Biomimicry
Finding meaning, purpose and inspiration in nature
Use me, God.
Show me how to take who I am,
who I want to be, and what I can do,
and use it for a purpose greater
than myself.
-a prayer by Martin Luther King Jr.
It was moving to receive so many of your emails and messages last week with your inspired ideas of how you intend to participate more fully and aligned to serving the greater good. Thanks to those of you who took the time to contemplate, take action, and comment -it encourages me to keep writing these posts! So many of us think we don’t have time so we scroll through our phones for hours a day and merely scratch the surface of the great content out there and feel entertained, but it can leave us feeling empty and always wanting more. I’m glad you can consciously make time each week to digest things in depth and to drill down more deeply to embody the possibilities.
One question came up from a few of you that ties into our current theme and has been probably the most asked as a coach and a friend: “Nona, do you believe that we all have a unique purpose? How can I find mine and does it always mean doing something that serves the whole? What if it’s just for the benefit of my family?” Good questions. I thought maybe I could write a bit about that today.
Have you heard of the term “Biomimicry”? It originated from a book published in 1997 by the brilliant Jenine Benyus, which in case you’re wondering is defined as “the conscious emulation of life’s genius”. Her life’s work has been used to inspire companies, engineers, and designers to solve problems with the innovative practices found in nature. If we have a problem, we can ask “What in the natural world has already solved this problem"? We can emulate organisms or animals and even plant life to find solutions to our problems.
As Jenine says in her book “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature”:
We are surrounded by geniuses. Nature solves problems and performs what appear to us as miracles in every second, all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly creating conditions conducive to life.
Jenine tells a story of taking some of her clients to the Galáppagos islands. She likes to take them to beautiful places for inspiration. “We need to get dirty and take a closer look at genius at work” I once heard her say in an interview. Her company’s compass statement made me smile… “muddy knees and epiphanies”.
Jenine’s clients (wastewater engineers) were confused about what they were doing there and they were resistant to the trip. She took them out on the boat and asked them “what do you guys do?” and they responded that they filter stuff out of water.
So she responded:
“Well, then let’s go snorkeling because everything in this ocean is flitering salt out of water because it lives on fresh water and it lives in saltwater. Everything is a membrane”. That got their attention. Later on as she walked by one of the engineers in a mangrove who was a pretty buttoned up guy, she noticed he was crying. He had tears streaming down his face and he said “how is it that I’ve been doing this work for 30, 40 years and I’m a desalination expert. I filter salt from water and this plant has its roots in saltwater and it’s solar powerd and it’s desalinating. I'm crying because its beautiful and no one ever told me.”
Innovation, as we know, is not always “progress”, and in many of our own inventions, we’ve created more harm than good.
A quick example is our food system. We’ve innovated our food and we’ve turned it into something that comes out of cans and boxes which we thought was considerable progress. Is it just me or is it a bit absurd that we talk about “farm to table” like it’s some incredible invention and charge a lot of money for it? We’ve gotten far away from the real source of our health and our wealth.
We seem to have successfully separated ourselves from nature and our divine source of interbeing and many of us at some point in our life can begin to feel a deadening. We live in concrete jungles. In Toronto, in the name of progress and building more homes there has been a Bill passed that will effectively remove the power of Conservation Authorities (CAs) to regulate development that negatively impacts wetlands and waterways. The opposite of creating conditions conducive to life.
We feel like we’re wilting and less and less fulfilled with our work or life and we just can’t pinpoint exactly what would help make us feel better. It’s no wonder we’ve lost our way and are feeling so disconnected from nature and each other. It’s not just what’s happening in our own lives, it’s ALL of it and we can sense it.
I once heard Marianne Williamson speak and she described a study in Africa where they discovered that in chimpanzee populations, the same percentage of chimps exhibit the same symptoms of depression as our human population. They exhibited similar depressive behaviors like a loss or gain of appetite and withdrawal from the group or play. About 23%. In the research study they separated those depressed chimps from the rest and what do you think happened?
I guessed that 23% more would become depressed.
No. They all died. That 23% of chimps played a valuable role in their community. They were the early warning system for all the chimps and were more sensitive than other chimps. They could sense when a storm was coming when danger lurked and they felt it and it was their purpose in the group.
It wasn’t a mental illness, it was a gift. That is not how we see our malaise at all. That blew my mind and had me wondering if so many of us are feeling ill at ease, depressed, and anxious for a reason.
This is all related to our purpose and what Rudolf Steiner called our “pre-birth intention”.
I have one. You have one. We all do.
One of my teachers Dr. Robert Holden calls it a “golden thread” that tugs on our hearts and pulls us along. It goes with us wherever we go, even when we feel lost and we’re struggling to help us find our way and get us back on track.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strong pull of what you really love. ~Rumi
In Robert Holden’s recent book “Higher Purpose”, he brilliantly outlines a distinct three-level purpose that ALL of life on earth shares that I found helpful.
It applies to us, to animals, and even to plants. It operates like a trinity, each distinct and yet connected to the other operating as a whole in a healthy system:
Our unique purpose.
A shared purpose with others.
A greater purpose.
Our unique purpose may in my own case be to care for my family and create inspiring materials to help others connect to their true nature. A bee, dolphin, or whale’s unique purpose may be the individual role they play in their hive or pod like protecting the Queen bee or the nursery of young dolphins a pod. An individual tree’s unique purpose may create shade, a home for squirrels and birds, or food for the local ecosystem.
Our shared purpose might be to serve our greater community, for me for example to write this substack each week and put out some positivity and hope into the world. As for the bees, whales, and dolphins, they are rarely seen on their own. They live in a community and care for one another. Dolphins in the wild use tools and pass that knowledge down to further generations. For example, they will attach sponges to their snouts to protect themselves while foraging for food. The tree’s shared purpose may be to clean the air by taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen in the air to help make the atmosphere hospitable to all of life.
Our greater purpose is the big-picture stuff. For me to evolve spiritually and to spend my life learning and demonstrating how to be a force for love, transcend fear, and humbly serve to promote peace on earth. For the bees, dolphins, and whales, their greater purpose may be to pollinate the flowers to help bring them to fruition, or to clean the ocean for all marine life and to balance the food chain, and maintain the ecosystem. A tree’s greater purpose may be to be a part of a healthy forest. To feed other trees through their root systems and maybe even to support our human species by giving all they receive.
This 3-pronged concept for our purpose really helped me see the bigger picture of how our purpose as adults is not entirely about what we do with our time as a hobby or for a J-O-B to make an income to provide for our own families. It’s also about who we’re being in our communities and how we’re showing up to serve the health of our whole organism.
When we’re all aligned to our true nature, we all fit together like cells in a body all of us in service of the whole we naturally become each other’s keepers by playing our roles to the best of our ability.
That reminds me of a key misunderstanding that so many of us were taught in school and seem to have built our entire society around and well, let’s clear it up right now…
In the Origin of the Species, Darwin never said “survival of the fittest”. He didn’t originally say fittest…he said FIT. Which means FIT to place, fit your community.
Darwin understood in his studies of natural selection that organisms don’t just move into a place and take over like a colonialist. They co-create a place and then the place creates them, and then they create the place. It seems misguided that we think we can even manage our natural resources. We’re missing the point that we in fact ARE a part of nature’s ecosystem itself.
Herbert Spencer, who was a political scientist and philosopher was a populizer of Darwin’s ideas about the human social sphere which was called social Darwinism. Darwin’s publishers eventually added Spencr’s words starting with the fifth edition of his history-making work, which is the edition most of us learned from, but I think it’s refreshing to reframe it back to his original that the ecological calling to us as a species is to orient around the genius that is here now to mentor us and is conducive to all life.
This is a relief to me. It aligns with spiritual teachings that we live on something that is competent and was created “good”. We’re part of it and we’re also “good”. We can heal and we have all we need to do that when we mimic life’s genius so let’s consider making that a part of our solutions for everything we do including uncovering our life’s purpose.
“You don’t create your mission in life- you detect it”. ~ Victor Frankl
In my experience, if we use our intellects and egoic desires to find our purpose like it’s some intellectual exercise we need to do separately from our life experience, it will often lead us astray on a wild goose chase since the mandate of the ego as outlined in “A Course In Miracles” is “seek and never find”.
It’s more natural than that. It’s all around us ready to be detected. The abundant clues are waiting for us to see them when we get down on our knees in the dirt and live our lives gently drawn to what feels good, the clues keep quietly presenting themselves every day wherever we go right from our first breath. We seek beauty and goodness.
This reminds me of a story…
My parents had a 1971 set of hardcover books called “The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom”. I used to sit at the end of our hallway farmhouse with a few of them on my lap looking at the covers and pictures inside for hours.
This is a picture of the very same edition. My favorite book was the one on the top, the second on the right with the blue sky, and the long printed neck of the giraffe. I can vividly remember the moment I imagined feeling the possibility that I might even see one in real life one day in the wild.
The golden thread tugged at me looking at those images and a seed was planted.
Why the giraffe and not the ladybug or the monkey? I’m not sure. That’s just my own particularity and interest. I’m drawn to it. It’s unique to me. Not something we need to dissect, it’s just innate in us.
Years went by, my love of the natural world grew and I became a Geography teacher and had no idea that I would be coming back full circle to my work today or how it all fits together. It’s like we can’t see the bigger picture from where we stand, we need to have faith and keep following the crumbs.
At Queen’s University in my 4th year, I visited the placement officer one day in the teacher’s college to let him know that I’d be interested in doing my final teaching practicum in Africa if something came up and he said immediately: “Great timing! I normally go to a conference for the Association of International Schools in Africa every year myself but I can’t this year so how about you go for me instead? I’ll get you connected with some principals to help you find places to live, you can do your placement in Uganda and there’s an international children’s book fair to attend as well.”
Say what? Blink. That just happened so easily. Almost magical.
Months later, there I was in an open-top van driving on a dusty road in Kenya just outside of Nairobi only 1 day after arriving and the vehicle I was in came to a complete stop in the middle of the road. I turned my head to see what was causing the traffic delay and there he was…
The most beautiful giraffe just doing his giraffey thing smoothly and peacefully sauntering across the road.
It was such a meaningful moment. The brown-spotted gentle giant slowed and suddenly stopped mid-way across the road. He turned and looked right into my eyes and I had to blink back tears and all of the hairs on my arms stood up. Someone beside me actually even said, “I think it’s looking right at you Nona”. Then in a flash, I remembered the encyclopedias that I had totally forgotten about from 2 decades earlier. It felt so good, like a “take note” kind of moment.
There’s a beautiful Hebrew word “selah” that refers to a voluntary or intentional pause for reflection. A moment that feels Divine. Something is revealed to us that transforms our perspective. This was definitely that. This was also before iPhones but I managed to grab my cheezy little camera with the old-school role of film and quickly snapped this…
That was the beginning of a grand adventure not just in Africa but in my life of associating what ideas I place in my mind and how I can create future experiences by focusing on what I love now and drawing that experience towards me at some future date.
One more quick story to make a point about how we can all find our purpose...
I took a break from teaching in Kampala and headed out to visit the mountain gorillas in the Virungas, the volcanic mountains bordering the countries of Uganda, Rwanda, and at the time Zaire (DRC: Democratic Republic of the Congo today). This was about 30 years ago so it wasn’t very well organized safaris and guided tours that they have there today.
Needless to say, after a harrowing journey to get to the mountain area (involving getting lost in the middle of nowhere at night, hearing gunfire, bribing border guards to let me in the country even though I paid and pre-arranged a legit visa, having my Tevas stolen at gunpoint and watching horrified as a rat tail disappeared into a hole in the cement floor that was supposed to be my bathroom) I made it to the area with a few other weary world travelers and our guides tired but excited to find the mountain gorillas in their natural habitat.
The trackers led us into the jungle with their machetes methodically swinging back and forth to help clear a path and guns poised on high alert to scare off any unfriendlies and they hacked a way through the thickets of greenery. We hiked up steep embankments and slippery mud I can remember silently wondering to myself (like every child on every road trip ever) how much further?
The tracker’s essential method is to go to where they were last seen and then do the leg work to find fresh feces and follow their senses from there by holding an image of them in their mind’s eye, they are led. It takes as long as it takes and they don’t guarantee a sighting, they are wild animals but they are very good at what they do and the gorillas are accustomed to jungle visitors. After several hours of seeking we decided to take a rest and sat and soon after we came to the realization that we were the ones being watched.
The gorillas had surrounded us in a circle formation and were hiding in the greenery.
It seems they had found us, not the other way around. We stayed low to the ground so as not to challenge the silverback, looked down, and didn’t attempt to touch them.
We just sat quietly and observed as instructed.
Again, apologies for the grainy old photos but I wanted to give you a feel for the wildness of it. There was no path, no way to indicate where to go. It felt like we took the road never traveled.
It was another dream come true. I had seen the movie “Gorillas in the Mist” when I was 18 and again, had a “moment” or felt the pull to have that experience and here I was deep in the jungle about 5 short years later having another “Selah” moment that filled me with awe and wonder.
It was incredible to sit in the midst of the most gigantic beautiful animals in their habitat. We watched them eat, and their babies play and one baby tugged on my leather necklace with a wooden elephant and tugged on my braid.
This is pretty much what it’s like for us to find our purpose.
If we align with what makes us feel alive, to the good, the beautiful, and get out and live our lives and do what brings us joy even when it gets tricky and there are challenges blocking our path but if we feel convicted and we keep going, IT will (eventually) find us.
We can think we know what we’re supposed to do and intelligently plan away and research or buy the books, set goals, save money, and ask the right questions in our journals, but that’s not what this is.
We need to experience it for ourselves. To allow ourselves to be a bit more impulsive.
Since my visit to the Virungas, I also like to remember that when fresh “sh*t” comes across our path we know we’re getting close. It will help guide us if we listen. We can shift course, change and adapt as we go. It often just takes a tiny shift or turn to find our way.
Have you ever watched a fly on your window or screen caught inside your house and even though the door is wide open it can’t seem to find its way to freedom?
I actually feel bad watching them struggle. They keep repeating the same pattern of trying or buzzing harder into the window to head the way they are where it appears there is a way out to the light, but they are stuck and eventually, they may even drop dead from exhaustion. We can try to force or swoosh them but it stresses them out and they just become more frantic.
I’ll admit that I have tried to do Jedi mind tricks and see if I can energetically get them to do a quarter turn and see the open doorway just off to one side… just a wee quarter turn and they will be able to end their suffering and live a full fly life and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
We’re a bit like those flies.
Our egos can keep us looking the wrong way to “find” our purpose.
Steiner called the ego the “narrow self”, and I think that’s such a good description. We become narrow-minded, on a track where we think we know what we need and we suffer but instead of taking responsibility for it we blame others for our life circumstances and stay stuck like the fly on our patio doors.
When the fly stops and gets still and uses its mouth or palpus to feel its way it can sometimes find another way to freedom. Just like we can stop and take a beat from our routines. A solo trip. A sabbatical. Or maybe we lose our jobs and temporarily stop buzzing about and sit and look around to see or feel if there is another or a better way for us to exist. Just when we least expect it we see it, another epiphanic clue and we find a better way.
We begin to feel deeply passionate about something we love, or injustice in the world that we soon come to realize others don’t give two hoots about. Why? Because that’s our work to do.
It energetically feels like a bell ringing YES- go there, get off the couch and try that meditation class, take that course, or call him back before our mind comes back online with its habitual fear and very strong opines trying to keep us buzzing on the same old screens feeling stuck and trapped.
Just a quarter turn is all it takes to shift how we perceive ourselves and how life works.
As Jung taught pay attention to your life, the synchronicities. It’s beyond all of the small self’s preoccupations and all that can elude us until the time is right and when we are willing and have the eyes to see it. We stop looking so hard outside of ourselves and start living this “normal” or natural more instinctual life.
We have misunderstood so much about our true nature, it’s no wonder we’re so confused. The Latin root for the word vocation is “vocare”. It is one of those words that gets a bit lost in the English translation. It doesn’t merely mean employment or occupation the way it says it does in the dictionary, it means to call, to invite, to summon. Jung who was fluent in Latin described that having a “vocation is to be addressed by a voice”. A voice that I finally literally heard in my 50s when I stopped thinking I had all the answers and finally stopped and surrendered to a higher power.
Fate, destiny, and synchronicity will lead us to the places once we start to listen and look for the signs. It doesn’t come from our ego or thinking self but from what Jung called “the bottom of one’s own being” or the “big S Self”.
Our essence.
Jung wrote: “Man cannot stand a meaningless life”.
I think we often misinterpret all of this Purpose talk and imagine that judging by the books in the self-help section that seems to sell that we’ll be some high-paid Boss woman or Baller and that is what would be an ultimate work experience is more about being shown the money and living happily ever after in our modern sustainable perfectly tidy home with no clutter and the perfect partner.
I also think it’s normal and healthy to question our choices and feel off track or suffer. It’s the contrast we need to find our way.
One particular moment that I can think of to give you an example is when I was standing in my older brother’s beautiful house in downtown Toronto matching his colourful socks and carefully folding his underwear one day and I started to laugh out loud. I thought wow, two university degrees, this wasn’t the dream!! I was in my early 40s and I thought I’d be somewhere else at this stage in my life. I had helped to raise our kids and hadn’t written my book or started my business I was FOLDING MY BIG BROTHER’S boxer shorts.
But the thing I didn’t realize, is that I was still very much on purpose.
It ended up being the best short-term job and I had the opportunity to love and get to know my young nephews in a priceless way. They were between nannies and I lived 15 min away so what began as being a volunteer temporary stand-in to bridge them while they looked for someone new, turned into a few months of fun and paid work to get them to the end of the school year.
We played on the playground after school with their friends something they missed out on when they had to catch the bus, I brought our golden retriever and they loved her too and ritually ran out the side door to greet her first. We played games, had snacks, had Shawn Mendes dance parties in the kitchen, went swimming, played soccer, and tobogganed. They were old enough that it helped us create a bond we otherwise may not have had. I enjoyed going there and seeing my brother and or sister-in-law every day for a few minutes when they would come home after work before I’d head home from mine. It may not be something to post on LinkedIn but it felt restorative and I loved it.
It was a surprising clue pointing me to my purpose.
A similar laugh bubbled up in me at a humbling moment when I found myself pouring my heart into cleaning a public toilet and mopping floors. Again in my 40s, an acquaintance owned a vegan restaurant that I loved and needed a hand. I frequented the restaurant often and did love the idea of learning to use a dehydrator, make their recipes, use a juicer, a Vitamix, and learn more about plant-based nutrition so I thought why not?
My ego came in pretty fast and loud with its say as you can imagine as we know from “A Course In Miracles”… the ego speaks first and speaks loudest. Usually something like “You can’t be a waitress, that is so beneath you what will your friends and family say?”, I softened when I immediately recognized which part of me was doing the talking. My fear and so I said yes.
It was the kind of amazing job where I made new friends, served an incredibly conscious clientele, and learned how to make and serve plant-based homemade food with love. It was a small operation so I did every job they had (hence the mopping and bathroom cleaning). It was another incredible opportunity to have a first-hand appreciation for how hard people work in the service and food industry. I got the chance to get out of the house and work with an incredible group of people and we’d have the best deep conversations in the kitchen. I left with new skills and a slightly further deconstructed ego and a feeling of being fulfilled.
Another clue had surfaced.
I had a realization while I was at both jobs that it wasn’t the title or the income or what we did that really mattered, it seemed to be something I felt.
A knowing or empowered sense of how we are being when we do the work that matters most. I was going through a rough time and I struggled to see a deeper meaning to life, but I was determined to seek and find a solution.
I prayed for help.
That’s when I seriously began to read and study A Course In Miracles. In a nutshell, it helps guide the reader to have or experience an inner shift from fear and ego to love. I recognized that the divine kind of love I felt when I did both of those “jobs” and set my ego aside was surprisingly fulfilling. I showed up day after day practicing being loving and serving even when I didn’t feel like it and I always left feeling better.
It felt fulfilling. I even started to feel less depressed from serving others.
Many of us are guided to slow down and have a “Selah” or realization of our own.
To do something new or off the beaten path. But if the path you’re on is not feeling good to you, that is an indication that you’re entering a cold zone.
I remember my girlfriend and I saw Oprah speak live on her “Live your best life” tour in Chicago and something she said stuck with me. That our intuition speaks to us. It begins with a whisper, an inkling, a thought imprinted in our minds ….and if you don’t hear that first message they get louder. Eventually, if you ignore it a brick wall may fall on your head.
If we choose to ignore the call, one of two things seems to happen universally. We either slow down of our own volition and listen to it, or ignore it and press on and in my own experience we still take a break, it just becomes involuntary in nature.
I’m very familiar with the latter. It could be a stubbed or broken toe, or something far worse. For me, the universe prevented me from literally taking another step forward of my own volition and it was the beginning of the deconstruction of my own ego so again, it was as though I was being guided to see another way of being in the world.
“The planet does not need more successful people. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds”. ~ The Dalai Lama
Last year I heard Elle Macpherson say something in an interview with Zach Bush about her very public-facing career in beauty say something cute that resonated with me.
I believe that wellness is the new beautiful.
Health is the new wealth
Kindness is the new cool.
And inner peace is the new success.
They say you can tell when a person, a community, or even a forest is healthy by all the things they give away.
In nature, dirty water is cleaned and sent downstream, trees clean the air and send it downwind, and forests create habitats that wildlife migrate through.
As individuals and communities, we are not doing the same abundant giving with our life force and potential (yet).
We are about to welcome 3 billion more humans on our planet between now and 2050. That’s the equivalent of building a new city with a million people in it EVERY five days. We need to do things differently and bring nature’s wisdom to the places that need it most.
The concept of biomimicry has inspired my own life’s work and has inspired me to look more closely at nature instead of others for my own answers to the problems in my life.
We have taken a short detour into fear and we no longer fit “to” this place, but we can each shift our own minds, and see things differently and our behaviors will follow to help us all come back to our “fittedness” so that our habitat changes and we not only just survive, we all thrive together.
Let’s help each other take a quarter turn together and experience what is on the other side of the screen that’s been holding us back from trusting our own inner wisdom and fulfilling our own unique, shared, and greater purpose.
With love,
Nona
ps. Our son just texted some photos and a video of him feeding a baby elephant bananas early this morning and I laughed at the timing. He’s traveling with a friend overseas and has always wanted to see an elephant, he even wanted us to get matching elephant tattoos after he heard about a group I’m creating based on elephant behavior which I think may be happening sooner than later. lol
Note: photo credit for the two nicer-looking professional photos of the mountains and the cover were taken by an anonymous photographer from the World Wildlife Fund.
THANK YOU Nona...again, every time I read your work, I feel lighter and learn something new (usually many things!) You are a light...keep on shining!