About Tim
I am trying to answer one question.
How do you bring water to the desert?
Not just the literal desert — though that too. But the desert as a condition. What remains when the bonds dissolve. When culture loses its connection to the sacred. When the self loses its connection to community. When the visible world loses contact with the field it unfolds from.
I believe modernity is fundamentally a process of ontbinding — a coming apart. The progressive dissolution of the bonds that make life coherent: between self and nature, individual and community, the present and its roots, the material and the immaterial. What we experience as meaninglessness, exhaustion, fragmentation — these are not personal failures. They are the felt symptoms of a civilisation losing contact with its ground.
The ground is what I call the field. The implicate order — the hidden wholeness underlying the visible world. The dimension of reality that cannot be measured but can be felt. In ritual, in genuine encounter, in the moment when a landscape stops being scenery and becomes presence. It has been called many things across traditions: the Tao, Brahman, the implicate order, the commons of meaning. It is what life unfolds from. And it is what modernity, in its drive to abstract and optimise, has most thoroughly abandoned.
The work — as I understand it — is re-weaving what has come apart. Restoring contact with the field. Cultivating wholeness.
My path to this question was indirect.
I spent the first decade of my career building the persona that high-performing environments reward — fast promotions at Unilever and P&G, rapid success in tech sales, the outward markers of a life going well. But the fuel running that engine was fear masquerading as ambition. When it ran out — in Brussels, and again in Copenhagen — I had to ask harder questions.
A sabbatical year in 2020 changed everything. Vipassana retreats in the desert. A permaculture design course in Andalusia. Months of reading, excavating, sitting with what remained when the performance stopped. What emerged was not a career pivot but an epistemological one — a shift from a world of abstractions and achievements to one in which direct experience, living systems, and the quality of aliveness became the primary categories of meaning.
The question that has guided everything since came to me on a drive through the Atlas Mountains. Miles of eroded farmland. How do you bring life back? I have been working on the answer ever since — at multiple levels simultaneously.
My worldview sits at the intersection of three layers:
The Ground — reality as fundamentally conscious, alive and interrelated. The implicate order as the hidden wholeness from which the visible world unfolds. Rooted in the contemplative traditions — Vipassana, Vedanta, Taoism, Zen — and in the work of thinkers like David Bohm, Bernardo Kastrup and Rupert Sheldrake who have approached this from within science and philosophy.
The Middle — the biological-ecological expression of the ground. Life as the self-organising unfolding of the implicate order. The regenerative paradigm: whole-systems thinking, the primacy of living relationships over extractive ones, aliveness as the central measure of whether something is working.
The Surface — the civilisational layer. The specific pathology of late-modern Western culture as a process of ontbinding: technique colonising experience, networks dissolving community, the sacred evacuated from public life. And the case — conservative in the deepest sense — for rootedness, tradition, and the restoration of the immaterial.
These are not three separate interests. They are the same question at different scales. The desertification at the surface is the loss of contact with the ground. Bringing water to the desert means restoring that contact.
Together with my partner Annalot, I have launched Nous — an initiative focused on cultivating the immaterial dimension, beginning with high-quality experiential events around traditional seasonal celebrations. Nous is a Greek word for cosmic mind — the intelligence through which reality knows itself. We chose it deliberately. The work is not entertainment or wellness. It is re-weaving. Restoring the conditions in which the field can be felt again.
I write here when something has crystallised enough to be worth saying.
Rotterdam. Father. Sales professional by day. Everything else by nature.