Short Stories About the Sparks in the OUBEY MINDSPACE – Episode 1: THE FERN

In the Carboniferous period, ferns that were larger than today formed huge forests together with horsetails and club mosses.

They created the basis for most of today’s coal deposits. The oldest fossil finds date back to the Lower Devonian period, around 400 million years ago.

When I once had the opportunity to visit a coal mine 800 meters underground, I discovered the imprint of a fern in a piece of coal out of the corner of my eye as I crawled through a narrow seam. I was so fascinated and moved by this rare find that I picked up the piece, held it in my left hand, and continued crawling through the seam with the fossilized fern in one hand.

There are many artifacts from OUBEY’s everyday life on display in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. The fossilized fern, which I still cherish to this day, is not one of them, because as an artifact it is part of my own life.

But to our delight, OUBEY and I agreed one day that ferns are our favorite plants. They are simply fascinatingly beautiful: how a broad, huge frond grows out of the snail-shaped shoot, with many small seeds neatly lined up on the underside, which ensure the plant’s propagation. A masterpiece of nature!

OUBEY was also very enthusiastic about the changing aesthetics of the fern as it grew. He used the fern to explain the Fibonacci sequence to me, which the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci discovered in various plants in the 13th century, after the ancient Greeks and Indians had already discovered the mathematical series itself – without, however, applying it to the plant world.

But what impressed him most was the fact that this plant has survived all the natural disasters of the last 400 million years and is therefore not only a fossil, for example a piece of coal, but also a living testimony to evolutionary history in the wild.

It was clear to me very early on that OUBEY MINDSPACE definitely needed a “spark” relating to evolutionary history, which would naturally also give the 400-million-year-old fern a moment of attention and respect. The image in the header shows the fern as it appears in the Mind Spark on evolution.

There are six rooms in OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different one-minute Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. These stories are told here by me.