Biomimicry is super fascinating, awe-inspiring, fun, engaging and a great way to lose yourself down many, many, many rabbit holes…but it’s challenging. Just like when you’re going to have a baby, no one tells you how hard it will be! I’m telling you up front, practicing biomimicry is hard. But so worth it.

Biomimicry requires your brain to twist itself in knots trying to translate challenge to biology to challenge to biology to challenge…in a seemingly endless iterative process. And if it’s a metaphorical application, forget it. All your RAM is taken up and in the background your hard drives are being rewritten and somehow you have to figure out how to think again…in a world that hasn’t changed, but somehow everything is different.

And then you have to communicate it. No one knows what biomimicry is, so you have to start by educating your audience in a way that allows them to make the leap with you as you describe an idea unlike any they’ve come across before. Months or years of work reduced to an easily digestible two-minute elevator speech. And still you know you’ve only scratched the surface and the possibilities of your ideas are endless. How to decide where to take it next…

Full disclosure: no one said it would be easy.

A couple of years ago when I was completing my last biomimicry project for my professional certification/MS, I came to a point in the project where I literally had to step away from everything else so I could focus just on my project. And I had to go back to the basics – I needed to get those little hamsters running in my brain to shift the cogs and process months of research into coherent thoughts. By the time I finished my project, I was happy just to end up with a working metaphor. I had more questions than answers.

I’ve taken a hiatus from my blog over the last several weeks as my brain has been working overtime trying to figure out how to refine and communicate two very different and complex biomimicry-based ideas in bite-sized chunks to people with a wide range of biomimicry knowledge. All the while realizing and exploring the potential depth to which branching ideas expand upon the core idea without losing sight of that very idea. But see, the kicker is, the ideas could be game changers. And like so many other biomimicry-inspired ideas, the potential lies in actual implementation. So I’m rolling up my sleeves. I’ve got work to do.

While my brain is playing catch up, please enjoy Part 1 of my newest photography collection from Botswana. I promise I’ll be back soon.