“But to make that possibility – to make it just a possibility seems to me no more than a minimal human obligation. It’s not a big political deal. It’s not even a big spiritual deal. But it is part of the fun of being alive in your own time to sweep a little bit of the path for the little ones who need a little sense of where to go. And for some odd reason, we live in a culture that gives nobody a sense of where they might want to go.”
Gary Snyder in You Can’t Count the Apples in a Seed,WHOLE EARTH REVIEW, no. 52 (Fall 1986)
My experiences at Kiet Siel with check dams quickly taught me the futility of trying to oppose an established flow. All the world is flowing. If we try to stop a flow, it backs up, rising higher, accumulating potential energy to blast the channel back open again. Rain walks taught me the wisdom of leading some of the flow off onto a new, slower path that can absorb some of the flow, transforming its erosive energy into possibilities. “Offer a new path before opposing the current path.”
The Scientific Revolution and Industrial Revolution have profoundly transformed our civilization over the last 500 years. Five hundred years ago, Europeans experienced themselves as the unmoving center of a very small universe that literally revolved around them. They had God’s full, undivided attention, giving them a strong sense of what they should work towards; entering Heaven, God’s universe-encompassing realm that lay just beyond the Celestial Sphere with its attached stars. That universe was all about us. We were its culmination and reason for its being. But then Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and finally Newton blew that celestial sphere up into immensity and set us orbiting in an ellipse around one of thousands upon thousands of stars. Geology discovered deep time that gave Darwin the time needed for evolution through natural selection and we found ourselves lately-arrived animals on an ongoing, life-filled planet. These scientific discoveries shredded the cultural assumptions that gave direction to that earlier culture’s moral compass, leaving us disoriented in a new world.
We lost our sense of direction. In our spinning confusion, it can seem that the universe’s direction is towards cold, inevitable dark lifelessness. Dead planets orbiting the dark embers of former suns, simply orbiting within the relentless laws of the universe for billions of empty years. One of the biggest challenges we face is a trance of “It’s not possible,” collectively woven over these last centuries. This trance limits our imaginations in ways that confine our thoughts and actions within walls of seemingly inescapable logic, especially economic logic. Within this trance, our culture loses hope. More and more of the movies and stories we create for our young are darker, colder, containing more death.
This entire book, however, has been an offering of the path: “It is Possible.” It is possible for our lives to increase possibilities into the future. Our lives don’t have to be at the expense of the greater world. A direction extends both ways (both Up and Down, East and West, forward and back). There is the direction towards cold, dark lifelessness and then there is the opposite direction towards increasing possibilities system-wide. Life explores that direction. Upward is the direction to orient one’s life by; the direction in which possibilities arise. That direction gives us billions of years to explore what is really possible within the still-being-discovered laws of our universe. Giving into hopelessness so early in our game leads to actions that diminish that possibility. I sometimes think of sperm with 1/100,000,000 chance of fertilizing the egg. With such odds, one should just give up and many probably do. But every one of our ancestral sperms didn’t. They kept swimming. Optimism has been bred in from the beginning.
The all-pervasive Second Law can be trusted to guide one’s life Upward in the same way that a river’s current can guide salmon back up to their birthplace. True, as the Second Law predicts, drifting down is a lot easier than working upward. But Upward is possible.
Life feels mythic in the Upward direction like how that rosy finch changed my life or the way keeping my vow to myself led on an upward angle to Glacier Bay and the question it inspired of how the land was different before the appearance of life. Life feels mythic in the Upward direction because we have powers. Not comic book superpowers but the power within every second to shape our lives towards Upward, the power to encourage the light within each other. Usually the effects are small but every now and then, an ally emerges or something delightfully amazing happens. It is possible for us to be part of a great Upward Spiral that stretches back billions of years to our anaerobic primal atmosphere and that can expand within our galaxy for billions of years into the future. We can be part of the process that has brought vision and pollination, hands and tools, flight and consciousness into existence and will continue creating other unknown possibilities for billions of years more.
This is possible! But it requires work. By “work”, I mean something more primal than a job done for money. I mean work like the continuous work that our cells do to maintain our metabolism. Life is possible only with work. We exist within the universe’s stream of entropy flow. To hold one’s position within that flow requires work. To swim upstream requires even more work. Work is hard-wired into all life’s DNA. It is what our cells have to do. It is what we have to do. It is what we get to do. Life gifts to us the opportunity to make a difference through our work.
The work of Turning Upwards is responsive to every moment and can take a million forms. Part of it is the work of being trustworthy, of helping one another, of common courtesy. Another part is shifting relative balances, of increasing Possibilities in the future for all living things.
Just as primitive photosynthetic life gifted us with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and plants have gifted us with food and more rain, so animals long ago gifted us with vision and the ability to move and the power of a central nervous system. We contain the same power to bring yet-to-be imagined Possibilities into existence for life, for Earth, for the Universe. We are not the culmination of evolution. History does not end with us. We are a current stage in an ongoing process of transforming starlight into amazing possibilities.
But this stage is important because we are learning how to navigate a tricky constraint of the Second Law. The Second Law requires each of us (as a sub-system within the greater system of the Earth) to harvest sub-systems outside of ourselves and to dump our waste into sub-systems outside of ourselves. If we don’t do this, we die. The graph below shows several sub-systems dying in various ways.
Notice that this graph has a different title for its vertical axis and it has a zero line. This graph shows whether the amount of Possibilities within a sub-system is increasing or decreasing over time. Above the zero line, Possibilities are increasing within the sub-system; below that line, they are decreasing. In terms of individual organisms, the graph shows the Relative Balance between inflow and outflow of usable energy an organism is experiencing through time. Line #1 loses its usable energy right away. This would be like the runt of the litter that never gets a chance to nurse. It quickly fades away. Line #2 is of someone who fails to thrive. They get nourishment. They hang around for a time, but it is, nevertheless, a downward progression. Line #3 is of someone who might make it. The organism occasionally catches something to eat but it can’t get enough. This one lasts longer but eventually runs out of energy and dies.
#4 is a different situation. This could represent a well-fed goldfish in a small bowl that is never cleaned. For a while, usable energy is flowing in abundantly to the great benefit of the fish. But its accumulating excrement makes the water toxic and the fish dies. Or it could represent a predator that eats its prey so fast that the prey is eliminated. Then the predator starves to death. You need to harvest to survive but you can’t harvest too much.
This frames the tricky challenge the Second Law poses to living things. If your line is downhill, you will die. You need to harvest and get that line moving upward. But if the line is too upward, you will also run into trouble. You will grow and reproduce faster than the environment you harvest can replenish itself. The challenge is to find the sweet spot in between those lines. Searching for the sweet spot will probably look like line #5 with erratic swerves. But with experience, perhaps it can eventually stabilize into something like the gently oscillating, slowly-rising line, #6.
My experience suggests that the key to achieving line #6 is for us to use part of the usable energy we harvest from other sub-systems to become part of The Commons and do the work of altering flows so that more possibilities can emerge for all, not just oneself.
After the storms at Kiet Siel revealed the power of slowing flows by splitting them, my life started accumulating possibilities. I committed to rain walks and shifting Relative Balances. I made a life-long commitment to Alysia. I started understanding the long-term power of teaching. I began navigating by the Fifth Dimension. I wrote a book, raised a family, co-founded a school. I’ve shared these stories to offer you the perspective of a searcher who has found something that has tested personally true. It is possible to live an Upward life, rising on Upward Spirals of feedback between my actions and the world’s.
To many, hope has died like it did for me in second grade when I learned the Sun would die. Growing up seems to require putting hope away with one’s toys and accepting a jaded sophistication that will hopefully come across as cool. But hope throbs with possibilities, gives spring to one’s step, shines in one’s eyes. Hope transforms one’s view of the world and of being alive. In this book, I have tried describing and demonstrating the experiences that have transformed my life in the hope that my book can be for you what that rosy finch or the rolling dancer was for me.
Having used this chapter to offer this new path, it is now time to oppose a current path that directs much of my culture’s collective energy. Many people feel like the world is moving in a wrong direction but different people can disagree as to the reasons and end up opposing one another’s attempts to create change. These disagreements create turbulence, adding to the erosive energy of the current path. Avoiding turbulence is part of the reason I have started with this chapter of “offering a new path before”. Knowing my intent for this path will hopefully reduce your chance of turbulently misinterpreting the next chapters.
Next Chapter . . . . . Table of Contents
Leave a Reply