My wife knew it would be healthy for me to get away and to be stimulated for a spell, away from parenting and work. A vacation of sorts. She forwarded me the email calling for proposals to a self-organizing symposium about self-organizing. The timing was perfect, considering she and I were in the middle of planning a member-owned and operated art space. I’m a game designer and I had just the game to submit that plays on the need to form alliances to be success as a player: Heartbreaker, a game based around the prisoner’s dilemma construct which uses the theme of finding love. Not only was the game accepted to run at the symposium, it would run the day after Valentine’s Day.

Off to Belgium I flew. But first, I stopped in the Netherlands. There was some nice art and food in Amsterdam, but it was Rotterdam where matters became profound and transformative. Yet Amsterdam offered one place that was important to me: I discovered OT 301, a collective that’s sustained for over 20 years and similar to what my wife and I want erect back home. I visited and took many pictures to learn about how OT 301 operates.

When I arrived in Rotterdam, I got some culture shock, some home sickness, and some what am I doing here? driven by a literal sense of what am I going to do here? because I knew little about the city. My hostel in Amsterdam was a shit hole, so I suspected the same or worse. As I entered an ethnic part of town to find my hostel, I stopped for ice cream. I was exhausted, still a bit jet lagged, and was ready to submit to the universe: show me your way. I finished the milkshake, felt slightly revived to finish the walk to the hostel with my heavy bag and backpack, and rest. When I entered the hostel, it felt like home. A very warm and comfortable living space showed people writing, listening to calming music, and preparing food for each other. My room was excellent in comparison to attic stash I was given in Amsterdam (I can stand up straight!). Matters were brightening, quite literally since the walls of the room in Amsterdam were painted black and here the late afternoon sun poured in across the light pinks and browns of this new room.

The real transformation occurred the following day (today). The main art space I hoped to see was set to be closed both days of my visit, so I had to come up with a new plan. Luckily an old poster in my hostel advertised a museum called Het Nieuwe Instituut, a place about architecture and the environment. The first exhibit was about healing places — not a spa but rather spaces for groups that have lived expansive trauma, like a war torn place like Sarajevo. The next exhibit was about squatting, which has a rich history in The Netherlands because of laws protecting squatters. At the end of the exhibit was a book room. Right as I began to walk out, my eye caught a tiny icon on the edge of a book — it was the OT 301 icon. Here was a book about the entire history of OT 301. I sat for an hour reading through it, taking pictures of what they learned, and even a chapter on similar collectives and collaborations around the world. This felt like why the universe had led me to this place, to gain this knowledge.

As I retreated to lunch in the cafe of this museum, I stopped in the bookstore to see if I could find the same book about OT 301 to buy and take home. While I did not find it, something incredible happened: my caught the name Wendell Berry, a Kentucky-based author and environmentalist. I took a picture for proof of Kentucky’s reach all the way to Rotterdam, and it was then that I noticed a book perched next to it: The Mushroom at the End of the World — On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruin.

I can’t make this up: this is a book about mushroom foraging and the Matsutake, but explained in the light of the need for collaboration to survive and how to navigate capitalism’s wrongs. Everything that’s led to my wife and I’s attempt to foster this new cooperative space is based around the need for community, cooperation, and the need to fuse art and environmentalism while proving a new economic model for organizations to fork capitalism down a path that serves everyone: the members, customers, artists, the local community, the art community, humankind, and nature. That’s what this book turns out to be about. But wait, there’s more! In the preface, Tsing literally explains how this mushroom was the first sign of life as it grew in Nagasaki after the atomic bomb. She then uses this story to explain the possibility of life after the humans waste an environment, and how the atomic bomb represents humankind’s attempt to control nature.

What’s wild about this? Days before I left on this trip, my wife took ten images of mine from 18 years ago (which I turned into prints) to place into an art show she was curating… about mushrooms. My prints? Declassified military photographs of atomic bomb tests, which I abstracted to tease a pleasing aesthetic to the mushroom clouds and juxtapose beauty with something as grotesque as these bombs — and as I noted, to depict the ultimate collision between Man and nature as the atomic explosion.

I’m reminded of the opening sequence of the film Magnolia. There, scene after scene are described to talk about the extreme coincidence of events only to arrive at one situation that can no longer be explained by chance. Likewise, I believe in randomness and chance, yet life taps me on the shoulder every once in awhile as if to ask, are you sure? I’ve had small world occurrences with odds so long one’s mind can no longer comprehend the chance. Yet today, with all of this collisions between my current interests and finding this museum, finding the first book, which led me to the second book… and in that book not only does it reference my interests in self-organizing, in collaboration, in new modes of survival in the face of capitalism — all themes I’ll speak to during my game execution at the self-organizing symposium tomorrow night — but this book references the atomic bomb’s relation to the mushroom outside the context of the mushroom cloud… AND, back to the title of this, proposed two new terms for me to digest, right as I digest the coincidences of my day: Indeterminism and Teleonomy.

- *Indeterminism* is the idea that events are not caused, but chance.

- *Teleonomy* is the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms.

The name of the cooperative my wife and I are starting? Maybe It’s Fate. The year I bought that website domain, for no reason other than the feeling I will need it someday: 2009.

Perhaps this is all chance, all coincidence driven by my purposefulness. That’s the logical, likely explanation. Or, maybe it’s all fate. Maybe.

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