Quantum Fragments 014
Undomesticated Navigation Systems
Undomesticated Navigation Systems
This weekend at the Healing-Centered Futures Summit by the Acosta Institute, I watched my eight-year-old nephew Pierre become the gravitational center in a room full of brilliant minds. While we adults constructed elaborate frameworks for transformation, he simply was one…questioning everything with the fearless curiosity of someone whose language hasn't been colonized by our binary world.
Pierre lost his mother -my brother's Japanese wife- to a sudden heart attack last fall. Since then, he's been my teacher in ways I never expected. Children who've touched grief early become quantum beings by necessity, existing simultaneously in multiple states of loss and wonder, resilience and vulnerability.
At the closing party, Pierre transformed the entire energy. Dance battles with
, flies and breakdance moves, grabbing the mic to blurt whatever surfaced in his consciousness, encouraging participation, taking instruments to speak with the DJ, injecting "yalla!" into English conversations with people who had no idea what it meant but understood its invitation perfectly. His undomesticated bilingualism created community in ways that no facilitation technique could replicate.Throughout the weekend, he witnessed transcultural expression that most adults never experience: Dr. Sará King's liberatory technologies meeting Vincent Hunt's post-industrial creativity, Clarinda Tivoli's business-as-ceremony philosophy flowing into Musa Murchison's cultural geography. Pierre absorbed it all; not as content to be learned but as methodologies to be embodied.
When Solana Booth, a Native American educator and healer, gifted Pierre a bandana after patiently answering his questions about resistance and survival, she was practicing the indigenous understanding that children are our most direct connection to both ancestral memory and future possibility. Their hours of conversation weren't adult speaking down to child, but intelligence systems collaborating across generations.
curated something rare; a healing space that honored children not as peripheral beings to be managed, but as teachers whose wisdom we desperately need. The mixed format of floor sitting and yoga mats broke down academic hierarchies that Pierre navigated effortlessly, moving between "Superintelligence for What?" discussions and embodied play without missing a beat.Children are the ultimate quantum insurgents. They operate in superposition states we spend decades trying to recover… simultaneously innocent and wise, individual and collective, present and future. They naturally exist in the cracks between disciplines, cultures, and ways of knowing that we've been trained to separate.
Perhaps the future ancestors we're trying to become are actually the children we once were, before the world taught us that curiosity was chaos, that questions were problems, that existing in multiple states simultaneously was impossible rather than inevitable.
The real insurgency isn't hacking systems from the outside: it's remembering how to think like children from the inside, using their undomesticated intelligence as our navigation system for building the healing-centered futures we're all reaching toward.
This includes emerging technologies like AI, which are extensions of our collective intelligence, created by us… but not necessarily by the most insurgent, embodied quantum minds. What if we let children like Pierre guide how we develop these systems? What if their superposition thinking, their refusal of binary categories, their natural cross-pollination across cultures and languages became the template rather than the afterthought?
Pierre reminded me that quantum culture isn't something we create… it's something we remember.
Future Ancestors in Motion: Quantum-crafted children running
Pierre in nature at Garrison Institute
Children with sheep in Turkey by Mustafa Sahbaz
The shadow of Pierre and I on Garrison Institute grounds
Quantum-crafted Future Ancestors family portrait 2023
Children from Gaza with love via Saint Levant
Pierre swimming in Garrison Institute lake
"Liberation requires the ability to see beyond what is currently present..." - Joel Leon
Pierre at Kino Saito Gallery (Upstate Art Week)
Throwback: Young Samar with grandmother
Pierre in nature at Garrison Institute
Pierre in deep conversation with Solana, wearing her gifted bandana
Pierre watching the Fijian / Samoan ceremony by Clarinda and Philadelphia Tivoli
One of my Postcards Series on
: "Ceremonies in the Multiverse"Pierre creating "The Source of Water" artwork at Kino Saito Gallery
Little girl in South Pará, Brazil, drawing indigenous heritage on her doll's face
Pierre in nature at Garrison Institute
Pierre in meditation pose, listening to summit sessions