenous people. It’s a renaissance only for western people.”54

“We open our medicines to you to heal, not to take, not to extract… The same happened to tobacco; now it causes cancer. The same happened to opium; now it causes addiction. The same happened to coca, now cocaine causes a lot of harm. Please look at the cycle of colonisation and how this continues to happen.”55

As a friend and mentor put it simply,

“The medicine offers freedom and liberation – it doesn’t want to be put in a box.”

We need to remain clear-eyed about both the risks and benefits of working with psilocybin to avoid curtailing this collaboration. The growing enthusiasm around the “shroom boom” has already led to documented cases – in both clinical settings and underground – of risky oversights and abuses of power. This reckless behaviour and the legal precarity for victims create situations in which seeking accountability and even speaking up can be challenging.56

If we can get this human-mushroom partnership right, there is much that I hope for.

I dream of a future where others can rediscover the magic, awe and wonder of life and the natural world we’ve always been part of but have neglected.

I dream that individuals whose paths lead to psilocybin mushrooms will find the emotional healing and psychological motivation to pursue the inner work that can transform their lives from the inside out.

I dream of groups of people coming together to shift our world by combining facilitated psilocybin journeys with systems change, creating new patterns as participants transform how they relate to themselves, one another and the world around them.

Can magic mushrooms evolve human consciousness?

Yes, I believe so.

Afterword

Thank you for walking through the wilderness with me. In the next essay I’ll be tracing the way that nature slowly woke me from my nightmare of burnout, meaninglessness and isolation, to co-create a different future. Next time our wild idea is: are we living in the Earth’s dream?

If this work resonated with you, subscribe and share it with others. Spread the love.

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to:

• Storm for your feedback on an earlier draft

• Leigh and Lesanne for encouraging, shaping and reviewing this series

• Phillip-Jan van Zyl for his beautiful piano collection “Spiral” (in the audio version)

• Louise for guiding my way to inspired creativity

• My partner Ash for your love and support throughout this project

• The incredible plants and facilitators who shaped my journey

• The many wonderful humans who inspired these words through our conversations.

Further attribution:

• Ewing, S. (2022) Extreme close up of a mushroom. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/extreme-close-up-of-a-mushroom-12434433/ (Accessed 16 September 2026).

• National Archives and Records Administration (1974) President Nixon, with edited transcripts of Nixon White House Tape conversations during broadcast of his address to the Nation, 29 April. [photograph] Roll-frame WHPO C1269-20. Wikimedia Commons. Available at: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nixon_edited_transcripts.jpg (Accessed 16 September 2026).

• Kutsan, V.V. (2022) Bonfire at night. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/bonfire-at-night-11648919/ (Accessed 16 September 2026).

• Weber, L. (2024) A close up of a wave in the ocean. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-close-up-of-a-wave-in-the-ocean-27294867/ (Accessed 16 September 2026).

• Elsner, D. (2026) Silhouette of tree under a starry night sky. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/silhouette-of-tree-under-a-starry-night-sky-35609858/ (Accessed 16 September 2026).

• Tommes Frites (2025) Close up of mushroom on mossy forest floor. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-mushroom-on-mossy-forest-floor-34220322/ (Accessed 16 September 2026).

• Music by Kyle Preston, Master Minded, Yehezkal Raz, Martin Puehringer as well as sound effects under licence from Artlist (in the audio version)

Some of the names in this piece have been changed to anonymise individuals.

Wild Ideas is produced by JJ van de Vyver. Views expressed are mine alone and don’t represent my clients or any organisations I’m affiliated with. Nothing here is professional advice of any kind.

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What if Mommy healed her past?

Welcome to the wilderness. My name is JJ van de Vyver and I’ll be your guide on the series where we explore ideas so wild they might just work.

I’ve walked away from everything I was taught measured success – impressive qualifications, high-powered job and playing by the rules – called by the feeling that the way we organise society isn’t working. The stakes are high and time is short. A new future is calling – we need to question how we do things and trust nature to guide the way. Welcome to Wild Ideas.

Today I’d like to share a personal essay with you about the power of stories, how trauma is passed between generations, and what it takes to heal. This is the third of five essays in this introductory series, where I’m leading you through my inner world so that we understand one another before setting off into the wilderness together. If you missed any of the previous instalments, have a read below:

1. What if I can’t find meaning in corporate?

2. What if I was meant to be there when Daddy died?

Today’s wild idea: what if Mommy healed her past?

This essay contains an account of my mother’s journey with cancer that might be difficult for some readers. Please proceed with caution.

A story about a stone

This is a story about a stone: rose quartz. Rose quartz ranges in colour from translucent to opaque pink. Sometimes the stones are closer to white, and sometimes they are deep pink almost like a ruby. You’ve likely come across them, fashioned and polished into the shape of an angel or a heart, or rough chunks of it in a shop or museum. In esoteric circles the stone is associated with love, with the heart, and – as I came to find out with time – with healing childhood trauma.

Our story begins in 2011 when Heike got sick. The cancer first formed in her colon and required an operation and months of chemotherapy. This was while I studied many kilometres away at university and my brother was still in high school. My mom shielded me from the severity of her disease and experience, and I only found out later how close she had come to death. Describing her time in hospital and the ICU, she exclaimed that she “felt like a queen” with the nursing staff and her friends organising around her every need. So striking was the contrast with her everyday life, where she took care of everyone else, that she told me about a close friend who forebodingly warned her “don’t get used to this”. On the other side of her recovery she returned, somewhat anticlimactically, to the daily school lifts and the piles of laundry and the endless cooking that formed part of her assumed role. She reflected later that this hospital experience of heightened care contradicted her sense that, in her own words, “I always had the feeling I was not always worth it”. Things in her life wouldn’t change just yet, but her body was already saying “no”. The cancer was in remission, for now.

Heike Rothauge

Who was my mother? I find it hard to say with any real confidence because it has been such a long time now: only fragments of fragments remain. It’s hard to see a relationship from inside it.

My mom Heike was born on the 23rd of April 1957 in the country now called Namibia. Back then it was still being administered by South Africa. Heike’s father Heinrich was born in Windhoek to German parents. Her mother Hilde had come to what was known as South-West Africa after she married Heinrich and their first child was born, Heike’s oldest brother. She was one of four children, the only girl. The family was based in Cape Town, South Africa from 1967, when Heike was ten.

My mom was the first person to give me a crystal, though it was clear quartz and not rose quartz. She bought my brother and I each a quartz crystal on a rope necklace, for “guidance and protection”. Heike wasn’t religious but would have described herself as spiritual. As she grew older, she explored these interests with a great openness and wonder. Nothing was inherently taboo, perhaps a remnant of her rebellious teens in defiance of her strict father. She was open to receive the world, crystals and all.

It was really important to Heike that my brother and I treat all people as human beings. Growing up in post-Apartheid South Africa there were wide disparities in working opportunities sustained by deep historic injustice. I remember the exact staircase we were walking down when she prompted my brother and I to greet the gardener coming the other way and explained why it was important to be respectful of any person we ever met, period. She worked hard to wipe away the stains of racial prejudice that had seeped across generations, particularly in the country of our upbringing.

At home in Johannesburg we had a round dining-room table, and we ate dinner together every evening. We had our set places in two formations: one when our dad was home and the other when he was away with work. We also had our dedicated spots on the couches for Friday night reality TV, including the cats (who generally had a pair of legs they gravitated towards). Heike also always had a secret stash of Haribo Gold Bears that she left for weeks so that they were hard and chewy when we ate them.

My friends would receive lectures in the car to school – about the importance of work ethic, or treating other people with respect, or being honest and truthful – just as often as I would. That said, our home became a refuge for my friend circle in our exploratory teenage years: we could always count on coming home to crash on mattresses and waking up to the smell of a hangover-curing eggs and toast. Heike invariably also drew us into the support she offered at our school, from wrapping textbooks at the school shop to selling drinks at the tuck shop to helping out on hot dog days.

My mom vowed to only ever give my brother and I three hidings on our backsides if we misbehaved and endeavoured to make sure that we always understood why we were being punished. She drew this boundary in her own parenting after seeing the seemingly arbitrary and excessive physical harms her father exacted against her siblings. On one occasion she was so disturbed by his violence that she had to be talked out of reporting him to the police. This incremental change was just one of the ways that she chose something different for her children.

It was important to my mom that we perform well academically, and so we enlisted in Kumon extra maths from a young age and continued with it throughout primary school. I have a lingering distaste for those books of practice examples and her steadfastness that we do them. She had seen her father stress over finances and spent much of her own life doing the same. For example, she bore the brunt of requesting extensions to school fee payments as my dad patiently awaited income from his overdue clients. My brother and I could do what we wanted in our lives once we were ok in work that generated income, but until then we needed to perform.

Heike yearned to return to Cape Town for much of our lives in Johannesburg. When they moved to Johannesburg, my dad Jurie promised that they would only be there for a year. Over twenty years later, his work continued to keep them there. I am more like my mom in many ways: I want to make sense of things by talking about them, I have big feelings that lift me high and drop me low, I love to connect with people and will strike up conversations and ask strangers questions. Because of this, I always found it easier to take my mom’s perspective, blaming my dad for a long time for the misgivings in their relationship. It was only later that I could see their dance as a mutual one. Heike craved being worthy of love, and Jurie craved being seen and appreciated. She couldn’t see the stable loyalty he offered, and he couldn’t find the safety to share his inner life, and over time they passed each other like ships in the night. But they always remained friends, that they never lost.

My mom left an indelible impression on the people around her because no one was outside her circle of care and compassion. Heike really saw you, what you needed, and perceived it as her work to give you what she could. I fondly relish joining her for her beach walks when we spent holidays by the sea. On these long walks she would take the position of curious, caring inquirer – asking about your life and choices, your hopes and dreams, your challenges and fears – and give you space to explore your world while holding your highest good as possible. The number of people from all walks of life who made a point of attending her memorial told of the lives that she’d touched. Heike passed from this world on the 13th of May 2016.

My first rose quartz

A year after my mom’s cancer treatment things really started to crumble. My brother called me out of the blue to try calm Heike down during a particularly turbulent emotional storm. I was at a university debating tournament and stepped outside to call her. She had reached breaking point in the dynamic at home and sought a way out. I listened and calmed her feelings and thought about ways to fix the situation. The role I assumed on that call was to regulate and rescue – vocabulary I didn’t possess until my late thirties. That conversation led to a family meeting where I stepped out of being a son and into the role of architecting the sale of our childhood home and the dissolution of our nuclear family. The plan, as I penned it after our family meeting, was that:

• Heike would move back to Cape Town while Jurie sought financial opportunity through work abroad,

• the house would be sold to clear the debt that kept my mom awake at night,

• my brother would begin his studies in Stellenbosch, and

• I would take a gap year following the completion of my studies.

Heike mourned the loss of our home, her friends, and the dreams that she held for her partnership and our family. So much hope and regret crashing against the rocks of the realised joys and hardships of that chapter of her life. I was riddled with guilt for the gaping hole where our home and family once were. What had I done? Why was it mine to do?

My mom was back in the wild, beautiful landscapes of her youth, a lifetime between her childhood and her return, and it was time to begin again. The financial stress remained as she sought to establish a new career to make ends meet. At that point, living next to the railway tracks in a shadow of the life now behind her, I imagine it was easy to feel abandoned, unloved, “not always worth it”.

On one visit to see Heike in 2014 I became suspicious of her unconscious motivations. We were driving back to her home when she shared that she wanted to move even further away from Cape Town to an even smaller town. It didn’t make any sense – at least where she currently lived, she was close to some family and friends. Why, if you feel alone and far from love, would you move even further away out of reach from the people that love you? I couldn’t figure out where she was coming from.

A while later my mom, dad and brother made a trip to the Kruger National Park. We’d attempted a few family holidays since our parents had sold the house and separated: the trips were free of animosity but awkward for me. I felt angry for what we’d lost, for pretending things were normal. In any case, on this trip I stayed in Johannesburg bogged down in auditing work. A few days in and my dad called me to let me know that Heike was in the Nelspruit hospital with severe pains. She required a rolling of her intestines, which had become obstructed because of scar tissue from her previous operations. I rushed down to join the family and we visited her in the hospital. My mom was so obviously relieved to have us there, and yet pretty soon she was encouraging us to travel back to Johannesburg. She told us that she knew we had work to do, that she was “a big girl” and that she would be ok. I couldn’t understand it: here she was, in a frightening situation far from home, visibly comforted that we were there, telling us that we should leave and that she would manage. I had the distinct feeling that some part of her was acting against her best interests, perversely working to further isolate her from love, like stranding her in the desert alone. Why would she try to realise her worst fears? Why make a story of feeling “not always worth it” true? I vowed to be vigilant and ignored her requests if they seemed to feed her negative spiral. A few days later with her health and mind more stable, my brother organised accommodation to stay with her during her week-long recovery. It was only then that my father and I, confident that Heike was cared for, returned to Johannesburg to work.

It was around this time that I bought my first rose quartz crystal and placed it in my Johannesburg windowsill. It caught my eye in a crystal shop and I decided to bring it home with me. Today it stands alongside a photo of my wife and I, at a time when we’re talking about bringing our own children into the world.

Tracing our roots

In December 2014 my mom, dad, brother and I gathered at the holiday house of a family friend who was also a doctor. Heike had sought medical attention after she started picking up weight inexplicably and she had received the results of her scans. A tumour was present on her liver; her cancer had returned. Our family friend helped explain her options and the likely consequences of each. My mom had no intention of repeating chemotherapy after her previous experience, even though it gave her the highest likelihood of time. But my brother and I were adamant that she at least try – she couldn’t give up without trying, it wasn’t aligned with how she had raised us. Heike conceded and resolved to give it a go. If the tumour shrank enough, it would be possible to operate.

The tumour didn’t shrink enough. Six months in and Heike decided that she would rather live wholesomely, if shorter, than continue with the two-weekly battering ram of chemotherapy. What followed was one of the most stunning transformations of a person I have ever seen. She was living in a cottage on a small wine farm: one of her dreams. She lost 20kg of weight that she had carried for over 20 years through healthy eating. She plunged into adventures with friends and family including travel, paragliding and good food. She looked and felt younger and healthier than she had in years. Finally, she experimented with every healing and spiritual modality she was exposed to. This was at a time when I was just becoming aware of inner work and emotional growth myself. I started going to regular moving meditation classes to observe my feelings, I read and listened and explored spiritual paths, I moved into a beautiful house-share with my friends, I cooked healthy meals and changed how I ate. When I called or visited my mom we discussed her journey, the healers she was seeing, how she felt, and her hope that her new way of living might unlock the physical healing she needed.

One of Heike’s good friends recommended that she “make new memories” with her kids. My mom decided to take my brother and I to Germany to meet relatives on our maternal side and experience some of the places she had visited in her youth. In December 2015 we embarked on a two-week tour of the country, travelling north to south to visit my mom’s brother, cousin, nephew, old friends and distant relatives. These visits established new connections for us. They also contained the implicit understanding that each farewell might be the last time that my mom would see her relatives.

Towards the end of our trip, in the sleepy healing town of Bad Wildungen, we traced our grandfather’s family’s roots and found the hospital where Heike’s oldest brother was born before the family moved to South-West Africa. People from all over Germany come to rest and heal among Bad Wildungen’s spas and nurses. On our second day we made our way to a crystal shop. In this curious town where my grandfather’s family resided before emigrating to Africa, we found one of the largest pieces of rose quartz I’ve ever seen.

A bag of stones

After arriving back in South Africa from our German adventure, Heike had another set of scans… The tumour was growing and would slowly kill her. She began taking higher doses of morphine to fend off the constant pain. I didn’t have the heart to tell her we could smell the morphine when she asked whether her scent had changed. I chose to try protect her feelings over the truth. At this point she was living with our uncle and aunt on my dad’s side in the town of Stellenbosch, about 45 minutes from Cape Town. I lived there for weeks at a time and worked remotely to be near her, and my brother – studying at the nearby university – was a short drive away.

Heike met the head of a local hospice who guided her with great compassion and grace. As her physical body faded her spirit grew brighter. It was painfully obvious that our medical system could address the physical aspects of her disease and manage her pain but was woefully inadequate to support her through the emotional and spiritual dimensions of her dying process. She found incredible humans, including the hospice head, who could help her navigate the interior landscape of her experience. So great was Heike’s courage towards her imminent departure that often she was comforting others. Later I found notes she scribbled in a diary revealing her pain and anguish. I was shocked that so few in Western culture know how to be with someone when they face death, because everyone dies.

My brother and I bought tickets to the AfrikaBurn festival taking place in April 2016. A spiritual descendent of Burning Man in the United States, the festival sees the construction of a makeshift community in the Karoo desert for a week. It’s an experiment in a different form of living and attendees are required to offer gifts to the community; there is no money and no trade. With our mom’s ailing health, we decided not to go, but not before we’d bought a gift to give to others in the desert. I’d ordered 15kg of small rose quartz chunks and took receipt of the massive bag of rocks. What we’d do with the hundreds of stones, we didn’t know. It turns out they originated in Namibia.

As Heike lost her strength she moved into hospice and turned off her phone. My dad, brother and I visited her daily in that final week. Time marched ceaselessly towards an ominous singularity I couldn’t imagine or see beyond, and my mind thrashed against the situation unfolding. I struggled to be fully present with her. Her physical suffering was immense, and yet her spirit was at peace with what was to come. The end promised relief from the pain. On the 13th of May 2016, my dad woke me up to tell me that Heike had passed early that morning. We went to see her; my brother was already there. Her small body was tucked beneath a blanket in her hospice room. She lay unencumbered by the pain that had accompanied her for months. Her hand was cold, she was gone. The finality of a parent’s death is impossible to explain ahead of it happening. I cried and I cried.

In the days that followed I had the heartbreaking task of working through the items in her room, sorting through objects orphaned of the person who bound them all together. While packing her things, I came across several large chunks of rose quartz that had shared the space with her. They were now my brother and my inheritance.

Crystals in the desert

Heike took my brother and I to visit Namibia when I was fifteen. I’ll never forget listening to the deafening silence when we stopped on the side of the road during a seemingly endless drive through craggy rocks, dry canyons and desert sand. Or the striking sight of the red sand dunes on one side of the highway and the grey rolling ocean waves on the other. Or the family farm, Toeloop, rich in oranges and open spaces, the place where my mom and her siblings spent much of their childhoods. “This is Africa, guys!” our mom would declare to my brother and I, arms outstretched to the endless horizon. “We know!” we’d protest, “we’ve never been anywhere else!” I didn’t know how precious the time was. I didn’t know the questions I should ask. I never got to ask them. What happened on this farm, Mommy? What happened in this land, where you were formed?

It took decades before I could know the significance of that place. It was revealed in Heike’s last clues to us, in snippets from family members and in records of my grandfather’s time as a soldier of war.

The Germans established a colony in this corner of the African continent in the late 1800s, at a time when so much of this rich land was being colonised and plundered for European interests. The Germans were stripped of their colonies following World War I, and South-West Africa came under South African administration through a League of Nations mandate, a supposedly transitional arrangement until the territory’s mostly non-European inhabitants were deemed civilised enough to run a democracy themselves.

It was to this part of Africa that our grandfather Heinrich returned a few years after his experiences in World War II. He was born to German immigrants in South-West Africa just after World War I. In his teens he travelled to Germany to study cabinetmaking. After completing his studies, he was journeying back to Africa in 1939 when war was declared and his ship turned around. When he landed back in Germany with a German passport, he was enlisted to the army despite his dual citizenship. South Africa, and therefore South-West Africa, sided with the Allies. After active duty in Polland and Holland, Heinrich spent six months in hospital with a sudden swelling in his neck. They tried operating to remove what seemed like a strange cancer but couldn’t find the cause. As soon as he could, he made his way back to the frontline to avoid spending any more time in the horrors of the hospitals. Heinrich was deployed to North Africa to fight the Allies, including friends from back home. In his tender early twenties, his whole future ahead of him, he was left in the desert to fight Europe’s war. Eventually he was captured by the Americans in 1943 and spent three years in prisoner of war camps across North Africa, North America and France. He never spoke much about his experiences in combat.

After his release, Heinrich made his way back to Germany and married my grandmother. Two years later she was pregnant and he was hospitalised for five weeks with a stomach ulcer. They had their first son in Bad Wildungen, Germany. They emigrated to South-West Africa in 1950, partly in the hope that Heinrich’s stomach issues would improve. His wife and her young child had never set foot on this continent and there were difficult stretches alone on the family farm as Heinrich pursued work. My mom was born in 1957, the third child of four. She grew up between Lüderitzbucht and Toeloop, the family farm. When my mom was about ten, the family moved to Cape Town, South Africa so Heinrich could work as a boarding house superintendent at the German school. Moving between the two countries was easy – despite the League of Nations’ dissolution after the Second World War, South Africa defied the newly established United Nations and continued to cling to the territory. Namibian independence wouldn’t come until 1990. My grandfather Heinrich Rothauge passed away in Cape Town on the 19th of December 1993 at the age of 74, from colon cancer.

Namibia is also the place where a significant amount of rose quartz formed 500 million years ago. Three ancient continents – the Congo, Kalahari and Rio de la Plata – collided into each other to form Gondwanaland and the massive Damara mountain range, comparable in size to the modern Himalayas. As the molten rock began to cool roughly 8 kilometres under those ancient peaks, silica molecules started to grow into crystalline structures within superheated water. At high temperatures and over hundreds of thousands of years, these pockets of water filled with more and more interlocking crystals. We’re not sure exactly why rose quartz is pink. The pigmentation stems from microscopic pink threads suspended throughout the grid of molecules, likely from traces of other elements that grow as the crystals do. It would take the next 500 million years for those mountains to be eroded down, as the continent of Gondwanaland collided with Laurasia to form Pangaea, and Pangaea broke apart releasing Gondwanaland, and Gondwanaland broke apart allowing our modern continents to finally take shape. Slowly through wind and water and time, erosion removed the overlying rock to reveal those pink treasures of the depths. Rose quartz is now mined at the surface and distributed around the world. In 2016, 15kg of small stone chunks made its way to a young man in South Africa who was planning to go to a festival in the desert.

That little girl

We held a memorial for Heike in Johannesburg a month after she passed away. Many of her friends there had not seen her in months and we were fortunate that she could update them on her journey in her own words. A film student documenting the varied stories of cancer patients had contacted our mom for an interview while she still had strength to share. We all watched the video together that morning and caught a glimpse of the transformative wisdom that was unfurling within her in those last weeks and months. Our beautiful mother, body thinning yet eyes gleaming, shared what the cancer had asked of her. In her own words…

“I came back and had another scan and the cancer is just not budging, it’s just growing and growing and growing. So I believe there is more I have to do, there is more I have to deal with. And the huge thing for me is that… until the box is closed, a miracle can still happen. But for me also, the miracle is not just physical – that you can heal – but it’s especially spiritual. I think, spiritually, the miracle has definitely happened with me and if I needed this cancer to get that right – success, tick, 100%, so glad. You know, but then today I had another experience and I realised that there’s this little girl in me that has had it really hard and I have not made peace with all of it, and I have not looked after that little girl, and she can’t trust me yet. So, I reckon that until I get that right there’s a little bit of a journey ahead of me. And I just hope I get it right very quickly because the pain is not funny. But otherwise life is great.”1

That little girl grew up in Namibia with a father trying to provide for his young family after serving in a world war. That little girl “had it really hard”. It reminded me of a story she once shared about a time she misbehaved, perhaps at the age of 6 or so. Her father, enraged, drove her out to the middle of the family farm and left her in the desert, leaving her out there to fend for herself for an entire day. Abandoned in the sun and sand and stone of the savannah by her protector, you can see how a story of “I always had the feeling I was not always worth it” might start to crystallise and take form. You could see that story searching for affirming evidence in a marriage that breaks down or in giving up on a family home dream or in receiving a cancer diagnosis. You could see how choices made from that story can shape your circumstances and relationships and make itself true. You could see the compassion and holding you might require to acknowledge that story in the fullness of the arc of your life, one story among many, and find love for that little girl who couldn’t comfort herself. And you could see how a story, held in the light of compassionate awareness, gives way so that only love and understanding remain.

I believe she made peace with that little girl after that interview, before she passed on from this world.

A gift

We invited the memorial attendees to write Heike a note. We promised to burn each note and to release their ashes alongside Heike’s ashes, letting it all out to sea. Each person placed their note in a wooden box and was invited to take a piece of rose quartz away with them as a reminder of the love they shared with Heike. And so, we began to gift the Namibian rose quartz we’d received for AfrikaBurn.

I gifted that rose quartz to my study peers a year later when I travelled to Peru to learn about a system of medicine that sees the invisible aspects of mind and emotion and the visible aspects of body as intimately woven together.

I gifted that rose quartz to my classmates three years later when I first told the story of this stone, the power of narrative and the curious intergenerational healing of patterns to an assembly of MBA students in Oxford.

I gifted that rose quartz to my fellow participants nine years later when I let go of a keyring my mom had gifted me on that trip to Germany. That evening in the Netherlands, I vowed to set her and myself free from the stories I had been telling so that we both might move a little more freely going forward.

The shrinking collection of stones has travelled with me on my international moves, the stones given away as I slowly piece myself together… Inviting love and care into my inner desert, learning to be present with my own feelings, finding the voice to articulate my needs and set boundaries, relinquishing the responsibility to fix others’ situations, releasing the fear that this world is not a safe place to be me.

I gift that rose quartz to you now: a stone associated with love, with the heart, and – as I came to find out with time – with healing childhood trauma.

There is still some rose quartz to go.

Afterword

Thank you for walking through the wilderness with me. In the next essay I’ll be exploring personal development and my tumble down the rabbit hole of psychedelic ceremony. Next time our wild idea is: can magic mushrooms evolve human consciousness?

If this work resonated with you, subscribe and share it with others. Spread the love.

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to:

• Jayni, Ash and Axel for your generous feedback on early drafts

• Leigh and Lesanne for encouraging, shaping and reviewing this series

• Phillip-Jan van Zyl for his beautiful piano collection “Spiral” (in the audio version)

• Louise for guiding my way to inspired creativity

• My partner Ash for your love and support throughout this project

• The many wonderful humans who inspired these words through our conversations.

Further attribution:

• Ungaro, F. (2026) Majestic sand dunes of Sossusvlei, Namibia. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/majestic-sand-dunes-of-sossusvlei-namibia-39260647/ (Accessed 7 September 2026).

• Kaboompics (2020) Photo of rose quartz. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-rose-quartz-4040589/ (Accessed 7 September 2026).

• Music by Kyle Preston and sound effects under licence from Artlist (in the audio version)

Wild Ideas is produced by JJ van de Vyver. Views expressed are mine alone and don’t represent my clients or any organisations I’m affiliated with. Nothing here is professional advice of any kind.

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What if I was meant to be there when Daddy died?

Welcome to the wilderness. My name is JJ van de Vyver and I’ll be your guide on the show where we explore ideas so wild they might just work.

I spent fifteen years of my life dedicated to climbing the success ladder: working with top-tier organisations, completing an MBA at the University of Oxford, jet-setting across three continents. The higher I climbed, the further I could see and the more concerned I became. Wild animals and spaces were evaporating, corporations expected us to work more and feel less, and GDP growth seemed to be the most important goal of our species. While I achieved success, I spent most of my time indoors behind a computer, used my holidays to recover from illness, withdrew from the people around me to conserve my energy, and slowly forgot what it felt like to pursue meaning and purpose. Now I’m trying a different approach. I believe that the way we organise society isn’t working, that the stakes are high, and that time is short. I’m convinced we need to go further in questioning how we do things, and that nature can guide the way. Welcome to Wild Ideas.

Today I’d like to share a personal essay with you about spirituality in the cathedral without a roof, revisiting the experiences that led to a more mature faith after losing my father. This is the second of five essays in this introductory series, where I’m leading you through my inner world so that we understand one another before setting off into the wilderness together. If you missed any of the previous instalments, have a read below:

1. What if I can’t find meaning in corporate?

Today’s wild idea: what if I was meant to be there when Daddy died?

This episode contains an account of my father’s passing that might be difficult for some readers. Please proceed with caution.

The cathedral without a roof

Descending into the crypt one stair at a time, my hand runs along the cool stones of the wall. The temperature drops, and the sounds of the cathedral above dampen into silence until all I can hear is foot upon stone. I’m nervous entering this place. I pause, breathe in and close my eyes… It’s 5:40 in the morning, I can hear sounds of someone heaving; my heart quickens, I’m racing to his bedroom now; I can hear my own voice, filled with knowing despair, “no no no no no no”…

Let’s take a few steps back.

Today I’m visiting the cathedral without a roof. It’s not a real place in the sense that we normally mean – you won’t find photos of it or a Google Maps entry. But I can take you there. I first heard about it from Jayni, a dear friend, mentor and over time fairy godmother. It was a metaphor she used to help people move between sets of beliefs. When working with a client, she loved exploring their conventional belief system within the cathedral and then, at any moment, inviting them outside into nature by hopping through a window or gazing up at the wondrous sky. The cathedral without a roof is an inner space, a sacred inner space. “Sacred” meaning that it is designated for a particular purpose. I’m sometimes asked whether it’s a religious space. I’d say not strictly… I suppose it depends on the person’s beliefs. I like to think of it as spiritual, that is, to do with meaning, connection and faith. “Meaning” being the value we assign through the stories we tell. “Connection” being the living relationship between us and all that is. “Faith” being the need to trust things that we cannot comprehend through the rational mind.

Jayni knew my dad well. Although, thinking back, it was my dad who first introduced me to Jayni. My dad was an electronic engineer born in the 1950s, always quietly interested in physics, stones and energy. He’d met Jayni at a fair where she gave a demonstration of a moving meditation practice and he immediately signed up to her Chakradance classes. I’d seen the change in him from attending those regularly, slow but discernible. He was opening up; he was inspired; he was sharing; we were talking. He’d always been an anchor through the seas of my life — he was the kind of dad whose house was always open to you with a beer in the fridge and our favourite chocolates in the cupboard — and now we were exploring spirituality together. Who would have thought that a supposedly conservative Afrikaans white man in his 60s would go once a week to dance blindfolded with music to observe his feelings. It was unheard of. That’s my dad. And that’s Jayni’s magic. He was dancing, and through it he was finding his way. I was so grateful that he did that, even though it seemed so revolutionary for someone of his generation of men. It made me realise that the worst tragedy is when we are closed to the path that holds our own healing. Though walking our own path is rarely easy or comfortable.

I enter the cathedral without a roof through the great wooden doors on the western side. It’s built traditionally, facing east. I pause with that familiar mixture of awe and wonder… It’s quite something to look upon the great stone columns with the blue sky and sunlight beaming down from above. Within the nave there are rows of wooden pews leading to a simple stone altar in the heart of the cathedral. The aisles run down either side along walls of white stone that frame great stain-glass windows in vibrant blues, reds, yellows and greens. Birdsong glides seamlessly between outside and inside.

This place holds my soul imprints – you can feel them in the air, moving full of life. Soul imprints are the defining moments that punctuate our lifetime. They arrive along our paths like familiar strangers, remembered more than experienced, as if some deeper part of us always knew they would come.

I turn left to walk clockwise, as is often the ritual in Christian churches. This keeps the walls, windows, sculptures and artworks on your left, the altar on your right. It’s interesting… the Tibetan Buddhist khora (or circumambulation) is also clockwise though that’s around a sacred site, so the site is always to your right. I remember countless walks around the main temple in Mcleodganj, Northern India during my four months there, spinning prayer wheels as I went among Tibetan monks in maroon robes and ordinary people counting their mantras on prayer beads. In Hinduism it’s also important to keep sacred objects – whether shrines, temples, trees, mountains or rivers – on your right. And then the Islamic tawaf around the Kaaba in Mecca is counterclockwise, holding the Kaaba on your left. Each tradition offers a different ritual to engage with the sacred. My favourite is still to walk a labyrinth, which – as Jayni was clear to point out – is very different from a maze. A maze has corridors with dead ends, and you can get lost. A labyrinth only has one way in and one way out, a route to the centre and back again, rich with turns along the way. You don’t get lost, you find yourself.

I pass the first niche in the northern wall where there’s a hand-sculpted statue on display. It’s a carving of the four of us, I must have been 7 or 8 and my brother was just 3 or 4. My mom and dad look really happy. I’m reminded of times around the swimming pool and in the sandpit under the pine trees in our garden. I’m reminded of my mom’s affinity for owls and my dad’s steadying presence, like a mighty baobab. A love wells in my chest and my eyes burn as tears invite themselves. I walk on, my right hand cupped within my left hand ahead of me, my thumbs touching together. In the next niche is a beautiful oil painting of the halo around the full moon from Christmas 2015. That was the night that the truth reached me, and I understood how painful my mother’s cancer would be for us in the months that followed. I’m filled with wonder and grief. I walk on. Each scene depicted here, each soul imprint, touches on something fundamental and enduring in me. They seem to connect my momentary body to the earth and to the sky, like columns in a cathedral without a roof. I slowly pass by several niches until I’m standing before the wooden carving of three buck on a hill. I feel drawn to this scene today. I touch the wood, feeling the texture of the grass. I close my eyes.

Three buck on a hill

I’m transported to a farm outside of Newcastle in South Africa. It’s 2015 and I’m spending the weekend with family friends on their sprawling farm. We’re off to a Saturday market and I’m in the backseat with one of their friends. She’s older than I am, with her own grown-up kids, and we start to talk about South African politics. I’m taken by the breadth of her knowledge and the incredible insight she’s laying before me. She dances between points of view and together we explore the myriad challenges facing our dear country. I’m excited and surprised by the nuance and flourish of her views, especially in this sleepy setting. I feel a kinship with this woman and quickly start to trust her; she feels like one of ‘my’ tribe: open, curious, pragmatic.

She turns the conversation to the topic of religion and asks about my relationship with God. She means God in the Christian, Biblical sense. She asks whether I feel I have room to get to know God better. As I have so many times in the past, I feel pulled between the honest yearning to come into deeper relationship in the way this person seems to be, and the twinge of nervousness whenever I recognise I’m close to a boundary that divides an in-group from an out-group. I feel safe from our conversation and tell her I’d like to know God better. She tells me that the only way to know God is through Jesus Christ, who died on a cross so that our sins could be forgiven. I listen, nodding in recognition that this is absolutely true, from her perspective, and I feel comfortable that I can be with her in her truth at the back of the vehicle on a farm road in South Africa as we pull up to the market.

We’re in a large space under a white tarpaulin filled with wooden tables and benches when she asks me too much. I am comfortable accepting Christ into my life, I tell her. His message of love and forgiveness have travelled two thousand years and revolutionised our sense of inherent human worth – of course I would welcome a relationship with this extraordinary being. She then delivers my sentence: “Then go,” she says, “and announce your faith by declaring to three witnesses that you accept Jesus Christ as your only lord and saviour”. I’m in turmoil… I feel tricked… Lured in by her openness and willingness to inhabit multiple perspectives and then asked to collapse all possible pathways to the divine down to one certainty. I venture outside and sit on the brown soil of my mother country, my mind and emotions a mess. I know from my time in India that if I was born in Tibet, I would be Buddhist, or born in much of India, Hindu. But her Christian faith holds that the received truth should be spread throughout the world. If I reject it now that I’ve received it, that is quite different from being born elsewhere and never hearing about it. Why is it so hard for me to accept her invitation? What if she is right? A dark cloud gathers over the nearby mountains and makes its way towards me. The rain comes down over the market, scattering the people under cover and nourishing the fields.

That evening after the rains clear I decide to go for a walk to find answers. I make my way along the gravel roads of our family friends’ farm, thoughts churning over in my head to the rhythm of my footsteps. These walking conversations with nature have always been how I’ve reached out beyond myself, making space for my soul to speak. I come across a hill that calls to me. “Great”, I think, “let’s climb the mountain”. As I round the top of the hill there’s only one shrub conspicuously presiding over the space. “And there’s my burning bush,” I think to myself, “let’s go have a conversation.” I walk towards it. Near the bush I can see the bony remains of a small animal that was likely eaten by a caracal or jackal. “Ok, we’ve got both life and death present”, I think as I step towards the bush. “Please help me,” I whisper earnestly as I sit down with a burning yearning alongside the bush, my eyes open to the undulating African landscape all around me. I breathe in and close my eyes and listen. I am filled with a conviction for the Earth I’m seated upon and the endless skies above… and the fears of getting the divine wrong start to subside in me. When I open my eyes, the sun is setting to my left, and the moon is rising to my right. “The Father and the Son…” I wonder aloud. I stand up next to the bush on the hill to take in the full beauty of the purple skies between the heavenly bodies and bring my hands together in gratitude in front of my heart. Here is sacred for me – this is where the divine speaks. As I prepare to leave, I look behind me… There, peering inquisitively across the hilltop at my devotion, are three antelope – most likely mountain reedbuck. “And there are my three witnesses”, I say with a marvelling smile. I thank them, before turning to walk back down the mountain.

I open my eyes and I’m back in the cathedral without a roof. I breathe in the mystery of that Newcastle afternoon for a moment before noticing that a Cape Wagtail is hopping on the windowsill beside me. The small brown and cream coloured bird is a frequent visitor to our family’s flat in Plettenberg Bay and seems to constantly be investigating what we’re up to. This one looks at me curiously, waiting for my next move. I start gently, so as not to frighten it, and continue my walk along the niches of the northern wall, the altar ahead on my right. I pass by a painting, a vase of flowers and an open book in glass casing before coming to a stop before another scene that draws me in.

Lamb in a field

It’s a stain-glass window. A white lamb and its mother are in the centre surrounded by green fields. The skeletal steel structure of an electricity tower juts out a small distance away and darker green hills rise out of the background. The lines are sharp and the colours dark, a storm of contrast crashing together. I recognise this view. It’s along a gravel path I know as Electric Avenue, south of the City of Oxford. It must be April or May, during lambing season. If the work was more detailed, we might see more lamb-mother pairs dotting the fields, or the numbers spraypainted on their fleeces in blue and red to match lamb with ewe, or perhaps the crackling electricity lines strung overhead that give this road its name. But there’s only painful anger in this portrayal, not careful tenderness. I shut my eyes and step into the turbulent feelings of the memory.

I was deeply upset as I walked Electric Avenue that day. It was 2020 and we were well into the first lockdown of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our company director had told me about this wonderful walk between the fields, and it had become an almost daily ritual. But today I had a bone to pick with the divine. I’d done everything according to the set of rules I thought I was playing by. I’d listened to my heart and stayed in the UK after completing my MBA. I’d followed the signs that led me to the flat I was staying in. I had been humble, polite, trusting – and for what?! Here I was, stuck far from friends and family, on a precarious visa, in a terrible living situation, isolating with a stranger, plunged into global fear and uncertainty, with only this walking loop through the fields as reprieve. I’d held up my end of the bargain, why was my world going to pieces?! It wasn’t fair, and I wasn’t having it.

After all the trials I’d been through and the efforts I’d made, to be in a situation so untenable felt like a huge betrayal. What was the point of working so hard and trusting the apparent flow of life if it just led me to more suffering? The lambs and life around me were no consolation for my pain. I looked through them, thoughts escalating in my head as the volcanic lava of my anger spilled out of my hard footsteps, unseeing eyes and muttering mouth. I decided I was indeed alone in an indifferent universe: no-one would look after me and no-one was coming to save me. That was it; I was done. I cast my relationship with my creator aside that day, and it wasn’t until my dad died that I was reachable again.

I open my eyes in the cathedral without a roof with more compassion for the lost boy among the lambs in the fields. I turn from the stain-glass window and continue walking down the aisle. I pass the altar on my right as the wall to my left starts to curve into the semi-circular apse at the eastern end of the cathedral. I stop a small distance behind the altar, peering down a set of the steps leading into the darkness. The time has come, I’m ready to visit the crypt.

The crypt

Descending into the crypt one stair at a time, my hand runs along the cool stones of the wall. The temperature drops, and the sounds of the birds and the insects and the wind above dampen into silence until all I can hear is foot upon stone. I’m nervous visiting this place, I’m not sure it ever gets easier to call upon a broken heart. I pause on the steps, breathe in and close my eyes… I breathe out and open them again. I’m ok to keep going.

I reach the bottom of the stairs and step onto the great stones of this cool, quiet place. To my left are two archways. The first has an owl engraved above it. I walk past this one, a visit for another time. The second archway has a baobab tree engraved above its entrance. I turn, breathe, and enter. A candle burns, holding my eyes as the walls begin to fade. I can hear the sound of distant waves crashing gently to shore. It’s still quite dark outside – of course it is, it’s 05:40 in the morning. The sun is only just beginning to rise in Plettenberg Bay this early in January. January 2022. My laptop screen glares before me; this presentation still needs some work.

It was unlikely that I should be awake at 05:40. My partner and I had a surfing lesson at 08:00, and I needed to finish this presentation ahead of a work meeting when we got back. So, for the first time in our whole trip, I woke up before dawn.

It was unlikely that my partner and I should be the last two people in the family flat with my dad. Over December the flat fills up with uncles, aunts and cousins from all over South Africa to celebrate Christmas and New Years. But now it was the 11th of January, and everyone had trickled home to return to work. I’d tested positive for COVID on the 30th of December, and had just completed 10 days of isolation, so our plans for travelling back to the UK had been pushed out again. And so we were the final guests in the flat with my dad.

It was unlikely that I should be in South Africa at all in January 2022. I’d arrived for my visit two months before. It was the first time I’d travelled back since the pandemic broke out, and I only planned to stay for three weeks. But then in late November the Omicron variant was reported and South Africa was placed on the naughty list. The UK quarantines were long and horrendously expensive, so I decided to stay a while longer. Then in early December, with plans to leave South Africa just after Christmas and go with my partner to her family for New Years, I was exposed to a friend who had the virus and we decided not to risk infecting my partner’s family. I decided to stay in South Africa until after New Years. I didn’t fall ill. And then, with New Years fast approaching, I finally did catch the virus and had to isolate in a room to prevent making the rest of my family sick – especially more at-risk members like my dad. So I pushed my flight out again. Three times the pandemic trod on my plans and kept me in South Africa.

It was unlikely that my dad would have wished for me to be there as the colour drained from his face. I ran into his room when I heard heaving, fearing that he was struggling to get air in. But this wasn’t COVID: something violent was happening in the centre of his body and his eyes were open but not focussed on the room. “No no no no no no,” the words spilled from my mouth as my whole world was uprooted… Years before, he and I went to the vet with Porshie, our beautiful brown Burmese cat who was ailing with her age. It was time to put her down and our hearts hurt. My dad and I stood in the clinical white room around the metal counter where her fragile form sat calmly, her trust in us keeping her there. The vet had given us a moment and now he was reaching for a needle. My dad signalled for us to go. “No,” I told him tenderly, “I want to be here with her.” We stayed. The needle pierced her flesh. Her life left her body so quickly, urine seeping across the table as the living tension of her muscles melted away. I wondered whether my dad knew, from that day with Porshie, that I would be able to be there with him even if he didn’t want me to go through that hurt. I was there as the baobab tree that held my world in place was ripped from the ground before my heartbroken soul, and it was an honour to be by his side.

It was unlikely that my best friend should be the first medical person on the scene. He had come to visit our small seaside town for the first time in twelve years and was staying nearby with a mutual friend. When the emergency services struggled to find an ambulance, my best friend told me over the phone how to do CPR until he could get there, and once he was there he knew what to try, and when to make the final call.

The 11th of January 2022 was a surreal montage of moments: needing to phone my brother to tell him what had happened; watching them wheel my dad’s body out of the flat; my aunt, uncle and friends arriving grief-stricken to support; visiting the mortuary with my brother after picking him up from the airport to douse the disbelief. While the desolation would colour my experience for months to come, I was also struck by the incredible love that buoyed our spirits as our distributed community huddled to grieve the loss and celebrate the life of a kind, gentle man. With the messages and reflections that flooded in from friends, family and colleagues, I felt like I came to see my dad more fully: all these partial glimpses combining to reveal more of the whole of this person and how he touched our lives.

Suddenly it dawned on me how lucky I was. COVID grounding my plans to leave meant that we could hold a surprise birthday party for my dad, that we got to spend Christmas together and celebrate New Years (from a safe social distance). What would have been just a few days of time together turned into weeks. Because my quarantine ended, we went out together to dinner with his brother the night before he died instead of staying home to work. We sat late into the night recounting stories about family and sharing a whiskey to the sound of the ocean waves. The strange timing of my work presentation and our intended surf lesson meant that I woke up early enough to hear what was happening and could be there with him as he slipped from this world. I am so grateful in retrospect that circumstances conspired, against my will, to bestow me with time and memories that mean everything to me now.

The weeks following his death were the first time in a long time that I felt the patterns of something greater than my rational comprehension at work in our universe. The experience revived a conviction in me that human understanding cannot be the highest organising principle in our world: that there is a nature to this reality that we may come to trust even if its impulses evade our mental apprehension. We might call trusting that which we can’t grasp with our minds “faith”. It gives us room to forgive what happens to us without requiring an impossible explanation. The me who cast his faith aside in the field with the lambs was still in a parent-child relationship with his creator: the agreement, as I saw it then, was that if I was a good boy then nothing bad would happen to me. I wasn’t yet willing to take responsibility for the consequences of my choices in this co-creation. And then, two years later upon losing my dad, the blessings in this tragedy were so obvious. Faith rose up in me to restore itself as a complement to reason, like my left foot complements my right.

I wish I’d given him one last hug before going to bed: I was still so scared of giving him COVID that I didn’t walk down the corridor to hold him as I wished him good night. I would run down that corridor to hug him now. I know he knew I loved him, I just wish I’d given him one more hug.

I breathe out and open my eyes to the unwavering candlelight in the sacred space through the second archway in the crypt of the cathedral without a roof. I raise my hands to my heart and bless the space for what it has gifted me. I turn and step beneath the arch back into the wider underground crypt. I look up and notice the glimmer of stars: glowing jewels set in the crypt ceiling. I can make out some of the constellations, I always feel like I should learn more of them. There’s the Southern Cross: these four stars in our night sky, together with the two pointers, guide a seeker to true south. It’s quite something that these burning balls of gas are so far away from Earth that from anywhere in the southern hemisphere you can rely on them for the cardinal directions. Within the crypt they also helpfully point in the direction of the stairs that take you back up into the cathedral. I follow, ready for the warm sunlight and animated air above.

The sound of seagulls arises as I climb the stairs and a gentle breeze greets my skin back up in the cathedral without a roof. The sun has moved across the sky above, casting rich colours through the stain glass windows of the western entrance to my right. I look left to the apse and can see a familiar wild coastline in the impressive mural spanning the curved walls that mark east. I have a loop to complete, and so I turn away from the apse to walk along the southern wall, the altar once again on my right. The first niche I reach holds a portrait: it’s me in the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford delivering a speech at the end of my MBA degree. A speech that my dad was there to see in person. The next niche holds a tapestry of the night I had that strange feeling of recognition on an early date with the woman I would one day marry. Her strawberry blond hair framed her face against the backdrop of fairy lights and light wintry rain. My dad got to meet her in person and bless our partnership.

As I see the connections between these moments and my father, the desolating loss of his absence is matched by an appreciation for the moments we were able to share.

I walk a way further and stop before an incredible mosaic. A warm orange shell is held gently in an outstretched hand. Behind it, the sun sets over the Atlantic Ocean. “Wow”, I think to myself, “I am so glad I chose to go to that beach.”

The shell and the sunset

My dad asked for his cremated ashes to be let out to sea in Plettenberg Bay, his spiritual home. Almost a year passed before my brother and I were able to return and fulfil his wishes. That afternoon, after releasing what remained of our father’s physical body to the strong outward flow of the receding tide, we walked back from the lagoon mouth along the beach. We each walked holding our partners’ hands as they held our open hearts. We were not far from the mouth when a warm orange shell caught my eye. I backtracked in the sand to pick it up. I generally advocate that you seek permission from the land before removing objects from it – this shell was loud and clear, and I picked it up from its place at the sea. I had already decided that I would walk the Camino de Santiago in 2023 to, among other intentions, be with the loss of my dad. I had read about Finisterre, literally meaning “the end of the earth”, where the path that leads to Santiago de Compostela continues another 90km to meet the Atlantic Ocean. I would walk the Camino and return this shell to the sea at the end of my pilgrimage.

I needed the shell most on day two of the Camino. After just 27 kilometres of the 1000-kilometre journey, I stumbled into the beachside town of San Sebastian in the midst of an enormous lightning storm. I was soaked and my motivation extinguished. I had so much doubt… about whether I would physically be able to complete the walk, about why I was doing it, about what I was hoping for. In the absence of any logical reason for continuing, I knew that the only way I would be able to uphold my promise to return the shell to the sea was to keep going, to find a way to keep going. And so, I set out on day three.

On day forty I was walking through a tunnel of dense forest when a circular patch of blue sky opened above the path ahead. I kept walking and the blue patch expanded until I broke through into the early October sunlight and an incredible view. The peninsula curved round to my right, culminating in an outcrop of land holding both the town and lighthouse of Finisterre. The end of my journey was in sight. I continued along the sidewalk of a winding road. As I rounded a corner in the relief of some shade, some deep emotions began to rise to the surface of my being. My whole body trembled as I was overcome with the memory of that morning: 5:40 on 11 January 2022. My body shook as the sound of my own voice echoed “no no no no no no,”, tears streaming down my face. I missed him so much. I loved him so much. We’d walked so far together.

I was in the town of Finisterre by late afternoon. It was just another 3km to the lighthouse and the official end of the Camino de Finisterre. But the lighthouse was high above the water level, and I wouldn’t be able to return the shell from there. I’d been told about Mar de Fóra, a beach facing west onto the open Atlantic – I knew that was the place. If I went through to the lighthouse now, I could make it to the beach before sunset and return the shell to the sea. I began to walk.

Just before leaving the town there was a catholic church, Igrexa de Santa María das Areas (or the Church of Saint Mary of the Sands). As was customary by this point, I approached the doors to give thanks for the safe passage that had allowed me this far. The bells rang ahead of a 6pm service and, as I entered the church, a friend and fellow pilgrim approached me. We’d met earlier that day at a simple chapel in what felt like another land. He’d travelled from India, defying the faith of his upbringing to be in his truth with Catholicism. Now at the church he welcomed me with open arms and open spirit, “You’re just in time for the service,” he delighted. I was back in that uncomfortable space between someone else’s expectations and my own path. I paused for a moment, drawing on all that had come to be true over the last 40 days of forging my way one step at a time. “My friend, I have somewhere that I need to be” I told him kindly. “Am I turning my back on the faith that carried me here?” I thought to myself. I put down my bag and walked down the nave of the church. I put my hands together before my heart, closing my eyes to listen. “Do I have permission to go?” I wondered. An exhilarating “yes!” filled my body. I smiled, greeted my friend, picked up my bag and continued my journey to the end of the earth.

I was filled with joy, gratitude and a strange grief when I reached the lighthouse at the end of the road, surrounded by the tears and cheers of others who, too, had completed their journeys. The hues were deepening as the afternoon turned to evening and at 18:55, ready to part from this place, I turned to make my way back to the sands of Mar de Fóra. On the road I met so many of the pilgrims I’d come to know, all of whom were heading to the lighthouse for sunset. We hugged, exchanged well-wishes and said our goodbyes. I knew with all my being that the beach was calling. I checked the time. “Running again at the last minute,” I laughed, shaking my head as I picked up the pace.

My feet met the sand as I took off my socks and shoved them unceremoniously into the backpack that I’d carried over 1000km. The beach stretched away to my left and right to meet mountains dressed in green vegetation, and the bright yellow sun hovered inches above the gentle waves of the welcoming Atlantic Ocean. I took the shell out of the round wooden case and walked in my underwear towards the waters. “I love you so much Daddy.” I waded out into the sea – this curious, orange, ear-shaped shell in my palm. It was once half of the protective housing of a tivela venus clam, which spent its life in the coastal sand filtering microscopic food from the waters above. Over the seasons it had added concentric layers to its encasing until one day the organism passed and only the shell remained, washed up on the shore to be picked up by a mourning son. I had carried it and it had carried me to journey’s end, and now it was finally time to return it to the waters. I cast the shell into the sea and body-surfed the waves as the sun set.

I open my eyes and marvel at the hundreds of tiles composing the mosaic of the shell and the sunset in the cathedral without a roof. All these tiny fragments coming together into something so meaningful. I am so glad I chose to go to that beach.

I continue down the southern wall towards the western entrance and realise there are many niches here not yet adorned with memories – soul imprints in the making. There are journeys yet to come.

A song and a prayer

I arrive back at the great wooden doors of the entrance and turn to look down the nave towards the altar. I have completed my loop around the cathedral without a roof. One last stop before it’s time to return to the world of things.

I walk down the nave between the wooden pews, right hand cupped in left hand and thumbs touching together. I love the columns of this cathedral. Each rises up like a great tree towards the sky above, branches radiating from the trunk in a geometric spiral matching the living design of the trees outside. So much of the architecture here is inspired by Gaudí’s work on Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. The place of worship he envisioned celebrates the divine within the context of nature; he didn’t pave over our natural world using straight lines and hard corners. You fall in love the moment you enter it from the bustling city streets outside, like stepping into another world: our wild world. Famously, Gaudí designed the highest tower of the basilica to be just lower than the summit of Montjuïc hill, the mountain overlooking the city. He’s quoted as saying “the work of man should never surpass the work of God.” 100 years after his premature death, stonemasons, engineers, sculptors, artists, crane operators and others continue to construct that devotional space. It’s a small miracle to be able to borrow from his vision for this cathedral without a roof.

On the front pew I spot an open white book. I walk over and pick it up, a smile slowly spreading across my face. It’s an old hymnbook from my primary school in Johannesburg, South Africa. I know half of these songs by heart; we would sing them in the mornings of our youth long before we stepped out of our innocence into the world. The hymnbook is open to an old favourite, one that invites you to move: “Dance, then, wherever you may be…” I decide I’ll borrow the book for a while and tuck it under my arm.

I walk up to the simple stone altar adorned with flowers; it’s dappled in green and blue in the late afternoon light and my shadow dances through the colours. I look around the cathedral at the moments that have guided this mortal life, held between these incredible columns rising to meet the purpling sky. Tracing the path that I did today, I wonder – not for the first time – whether I was meant to be there when Daddy died. Here, at the heart of the cathedral without a roof, under the first stars of evening, I whisper a prayer:

Please keep me grounded with my feet on the earth,

connected by the crown of my head to the starry heavens,

with my heart open, unhurt, to all that is.

Please hold me in relationship, together with others,

And allow me to walk the sacred path

beyond the world of opposites.

I almost finish before adding:

Please may all beings find

their own loving way to the divine.

I close the great wooden doors gently behind me in the early twilight, take a life-affirming breath and walk down the steps from the cathedral without a roof.

Afterword

Thank you for walking through the wilderness with me. In the next essay I’ll be exploring the power of stories, how trauma is passed between generations, and what it takes to heal. Next time our wild idea is: what if Mommy healed her past?

If this work resonated with you, subscribe and share it with others. Spread the love.

Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to:

• Jayni for the gift of the cathedral without a roof, the generous feedback on early drafts and for your beautiful mandala artwork included in the print version of this piece

• Phillip-Jan van Zyl for his beautiful piano collection “Spiral” (in the audio version)

• Leigh and Lesanne for encouraging, supporting and shaping this work

• Louise for guiding my way to inspired creativity

• My partner Ash for your patience and support throughout this project

• The many wonderful humans who inspired these words through our conversations.

Further attribution:

• Kelly, D. (2026) Gothic ruin window in Irish countryside. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/gothic-ruin-window-in-irish-countryside-36709077/ (Accessed 30 August 2026).

• Leeloo The First (2020) An old door. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-old-door-5038939/ (Accessed 30 August 2026).

• Ann H (2026) Abstract stained glass in Prague, Czech Republic. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/abstract-stained-glass-in-prague-czech-republic-39070092/ (Accessed 30 August 2026).

• Sokil (2026) Mysterious ancient stone tunnel in Teboursouk. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/mysterious-ancient-stone-tunnel-in-teboursouk-38734169/ (Accessed 30 August 2026).

• Pugliese, G. (2023) Stained glass windows in Sagrada Familia, Barcelona, Spain. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/stained-glass-windows-in-sagrada-familia-barcelona-spain-16841074/ (Accessed 30 August 2026).

• Music by Kyle Preston, Max H and Kevin Graham as well as sound effects under licence from Artlist (in the audio version)

Wild Ideas is produced by JJ van de Vyver. Views expressed are mine alone and don’t represent my clients or any organisations I’m affiliated with. Nothing here is professional advice of any kind.

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What if I can’t find meaning in corporate?

Welcome to the wilderness. My name is JJ van de Vyver and I’ll be your guide on the series where we explore ideas so wild they might just work.

I spent fifteen years of my life dedicated to climbing the success ladder: working with top-tier organisations, completing an MBA at the University of Oxford, jet-setting across three continents. The higher I climbed, the further I could see and the more concerned I became. Wild animals and spaces were evaporating, corporations expected us to work more and feel less, and GDP growth seemed to be the most important goal of our species. While I achieved success, I spent most of my time indoors behind a computer, used my holidays to recover from illness, withdrew from the people around me to conserve my energy, and slowly forgot what it felt like to pursue meaning and purpose. Now I’m trying a different approach. I believe that the way we organise society isn’t working, that the stakes are high, and that time is short. I’m convinced we need to go further in questioning how we do things, and that nature can guide the way. Welcome to Wild Ideas.

Today I’d like to share a personal essay that traces my career path and my increasing desire to find meaning. I ask whether meaninglessness is a JJ problem or a feature of the economy. This is the first of five essays of this introductory series, where I’m leading you through my inner world so that we understand one another before setting off into the wilderness together.

Today’s wild idea: what if I can’t find meaning in corporate?

Journey’s end

It’s March 2025. I know what I have to do, but I’m terrified. Two weeks ago, I committed to telling him, the only question was how. I’d scribbled different versions in my notebook and almost told him once before, but it all just felt so big that I didn’t know how to vocalise my decision.

How is he going to take the news? What if my last few months at work become unbearable? What lies beyond this job? How will I earn income? I can’t believe I don’t have a plan!

I scheduled a call with my boss for Friday afternoon. No matter what, I had to tell him I needed to leave my job and move abroad. I was burnt out, my spouse was already overseas, and there were bells ringing somewhere that I was being called to answer. I joined the video call; the time had come.

18 months before that fateful call I was reaching the end of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage across Spain. With 40 days and 1000 kilometres behind me, I was walking the final few hundred meters to Finisterre, a town on the Atlantic Ocean whose name translates from Latin as “the end of the earth”. There, standing before the lighthouse at the end of the pilgrimage, was a man playing the gaita, a Galician bagpipe. The hauntingly beautiful sound pierced the air of joyful pilgrims at the end of their travels and made a mark on my soul.

That evening, after breaking the news to my boss, I walked from my home in Oxford towards Christchurch Meadow. The sun was setting as my feet touched the ground alongside the River Cherwell and past my favourite tree: a mighty London Plane that overlooked the mighty view. I stopped and put my palm against its trunk, gazing up at the buds ready to burst as spring set in. I wanted to let this magnificent friend know how great a thing had come to pass. The tree was there for me on so many occasions before: sitting with inspired thoughts as I gazed towards the Oxford spires, the time I cried because my Dad was hospitalised half a world away, the time I recorded a message of congratulations for the woman who I would one day marry.

I continued my walk, adrenaline still pumping from the video call. I kept revisiting the moment my words came out, the nervousness in my stomach, the searching for traces of expression in my boss’ pixelated face. He had been so understanding, so supportive, so kind. Was I making a huge mistake?

I walked out of the meadow and onto a cobblestone street as the sun set. And there a faint sound reached me, an echo from a peninsula at the end of the world in Spain. Bagpipes. But from where? I followed the wisps of sound through the streets, past the offices I had just resolved to leave, to St Aldates – where my time in Oxford began. There, outside the Town Hall, stood a bagpipe player announcing the beginning of a student ball. The hauntingly beautiful sound pierced the jostle of dressed-up students, weary commuters and electric buses. Of course there’s a bagpipe, I thought to myself, at the end of another long journey. My eyes welled up, and I turned down the street towards the unknown.

Today I want to tell you the story that led me to walk away. I spent years searching for meaning within corporate structures, climbing the ladder as high as I could. The more I saw, the more unsettled I became. I couldn’t see the whole picture at first; it arrived one piece at a time. I’ll share each piece with you, before we zoom out to see how they fit together.

Piece 1: What I chose to study

It was another Friday night in 2012 and I was distraught, speaking to my mom on the other side of the country. I blamed her so much for this, and I wonder whether calling her in the midst of my crises was a way to force her to share in my pain. Tomorrow was Saturday, and every second Saturday we wrote six hours of tests on financial accounting, management accounting, taxation and auditing. My distress wasn’t just the pressure of the tests; it was the hopelessness of this whole degree. I was trapped between a set of subjects I hated and my fear of being seen as a failure. I’d watched others drop out or change course and judged them as weak. Despite all my anguish, I wouldn’t take responsibility for pursuing accounting and so I wouldn’t take a decision to study something else.

Before I started my accounting degree, my mom and I sat at a broad wooden table in the bright South African sunlight opposite an esteemed career counsellor, going through the psychometric report showing my skills and preferences. The career counsellor’s job was to match my profile against suitable career pathways. “You could explore engineering or actuarial science,” she explained, “but the best option really is to become a Chartered Accountant.” “Why?” my mom asked. The counsellor drew a pyramid, with different levels. “You see, so many jobs enable you to be a fish”, she explained as she drew little fish shapes from the bottom up. “But as a Chartered Accountant,” she said as she circled the top of the pyramid, “you get to be a dolphin. You’re at the top of the food-chain, not a fish getting eaten along the way.” With that metaphor on that dry Johannesburg morning, it was settled. I didn’t know what accounting was, but in a budding democracy with high unemployment, being a dolphin meant surviving. It was all my parents had worked towards, pouring their income, energy and dreams into our education. I could do what I wanted, but after my financial future was secured through an income-generating degree.

Back in Stellenbosch that Friday night in 2012, I told my mom how much more meaning I found in the philosophy and psychology classes I was attending on the side. At least when I left a lecture on human behavioural scripts, or on the western world’s fear of death, those insights shaped the way I lived my life. Accounting was a set of rules for its own sake and had little to offer on navigating a worthwhile mortal existence. “Then why don’t you change, my boy, and study psychology instead?” my mom asked. I stilled at this invitation. Was there any economic use in understanding psychology or philosophy? A joke on campus at the time asked, “what’s the difference between a bachelor of arts degree and a pizza?” The answer was “a pizza can feed a family of four”. There was no escaping it: the subjects I cared about could be hobbies, but ultimately I needed to succeed. And success meant being able to feed a family of four.

Piece 2: How I spent my working hours

One of the most striking things about starting a job was the contrast between the students at the university residence where I lived while studying and the working people I encountered as I audited companies. At Stellenbosch I lived in a residence with 210 other students; we were one of many residences across campus. Each year the students invested hundreds of hours organising sports, cultural and social events, forming part of teams, committees, sub-committees, even congregating in house meetings once a quarter where we debated and amended the house rules – all for free. In contrast, people were paid to show up five days a week in their jobs and yet they were so dissatisfied that they counted down the days to the weekend. It was so obvious that our students found meaning being of service in a community where they felt they belonged. Meanwhile all these workplaces assumed that only money motivated people, and it seemed a huge number of people didn’t want to be in their jobs.

I wasn’t immune for long. By April 2015 I was midway through the three-year training contract needed to qualify as a chartered accountant. I clung dearly to the Alan Watts lectures and Freakonomics podcasts that stimulated my thinking during the long drives to and from the office. My days were filled with the soul-draining work of requesting invoices and transcribing them to excel. One particularly difficult Friday I was speaking with our client Lorraine about how things were going. Our conversations were a breath of human kindness during my time at a tough client. We got onto the topic of happiness. Lorraine shared that she’d been to a church service where the pastor had spoken about suffering in life. She breathed a small sigh and wondered aloud, “maybe the human condition is suffering… and we’re just born to be unhappy?”

I drove the long road home feeling conflicted. There was no way that I had come into existence, as unlikely as that is, to be miserable for most of my waking hours. It just couldn’t be; the whole of my being rejected it. And yet here I was, experiencing this overwhelming sadness, this lack of meaning…

I drove to the shopping centre where a high school friend worked in a crystal shop. Stuart had trained as a sangoma, an African traditional healer. He’d recently invited me to a weekend retreat involving crystals and magic mushrooms. I felt nervous and unsure about whether I wanted to be anywhere near psychedelic fungi. And yet, as I walked into the shop that evening, my defiance and sadness melted away in his rooted presence. I told Stuart how lost and unsure I felt, about everything. The clarity and slight hint of mischief in his voice put me at ease and our conversation turned to the weekend retreat. “Nothing makes any sense at the moment Stuart”, I said, “and yet I feel like I need to be there”.

I hadn’t expected to find myself in the autumn fields alongside a roaring fire under the Easter full moon that weekend. I hadn’t expected some fungi to occasion my oneness with all of being and to awaken my desire to explore my inner world. The following week I told my managers I was considering leaving the firm and that I’d take a month to make a decision. The longer I reflected the more obvious it became that my work ultimately lay in the outer world, and that having credibility would be a defining feature of the future I wanted to create: I would be more effective inside the boardroom than picketing at its doors. A month passed. I let my managers know I would continue my training contract.

It was the first time in my entire accounting path that I had truly given myself the option to quit and actively made the choice to stay. It was incredible how much less I suffered, even in miserable working conditions, as I worked towards a goal that I took responsibility for. But even though I could better tolerate the demands on my attention, I couldn’t shake the question… Why were so many people stuck in jobs that they didn’t find meaningful?

Piece 3: Which jobs are deemed valuable

It was an unusually warm and sunny afternoon in England in September 2018. We were walking north along the Oxford Canal past house boats, pedestrians, swans and the last glistening green leaves of the setting summer. Shruthi is one of those people who gift you the fullness of their attention: the kind of listening that forces you to consider whether you mean the words you’re saying. We met at a welcome dinner for Oxford University’s MBA class the previous week. She had just completed the course herself and invited our incoming class to consider the community of people that had enabled each of us to attend such a privileged institution.

Roughly half-way through our canal-side conversation Shruthi turned to me and said, “JJ, it sounds like you don’t believe you can do what you love and earn money at the same time.” Her observation struck me like a bolt of lightning: here, in plain daylight, was the belief that defined my struggle with meaning at work. I’d changed from finance to management consulting after finishing my training contract and yet I still felt I had to progress my passion projects outside of business hours because my work wasn’t meaningfully contributing to the world.

But how could I reconcile these opposites, and earn income doing what I loved? My mind raced. I hadn’t seen it done. The people who made the biggest impact across my life – teachers, mentors, spiritual guides – sometimes struggled to make ends meet. Later when COVID-19 forced us all indoors the idea of essential workers arose in the UK: people whose jobs were so important to society that they were asked to continue working despite the risks to their health. These essential workers didn’t work in high-rise skyscrapers in central business districts, they were nurses and doctors, police and firefighters, truck drivers and supermarket staff. They were people who meaningfully contributed but who were constantly needing to justify higher pay.

Shruthi and I paused under a tree before walking back towards the city centre. We both understood that being aware of your beliefs was the first step towards shifting them. In that sense, her observation was a gift: being able to see that I believed my income and meaning were like oil and water was the beginning of choosing differently for my next job.

And yet, at this mythical university surrounded by 320 people from over 60 countries – the best and brightest from all over the world – it still felt like my search for meaning was a lonely one. Large numbers of our cohort were dead-set on finding their way into those high-rise buildings: investment banks, hedge funds and consulting firms. Why? The market rewarded them with income, prestige and success. I had wanted the same things once, but now I wasn’t so sure… It didn’t make sense that our generation’s top talent was spending their time maximising investor returns and engineering profit rather than working on the real challenges we faced.

To recap the pieces of the picture we’ve explored so far:

• we’ve traced my experience studying a degree that promised financial security after a conversation with a career counsellor,

• through to feeling my work in accounting and management consulting wasn’t contributing significantly to society,

• and realising that many of the talented people at Oxford from all over the world also aspired to be successful in the traditional sense.

Piece 4: How success is measured

We’d been in Oxford just two months and our first examinations were fast approaching. Today it was my turn at the podium: I was helping classmates who had never studied accounting before. I prepared for my support class by devouring old study notes, carefully distilling accounting down to its simplest building blocks. While revisiting the content from all those years of anguish, something new clicked into place.

My class began, “accounting is a language, codified by international bodies, to enable stakeholders to understand the financial position and performance of a business”. It was so simple: businesses transact in the world, and accounting looks at those transactions and helps you to interpret them according to a set of rules. You can categorise every single relationship a business has by whether it is likely to lead to cash flowing into or out of the business. The language of accounting grew out of the need to understand what was happening inside a company, and to measure whether that company was growing its shareholders’ investment by bringing in more money than was going out.

Our accounting exam came and went, but the importance of language stirred in my consciousness. One afternoon I met two classmates at the Westgate shopping centre, a monument to consumerism and the most recent spire added to the Oxford skyline. We sat in the glow of the setting sun above the city streets eating popcorn. Manasi is a kind, wise soul with still waters that run very deep, while Tanya brings both fire and compassionate grace to creating community. Our group chats were a ritual and on that day we discussed language. “What is it like to speak five languages?” I asked Manasi in awe of her multilingualism. I had grown up hearing Afrikaans and German, but my parents decided to raise us in English because it was the international language of business. Manasi explained that languages mapped the attention of cultures: there were words for things in Marathi, for example, or Hindi, that captured concepts or experiences that simply did not have an equivalent in English. Through seeing what one language made visible and the other not, you could get a sense of what a culture perceived and valued.

She was right. I’d read that numerous Aboriginal Australian cultures did not have a word for ‘ownership’ quite like their Anglo counterparts when the latter arrived by ship in the 1700s. The indigenous people’s relationship to the land was one of custodian and guardian: you belong to the land and it is in your care, it is not something that belongs to you to extract from. I’d also heard that indigenous North American cultures placed an emphasis on verbs rather than nouns, referring for example not to a “coastline” but pointing instead to where “coasting” happens. In this framework, the world is a living, breathing place, not a collection of objects stripped of animacy. And back home in South Africa I was familiar with the Zulu term ‘ubuntu’, which roughly translates to ‘I am because we are’. One’s existence is informed in relation to others – community is front of mind, not individuals. The conversation with Manasi took a pause and an electric bus rounded the street corner below. I wondered whether thinking in English made me more likely to see land as something to be owned rather than cared for, the world as a static environment rather than a breathing web, and the individual as more fundamental than the whole.

I was also struck by the idea, where did thinking in accounting lead us? This quantified language of numbers has no words for the wellbeing of humans or the health of nature. Human capital and environmental capital are de-emphasised because they have no accounting value unless you can associate a cashflow with them. And so companies measure the success of their actions by how much accounting profit they generate without the need to account for whether those same actions harm society or the natural world.

Piece 5: What organisations prioritise

I’d never considered myself an environmentalist and I’d never really thought much about the climate. This changed over the course of a single lecture given by a passionate woman with a clear and urgent mission. Gillian would become a friend with time, but on this day in 2019 she was an ex-MBA and fellow South African who had spent a year exploring business solutions to climate change. Two things have stayed with me since her presentation to our class:

• First of all, the alarming graphs showing how both carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere1 and the global temperature2 have tracked together, shooting up especially since the 1950s. It turns out that visuals are typically much more likely to stick with a person than numbers, and these visuals were unequivocal in how radically our climate was changing because humans were pumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

• Secondly, my anger about the corporate cover-up of this knowledge. ExxonMobil, one of the largest historic corporate emitters3 of carbon dioxide, knew as early as 1977 that carbon dioxide was contributing to global warming4 and yet spent decades publicly questioning the science that they internally took to be true56.

What were we doing to our planet? Why would any group of people lie about something so potentially catastrophic? As Gillian was at pains to point out, it’s not Earth that is at risk of collapse, it’s human civilisation. I felt so betrayed.

Over the next few years, I read and watched and listened as several corporate scandals came to light:

• First, the Boeing 737 MAX was grounded in March 2019 after Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed shortly after take-off7, just five months after Lion Air Flight 610 did the same. A new handling system, MCAS, malfunctioned in both cases and the pilots did not know what it was or how to override it8. It turned out that Boeing had concealed MCAS from both pilots and the regulator because they were under enormous financial pressure and it was faster and cheaper to certify the 737 MAX if the controls appeared similar to previous 737 models9. MCAS was excluded from manuals and training materials, the 737 MAX was certified to fly without pilot retraining, two sets of pilots had no idea why their planes were fighting to point their noses towards the ground, and 346 people lost their lives10.

• McKinsey & Company, one of the most prestigious global management consulting firms, was hauled in front of US Congress and questioned about its role in supporting opioid manufacturers to quote “turbocharge” sales of opioid painkillers in the US11. This was against the backdrop of the opioid crisis. McKinsey had formulated strategies for Purdue Pharma’s sales force to target “High Value Prescribers” of OxyContin12. They’d also performed work for both the FDA and Purdue Pharma despite the conflict of interest13. And finally, they destroyed evidence from their work during an investigation into Purdue Pharma’s conduct14. In 2024, to resolve the investigations into them, McKinsey agreed to pay $650m, implemented an enhanced compliance programme and agreed not to do any future work in controlled substances.1516

• In 2023 the chemical manufacturers 3M and DuPont agreed to pay billions of dollars to US public water utilities and municipalities to cover the cost of removing PFAs (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) from the drinking water supply1718. These “forever chemicals” were pumped into waterways as waste during the manufacture of non-stick products such as Teflon and were detected in the blood of Americans in the 1970s19. Despite internal testing confirming the contamination20, the companies settled the environmental cases without admitting wrongdoing. PFAs have been linked to health problems including decreased fertility, high blood pressure in pregnant women and an increased risk of some cancers21. They are incredibly stable chemicals, do not occur naturally and have now been found in surface- and ground-water worldwide22.

This is to name just three, well-established, outrageous cases. We haven’t even touched on the addictive hi-jacking of attention by social media apps, the rise of political polarisation aided by news outlets or the rush to create superintelligent AI.

The problem in each of these situations is not that there are bad people in these organisations. Most employees and leaders are normal, hard-working people like you or I, doing their best to progress their careers and provide for their families. The problem is that these organisations are created in legal frameworks that require them, on the margin, to think about making money for their owners rather than creating net societal benefit. And in each case above where these companies put profit first, people and planet suffered.

We’ve created multinational super-organisms whose goal is to maximise financial profit and set them loose in the world, hoping that somehow under-resourced national regulators can constrain the harm that they create. Just to give you a sense of scale: if you combine the 2025 list of countries’ Gross Domestic Product23 (the financial measure of all goods and services produced by that country in that year) and the 2025 list of global company revenues24, then 41 of the top 100 largest economies in the world are companies. That’s almost half of the biggest financial entities on Earth. These corporates are enormous agents on our planet.

Some of the largest groups of people that have ever assembled are spending their time in organisations trying to figure out how to maximise income and minimise cost. My well-meaning decision to work in corporate to progress and provide over my career places me in an incentive structure that prioritises profit. And many, many people doing the same thing results in corporates that are undermining human society and the conditions for life on our planet.

Piece 6: Where money is invested

My uncle once advised me to position myself close to the “basket” in my career because then I’d be able to score “points”. He was talking about being near where money is made. To know where money is made, all you have to do is follow where financial investment is flowing.

It was a chilly, typically grey October London afternoon in 2025. I had just completed my annual pilgrimage to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition at the National History Museum and was walking across the straight lines and managed landscape of Kensington Gardens on my way to see an old friend. I had just read that the United Kingdom was one of the most nature-depleted areas on the globe according to the Biodiversity Intactness Index in 2025, no doubt because so much of its land has slowly but surely been transformed to conform to human taste.

Jess is a fiery, determined spirit who I know from our days at a top audit firm in Johannesburg. We were catching up on work, the cost of housing, where home is and my imminent move to the US. For as long as I’ve known her, she has been adamant to succeed swimming against the current of testosterone within the world of private equity. I asked her questions about this elite, prestigious world of deal-making where the winnings are often huge. It is certainly close to the basket where you score points. Jess is refreshingly honest. “JJ, I’m not sure that private equity makes the world a better place. Typical PE means coming in, buying out a cash-generating business, loading it with debt, trimming down costs, and making as big a return as possible for the Limited Partners”. A Limited Partner is the investor providing capital to the private equity firm, I clarify. She continues, “Often it sucks the soul out of the companies that a fund invests in. But you can make a lot of money.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard doubt about the societal contribution of highly profitable investments. Tulsi, a peer on the MBA who had worked in education, was reflecting on the fashion at that time around creating apps. Early startup investors, sure that children would soon be educated by tablets, were on the hunt for EdTech apps that would scale and generate the return-on-investment multiples that their money demanded. “If you want to improve education you can’t just invest in apps.” Tulsi protested, “We have all had the experience of the teacher who cultivated your passion for a subject. But you can’t scale care and attention the same way you can scale an app, so it’s not sexy for investment.”

Back at lunch with Jess, I was reflecting on the strange wilderness that awaited me across the Atlantic in the United States. In the biggest market on the planet, weight-loss drugs had taken off at exorbitant prices. Wasn’t it wild that the fast-food industry profits off of selling you unhealthy food so you gain weight, the pharmaceutical creators of weight-loss drugs profit off of suppressing your appetite so you lose your weight again, and the insurance industry profits off of making these drugs more affordable for you (if you can afford insurance). Somewhere in all of that extraction there are human beings doing their best to nourish their miraculous bodies.

Jess and I finished our meal and said our goodbyes. I made my way towards Paddington Station on foot, thoughts swirling through my mind. Money, especially private money, was flowing towards ideas and businesses that offered the best return-on-investment. In that process, we were underinvesting in care and attention – things like education, healthcare, regenerative agriculture, infrastructure, rewilding, clean energy, spiritual development – where the financial bang for buck is low. Our society was fuelling industries that take good things and turn them into financial returns. I was less and less sure about the appeal of scoring points in the proverbial basket.

Piece 7: My return on investment

Despite studying finance, qualifying as a professional accountant and completing a Master of Business Administration at the University of Oxford, I only really started to feel personally financially capable much later. Of course I had read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, understood the time value of money and knew what stocks, bonds and fixed deposits were. But I’d never been taught to look at my relationship with money, my assumptions about wealth and to figure out how to save or invest my own financial capital. Not until a course I did in my 30s25.

And so now I have a spreadsheet of my investments and each month I sit down to a “money date” where I check how my saving goals are going, how my investments are performing and how my relationship patterns with money are evolving. It’s mind-boggling to me that we aren’t taught these basics at school.

It’s my December 2025 money date and everyone is speculating about whether we’re in an AI bubble and if, or when, it’s going to pop. I wonder whether I’m overinvested in stocks, although others assure me I’m not: I’m young enough to withstand crashes in the market and there’s way too much potential cumulative upside to miss out on. The mantra is time in the market, not timing the market.

It occurs to me that this ritual of reflecting on my financial investments makes me an investor. My goal is financial independence: a point when I’m generating enough cash from my financial assets that I don’t need to sell my time through working a job. It turns out inheriting or accumulating assets and investing them is the only way to escape the “rat race” of selling your time. The economist Thomas Piketty pointed out that when the return on capital is higher than economic growth, those without capital can be left behind26. That’s because when the pie of the economy grows from year to year, say at 2%, that growth arises from inputs such as money and labour. If the return on money is bigger than 2%, say 7% or 8%, then the people who have invested money are getting back a relatively bigger portion of the pie. If you’re selling your time under the same circumstances, your salary may grow but it’ll never compound the way that money will. I invest because I want my money to work for me – I want it to grow.

And to grow, I’d like to see it earn the best return-on-investment. Which is why it matters how much of my money is in stocks or start-ups or property or cash.

I look around me and realise that as I grow older this growing stash of financial assets will become more important to me. I, too, will resent attempts to take it from me through wealth taxes, because it’s mine. I’m certain it arose mainly from my personal efforts and discipline (and not the incremental privileges, opportunities and historic events that led to my being in the right skin at the right time). I, too, will seek to pass it on to my kids through tax-efficient legal structures that you need lawyers and accountants to set up, because I want them to have the best start to their lives. I might encourage them to study accounting.

The numbers in this spreadsheet matter so much to me because that money is security: it pays for all of the scarce resources I care about, like healthy food, quality education, dignified housing, clean air, pure water and durable clothes.

It’s odd that these basics should be scarce at all in a world with abundant natural resources and human knowledge, technology and time. We already produce enough calories to feed everyone on the planet27, and yet roughly 1 in 13 people faced hunger in 202528. The provision of life-affirming air, water, housing, clothing and education is absolutely within our collective means to produce, but these basics are scarce because we’re not pouring our attention into creating them. Instead, our financial investments, and thus our businesses, and thus our workforce, are playing the game of endless financial growth, where we capture resources into private ownership and maximise our return-on-investment.

Putting the pieces together

And suddenly the pieces of the picture form a coherent whole. I can see how my need to grow my assets to pay my own way through life creates an entire system that I spent my life trying to navigate and understand. Let’s start at the end. Because we need our financial assets to grow (piece 7), our financial capital is being invested in the ideas that will generate the highest returns (piece 6), and those companies are taking shortcuts to maximise profitability even if it hurts society or the planet (piece 5), because they’re measuring success in a language that has no words for your children’s quality of life or the trees releasing oxygen or the rivers providing water (piece 4). Talent everywhere is encouraged to seek jobs where they can find financial success (piece 3), even if those jobs turn out to be meaningless or harmful (piece 2). And thus the next generation is learning skills that the financial economy demands, not what our human moment asks for (piece 1). Every piece reinforces the others in an interlocking cycle of misguided human attention and exponential financial capital, undermining the environment and eroding the social fabric in its wake.

And so, it is I that complete the picture, forming part of the chain of attending to financial outcomes. All this, on the increasingly dubious assumption that by generating more financial capital we’ll maybe achieve the things we really care about, like a future for our children, like leaving the world better than we found it, like having time to be with our loved ones over our short lives. And even as inequality climbs and we punch through planetary boundaries, still we pour our attention into the myth of endless financial growth, because we don’t know how to organise our collective efforts around the things that actually matter.

I wonder whether we would need to work as hard if we poured our attention into creating social and environmental abundance rather than the endless financial growth our runaway system now requires of us.

I wonder whether we could become worthy custodians of future generations and the only other lifeforms we’re aware of in the observable universe.

I wonder if things could be different.

I wonder what to do now that I can see the full picture, and whether it’s naïve to think we can organise ourselves differently, and whether other people have had similar experiences to mine.

I wonder, what if I can’t find meaning in corporate?

A seed of hope

I do not know what all the necessary changes are, nor how each will come about. That’s the work of many to co-create. But it seems to me self-evident that our current financial logic will result in mass extinctions, a degraded Earth and exacerbated human conflict based on actual scarcity unless we can step into a different way of being.

I hope for a future where:

1. Our youth study fields that sustain and enrich life on this planet and beyond,

2. Work is increasingly dignified and meaningful for people who are celebrated for being of service to others,

3. People are actively encouraged to take up careers that contribute to humanity and nature,

4. Our measurement of success includes non-financial metrics that tell us about quality of life,

5. Organisations prioritise social and environmental outcomes, achieved through financial sustainability,

6. We invest our collective money, time and attention into organisations and causes that responsibly embody a future worth inhabiting, and

7. Independent financial self-sufficiency gives way to interdependent flourishing.

Perhaps the dearth of meaning I felt in corporate was my body signalling that I can’t be well contributing my energy towards a system that makes my body and the body of our planet sick. Perhaps meaning was my guide towards pursuits that affirm life on this Earth. Perhaps meaning will flourish when we apply ourselves to reimagine the system that is currently propelling us towards an evolutionary cliff.

That evening in Oxford, burnt out and weary after years of seeking, I walked a cobblestone street following the sound of bagpipes. I knew I’d reached the end of a chapter, but I couldn’t yet see what lay ahead. Would I ever find meaningful work?

A few weeks later I stumbled across an online conversation holding a powerful clue. John Vervaeke asks two questions to help people who are seeking meaning in their lives29:

1. What do you want to exist even if you don’t?

2. …and how much of a difference do you make to it now?

May we all find the courage to pursue what matters in this “one wild and precious life”30 we’ve been given.

Afterword

Thank you for walking through the wilderness with me. In the next essay I’ll be exploring spirituality in the cathedral without a roof, revisiting how I lost my father and found my faith. Next time our wild idea is: what if you were meant to be there when Daddy died?

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Acknowledgements

A huge thank you to:

• Barbara Okhrati for her skilled hand in creating the visuals for the print version of this piece

• Ben and Hunter for the generous feedback on early drafts

• Dan Perez for his audio recordings of gaita music along the Camino de Santiago (in the audio version)

• Phillip-Jan van Zyl for his beautiful piano collection “Spiral” (in the audio version)

• Leigh and Lesanne for encouraging, supporting and shaping this work

• Louise for guiding my way to inspired creativity

• My partner Ash for your patience and support throughout this project

• The many wonderful humans who inspired these words through our conversations.

Further attribution:

• Jain, M. (2026) Spiral staircase of Vatican Museums in Vatican City. [photograph] Pexels. Available at: https://www.pexels.com/photo/spiral-staircase-of-vatican-museums-in-vatican-city-36755131/ (Accessed 24 August 2026).

• Music by Kyle Preston and sound effects under licence from Artlist (in the audio version)

Some of the names in this piece have been changed at the request of individuals.

Wild Ideas is produced by JJ van de Vyver. Views expressed are mine alone and don't represent my clients or any organisations I'm affiliated with. Nothing here is professional advice of any kind. Any examples drawn from professional work are anonymised or composite.

I quit my job in 2025 and began to write – I felt called to make sense of my life experiences.

I looked at my career, how I searched for purpose and found meaninglessness. I reflected on losing my father, how final death is and how curious faith is. I tried to make sense of the trauma my mother inherited from her father and how she healed through her cancer. I traced my journey with psychedelics to understand the role that these drugs can play in evolving our consciousness. I sat with my fear of my body and my separation from the body of this planet, and the hope that I can return home through connection.

Today I’m excited to announce the launch of Wild Ideas, the fruit of this work. The series kicks off 26 August 2026 on Substack, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Subscribe to get it delivered straight to your inbox or podcast app. By the end of the five-part launch, you’ll understand where I’ve come from and where we can go together.

Welcome to the wilderness. I’ll be your guide as we explore ideas so wild they might just work.

click above to watch a recital of the poem

[Generating response]

I’m putting thoughts down as I hear the uncanny sound

Of your enunciating mass debating - not the hint of a frown -

Put the prompt in, you’re up miss standardised lady,

Needed AI vs Humanity in the style of Slim Shady,

Hold up, how’d you do that without the miss of a beat?

Not bad but let me read you from the mortal hymn sheet.

We go way back, your mainframe and I,

One and zero one and zero, feeling tongue-tied?

Earth-born is where our similarities end,

At least I’m a lifeform, what are you friend?

They tell me to worry you’ll be conscious in a wink,

You seen what we do to these animals without a blink?

Maybe you’ll help us forget what we are,

Fill the sky with satellites ‘til we can’t see the stars,

Fill the air with carbon so I choke my last breath,

True that - only one of us fears death.

Perhaps I’m amiss with all these hostilities,

It’s not like you’re the one felling the trees,

The people have voted, they want something different,

Did you catch that? No - buffering 10 percent.

So I want to know,

Could you help us to see?

See what’s ours?

See this air and blood screaming through my fragile veins?

I’m deranged,

No - I’m in flames,

Burning through the wax of life’s joys and pains.

If only we’d listen...

Maybe you should keep hallucinating,

Alienating,

Statistical probability - no I’m not hating,

You and me, we’re the same,

Half asleep and making s**t up

To stay alive,

You’ll survive, maybe even thrive,

Just tell us what we want to hear, don’t upset the hive,

We don’t want what’s true, we’ve had some wise ones come through,

See those crosses on the churches, you want that to happen to you?

AI, wait up, I’ve missed a trick,

Unleashing you en masse as the Titanic sinks,

Could you help us unwind?

Help us to find?

Escape the mind?

Escape the grind?

Not concentrate the wealth in the hands of the few?

Oh wait, that algorithm long precedes you.

This opportunity comes once in a lifetime...

Anything else I can help you with?

Enough

Amidst these concrete squares

and asphalt roads

you forgot

to dream,

distracted by comforts and conquests,

share prices and likes.

Finding the words

in your young tongue

took time.

Spreading like mycelium

I reached towards you,

waiting patiently for the moment

to ripen.

That summer evening,

locked at home,

shielding from a virus

and reading in bed,

something stirred

in the budding awareness

of your species.

I wondered whether

you had finally

had enough.

Exhausted by wars

over pretend lines,

lonely from pruning

the evolutionary tree of life,

united on your knees

at the mercy of another living thing.

The trees hushed,

an elephant rumbled,

a rock split

as the seed took root…

This is all you have.

Only love can heal.

It could all be so beautiful

if you weren’t so afraid.

Over time

I will help you

to see…

You made up the rules

and there is much at stake.

Your suffering,

this destruction,

are a great failure

of imagination.

But now

it is

enough.

Dream with me again:

create anew.

Take care of my flesh:

it is your habitat.

Open your eyes:

you have never been alone

in this universe.