So, I’ve reached my biblical life span. Death is twenty-five years closer than when I started Cairns. Sometimes my students share their fear of death and I remember how terrified I, too, was at their age as Death’s permanence spreads its vast wings across my developing consciousness. But now I feel comfortable with death. Though my death lies closer, it is still abstract so perhaps I will panic when it actually draws nigh. Nevertheless, I’m choosing to share my current attitude in this final issue. I’m not trying to proselytize some dogma. Just sharing my current perspective.
This perspective has quietly grown from experiences in vast wilderness lands such as the one I described in the Warner Wetlands. I can’t give you that direct experience so I will tell you some of the stories that accumulate experiences that underlie the idea.
Sitting once beside a small flow of runoff receding as the rainy season passed, I was fascinated by grains of sand being rolled along within the flow. A grain would move through a level stretch until it came to a half-inch drop. There the grain dropped below the current and rolled slowly down to rest at the bottom of that drop. Every five seconds or so, another grain came to the drop. I came to understand that each grain followed a predictable pattern. It would roll down and come to rest on top of the previous grain. Then the next one would drop onto that one but then roll to one side or the other. Back and forth, a grain at a time, they formed a one-grain thick layer that spread across the width of the drop, gradually building higher until it reached the top of the drop. When the next grain then rolled along, it had to roll one sand grain further until it came to that point where it dropped down to begin the deposition of the next grain-thick layer. This grain- for-grain pattern is replicating itself in flowing water all around the world, from mud puddles to river deltas.
(Here’s a video of a similar pattern on a larger and faster scale.)
A different pattern. The first time I saw a native black bumblebee land on a vinegarweed flower, I knew the two had evolved together. Vinegarweed is one of those flowers whose stamens tip when the weight of a bee lands on the flower. The male stamens dab some pollen on the bee in the same spot that the female style of another vinegarweed will also touch. Precise pollination with only a few grains of pollen. But what astounded my mind when that bumblebee landed was how perfectly the stamens fit like a glove around its large, round head, right between the eyes. A perfect match.
In the wilderness experiences I referred to, I had been observing many processes. Alluvial fan formation. Groundwater-shaped distribution of plants. Talus slopes pointing up to the gullies that funnel broken rock down to them. Direction of slope shaping what grows there. Ravens ridge soaring. Dust devils in the high desert.
Our culture is comfortable seeing a similarity between the synapses of our brain and the on-off switches within a computer. As computer circuitry grows more dense, we wonder whether computers will achieve consciousness. We tend to think of consciousness as arising from our synaptic complexity and that computers, if they can copy that, could achieve consciousness too. Our brains are the big, real thing and the computers are models based on that. But what I feel out there in the wild is that this interconnected world is the big, real thing and our brains are a wonderfully-evolved biochemically dense “model” of the interconnected dynamics of the world. What we call “consciousness” is the state of awareness we can generate with the body and experience we have. However, the Earth as an interconnected system, powered by the Sun, is so much vaster than our concept of consciousness that it would be hubris to think of the Earth as conscious. For starters, one part of the Earth is several billion human brains consciously computing away; that is part of the Earth’s complexity. And how many chemical transformations are performing the Krebs cycle perfectly and how many DNA recombinations are shaping the way life interacts with its environment? Our experience of consciousness is a small piece of something much, much greater. That something includes predators and disease and famine and lots of death and the rising and eroding of mountains and the water cycle. But when I am in those vast areas, the fundamental nature of that something feels both benign and personal. I am not apart from that, not irrelevant. It encompasses me in a way that I am gratefully grounded within.
To rephrase it in a mundanely different perspective, I am like a skin cell of a body. I am an organic, interacting part of something tremendous. I fulfill a vital function. Given the nature of this world, I will grow old, brittle and slough off but during my time, I will also be able to contribute to that greater something. Like a skin cell, my death is needed. My body and mind lose flexibility and alacrity. I was shaped by forces decades ago, many of which are now less important. For me, the advent of television, going to the Moon, and the Vietnam War were major shapers; for this generation, climate change, student debt, social media, and this pandemic are major shapers. Everything is being shaped to what is real now. Renewal must happen.
What happens to me after death? The molecules within my body are immortal but they come and go so I have no allegiance to any particular configuration of them. What’s important is that I have been given the opportunity to influence the world around me in a way that will extend beyond me. My little plays with runoff will nourish greater plant growth for some years to come. Many insects will be able to live that otherwise would not. Who knows what grows from these Cairns? I know I have opened some of my students in a way that will make them more centered, more powerful throughout their lives. My daughters will carry forward what I (any my parents and grandparents) have passed on. In that way, my existence carries on.
In a similar way, the shrieks of terrors in the dark Nazi gas chambers have created a collective nightmare ghost that will haunt us for generations, forming a hell within which Hitler lives on. But that too will slowly fade, just as many of us are undisturbed by the deeds of Genghis Khan. Like soundwaves that never disappear but spread out to fade into the random background noise, so the extent of my life shall be.
But that greater interconnected whole that I am a part of does continue. All living things are part of that. We all go through the same mortal termination but that greater thing continues. In our actions, we can help it encompass greater, more uplifting possibilities and our lives can also help dissipate possibilities that others in the past had helped accumulate. Our questions about what happens after death tend to focus on the individual. For me, those questions fade to irrelevance in the presence of this greater thing. What I really am is a part of that which will continue on. I’m not talking about God or anything metaphoric. I’m talking about alluvial fans and plant distributions and the dance between a glacier and the valley that contains it. Seagulls following the emerging insects as the water slowly fills a vast desert wetland. A pair of wolves trotting up an autumnally quiet arctic valley. The well-proportioned growth of a tree. Twenty gazillion, gazillion “synapses” responding in a diversity of ways to one another, evolving, including the consciousness developing within living organisms. What a gift being part of this is.
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