A Land of Fountains and Chimes

A set of windchimes I made for our garden hung silently on a still day. Alysia discovered that when she grasped the top of the wind chimes with her fingers and tried to hold them still, in 5-10 seconds, the chimes began gently contacting the quartz rock clapper. The chimes begin to whisper. Their song grows louder. If Alysia released her fingers from the chimes, the ringing quieted towards silence. Simply by touching and releasing the top of the wind chimes, she can make the random song wax and wane.

As she showed me this, I began thinking of the chimes as a sweet-sounding symbol of the relationship between the Earth and life. Without life, the chimes hang straight down, in a position of thermodynamic equilibrium. All is still within this closed system. When we touch the wind chimes, they become part of a larger, open system. Energy flows into the system and they begin to oscillate away from thermodynamic equilibrium. No matter how hard we try to hold our hand still, the chimes will begin to oscillate. Life is like that; energy flows out from it. (That’s it! – the distinction I’ve been trying to express in an article I’m writing. Life is not just an energy-consuming subsystem of the world; it is also a subsystem from which energy flows out to modify the world.) Eventually enough energy has entered this part of the system to get the chimes swinging into the clapper. The music of life begins. When we release our hold, the chimes become a closed system again. The energy drains out of the system into the surrounding universe and the chimes hang silently straight once again.

This last Christmas vacation was a time for me to play with making wind chimes. This last year has been a time for Alysia to play with making fountains in her home-embracing gardens. She adds and moves rocks about, “tuning” the fountain to the sound she wants. As we sat on a bench in her garden listening to her fountain and my chimes, a phrase came: a land of fountains and chimes. I imagined walking through a woodland where one occasionally passes a set of chimes tuned to the spirit of that place. Or a solar- powered fountain in a sunlit meadow surrounded by the calls and songs of flitting birds.

Often I get stuck thinking about how we must change our current behavior to get to a more desirable, sustainable relationship with nature. Just as a maze is often easier to solve working backwards, so it is refreshing to shift the focus away from us and onto the world; away from the current situation and onto future possibilities. Probably most of us believe in the concept of a sustainable relationship with the earth. In political debates, however, sustainable often comes across as a life constrained. But a land of fountains and chimes. Its loveliness invites me forward.