Silenzio is a landscape, a mountain ridge, a cloudy sky through which the moon is shining. Silence and solitude can help us find a new purpose in life.
Silenzio, a sculpture that brought me back to those hopeful early days of Corporate Sustainability (CSR).
When I met the American author Joseph Jaworski, he wanted to know: Is there a place in the Netherlands where it is completely silent? A place where you can go for days without hearing a car? Or an airplane flying overhead? A place where you hear only the sounds of nature?
I could not think of an example offhand. The Hoge Veluwe? One of the Wadden Islands? The Netherlands is such a busy country. Everywhere, you can see and hear signs of human activity.
Joseph Jaworski had been in the Netherlands in 2009, and I spoke with him about his 1996 book, Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership. In it, Jaworski describes synchronicity through his own experiences and explicitly connects it with a period of silence and solitude.
Magical experience
For him, it does not begin by pursuing a predetermined goal. It begins by becoming still and listening to what presents itself. There is the magical experience of a whale appearing off the coast, seemingly bringing him a message. Then he develops an increasingly clear sense of the direction he wants to take in life.
After that, remarkable encounters and events begin to occur that connect with this new direction. Jaworski calls such meaningful coincidences synchronicity. The events may appear coincidental, but they acquire meaning because they connect with the inner development that preceded them.
For Jaworski, synchronicity is therefore not a trick for making wishes come true. It is more a process of inner orientation, followed by meaningful events in the outside world.
Jaworski also taught me this: There is no such thing as coincidence. And when disasters occur, people can develop an enormous collective strength without communicating with one another, helping to turn the situation around and overcome the disaster.
For my grandchildren
In the hopeful days of corporate social responsibility (CSR), it was popular among sustainability-minded business leaders to withdraw from everyday life together. One of them was Herman Wijffels, chairman of the Rabobank, who organised such journeys to distant countries, particularly Botswana and South Africa. Under the banner of ‘Natural Leadership’, these leadership trails were intended to lead to a deeper awareness. Strategic business policy is not about the short term, but about the generations that come after us. In those days, you often heard Captains of Industry say from the stage: ‘I am doing this for my grandchildren.’
I thought of all this when I assembled this quiet little landscape. Clouds and mountains made from waste wood from sustainable construction: cross-laminated timber (CLT). A gilded disc of heaven tree as the moon, cut down because it is an invasive species considered dangerous to its surroundings. And, creating depth, an excavated rootstock as the ‘tree’. All in all, this sculpture embodies the Dendroism artistic approach.
Jan Bom, 28 september 2026
