Do you sometimes have the feeling that the universe is conspiring to help you on your way?
In the last few years, moving from “traditional” marketing work towards something more life-affirming, more aligned with my intuition, I have felt the magic of the universe conspire: meeting the right people at the right time, being in the right place at the right time, or something as simple as coming up with an idea that lands exactly where the people I work with were already thinking.
Call it divine timing or confirmation bias, something is happening. Let me tell you about it.
Out of a job, growing roots
Last year I was out of a job from February onwards. I decided to change away from being a digital nomad and towards growing roots. I moved to the countryside, in the middle of nowhere. I took a break and followed my instincts. I knew what I did not want any more.
That summer I took a course in building a cob house. With my partner, I co-developed the dream of building a house with our own hands. During that time I saw a post from one of my heroes in the regeneration space, Tijn Toelker (opens in a new tab) , offering three internships at the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective. Earlier that year, in January, I had taken part in the Hope event (opens in a new tab) run by the same organisation. The event really did what it promised: seeing the bioregional way of organising in action inspired hope in me. It planted a seed.
During the time without a job I spent a lot of time reading and learning. I read “Designing Regenerative Cultures” by Daniel Christian Wahl, and it became clear to me that, in order to reduce the complexity of system change, we need to focus on bioregions.
We can not save the world; we can only save places. The regeneration of planetary health can only happen ecosystem by ecosystem or bioregion by bioregion.
Daniel Christian Wahl (opens in a new tab)
It complemented what I had learned working with Climate Farmers: a single organisation will not change the world. We need portfolios of projects and innovations rooted in place, to build resilience and impact at a regional level, which then adds up to trans-regional systems change.
So there I was, scrambling an application together in between stomping cob and building a house with fifteen people from all over the world. In the weekly sharing circles over those five weeks, many people said how special it was that we were this diverse community coming together with purpose and coherence, while the world outside seemed to be getting more polarised and hostile.
An old world dying, a new one struggling to be born
I am seeing systems and institutions unravelling around me at speed.
Politicians and corporations are clinging to power and cannot handle the systemic volatility we are living through.
An old world that is dying.
I feel despair, anger, uncertainty, and sadness.
But then I see a movement of active hope (opens in a new tab) .
Changemakers all over the world are confronting the challenges of our time.
I feel hope, connection, coherence, and groundedness.
But also isolation of projects, and a lack of organisation.
A new world that is struggling to be born.
This is where bioregioning comes in.
What bioregioning is, and what weaving means
As a community resilience strategy.
As the act of living in a place, being part of the local natural systems and working with them.
As a specific response to the meta-crisis, taking in economy, ecology and social structures.
After all, it is an evolutionary survival pattern of our species: the exchange between place and people, based on relationships.
The “weaving” part of bioregional weaving is the practice of connecting people and projects in synergistic and purposeful ways. It connects people to each other and to a shared future vision for the bioregion. It fosters collaborations for systemic impact, it makes collective learning and iteration possible, and most of all it embodies the change we wish to see towards a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.
The magic of this approach: we do not need to wait for perfect conditions.
It is available right now. It is just a different way of being in, and seeing, the place you inhabit: becoming a steward of your place.
There is a whole network of bioregions across Europe and worldwide prototyping new governance, new financial flows and bottom-up participatory processes. Shared learning, shared resources, shared vision.
Bridging the online and the local
I started working part-time with the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective in September 2025. Now, after eight months of diving headfirst into the world of bioregioning, meeting amazing people, learning and supporting, I can look back on a rewarding journey. And there is much more to learn, to do and to be.
One thing we share among those involved in bioregional work: we want to spend more time offline, in the places where we live, feeling our bodies and connecting with the more-than-human world. That goes against the online way of working I need in order to connect trans-bioregionally.
How to bridge that gap?
By using my free time to make local connections and build relationships.
From day one here, I wanted to get to know the region and its people. The village project I joined was already connected to the wider community, and I had time, so this was fairly easy.
From work parties (opens in a new tab) to walks by the river and local events, my network grew quite fast.
And what I felt was that there is a lot of energy here. Many self-employed people looking to expand or to start something else, like friends beginning to make cider from an apple orchard that was gifted to them. A local consumption group buying in bulk from local producers. A world-renowned syntropic agroforestry project (opens in a new tab) shaping food forest design locally and internationally. Cultural spaces. And of course, our regenerative village (opens in a new tab) .
It was all there. But there was no coherence. Little collaboration. Isolation, even.
The ingredients were laid out, but there was no cook to make a delicious dish.
I was thinking: maybe that is my role. But imposter syndrome told me, “Who do you think you are? You do not even speak Galician. People will not respect you. Do not even start.”
But I felt a pull. Something else spoke to me: “You are the one you have been waiting for. You do not need the full plan, just start, and you will find out.”
Backed by the inspiration and the learning from my work at the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, I trusted that voice.
Look for the one per cent
It was getting to December, and an event showed up around social entrepreneurship, held at a local cultural space. It felt like a good opportunity to meet people interested in social entrepreneurship.
If you want to start bioregional weaving, a good start is simply to get to know the people and projects in your region, and to follow the energy of the people who want to do something about the status quo. Get to know your local changemakers.
A rule I learned from Igor, a bioregional weaver in France, is the 90-9-1 rule: 90 per cent of people are just watching, 9 per cent are engaging, and 1 per cent are making things happen. Look for that 1 per cent of your region’s population to start with.
And then the divine brought us together
Lucas, the man who organised the social entrepreneurship event, sensed something and asked me for a beer afterwards.
We clicked immediately.
When I told him about my work on bioregional weaving, his eyes lit up.
He told me he had been working this way for the last few years, but struggled to put it into words.
And he humbly revealed that he has been working to move the bioregion towards food sovereignty and regeneration through his food system innovation agency, PRATO_DO.
I think I fell in love that day. Not in a romantic way, but in a love for life and a gratitude for what the universe is guiding me towards.
Two weeks after Christmas we organised a potluck at our village. More connections were made.
Lucas introduced me to Eduardo and Pepe, two men doing cultural work, from capturing contemporary Galician culture (opens in a new tab) in photographs to turning an old cow stable into a theatre for the rural area, Teatro das Cortes A.C. Volta e Dálle.
That day I met a woman from the district council working on equality between women and men, who helped set up a seed bank led by women in our region.
A cook looking for work different from the traditional restaurant business, now collaborating with the syntropic agroforestry project to make delicious food from tree-based nutrition.
More people from the local bridge house (opens in a new tab) , which often works as an entry point for people arriving in the region.
It is on.
Bringing order into creative chaos
We simply started meeting weekly, in person, to go on this journey together.
I learn about his process of the last few years, and I tell him about the Bioregional Weaving Lab approach. He shows me a list of more than 200 stakeholders he has worked with, and I see the value of those relationships.
So, how to bring order into the creative chaos he has been carrying pretty much alone for the last ten years?
I am bringing some structure, something I am good at. The simple act of organising Lucas’s thoughts and local actions through the process we co-developed at the Bioregional Weaving Labs, providing an online workspace to collect the explicit work, and being a sparring partner, already gets things going.
We joined the Ashoka Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration Course (opens in a new tab) , which gives us more theoretical and practical help for working with the many stakeholders in the region and cohering them towards regeneration.
I learned that Lucas is full of surprises. With his friend Añon, who directs the master’s degree in renewable energy, climate change and sustainable development at the University of Santiago de Compostela and lives nearby, he had lined up a weekend in the bioregion.
A bioregional residency prototype.
We imagined the weekend as an activation of the ecosystem, too. We invited local changemakers, foundations and other aligned actors.
And the funny thing? This does not even feel like work.
The weekend
The weekend comes and I am far too excited. We sleep in a beautifully restored place from feudal times (opens in a new tab) , full of local art and history.
Friday is a big success. We convened more than 35 people from the local ecosystem and had everyone share why they came and what they want out of this. People shared their story, their gratitude for the event, and their love for the territory.
Call me a hippie, but when stewards of wealthy foundations talk about love in that setting, we have done something right.
On Saturday we visited five local projects.
- Panadería de Galdo: a local bakery keeping the traditional way of making bread.
- Estación Agroecolóxica de Vieiro: the syntropic agroforestry school where I took a course in February (opens in a new tab) .
- Museo da Identidade Cultural Galega: an exhibition of contemporary photographs of Galician culture from recent years.
- Teatro das Cortes: the theatre that was once a cow stable.
- O Cadaval: the old village we are rebuilding.
That day was exhausting and also fulfilling. When you hear students say it blew their minds and showed them different ways of living, of organising and of producing food, it touches you.
And this was not about the students. It was about an opportunity to plant some seeds, to come together, to see ourselves as part of a larger ecosystem in the bioregion.
From new ideas generated to gratitude expressed and an openness to walk this territorial process together, I felt a lot of energy.
Where do we go from here?
We have just grown the core team with Eduardo, our narrator and photographer, and the founder of the identity museum, Galicia Latente (opens in a new tab) , who took wonderful pictures that weekend.
I am sending this after the Bioregional Learning Summit in Romania, organised by Commonland and the Bioregional Weaving Labs Collective, where 27 bioregions of Europe convened for a week. There I met other bioregional weavers and partners who want to support our region.
We will follow up with everyone who took part in our bioregional immersion, gather feedback and carry out interviews to identify the critical shifts we want to tackle as an ecosystem in the region.
Then we plan the next bioregional immersion and ecosystem convening for local stakeholder groups, around more concrete topics and initiatives in the region.
And lastly, we need to find some financing so that our core team can do this work for the next few years.
The direction is clear: regenerative systems change at every level, individual, relationships, village, bioregion, Europe and worldwide.
I hope this gave you some insight into bioregional work. I will share more of it in the future.
Happy regeneration,
Jonas
First published on 30 April 2026 on Jonas’s personal blog, A Regenerative Life. Republished here with his permission. Read the original on regenerativelife.eu (opens in a new tab)
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