I am slowing coming to some kind of centered, easy and solid comfort with the subtle yet unmistakable power of the rising tide. It may seem achingly slow, but it is not to be discounted for its steady progress. One need do nothing, one (that would be me) can indeed do nothing, about that rising tide, save watch it, express gratitude for it, and perhaps nudge the earth in little almost laughably inconsequential ways to guide the flowing tide into some little channels or create some temporary small advantage. I brew and muse and ponder the origins of this tide, this achingly slow, but steady, rise in awareness. I wonder if it is youth. I wonder if it is the first global fruits of rationality in service to the system instead of to the self (or perhaps, in service to the long term survival of the self by preserving the system upon which the self in utterly and entirely dependent). Not until the late 20th century was there really any reason to imagine that humans could indeed create enough waste to actually impact global planetary functioning (air, water, plants, animals, etc.); prior to the 20th century we could create endless mischief, but nothing on a scale that would give rise to the notion of the 29th day. In some ways we are making enormously fast progress given our millenia of generations in which little changed. What is of course unknown is whether the speed with which the impacts we have already set in motion will be sufficiently reversed by the rising tide of our awareness to avoid some kind of tipping-point collapse. I don’t think the human species will eliminate itself through its own excesses in the next century. It might, tho, give itself a few rather large moments of truth, and nature could take no prisoners in some areas regardless of the apparent development-level of the nation which takes the brunt of her wrath. Wrath is hardly the correct term, as it implies a value judgment, a conscious decision. Nature is simply a systems engineer (may lightning not strike me) extraordinaire; its what works that goes on. If it doesn’t work, those atoms and molecules get recycled and restructured toward another experiment in complexity and interconnectedness. Right now it would seem that human’s are in her cross-hairs; like the rising tide she doesn’t need to do anything precipitous. We, being part of nature, will do whatever It is to ourselves.
I wrote a piece in the centripetus web site extending the definition of centripetal, making references to Michael Meade’s
World behind the World book. I suggested that we (humans, culturally) have been breathing in for a few centuries, creating an unprecedented acceleration in creativity and abundance, and, like the great cycles of the universe (including the big bang and the return to silence that preceded it and will apparently follow it), we need to breathe out now. We need to return to the center. The pendulum feels like it has swung too far toward separating us from the planet’s fundamental breathing and the rest of the planet’s various systems. I sense I am a “fin de siecle” guy (The term sometimes encompasses both the closing and onset of an era, as it was felt to be a period of degeneration, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning--Wikipedia); I sense I am like Yeats, in:
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I don’t sense my confusion as due to the transition of the millennium. I sense it from global narratives brought to me by the scientific community (global climate change, peak oil), from my own observations of the persistence of a huge gap between developed and developing nations, from my own intuitive and emotional withdrawal when I returned to America from the world trip in 1985 after more than a year in Micronesia, from my observations about American abundance excesses which I find deeply offensive, from my rational sense that at least one system responsible for the unrestricted consumption of molecules and production of other molecules (generally called waste) is an economic system that has ignored as immature and/or irrelevant the seven generation proscription of the Iroquois, from my sense of relief and identification with articles like White’s
Spirit of Disobedience. I’m searching for my own somewhat stable (he imagines) center, but right now my search process is more of a spiral, i.e., a process, rather than having honed in on a clear landing zone. Like the Shaker Hymn, I’m turning til I come round right, and I sense that I haven’t fully embraced that intuitively essential but rationally messy and emotionally disruptive process.
I've known for decades that I am one of the persons Thoreau imagined when he wrote about marching to the sound of a different drum. I can't really hear my presumptive beat. At a minimum, I adhere to the maxim that the majority of rhythms surrounding me are to be ignored. Perhaps the loudest is the incessant beat of American consumerism. We are told that the economy is in deep trouble because Americans are not buying enough, that they are now actually saving money. It is almost as if the excesses of the last several years were normal, that excess is in fact sustainable.
