Setting our own conditions

Humans like categories. Structuralist thought, in which the world is divided into clear rules and sections, is to many a comforting idea. Newtonian physics, with its clear rules for the nature of physical reality, is equally appealing.

But what happens when Einstein comes along, and tells us that we can never see reality (which is out there) because it depends on our perspective? What happens when Proust shows us that time bends and stretches memory such that a taste of a madeleine opens up an entire lifetime, or when Monet shows us that our eyes take in the available light and make something fantastical?


What's more, what happens when Bohr and Schrödinger then come along and say that no such reality exists, that all is in flux, that the world is not just unknown but unknowable? The quantum world, our best understanding of "reality," is an open door. It is probabilistic, stochastic, our very own to perceive. We must make a choice, we must measure our world through our own experiences of it.




In Quirks of the Quantum, Coale describes the nature of the quantum realm and its implications for "reality":

"The quantum realm shivers and quivers in a state one might call an indeterminate pulsating flux or, as Amir D. Aczel describes it, 'the quantum fuzz' (251). For Brian Greene it's a 'fuzzy, amorphous, probabilistic mixture of all possibilities' (112). Within that realm, anything can happen, and we cannot predict how, when, why, and where things will occur. Particles/waves/fields/forces, all of which are essentially descriptions of the same quantum phenomena, since all modern elementary particle theories are relativistic quantum field theories, appear and disappear, each with its own description, each susceptible to imminent dissolution and transformation, created within what John Gribbin calls the 'holistic electromagnetic web' (Schrödinger's Kittens 226), in Kenneth Ford's continuous 'creation-annihilation dance' of 'perpetual motion' (242, 222) [...].

"In trying to describe this process, we come up against both the unknowable 'essence' of the quantum realm in all its quivering and erupting randomness as well as the metaphorical nature of language itself. When we choose to describe something as a particle, a wave, a field, a force, or a web, we necessarily exclude other possibilities and images. Similar to Bohr's notion of complementarity, if we describe something as a particle, we have chosen not to describe it as a wave. In language and logic, these appear to be mutually exclusive. In quantum theory, each is valid, depending on the nature of how we measure these glimpses and snapshots. Contradiction appears to be a product of choice and grammar, rather than of the actual quantum event, since in the quantum realm the images of particle and wave 'apply to mutually exclusive conditions; hence there is no contradiction between them' (Malin 161)."

It sounds like we can choose or own story, providing--at least to some extent--our own conditions. Atheism or faith, it seems to be argued in The Life of Pi, is a simple matter of making such a choice.



In another tale of learning how to set one's own conditions for survival while being tossed by the wind, Katherine Paterson writes in The Same Stuff As Stars:

"What is man—and of course the writer means all of us puny little insignificant creatures—what is a mere human being that God who made the immense universe should ever notice?' She chuckled. 'The sky does take you down to size.'
     'Not even big as bugs. Not even a speck of dust to the nearest star,' Angel agreed.
     'But the psalmist answers his own question. "Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honor..."'
     'What?' Angel asked, not sure she had heard right.
     'A little lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honor.'
     'The real angels? Do you believe that?'
     'Yes, Angel, I do. When people look down on me, and these days'—she laughed shortly—'these days everyone over the age of five does. When people look down on me, I remember that God looks at this pitiful, twisted old thing that I have become and crowns me with glory.'"

The sky both takes us down to size, if you will, and pulls us together. Who would know this better than the astronauts? This video shows how seeing the earth for the first time changed several astronauts' view of our nature.


OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

If we are free enough to see how small we are and how grand, why choose to forget this? Every day, I hope we can remember to find the right conditions, so that our measurement of our lives will leave us content, and thirsty for more.

Tanglewood

“When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.”

                                                                                         - Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Vasilis Avramidis, "Caretakers," 2012
140x100cm, oil on canvas

When you were a kid, did you ever dream of running away to live in the forest? To get lost? To go wild? To grow up? Would you be one of the beasts, bold and ferocious? Or another kind of creature, small and nestled spindly-legged in a bed of petals and thorns? Would you nest among hidden branches, migratory and ready to fly, collecting treasures only to leave them behind? Or would you plant yourself firmly in the dead leaves, sprout roots, nurture fungi in your shadows, and drink from what was hidden, always going deeper?

According to J. Crews in "Forest and tree symbolism in folklore," many cultures believe that trees function as "receptacles for spirits or souls." No wonder the forest can bring such company, offering fodder for so many childhood imaginings.

Yet the nature of the forest--and of the tree--is double-edged. The forest can be blinding, dense and frightening, endless and beguiling. The tree, though rooted, stands alone, often condemned to never touch another of its kind. Do we really wish to grow these kinds of roots? How do we know exactly where to cast our lot? At what point does the magic engulf us?

A lovely and painful song about what it means to decide to grow (roots) through love is "Tanglewood tree," by Dave Carter.

Tanglewood tree

Source

Love is a tanglewood tree in a bower of green
In a forest at dawn
Fair while the mockingbird sings, but she soon lifts her wings
And the music is gone
Young lovers in the tall grass with their hearts open wide
When the red summer poppies bloom
But love is a trackless domain and the rumor of rain
In the late afternoon

Love is an old root that creeps through the meadows of sleep
When the long shadows cast
Thin as a vagrant young vine, it encircles and twines
And it holds the heart fast
Catches dreamers in the wildwood with the stars in their eyes
And the moon in their tousled hair
But love is a light in the sky, and an unspoken lie
And a half-whispered prayer

I'm walkin' down a bone-dry river but the cool mirage runs true
I'm bankin' on the fables of the far, far better things we do
I'm livin' for the day of reck'nin countin' down the hours
I yearn away, I burn away, I turn away the fairest flower of love, 'cause darlin'

Love is a garden of thorns
   Love's garden of thorns, how it grows
And a crow in the corn
   Black crow in the corn hummin' low
And the brake growing wild
   Brake nettle so pretty and wild
   And thistles surround the edge of the
Cold when the summer is spent
   Dim dark hour as the sun moves away
In the jade heart's lament
   Lamenting a lost summer day
For the faith of a child
   Who nurtures the faith of a child
   When nothing remains to cover her eyes?
My body has a number and my face has a name
   My body has a number, maybe my face has a name
And each day looks the same to me
   Each hour like each hour before
But love is a voice on the wind
   This longing is a voice on the wind
And the wages of sin
   She cultivates the wages of sin
And a tanglewood tree
   In a tanglewood tree




Yet the tree is not only of this earth. It is also of the sky: "The medieval Cabbalists represented creation as a tree with its roots in the reality of spirit (the sky) and its branches upon the earth (material reality)" (Crews, 43). So we are not condemned to suffocation. There must be other ways to grow.

Blue Christmas tree

The twisting of roots is only one kind of entanglement. Perhaps as humans, we must follow not the roots under the earth, but the entanglement of all that surrounds us, the entanglement of the stars:

"Quantum entanglement is one of the central principles of quantum physics, though it is also highly misunderstood. In short, quantum entanglement means that multiple particles are linked together in a way such that the measurement of one particle's quantum state determines the possible quantum states of the other particles" (read more here).

Apparently, this works across time as well as space. We are deeply entwined, yet this is not an overgrowth, or a distortion of something that was once comforting and beautiful. It is our very nature, and it is how we survive.

So if we look skyward instead, and grow our roots toward the heavens, will we find ourselves less tangled? Will the space that is not nothingness, because it is different from black holes, fill us with the room to breathe? Will the divinity of the stars anchor us as we stretch to understand how we connect? I cannot imagine we would be so different from the rest of the universe that we could not trust this. Whether we call it faith, spirituality, love, or just following our nature, it is in this expansive tangle that we root in each other, the earth, and the stars, all enmeshed in that which we cannot see.

"For there is hope for a tree,

if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,

and that its shoots will not cease." 

- Job 14:7, ESV

Silence and hope

It would seem as [...] though we are surrounded by myriads of emaciated words. They limp about, wounded by their lack of silence, and wounding others as far as they go. Words that only come from other words are lonely,  but  also  hard  and  aggressive.  Words  not  coming  from  silence  are  automatic,  obstinate,  and desperate – and could be called orphans.  “The tongue we speak today is no longer a mother-tongue but rather an orphaned tongue.” (Picard 1948: 41) Indeed, we are surrounded by sounds severed from silence, as opposed to sounds saturated with silence. (Cilliers, 2008)

Recently I made the decision to leave social networking sites. I found that I was offering my energy to a void, where the limits to true human connection were simply too much. Sherry Turkle, in her NYT article "Flight from Conversation," made a strong argument for face-to-face connection, for being present in the silences--silences that cannot be transmitted or lived on media such as Facebook: "Most of all, we need to remember — in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts — to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another."

I have decided, as my Tricycle newsletter this morning advised, to attempt to abandon futile endeavors. It seems to me that part of the attraction of social networks is that they can offer some sort of tangible evidence that others find us worthy (at least enough to "friend" us and maybe click on something we posted).


As somebody with a body that is perceived as so vastly different from others', I have spent much of my lifetime trying to prove my worth, trying to convince others who could not relate to me that I really was just like them, trying to help them see me, accept me, find a way to surmount the insurmountable beliefs about value and body, find true friendship in my company.

Harlequin woman

I am certainly not alone in this. Disabled blogger Carly Findlay writes, "Maybe I'm doing a metaphorical forward roll every day. To prove that I can do. To prove that I'm more than how I look. And to break down the assumptions people make about me and others with chronic illnesses and disabilities."

How much energy am I willing to spend to make myself human enough in another's eyes? Could this ever really lead to a mutually fulfilling relationship? It is a futile endeavor. I am not advising giving up hope. But what is of little value is not worth our time.

I seek the rare treasure, the silent understanding. I will do no song and dance. Connection is scarce, but that is okay. It is worth the effort, worth the wait.

What is scarce is not lost. Sometimes even the smallest spark of hope may be enough for the spirit. The whooping cranes are a lesson in placing one's heart in what matters. They are slowly recovering from the edge of extinction, with a population that has risen from a mere 15 birds to 600 with the help of Operation Migration and other groups. (If you are interested and able, you can contribute to the cause.)

 

Video streaming by Ustream

In human interaction, for me, the quiet spaces are my whooping crane. In these moments, there is a deep knowing and a presence. There is no question of worthiness, no painted mask, no juggling of truths and lies. I tend to this silence.

Professor of Theology at Stellenbosch University J. H. Cillers has written of the spiritual value of silence in our lives in his article, "Silence is Golden: Liturgy beyond the Edge of Language." I quote him here at some length:

Silence could of course be understood in many ways [...]. It may mean different things to different people. We know that there are different kinds of silence. The silence of sitting on the porch and watching as the setting sun winks her last light at you. The indescribable silence when moving from the house in which you stayed for thirty years, and you walk through the empty rooms for a last time, and the walls whisper the sum total of experiences that you had in this space and you know, deeper than words can express: there is a time to come, and a time to go. Or the strange silence that you experience in a graveyard, when the cooing of the doves in the trees deepens the silence and you know: our years pass by like a fleeting thought...

Willard differentiates between solitude - “being out of human contact, being alone, and being so for lengthy periods of time”- and silence (1998: 357). He concludes: “Silence means to escape from sounds, noises, other than the gentle ones of nature. But it also means not talking, and the effects of not talking on our soul are different from those of simple quietness.” (1998: 357)

Although silence is part and parcel of our genetical make-up (cf. further on), it is apparently also something that needs to be learned, a lost art that must be retrieved. The fact of the matter is that we normally react on an “epidermal” (skin-deep) level, automatically, following the usual stimuli of life. But in and through silence we escape the patterns of epidermal responses, with their consequences. This is however something that we find particularly hard to do. For us, the very idea of doing nothing could be absolutely terrifying – especially in our achievement-driven society. Indeed, it seems as if one of the greatest of spiritual attainments of humanity could be the capacity to do nothing. Because we do so much, we have so little of real value.

Togetherness in silence, a gaze, a touch, a shared view of the warm light hitting the trees--these alone tell me that we, imperfect and strange beings that we are, are more than enough.

A couple embrace in a park with snowy trees seen around, with the air temperature at about minus 8 degrees Celsius (17.6 degrees Fahrenheit), in Russia's southern city of Stavropol, on December 24, 2012. (Reuters/Eduard Korniyenko).

Cilliers, J. H. 2008. Silence is Golden: Liturgy beyond the Edge of Language. Paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Society for Practical Theology in South Africa, 14-16 January 2008, UNISA, Pretoria.
Picard, M. 1948. The world of silence. London: The Harvill Press. 
Willard, D 1998. The divine conspiracy. Rediscovering our hidden life in God. Harper: San Francisco.

Touchdown

Today we witnessed the touchdown of NASA's rover Curiosity on Mars. It has already sent back its first pictures.

How exciting to glimpse other lands, other stones! I often thought as a deeply star-gazing child upon whom gravity worked harder than most, such that I dragged myself and later rolled and tumbled across the floor, that I would be the first to sign up to leave this planet, a first colonist.

Yet, as I age, I realize that am deeply attached to the earth, as echoed in Caetano Veloso's love song to Earth, "Terra."

Eu sou um leão de fogo                        [I am a lion of fire
Sem ti me consumiria                           without you I would consume myself
A mim mesmo eternamente                  myself eternally
E de nada valeria                                 and it would matter nothing
Acontecer de eu ser gente                   that I happen to be a person,
E gente é outra alegria                         and a person is another joy
Diferente das estrelas...                       different from the stars...]

 

This attachment goes beyond humanity. Anthropologist and primatologist Dawn Prince-Hughes, in her memoir Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey through Autism (which I recommend; see a good "non-review" here), writes of her experience of walking and standing, of pulling her body upright, as a painful separation:

Physically, I thought about how standing up on two feet leaves you exposed. One's naked belly and chest and genitals are all uncovered and laid bare, as if standing has lifted a great warm cover made of the sacred space between body and ground. Like a plant uprooted, with the last of its anchor and succor falling in abandoning clods, we stretch up to the sky and let the close and nourishing earth fall away. This standing had often been too much for me to bear, and when it was, I would go and curl up somewhere, nursing the raw wound that my upright front had sustained in the million-year tearing away that my ancestors had undertaken. (p. 121).

In explaining her affinity with the gorillas she studied and worked with and loved, she explained:

What I found I had always had with the gorillas was such vulnerability and ferocity and love. Our similarities were beyond perseveration, a need for space and a space for hiding; we were always drawing inward and exploding outward, sharing laughter out of fear and sharing a ferocious sense of justice, beyond mere caring. Our similarities also went beyond a difficulty dealing with the human race, sensitivities to the world around us and to the stereotyping in the face of the soullessness all around. Our affinity met in being filled with archaic darkness and persisting memories of a time when all things were one. (p. 122)

Sacred Rock. Machu Picchu, Peru.

We are earth beings. Now, perhaps always, as New York Times contributor Adam Frank somewhat sadly pointed out in his piece, "Alone in the Void."

Since time immemorial, the earth stones have been watching our growth. Do we not caress them and spill our tears and blood into this great rock? And our waste, too, and our bombs of rage? What better than the earth to serve as witness to all promises, all covenants made between living beings? Who better to know when we have forgotten ourselves?

Image found here.

Come now, let us make a covenant, you and I. And let it be a witness between you and me.” So Jacob took a stone and set it up as a pillar. And Jacob said to his kinsmen, “Gather stones.” And they took stones and made a heap, and they ate there by the heap. Laban called it Jegar-sahadutha, but Jacob called it Galeed. Laban said, “This heap is a witness between you and me today.” (Genesis 31, 44-48)

For all it has seen, the stone, the earth, like a stillness we can create in our own spirited flesh, offers the relief of an energetic, living silence:

Thomas Aquinas said that beauty arrests motion. He meant, I think, that in the presence of something gorgeous or sublime, we stop our nervous natterings, our foot twitchings and restless tongues. Whatever that fretful hunger is, it seems momentarily filled in the presence of beauty. To Aquinas’s wisdom I’d add that silence arrests flight, that in its refuge, the need to flee the chaos of noise diminishes. We let the world creep closer, we drop to our knees, as if to let the heart, like a small animal, get its legs on the ground. (from Stirring the Mud by Barbara Hurd, © 2001 by Barbara Hurd, from Tricycle)

I do not think that have ever felt the earth so keenly, so close, as when I lived in Mexico. There, in Cholula, at the foot of the great volcano Popcatepetl, artifacts of tiny clay faces, rain gods and jaguar-men, surfaced around the edges of ancient dusty roads. When the volcano erupted, the ground would rock slowly, like being rocked in the arms of someone who has forgotten just how little you really are.

Cholula with an erupting Popocatepetl. From A Gringo in Rural Mexico

Here is a poem of mine about the land of Cholula. The title, Huellas, has several meanings, including footprints, fingerprints, traces, and tracks. (The story of Footprints was one of my favorites as a child, and I carry a hint of this into the poem as well.) (Trigger warning)

Huellas

I

Five hundred years ago, a burned white man broke

ground for Catholic rites, the pyramid cradling

gold-spun idols. Today, a child crawls underneath mud

stone upon stone in small doorways, ancient

stories painted on the walls where her ancestors knew

one day she would laugh, remembering how

everyone always leaves a trace of what was, even

if it was not worth it. Even if we are lost in the end.

II

She is a cherub, round and brown

like the angel cheeks: they cried wax tears

where her mother knelt in a copal cathedral.

That whole month her knees were bloody

and she kept those flowers she picked

dried and thirsty among the saints

the day the youngest of her dozen

came home, defiled and married, but home.

III

At the market on Wednesdays, downy

chestnut-skinned fruit is split open to seduce

buyers who will suck out the burnt orange

dripping mamey, only to say it is not

yet ripe, let me try another, because

the uncut ones always taste best

and cherubs who do not run home fast

will most certainly get eaten alive.

IV 

The golden hour thickens in vapor,

lightening pouring red through woven cloth

windows. Just about any two bodies here

know each other to be sacred and hold

like a cross against the salted earth,

against the stumbling gait of those damned

by ancient pictures and buried ash. Volcanoes

boom and the ground, it breaks, it trembles. 

© 2010 J. Aaron

Mutable caress: On water, impermanence, and trust

I grew up with my toes in the Willamette River.

Crossing the Willamette River
Eugene, Oregon, February 21st, 2011
(from I'd rather be riding... )

I loved to stare at it, immerse myself in it, float down it in a passive stance that once sent my mother flying into the current screaming. I had shouted a contented "Bye!" as I floated past and away. At the ocean, I would stare out as far as possible, convinced I could see the curve of our planet, and then the sky as a dome above, and me so tiny there, seized by deep passion.

Why such love, such fascination?

In its nature, water teaches us impermanence, in the Buddhist sense of the term:

According to the teachings of the Buddha, life is comparable to a river. It is a progressive moment, a successive series of different moments, joining together to give the impression of one continuous flow. It moves from cause to cause, effect to effect, one point to another, one state of existence to another, giving an outward impression that it is one continuous and unified movement, where as in reality it is not. The river of yesterday is not the same as the river of today. The river of this moment is not going to be the same as the river of the next moment. So does life. It changes continuously, becomes something or the other from moment to moment. (from Urban Dharma)

Loblolly Creek, Gainesville, Florida
© 2011 by Friends of Nature Parks

Impermanence goes beyond philosophy. It is a basic state of nature in physics as well. For a more technical discussion of this notion in both Buddhism and modern physics, see Victor Mansfield's 1998 article, "Time and Impermanence in Middle Way Buddhism and Modern Physics," originally a talk given at the Physics and Tibetan Buddhism Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The other day, on a rainy walk to the local creek with my dear friend and her dog, I witnessed such a lesson in very simple terms. The dog was thrilled with a tennis ball that we had discovered, and he was chasing it and carrying it around as he bounded up and down the creek. Spotting an interesting stick, he placed the ball in the shallow water. A few minutes later, tiring of the stick, he returned for the ball, only to find that it had disappeared downstream. He looked up to us, confused. Why is my ball gone? Who took it? In our grief and our loss, we often look skyward, confused. Why? But this is just the nature of the world, as gentle and as reasonable as the flowing creek. And we do not mourn each ripple as it flattens and disappears. We call such perpetual motion beautiful.



Yet this is not really about loss, but about change. In its nature, water also teaches us a kind of permanence. It is liquid, gas, or solid. It is internalized and externalized. It remains a continuous, dynamic entity, paradoxical in its changing faces. And it is in the continuity and connectivity that we find something akin to hope.

Ecclesiastes 1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

Conceptual Photos by Olaf Mueller

Systematic, apparently chaotic, and deeply faithful in its journeys, in its ebbs and flows, water offers us a territory of trust.

There is also another water we all know: the primal water of the womb. When else are we embraced so entirely and so safely? When else are we touched by another so completely? The healing, often magical power of touch is a taste of what we once knew: nearly total connection, before the first shock of becoming separated and, perhaps, feeling lost.

Camelia Elias, in her blog Taro(t)flexions, writes of the honesty evoked through touch and visualization:

Underwater: Photos by Erin Mulvehill

Whether imagined or not, touching is a participatory rather than an individual move. When we say, ‘I’m touched,’ about something, we first get the visuals in place and then the abstractness of the situation. Touching is therefore quite magical. For instance, there is a powerful relation between asking people to imagine things and physically touching them. Touch relating to visualization is the most complicit of acts. When people allow you to touch them in that way, they strip naked for you. Yet their nakedness only serves to give way to a translucent light right into their souls.

When water encircles our bodies, we are also vulnerable and touched. This offers another reminder of our erstwhile selfless selves, a vague yet urgent thirst for the unity we knew in a time beyond memory.

Yet the water out here is not insular. It carries us or it passes us by. It cannot bear to stay still. Still waters stink and fester. Stagnant, they invite diseases and no longer draw our loving gaze.

My Willamette is not a pretty opal shine, steady and posing for a grateful human eye. This is my Willamette:



"Nothing was, nothing will be, everything has reality and presence" (Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, trans. Hilda Rosner, 1951, p. 87).

And perhaps herein lies its true lesson: even in the constant flux of relationship, the objects carried away to unimagined lands, the memories that ripple as the wind and time transform their edges, and our own selves as we erode, nothing is really lost, and we are still safe. And we are greater than we think. Through all of this, the water embraces the life it carries, the rivers still find each other, the ocean still looks to the moon. And yet nothing is ever the same.

Siddhartha listened. He was now all ears, completely absorbed in his listening, completely empty, completely receptive; he felt that he had now learned all that there was to learn about listening. He had often heard this all before, these many voices in the river, but today it sounded new. By this time he could no longer distinguish the many voices, could not tell the gleeful ones from the weeping ones, the children’s voices from the grown men’s; they all belonged together, the lament of longing and the knowing man’s laughter, the cry of anger and the moans of the dying; it was all one, it was all interwoven and knotted together, interconnected in a thousand ways. And all of this together, all the voices, all the goals, all the longing, all the suffering, all the pleasure, all the good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of this together was the river of events, the music of life. And whenever Siddhartha listened attentively to that river, that song of thousand voices, when he listened neither to the sorrow nor the laughter, when he tied his soul not to any individual voice, entering into it with his self, but instead heard them all, perceiving the totality, the oneness, then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was om, the absolute. (Siddhartha, Herman Hesse, found here)

In what is left, do we find the soul of us, the divine spirit, the one sentience? Is that what we water-leaning, toe-dipping creatures truly seek?

Relating, refraction, and relationship

Ernst Haeckel. 1904. Kunstformen
der Natur, plate 51: Polycyttaria. 

Though my much-younger self would never had admitted to really loving anything having to do with math (though recently I have been accused of being "obsessed with numbers"), I have always loved fractals. I love them because they're pretty, sure. But I love them, honestly, for something else: they are heterogeneous and deeply connected. This is the kind of world I believe in.

In animal form, we see it clearly enough. A while back, the lovely blog subblue demonstrated the easy connection between biological forms, like this one from Heackel's early 20th-century depiction of art forms in nature, and mathematically enhanced images of biology, below.

Source: Artforms of nature

Not such a far cry from the mathematical:

So, what's so interesting? To me, refraction. The unity of what is not the same but is connected. It is like taking a step back from the universe, as if we could look from the outside. 

A tall steel cross is refracted in raindrops on a window in Joplin, Missouri, on May 7, 2012. The cross is all that was left standing of St. Mary's Catholic Church, which was destroyed by an EF-5 tornado that tore through a large swath of the city and killed 161 people nearly a year ago. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel) (In Focus)

To simplify the idea, water drops offer another example. Does each cross, each flower know that it is not alone? Looking in, we certainly know.

Macroreflection by Harald Naper

How can we, in our separate notions of identity, see the refractions that surround us?

What do we see when we look into a friend's eyes? An other, a separate being? Yes, of course. And yet, we know this is not the whole story. This relation, this refraction of something else is there, and we relate. And if we allow ourselves to feel the density of connection, in space, in time, in the mere fact of living and the miracle of loving, in looking beyond our own small drop of water, there is healing in that.

Healers are those who can connect with others. Those who see themselves clearly enough to forgive themselves, and in this, judgment falls away. This is outlandishly idealistic, such clarity, such connection. But we have dreamt of it. And I would like to think that anything we can dream of in such a way must be at least to some extent represented by the truth of human experience. I turn to Zhaan of Farscape: anecdotal evidence that conscious connection can heal.

The possibility--indeed, necessity--of connectedness and relationship make sense from a scientific viewpoint as well. In his blog Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer interviews the author of the book The Self Illusion, Bruce Hood. On the notion of self, Hood explains:

"...for most of us, we consider our self as some essential core of who we are. Most of us feel our self is at the center of our existence responding to everything around us – that notion of an integrated entity is what I am challenging, not the experience of self. Must of us, including myself have that experience but that does not make it real. For example, most us think that we see the world continuously throughout the waking day when in fact we only see a fraction of the world in front of us, and because the brain blanks out our visual experience every time we move our eyes in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at least 2 hrs of the day. This is why you cannot see your own eyes moving when you look in a mirror! So conscious experience is not a guarantee of what's really true."

Indeed, we form this experience of life in and through relationship:

"In the book, I argue that because we have evolved as social animals, those around us construct a large part of our mental life that we experience as our self. We can see the influence of others but often fail to recognize how we too are shaped. I am not denying the role of genes and temperaments that we inherit from our biology. After all, children raised in the same environment can end up very different but even these intrinsic properties of who we are play out in a social world which defines us. If you think about it, many of the ways we describe each other, such as helpful, kind, generous, mean, rude or selfish can only make sense in the context of others. So those around us largely define who we are. I hope this book will remind us of this obvious point that we so easily forget."

So today, I am thankful for our connections.

"Soft, yes. Weak, no."

In her well-known article on the traits of gifted adults, "Can you hear the flowers sing?", Lovecky writes of the trait of sensitivity:

Zhaan from Farscape

"A depth of feeling that results in a sense of identification with others characterizes the trait of sensitivity. Gifted people form deep attachments and react to the feeling tone of situations; they think with their feelings. People who are highly sensitive make commitments to other people and to social causes. They can be enthusiastic and intensely single-minded about their dedication. Poets, Investigative reporters, Peace Corps workers, and political and religious leaders are often gifted in sensitivity. Examples of such people include St. Francis of Assisi, Elizabeth Blackwell, Emily Dickinson, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, and Virginia Woolf.


"People gifted with the trait of sensitivity find positive social and emotional benefit in their deep concern for the needs and rights of others, their empathy for the feelings of others, and their desire to help even at significant cost to themselves. These gifted adults may be unusually aware of the feeling tone of situations and of the more sensual aspects of the environment, such as color and shading. They are often aware of their own shortcomings. Some gifted adults feel a sense of unity with the cosmos, an experience of a universal sharing of self. Adults gifted with sensitivity tend to be highly moral people concerned with giving and with doing what is right for others."

Unfortunately, any sensitivity has the tendency to be viewed as somehow passive, fragile, or weak. Yet let us think in other terms for a moment. Psychologist (and my former teacher) Paula Prober refers to such minds as "rainforest minds": rich, vibrant, and, yes, sensitive. In the density of its riches, apparently small damages can create disproportionate harm. The plants heal, the animals are beyond compare.

So sensitive folks are simply densely rich. Does this come with a certain vulnerability? Yes. Does it mean weakness? No.

To turn to another world now, we may remember Toph from Avatar: The Last Airbender. She is small, female, and blind. Her hyper-sensitive feet "see" for her; they remain exposed to the world, easy to damage, far from impervious to the lash of any flame. Yet it is this that makes her powerful.

We must learn to move in new ways.

Tree like music

création sur paysage
Originally uploaded by vivianeballez

The weeping willow was always my favorite tree, along with the blue spruce. There is something so delicate, fragile, and ephemeral about its silhouette. A paradox: a tree that is ready to be blown away. And it weeps...