The World Is Not What It Looks Like
On perception, participation, and the extraordinary strangeness of ordinary reality.
Latest
A place to return to, room to wander
What draws me this October: cottages, gardens, gentleness, open country, and room for awe. A visual letter about embodied life and the relationships that give it meaning.
The Things That Do Not Love Us Back
Must something love us back for an encounter to matter? On the sea, art, AI, and finding meaning without mistaking it for returned affection.
Must the World Be Good for Us to Love It?
Walt Whitman, Genesis, Job, and the difficult art of loving creation without demanding that everything within it be good.
The Ground Remembers: Cain, Abel, and the Consequences of Being Human
We construct entire worlds of meaning, but our interpretations do not make us sovereign over reality. A reading of Genesis 1–4 explores human limits, responsibility, violence, mercy, and the consequences that ripple beyond us.
Reality Never Agreed to Our Terms
On the sovereignty of our abstractions, the living world, and humanity’s struggle to accept correction. There is something rather extraordinary about the way human beings relate to reality. We build models of the world. We name things, categorize them, assign values, establish institutions, draw borders, develop economies, and construct
In the Gaps, Reality Streams Back In
On Iris Murdoch, a dog beneath a blanket, and the art of looking again. This morning, I was sitting beneath a white blanket, holding a striped mug. The television was dark. A little light illuminated the room, and somewhere beneath the folds of the blanket was my dog. I couldn’
The Seams Are Showing
Marisol’s assembled figures, a museum afternoon, and a reflection on bodies, relationships, and the tenderness of being unfinished.
The Curious Little Ape
50 strange, silly, tender, and rather wonderful things human beings do.
The World I Thought I Already Knew
An unexpected library book, a familiar sky, and a conversation. A Field Note on looking again and learning to take part in the life already here.
The beauty of an ordinary doorway
The Education of Beauty, no. 1. A close look at Vermeer’s The Little Street, the work of keeping life going, and what attention might ask of us.
Keeping a little room for wonder
A first Field Note on personal blogs, curiosity, and making room for beauty, play, and the smaller beginnings of a thought.
Philosophy
Can I Reach for God Without Deceiving Myself?
What if existence itself is sustained by something beyond our understanding? An exploration of consciousness, the possibility of God, and the difficult balance between longing for connection and remaining faithful to truth.
Experience & perception
Attention Is a Way of Living
What we notice shapes how we respond. A reflection on listening, correction, community, and the small practices that give a life its direction.
Experience & perception
Taking Experience Seriously Without Turning It into Proof
A reflection on perception, systems, and religion: how to take an experience seriously, examine its interpretation, and act without claiming more than we know.
An archive in transition
The Living Fractal is an archive in transition. Earlier essays preserve earlier models and do not necessarily represent my present conclusions. My current work examines human experience, perception, systems, religion and orientation under uncertainty, distinguishing observation, inference and metaphysical claim wherever possible.
Notes on Staying Human
Notes on Staying Human: Community is the most effective form of rebellion (3/2/2026)
Friends, We cannot defeat large-scale systems by opposing them directly. Complex systems do not respond to moral arguments; they respond to incentives, constraints, and feedback loops. So the task is not to fight the system, but to reduce dependence on it and increase local resilience. Become human again. Strengthen
Newsletter
The Self Isn't an Illusion, It's Power-Saving Mode for Consciousness
Something shifted in December 2025 while I was sitting in meditation. Not a dramatic enlightenment moment, just a quiet recognition that landed differently than usual: I am not awareness. I know how that sounds. Like another spiritual cliché, right? But stay with me, because what happened next was the opposite
Newsletter
The Netherlands Has Entered a New Climate Regime: KNMI 2025 Report
This morning I woke up at 4:30 AM after a fragmented night of sleep, one of those nights where you wake up at 11 PM and your brain decides it’s time to think about everything for a few hours before letting you drift off again. I measured my
Newsletter
System state: Early February 2026
The world is doing what constrained systems do when slack runs out: testing which feedback mechanisms still function. System state: Early February 2026 Constraint stacks activating simultaneously Physical layer caught up. Multiple systems now operating beyond design baseline with no recovery time between shocks: Consecutive winter storms → infrastructure stress Climate-
Palestine
Palestine: A Systems Reading
Palestine is not a moment, it is a long-running collision of systems: Ottoman decline, British colonial governance, partition logic, Cold War alignment, neoliberal militarization, and resource pressure, all metabolized through land, law, and human bodies.
Newsletter
Where This Is Going (Mechanism, Not Prophecy)
Update January 2026
Newsletter
The People We Almost Didn't See, Part 1: The Yazidi Genocide and the Pattern of Erasure
I hadn’t planned to be at a Yazidi protest. I talked with one man for minutes. They consented for me to write about this. Part of the series: Witnessing Without Sides I hadn’t planned to be at a Yazidi protest. I had just come from peace talks in
Newsletter
The Ape Inside the Machine
On What We Forgot, What Never Changed, and How to Live Without Illusion There was a time in my life when the world felt coherent. Not perfect. Not painless. But coherent. I was small. I lived with my grandmother. When I was afraid, I could go to her. When I