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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