I died in a Borneo jungle at twenty-three and have been working out what to do with that information ever since.
"The world does not need fixing.
It needs remembering."
— The World Remembers Itself
I grew up reading my life into existence. Books were the grown-ups that explained what was going on, since the actual grown-ups were otherwise occupied. I was a bookworm before I knew the word for it, and I have been writing ever since: poems, letters, manuscripts, corporate reports, chatbot dialogues, peer-reviewed papers on carbon sequestration, and now a seven-book novel series.
Born in South Africa, Austrian by nationality, and living in the Netherlands for most of my adult life. Trained as a geologist and engineer. I spent fifteen years inside the oil and gas industry trying to change the system from within, before arriving at the unavoidable conclusion that the problem was never the data. It was always the hearts and minds.
I held the IPCC reports in my hands in 2003 and had, frankly, the same reaction as Greta Thunberg. Only I was in a meeting room and nobody was filming. I pushed carbon sequestration for years. I believed the answer was in the rock. It partly was. Eventually I left and retrained as a coach and facilitator, placing the inner life at the centre of everything.
Since 2020 I have been building HeartWork with Frank, my partner, asking the question the corporate world finds deeply inconvenient: what if behaviour change starts on the inside? And writing. The writing has become the primary adventure. I no longer watch Netflix. Why would you?
Hospitalised alone at two and a half. Again at five. Reading as the alternative to a confusing world. Started writing poems as a teenager. Started writing letters. Never really stopped.
Took a year off studies. Worked at an aluminium press factory, collected donations door to door (excellent salary, useful skill set), saved the money and flew to Indonesia alone. Trekked through the primary Borneo jungle just before the fires that decimated two thirds of it. Contracted malaria. Near-death experience. Came back an entirely different person. Wrote a complete manuscript about it.
Studied at the Montanuniversität in Austria, where women made up ten percent of the student body. Went straight from there onto African offshore platforms as the only woman on the rig. Learned more about electrical wiring than I ever intended. Progressed into sustainability research at Schlumberger and Shell. Medusa Project: trying to mineralise CO₂, turning it back into stone. Programme manager for carbon storage in Australia. Read the IPCC reports in 2003. Had strong feelings about them. Eventually left corporate life.
Retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh's community in the south of France. Impossible to fully describe. The change played out over years.
Left corporate world. Retrained as coach. Co-founded a mental health tech startup: wrote entire chatbot dialogues, scripts, engagement flows. Entered a startup accelerator. Discovered the entrepreneurial journey is an education in itself, and not always a comfortable one.
Met Frank. Co-founded HeartWork, placing the heart at the centre of sustainability and change. Enthusiastic about building communities, be it with sustainability professionals, or locally around the food forest & our Zen Buddhist Sangha. Living among farmers. Writing the book. Quantum physics experiments on the side, just because. Living in the best creative period of my life.
When Russian tanks roll onto the Ringstrasse at nine in the morning, Erica is standing two minutes away, folder of papers in hand, keys still warm from the notary's desk. She walks toward the sound. A news camera holds her face for four seconds. That image, a woman standing motionless while history lurches forward, will set in motion a chain of events that nobody in power is prepared for.
A seven-book literary fiction series following two parallel narrative layers across seven symbolic years: a near-future thriller in which three people build a decentralised digital platform governed by the truths of non-duality, a platform no government can control, no algorithm can bend, and no amount of money can buy, and a contemporary strand in which three ordinary people bear witness to the world unravelling and slowly remembering itself. The six characters are the same souls, in different realities.
The philosophical backbone is thirty-three remembrances, truths about consciousness, ego, and the illusion of separation, drawn from Advaita Vedanta, Ramana Maharshi, Rumi, Gandhi and the Seven Grandfather Teachings of the Ojibwe. They don't appear as essays. They arrive through action, image, and the specific weight of a particular moment.
Book I, Truth, named after the first of the seven Ojibwe virtues, is in progress. As of May 2026 the manuscript stands at 35,438 words across 7 chapters. Chapter 8 is currently being written.
The deeper motivation is simple, if not small: I want to write a different future into existence. A glimpse of how we might move through the intensifying everything crisis, which we all feel and witness, toward a version of the world that is messy, emerging, flawed, more just, more equal, and hopeful at the same time. That version exists. It is already beginning. This series is my attempt to make it visible.
Essays on consciousness, collective change, leadership from the inside, and the stubborn question of why knowing better is not the same as doing better. Written with Frank, for people who are done pretending the data is enough.
Read at HeartWork →Six thousand five hundred followers and counting. Posts on organisational transformation, non-duality in practice, the interface between inner life and outer change. Shorter than the blogs. No less direct.
Follow on LinkedIn →Published research from my years in carbon storage and geological engineering. The Medusa Project. CO₂ mineralisation. Subsurface storage. The phase of the work where I believed the answer was in the rock. It partly was.
View on ResearchGate →A place to see what is alive in your community. Who needs a pot of soup. Who lives three streets away and is asking the same questions as you. Born from the HeartWork Sangha in Doorn. Starting small, staying human. The kind of ungovernable, decentralised platform that Erica builds in the novel. The real-world version starts here.
Visit hetdigiprikbord.nl →How does order arise from turbulence? How does coherence emerge from noise? And what if consciousness itself acts as a unifying field across human systems and the natural world? These are the questions driving my current research project, Black Box in Flux, which explores the deep patterns linking quantum transitions with chaotic systems.
The aim is to bridge scientific and human understanding of transformation. Not as metaphor. As structural inquiry: looking for the places where the physics and the philosophy of non-duality point at exactly the same thing, and designing experiments that can be simulated to test what that overlap actually means.
This is not separate from the novel, from the geology, from the coaching work, from twenty-five years of watching organisations and people move through change. It is the same inquiry, in a different register. Everything connects. That, in the end, is the whole point.
Experiment 4: onset detection via piecewise fit with optional LLE, dataset v0.2.1. Methods, figures, and decision log included. Versioned archive on Zenodo with DOI. Reproducible notebooks and plain-language summary included.
I live on a farm in the Netherlands, above the calves, with Amber and one dog. We are squeezed into sixty square metres, and looking into tiny houses for what comes next.
The calves are my neighbours. Cute. Loud, especially at four in the morning when they are hungry and lonely and have things to say about it. Smelly. Still sweet.
We planted a food forest, which takes its time and then becomes extraordinary. In summer I lose myself entirely in it. The peaches, the mulberries, the black currants, the raspberries, the apples and pears. Making jam, making cakes, standing in the garden in the heat with my hands in the earth. I do not go anywhere in Dutch summer. It's simply good to be here.
Amber and I have rituals. Hip Asian food joints. The cinema (yes, The Devil Wears Prada 2). Outfits sourced from Vinted. I am still in love with rocks, so we built a stone circle in the food forest. I do my morning Tai Chi there.
Newly planted, quietly growing, already miraculous in summer.
Downstairs neighbours. Loud at four in the morning. Smelly. Still cute.
Peaches, mulberries, pears, apples. Made into things that smell of abundance.
Present, enthusiastic, entirely unhelpful in the garden.
Happens here. Early mornings. No Netflix. Inner adventure only.
Shipped from Norway to The Hague, then moved to Doorn. I am still in love with rocks.
For literary enquiries, speaking, HeartWork, or the quantum physics experiments.