The Universe Is Unfolding

When I was young, The universe is unfolding as it should was a sort of mantra that became integral to my awareness. The angst and drama that seemed to plague many of those around me was rendered, for me, slightly paler for it. Slightly less able to command my attention. I saw the need for and understood that there was a rainbow, in fact, welcomed and honored it, before the iconic "rainbow" of today was even an inspiration to the human rights campaigners. The Rainbow Coalition was something that I felt, before it even had a name. I have now heard of the Legendary Hopi tale, regarding the Rainbow Warrior, Peace Warrior, Guide for the Ages, whatever you call it, the traditional view claims to be a prophesy. I think it is just the understanding that eventually two trends would converge. One trend is the scientific proof that we are all one. As the hippies used to say, we are all one big family, a tribe if you will and the other is the steady increase in awareness that we are really nothing more than billions of years old carbon, only taking the shape that we perceive today for the briefest of lifetimes. As a charmaster, this carbon is a major source of fascination for me. The older I get, the less like a mantra those words become, but the more real they seem to be. I no longer have to think about it, I just know it to be true.

This is not always the case. In the unfolding, there are always going to be deeper and deeper understandings. This requires fractile awareness of scale. The Universe is unfolding...end of story. Universes can only be perceived as a multi-dimensional broadening of awareness taking place. Roughly at the speed of light, photons make their way across nearly inconceiveable (to the human mind) distances. Our awareness grows as time elapses because more distant (than we had been able to see) parts of the whole enter our awareness each moment. At the great distance (from our points of reference/awareness), the very amount of information we are able to perceive anew each second, is more than the average brain can comprehend. Imagine for a moment that there is a rushing wave of awareness, pouring out across vast, empty space, at the speed of light in all directions. There will always and forever be, more unknown than known and we mortals need to come to grips with that.

The concept of "as it should", although in some aspects can be liberating, it also super-imposes a grid of perception that this vastness could not have done so in any other way. The unfolding universe reveals more when we see the fractile pattern of uncertainty superimposed upon that which is. There are no questions in the Universe. It is, nothing else. There is no kinda-sorta, now but not later dichotomy. It only is. That is the powerful release point for all perception. When people are "groovy" or had "good vibes", people you feel good around, you know the kind, it is typically that we are reacting to their soul. They seem to resonate with the universal. I have heard people describe their personalities as infectious or magnetic. Interestingly these are elemental forces in the Universe as well. Often, soul mates speak of being drawn to one another, part of a soul family or they will say that before meeting their partner, they were friends that had not met yet. This is actually more than fate, more than mere chance, but an un-testable force in nature. Our own perceptions of good, bad, beautiful and ugly are all just subjective attempts to make sense of it all. Values which humans have come to accept and that are used to guide our thinking, our language and many of our actions are not as real or universal as we lead ourselves to believe.

I have heard many times in the recent past that most of the rules that religions give us are universal, but just one, scratch into that concept and we find that love one another seems to be predicated upon the fact that we only want to feel that way about some of the people we share the world with. Otherwise there would be no war.

Perhaps there is a reason for war...to teach us what not to do. In spite of all the horrors of war and the death of millions of innocent lives, perhaps war will teach us one day, what not to do.
 

Earthday Full Moon

Since these two days don't always coincide, it is well to note that in spite of the fact that every day is Earthday, or needs to be if we are to survive as a species, it is also well to note that the brightness of the night sky frequently brings groups out into the night to walk about, because of the reflected light of the sun partially illuminating the dark side of our planet. In the spirit of this walkabout, perhaps it is well to remember that our entire culture has been plunged into the dark side, economically, culturally, educationally, religiously, environmentally, etc. The Great Grandmother Moon, continues to bring at least a partial light in which to "see". There may be a few bumps and diversions along the trail, but let us start along the path, into this great darkness.

First we must take our bearings and orient ourselves in the fading glow of functional twilight. Fifty years ago, constant court challenges fought back against the sweeping changes brought about by the New Deal. Even though the reforms of FDR would be felt for thirty years, and more, the long slide toward poverty that the majority of workers are currently experiencing began to be felt after a generation that was the unknowing recipient of all the new deal prosperity and the rewards of long-term investment in our nation. Just as the Divine Right of Kings obscured truth, rather than elucidated it 400 years ago, the myths that we have been steeped in continue to foist lies upon us, represented to us as truth.

Darwin, for instance represented to us the theory of survival of the fittest and it gave another shot in the arm to the dead religion of dog eat dog and the lie that life is short, and humans are cruel, brutish creatures, each out only for self interest. The poor chap was deferential to the theories and beliefs his forebears had laid down for him too. If he only knew his level of privilege, perhaps he would have been able to conceive of survival of the luckiest, as we see is true today. We are each infinitely lucky, first that our species has not been obliterated by nuclear winter. Lord and Lady both know that we have stood at the threshold of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) of generations. Like looking down the barrel of a loaded gun, the major world players have held the power to wipe out humankind for decades. We survive, because we are the luckiest.

The oligarchs today pat one another on the back and tell one another that they really do have the best interests of the rest of us in mind, but growing numbers are seeing this is not the case. Oligarchs, cannot help but understand the world in ways that they have had presented to them. Getting them to understand that the drug war, combined with race based law enforcement, equals genocide, seems an insurmountable task, but rank and file police officers see the truth of it played out. There are black neighborhoods in America today, where half the young black population is incarcerated or on paper. with unemployment at fifty percent, we have driven hopes and dreams out of the black community just as we are driving them out of the poor white communities, only with vengeful punishments and bigoted hate.

More and more people are coming to understand that this is indeed our darkest hour. The more than four trillion dollar attacks on the Iraqi and Afghan people that have left a trail of destruction, mayhem and poverty that are dwarfed by the pain and misery of the continuing drug war that we fight against our own people. The Earth, mother of all creatures teaches the exact opposite. Growth and even in death, nature leaves only resources for the next trophic level. When we destroy entire cities, towns and villages, nothing can grow upon the rubble.

We are 4.543 billion year old carbon...

This Full Moon Earthday, let us spread the message that it is time for all of us to walk out of the dark ages, time to enlighten the conversation, time to speak truth to power and time to refrain from allowing the lies of the past determine how we approach one another and the world around us. we the People have the power to stand with and for one another. We all see what happens when the wealthiest among us decide who shall rule...

We the People began Earthday, We the People must take it back from the big money donors, the corporate welfare recipients who have commandeered the festivities, those who would distract us from the true meaning of the day. We must remember that Earthweek is a thing and that a week is still not enough to keep the ideas which were shared during the first Earthday alive amongst the people. Every day needs to become Earthday if we are to leave the next generation with hope and a reasonable expectation of carrying on the species. We are the ones with the most to lose, we will have to take matters into our own hands.

Share time with friends, family, community, let everyone know that caring for the Earth is just as easy as assaulting it, and all we need to do to experience abundance is to learn to behave according to nature rather than seeing ourselves at odds with it. Science continues to prove that we are one with nature, we just need to start acting like it.

Flourishing-Diversity

Flourishing requires a network of support services. Whether you are a bacterium, a fungi, reptile or mammal, your state of being and the homeostasis that you are capable of maintaining is based on a myriad of factors. There need to be enough of several things to keep your organism healthy and functional. Air and water are needed for most creatures on Earth to function and a higher rate of pathogenic organisms inhabit areas that are deprived of air. The relative quality of the air available directly impacts the health of organisms. The relative quality of water often is as well. Specific organisms can make their way in polluted environs better than others, but generally speaking, the cleaner the air and water, the healthier the organisms who live there will be. Another realm of necessary support systems required for "life", are based on availability of food and nutrition, or a substrate that can be easily broken down so that energy and resources can be harvested from the environment and ultimately used for metabolism. Macro and micro nutrients, minerals and carbohydrates are almost universally integrated into organisms and at each trophic level, energy is both stored and released in step-wise fashion throughout the food web.

When sunlight strikes leaves, or blades of grass,  there is a concentration of both energy, which is absorbed by the tissues of the plant and nutrient, the plant material itself. There is also a massive capture of carbon, directly from the atmosphere, but also from the "food" that the tree, or grass,  harvests through roots. When filter feeding whales harvest krill or plankton, billions of discreet energy and nutrient concentrating organisms are required for a single snack. Eating low on the food chain (less trophic levels between our organism and the Sun/Water/ nutrients/minerals where our food starts out)only protects you if the foodshed is clean. Many toxic compounds are bio-accumulated through each trophic level.

Whereas the plankton feeding whale is exploiting the lowest levels of the food chain, his cousins who eat fish and squid are at least two trophic levels removed from plankton. Tiny plankton eating fish may be two trophic levels from the source of the sun energy they need to survive. Phytoplankton eaten by zooplankton, consumed by tiny fish, eaten by larger fish is already four trophic levels and at each one, a typical concentration of both energy and toxicity, of bio-accumulating materials is about tenfold. I have spoken to several toxicologists who agree that one of the best ways to clear some toxic compounds in the environment is to encourage people who like to eat fish to eat them and upon death sequester their bodies as hazardous material, because their tissues are sponges for some contaminants. We are all only as healthy as our environment allows us to  be. That being said, we can never know how healthy we might be, had we not denuded 90% of the primeval forest that once covered North America.

This cycling occurs with energy from sunlight, carbohydrates, minerals, some toxic compounds, etc.

When biologists say that organisms need food, shelter, to exchange gasses and carry on the species, we can all understand what that means. If you are the size of a microbe, your habitat can be microscopically small, but all the same support services must exist for you to survive. In conditions of optimal availability of these resources, it is easy to understand that flourishing will occur. In very real terms, the better things get, the better things get for the organism. In fact, in nature the booms and busts that occur within and among the different species of organism never lead to only one organism succeeding in isolation, but when populations go into decline, other organisms and their relative abundance increase, often in equal measure to the biomass of what died off to give them rise.
these cycling processes are similar to the water cycle we all learned about in fifth grade.  

Diversity  is required to facilitate flourishing. The two cannot be separated. When mono-cultures expand beyond carrying capacity, Mother nature slaps them down and we can see evidence of this at each and every trophic level. Exceed the limits of your habitat and you die off. then, your carcass becomes resource for another food chain to take hold, another series of trophic levels to begin...

Broadening the base of any food chain adds stability and  continuity to the whole. Anthropogenic (human caused) change in plants and animals are clearly demonstrated by science to exist for a variety of functions that help we humans to prosper within our environment. Our species domesticated plants and animals for our use for over eleven thousand years. Over 550 generations, we have benefited from conscious husbandry of thousands of species. In the last three generations the diversity of these organisms has fallen precipitously and with it, the adaptability that nature proves is necessary to stabilize populations over time. There is no excuse for this de-evolution of the human possibility for a future. Science proves that flourishing is based on diversity, on availability of a diverse set of resources, on unique and varied ecotones. Our history is replete with examples of how diversity serves all as well as the individual, yet we let fewer and fewer numbers of people, and fewer and fewer species of organism determine and represent greater and greater realms of what we have available.

This reductionist approach is what allows some people to go through life consuming most of their calories from meat and processed foods. If they eat lettuce, of the thousands of types, they probably have only tasted three or four. It is the reality that we face that some people never eat any meals that do not contain high-fructose corn syrup and how just a few genetic strains of potato are responsible for the vast majority of all potatoes eaten on the planet. We have lost more than we can hope to understand because we lack the knowledge of our ancestry that exists in intact native cultures. as we develop into a pan culture, that surrounds the earth with nearly identical tastes, consumer habits and proclivities, we become susceptible to the very real threat that all mono-cultures face.

Bioneers, for decades, have begun to reclaim our ancestrally acquired bio-diverse plants and animals. Often referred to as boutique breeds of cattle, pigs, horses, sheep, goats and chickens are favorites among smaller scale agriculturalists because of their disease resistance, their ability to thrive in varied climate, and under more diverse circumstances. When I was looking into sheep, for instance, my goals were different than most breeders and luckily, there has been a strong effort recently to restore vital, but less financially rewarding breeds. There are specific needs that need to be met in different places and at different times. There are breeds that are more and less adaptable, or adapted to specific conditions and knowing that can make the difference between flourishing and just surviving. It is the same with any plant or animal, let us not forget that we need diversity to flourish.