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Pandemic Journey Day 59

May 19, 2020

Today’s idea – We are in this together -I see that a lot these days.  Billboards on secondary highways, neon-colored letters painted on storefront windows, plastic letter inserts for sidewalk signs on wheels.  It’s a good thought that rides on the back of a bigger truth. Actually, we are in everything together. Our biology has developed to be intrinsically connected to other biology around us and beyond us. The air we exchange with the plant world fans the nutrients we trade with other life, that rides with the water as it conveys through everything - sky to sea to sky to sea to sky.  The science lens continues to find more and more ways that everything has connected with everything else.  Some of the connections are up close and personal; some are subtle and extenuated.  Think about the paradox of an aspen grove.  We see hundreds or thousands of tall, slim, white trees with heart-shaped leaves that tremble in the wind.  Below the surface is one organism, the aspen clone that stretches out for hundreds of acres and essentially creeps along, sometimes in pursuit of the opposite sex.

Chaos theory supports the idea that life is dynamic because it must continually dance through other systems. We rest in the patterns of those systems; they are the eddies.  While we assume that unexpected events happen for random reasons, mathematics can show that the randomness is really not all that random. When patterns intersect, or systems collide, the first moments of contact seem chaotic. Like a fistful of pebbles tossed into a pond, the motion of one pattern touches the intersecting movement of others.  Some events give a big push and some only a ripple.  With time they find their groove again, like the free-flowing improvisation intersections in jazz.

We are in this together and always have been.  The virus is like the butterfly, at the outset, it is a relatively insignificant body, but over time it can launch a lively cascade of linked events that might blow up into a tsunami of chaos for other systems.  The biosphere can act as a trampoline for tiny things, especially when it launches them into deeply matted pools of connection. We are in this together because our big complex anatomies and sociologies and economies have thrown out their arms in every direction.  The surface area of our networks makes us very sticky.

Since we are in this together, we know, the only way to get out of this thing is together.  Today I pray that the divine force of entropy degrades and releases all those misguided, clueless political systems that wobble a little more each day. They certainly don’t serve our recovery and its new normal.  Please move them along quickly to dust and flatulence.

Oh, Goddess, hear my prayer.


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