Milena Bon née Flego would have been a hundred and four years old on this day. She was an extraordinary woman, but her main contribution to the human race was her one and only son, Ranko. Having given birth to him in her thirty-sixth year, which was considered rather late at the time, she dedicated the rest of her life to him. Ever so quietly, she taught him to undertake all his projects with utmost commitment, conviction, and courage. And he was the crown of all her efforts in many surprising ways. Whatever he touched, he transformed. And he touched a surprising range of fields—from art to science, from philosophy to literature, and from academic life to yoga.

As a youngster, Ranko showed a special gift in painting. Although he put it aside during a good stretch of his life, he returned to it in his mature years. The cycle of his paintings, which he named Cave Art Now, took more than two decades to complete. It is dedicated to geometric art that spans all stages of human development. It started with shamans in caves and came to its fruition around the time when Milena was born. As Ranko argued persuasively, the masterpieces of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich went all the way back to the cradle of the human race in Africa.

In his studies, Milena’s son excelled in economics. Mathematical economics was his field of choice, and he managed a number extraordinary results. In particular, he showed that the work of a Nobel laureate in economics was faulty in a particular line of economic models of potentially great importance for economic governance of not only individual economies, but also the world economy as a whole. He also provided economic models in replacement of those he had showed to be deficient. His academic work led to an academic career that he pursued much of his life.

Ranko started a major literary endeavor in his youth and stuck with it through his old age. In recognition of the mind’s meandering ways, he named it Residua. Over the years, his writing acquired the status of art, but it had its underpinnings in philosophy, as well. When the World Wide Web came into maturity, he produced one of the first works that became known as a web log or blog. He called his own the mother of all blogs, and rightly so. Over many decades, his writing grew to impressive size. By his mother’s one-hundred and fourth anniversary it counted nearly three-million words on every subject under the sun. Every so often, he would publish a book by making a selection from this vast literary source on a particular subject of interest to him at the time.

After his retirement from academia, in which he spent most of his adult life, Milena’s son turned to yoga. The stilling of the mind became his last project. Soon enough, he transformed it, too, by offering an understanding of the ancient art that eschewed all metaphysics, let alone religious constructs. Pointing out that the beginnings of yoga were in shamanism, which was an eminently practical pursuit, he stripped it of everything he called mumbo-jumbo. Endeavoring after enlightenment, he kept pursuing the stripped-down version of yoga with ever-greater fervor. He also kept recording his experiences and offering them on the World Wide Web, which became his own way of teaching yoga.

Milena Bon was an extraordinary woman as shown by the achievements of her extraordinary son. From the day of his birth to her last day in her ninety-first year, she did everything in her power to guide him without ever appearing to be doing so. By and by, he understood and appreciated her remarkable approach. Following her death, he adopted much of what she had taught him as his own way with teaching. For this reason, this tribute to her at first glance appears to be a tribute to her son, which is actually not the case. After all, he was her project in every imaginable sense of the word.