Generating the Re-generation

Reflecting on what I’ve inherited in this lifetime, I ask — what would I like to leave as an inheritance to my son and his kids and their kids? It can seem like an intangible thing to mentally grasp, because an inheritance is something that is considered to be passed “down” following death. And we don’t like to think, or talk about, death in our culture. When I think about an inheritance, it usually takes the form of money or things — a house, an estate, heirlooms.

I’d like to consider what I’m passing “up” and forward, seeing as our kids are the ones that will be continuing this spiral of evolution. Thinking 50 years ahead, I wish for everyone to wake up in the morning and genuinely feel a sense of awe, of “wow, what a beautiful and incredible world I get to live in, and that we all get to live in”. To know that what they get to enjoy, everyone else has a genuine opportunity to enjoy — connection with nature and beauty, livelihood, community of care of belonging, self-realization.

What can I do now, in this lifetime, while I’m here and alive, to create for and with my son? I’m thinking of the seeds that I could plant with him now, so that we could nurture them together and have my inheritance to him be meaningfully integrated through our shared experience. Considering how much he teaches me, it only makes sense and seems right to acknowledge his impact on my life by using it as fuel for our mutual growth.

I approach my relationship with nature in the same way, and why I’m so draw to biomimicry, which is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve design challenges. Nature has been around for nearly 4 billion years, and what exists today have all survived and evolved — forests, trees, flowers, animals, birds, coral reefs. They are the heirlooms that were left for me and all of us to learn from, to apply and to create something new with. The forms, processes and systems found in nature hold the blueprints for creating life-generating artifacts of beauty and magic. Let’s generate the next generations — or “re-generations”.

In the meantime, I’ll open up to this question and contemplate the types of seeds I could plant with my son, in addition to the investment of my presence and time together.