So there I was, standing on my touring skis overlooking the hills and mountains covered with forests and pure wilderness. As an airline pilot who grew up in concrete deserts of the Netherlands, I felt something I never felt before: this feeling of deep connection and belonging, I felt very alive.

 My brain picked it up immediately and knew I needed to do something with this. I needed to invite people to feel this connection and act on it. To celebrate this wilderness, to nurture it. Suddenly my extractive life in aviation didn’t make much sense to me anymore. This was the beginning of a long quest that I am still on; how to move from this extractive life to a life that compliments this wilderness.

 But the feeling raised a question I couldn’t shake. Why did that feel like coming home – here in these mountainous lands far away from where I grew up?

 I’m Dutch. I grew up in a landscape that only exists because we fought nature back — polders drained from the sea, water held behind dikes, every field a testament to human will over natural force. Where I come from, nature is not something you belong to. It is something you manage. That idea was installed in me long before I was aware of it.

 From Cockpit to Ground

 Then I became a pilot. And somewhere above the clouds, something started to shift.

 You don’t master the atmosphere at 35,000 feet. You learn to read it. You build an intimate, ongoing relationship with a living system that is vastly more complex than any procedure manual. Weather is not an obstacle — it is information. Turbulence is not a problem — it is the air speaking. The best flying I ever did was not when I was in control. It was when pilot, aircraft, and atmosphere became a single fluid system, each one responsive to the other.

 Over time, I started studying why some crews managed that attunement and others didn’t. This took me to Lund University, to a Master’s in Human Factors and System Safety, and eventually to a deeper question: not just how do we fly safely, but how does any complex system stay coherent when it’s made of many different actors — human and nonhuman — each operating from their own understanding of the world?

 What I found was that the aviation industry had the same problem Transylvania had. Everyone was working in their own bubble.

 Pilots, engineers, regulators, manufacturers — each with their own version of reality, rarely meeting, rarely exchanging the small pieces of information that hold a system together. The result, in the worst cases, is a crash. In less dramatic cases, it’s a community that never quite becomes one.

How We Perceive — And Why It Matters

 It was in studying those dynamics that I found the language for what had happened on that hillside wake-up moment.

 From my article “Toward Compatibility in Aeromobility” that I wrote with Dr. Tina Harris (2024): 

 Psychologist Ulric Neisser developed in the 1970s a theory in which individuals activate schemata (organized patterns of thoughts) that consist of experiences they have encountered before. Neisser argues that schemata interact with the temporal nature of events, linking the past to the future in two main ways. First, the anticipation of what will happen next determines what one does — in other words, what information one looks for and attends to in order to act. Second, one understands the stream of activity through anticipation (and the continuous modification of that anticipation) to make sense of the events as they unravel through the interaction.

 What this means in plain language: we mostly do not see the world as it is. We see it through the lens of everything we have already lived. Our past often shapes what we look for, which shapes what we find, which shapes how we act — and the cycle continues.

 So what happens when you grow up in a landscape engineered against nature? You build a mindset that says: “nature is something out there, something to manage, something separate from me. That mindset then filters everything. You travel through wild places without really arriving in them.

 You build projects “in” a landscape without building projects “with” it. You say “going into nature” as if you ever left.

 What happened on those skis was a mindset update. The Carpathians broke through a filter I didn’t know I was carrying. And once a schema cracks open, you cannot unsee what came through.

What Alignment Actually Means

 We speak about aligning with nature as if it’s a practice — something to schedule, a walk in the woods between meetings. But if Neisser is right, alignment is not a practice. It is a perception shift. It is what happens when the old perception – I am separate from nature — gives way to something older and more accurate: I am nature, becoming aware of itself.

 That shift has practical consequences at three levels.

 At the inner level, it means asking: what story am I running? What inherited narrative shapes what I see as possible here? For many of us — trained in extraction, in management, in the logic of maximum yield — that story is still running quietly in the background, shaping our projects even when our intentions are regenerative. The first act of alignment is noticing it.

 At the outer level, it means letting the environment be a participant, not just a backdrop. Cobana is not a venue for the work — the forest edge, the mountains, the wildness of Piatra Craiului are part of the work. The place speaks. The question is whether we are listening.

 At the ecosystem level, it means building compatible awareness across the bioregion — not standardised, not imposed from above, but cultivated through honest exchange between the many different actors who are already here, already working, already holding different pieces of the picture. That is what Regenerative Futures Transylvania is attempting. Not a single vision, but a shared map — drawn together, in the field, by the people who know this land.

Back to the Hillside

 I think about that moment on the skis often. Not as a memory of something that happened once, but as a reference point I keep returning to — a place where the signal was clear.

 The Carpathians are not romantic. They are ancient and extraordinarily alive. Standing in them, you don’t feel elevated. You feel situated. You feel like a node in a system that was running long before you arrived and will continue long after you leave. That is not a diminishment. It is a relief.

 The quest I am on — from aviation to Transylvania, from compliance to compatibility, from extraction to regeneration — is really just an attempt to act from that situated feeling rather than from the managed, separate, Dutch-polder version of myself that got onto those skis that day.

The question I carry into every conversation, every project, every community gathering:

What would become possible — for you, for this region — if our perception shifted?

I don’t have the full answer. But I know where I feel closest to it. Join Regenerative Futures Transylvania and we can explore together.