An Opening Note for my Website

“I don’t know exactly when it started - that question of whether we’ve lost something essential. […] something fundamentally human.”

It was somewhere halfway through my journey in Vietnam, on the edge of a village that only seemed to exist in the morning light, when I became quiet enough to notice something I might otherwise have passed by. Not a grand insight, not a mystical revelation - rather a subtle shift. Something that unfolded between the way the rice field reflected the sky and the way my feet touched the ground. A fleeting second in which it felt as if the boundary between myself and the surroundings briefly gave way. As if I was being drawn into something that had always been unfolding. Not a moment of knowing, but a moment of being moved along.

I remember not writing anything down. No analysis, no observation. Just breath. And yet, perhaps that was the moment this space began.

It might sound vague, and I know that puts me on thin ice - especially as an academic. But that is precisely the space I want to dwell in: the thin layer between clarity and confusion, between knowing and feeling, between concept and contact. I’m not writing here to prove anything, but to evoke something. A way of being, perhaps. A way of seeing, listening, and being present in a world that we too often approach only as an object of study or a problem to be solved.

I don’t know exactly when it started - that question of whether we’ve lost something essential. Not something tangible, like biodiversity or clean air (though of course we’re losing that too), but something fundamentally human. Something in our posture, our relationship to the life around us. As if we’ve gradually forgotten that we are part of a greater whole. As if we’ve separated ourselves, onto some imagined island of rationality and control. And from there, we’ve begun to speak of “nature,” “the environment,” “the climate” - as something outside ourselves, something to manage or save. As if it wasn’t also about us.

This space is my attempt to come closer again. Closer to what I sometimes felt as a child when I ran through the rain, or picked green beans in the garden with my father. Closer to the sense that the world isn’t made of separate pieces, but forms a living whole - and that we, as humans, are not its directors, but its participants. Co-players, co-inhabitants, co-responsibles.

I don’t want to pretend to be the an expert. I write here as a human being. A person who happens to be doing a PhD, but who increasingly wonders what science would look like if we brought our skin, our breath, our wonder and our grief into the process of knowing. A person who long believed in the power of definitions, but now finds more value in silence. A person who sometimes cries at the sight of a sea urchin, or laughs at the howler monkey in human gym behavior. A person who is searching.

What you will read in here are not absolute truths. They are observations, memories, thoughts, and questions. Some arise from fieldwork in faraway places, others from walks along the river where I played as a child. Sometimes I quote philosophers, sometimes my own confusion. I’ll tell you about my struggle with structure and my longing for fluidity. About the tension between spirituality and science. About what it feels like to work within an academic system that demands objectivity, while everything in your body longs for connection.

This is not a manifesto, but an invitation. To pause for a moment. To feel how the world breathes - with or without us. And to ask again: what does it mean to be human, among all that lives?

If there’s one message that will keep echoing through these pages, it is this: Maybe knowing isn’t something you can possess. Maybe it’s something you participate in.