Modern Marvels

This carpet moss (Mnium hornum) is living on the moist ground at the edge of my yard, the mosses are an incredibly persistent life form. They are rootless organisms - having only a single celled rhyzoid to embrace the earth and absorb water - yet they are formed to place, not made to move, but to flourish. Their vitality comes from a resilience of marvellous proportions. Mosses can rebound from near desiccation and flourish anew. Mosses are the primary land plant. Their story is astounding, when you think of it. Some 500 million years ago, this gaggle of cooperating cells, this self-replicating system, found a way to flourish where water had evaporated. (Life has that persistence.) How many tries before it got it right? Enough to get it right, if Darwin and Mendel are correct. These relics flourish now in my yard, glowing green, alive in honest worship of their god the sun. Male and female in successive generations. This life form in all its stories represents the memory of a certain kind of living momentum so undeniably different from the momentum of empty space that consciousness called it holy, ancient philosphers explained it as sacred. And I would argue that no engineering course at MIT or management course at the Harvard Business School or philosophy course at the New School for Social Research can possibly replicate the profound insistence of self-organizing material. That's what Thoreau discovered, I think. We take it for granted. He pointed that out as well.

The question is: This loss of notice, this failure to be aware, can it really harm us? Because those would amount to laughable claims in many books. The very idea that the wild somehow feeds us beyond our pragmatic needs and abundant wants has been rendered mute through shaming mechanisms and misdirection. So why, really, could it possibly matter whether we stare down a flowering apple tree or stare at a glowing screen, what possible imprints could the visible world have upon our imagination. I mean, come on. It is just stuff that we look at, it is not thought itself. Is it?

Luna

The story goes that some thing very large slammed into the side of the rocky boiling mass of gas and magma that was the Earth four and a half billion years ago. A cosmic fender bender. The resulting projectile was flung out into space, to the outer reaches of a gravity field, and locked into a perpetual dance. This chunk of rock marks our seasons and has represented the principle of eternal return in all of our mythic tales and scared texts. It draws the tides, a fundmental pre-condition of life evolving, and it is said to draw our moods as well. It's reflection of sunlight has projected earthward since the deepest time. Dinosaurs and mammoths saw the same. Who else has counted its cycles, its waxing and waning, and found measures that hold more than personal interest. What does it mean to look upon a vision looked upon for so long by everything that can look? Why does the moon enchant me so? It's persistence, perhaps. The lesson it holds. What other things mark time now that resulted merely from accidental encounter? How else have cosmic accidents come to measure the rhythm of my own time? Organic time moves in one direction and yet its effects linger forever. Each thing, just the history of some other set of things. We are not islands, separated from others by a gaping sea and immeasurable space; space is the illusion of the quanta. We are all-too-crowded inside a fishbowl comprised of our own detritus. In this case, which seems to be the case, be sure to make what you would like to see. For you will sit amongst it for eternity.

Carnage making carnage, violence making violence. We have pushed it and its echoes wave all around. The means are all we have. And that is the ultimate tragedy here.

Snow shadows

What a joy, this life. The snow fell with a fury for twenty-four hours. It layered everything, gently, lovingly. The post-modernists would say this sense of love is nothing but my own creation, my own projection out onto the world, a set of values generated only in me. Out there, they say, no love. No meaning at all. Well...perhaps in your corners, I retort. But I see this snow, I watched it fall. It evoked something that was not clear to me without it. With it, I think I have found clarity, I find some tangibility to the thought and emotion that previously had no form. Nature makes the metaphor for our thoughts, at the very least, does it not? This snow here, the shadows, they represent as well as just exist; if you turn your head sideways, you can see the dragonfly made by the oak sapling; you can squint and see the blues of life giving water and shadows of form that could be mountains not just crystals of snow. There are things to notice - more than we ever see in fact. And the associations with this image here trickle out into the world of metaphysics. It forces you to question the basis of your truth, of what you think you know. Think on this: If what I see associates to me, then am I truly that? Does that refer to me? My ego says it must, but what, in fact, if it doesn't and I just think it does? What then? Can I ever really know? We face the ever changing realities of time unfolding, and we desperately try to stick elements of higher consistency onto the flux. Certitude is contingent. Process is everything. Care is tantamount. Joy is a must. What a joy this life, what a loving landscape.

This truth is lost, of course, on the ideologues and power mongerers (and others with even less to contribute). They got there, somehow, suckered the masses. Smoke and mirrors. But even that is fading now. One year, two years, three, four, the same lies spread thinner and thinner and thinner, the outcasts growing in number. Just as the gentle snow of winter is blown into spring torrents, the careful love of genuine humanity always trumps grasping narcissism. David slew Goliath, don't forget. Without peace, time is not your friend.

Just Ice

It is not nearly far enough into the new year for the spring rains and swollen rivers occuring all around us. One anticipates cold this time of year, not arms of snow melting in the yard. In New England, we expect snow to stay around in the winter. We expect layers. This precipitation today, for example, seems like it should have been another layer. A fluffy dusting of fresh powder. The sort of blanket of ice that Thoreau would have loved to have wandered in, detecting the lives that lived beside him in the forest and meadows of Concord, their footprints in the piles of crystaline water freshly fallen the day before. He saw intelligence in the paths of their footsteps. We cannot even see the footsteps today. Sadly, in both literal and figurative senses, we do not detect the lives that are around us lived. We cannot find metaphorical bridges or literal tropes to gap the gaping divide. We watch the snow wash away from our yards, a snow that barely held on after the previous snow had melted, and the one before that. This warming cycle is proximate, but part, no doubt, of the random changes that are expected under the soup of carbon dioxide that we now live. And so, neither true space nor genuine time mean anything to us any more. Each moment a fleeting one, a desperate lunge into the next, a blinding certainty. This snow here, for example, this natural last embankment in the middle of my yard, jumped up to me as a fine image of global warming, a picture of its implications. But my memory reminded me that this curvature of snow is something else as well. It exists as the final remnant of a family of snowmen built up by my family and I in full knowledge that that forces of human nature would bring them down again. They were chopped to bits by middle and high school boys, all muscle and hormones and energy and welcoming the opportunities to use them. This is the last remnant of that opportunity given to them that day and taken up predictably and with a fury out of proportion to the harm the snowmen had done to any one of them. Their force against the snow compacted the crystals making them more difficult to wash away. Their fury left this rain-resistant pile, now lying here in my yard as a reminder, a material memory of the boys' muscle power, their physical emotions manifest.

We understand the world too imperfectly to move with the sort of certainty our nation state has determined to move with. We have harnessed force with the utmost precision and toward too many ends to conclude our ambitions have been soley evil, but we have never learned the table manners of the gods. "Our whole life is startlingly moral," Thoreau reminds us in the "Higher Laws" chapter of Walden. "There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails." Force and power as ends in themselves cannot help but bring despair, misery, and continued death. We know better than these days have shown of us. We could do better if we chose to try.