succumbing, a leaf
What's there not to love?
As I sit and write, peering out the coffee shop window, photons have journeyed millions of lightyears to tracelessy ricochet off a sparkling leaf that has become tired, brown, and is falling in rebellion. The photons haphazardly bounce again off of my retina, out again to the heavens. "If you will not provide me with energy, I will feed the earth." I heard the lead whisper to the tree it's mother. I relate to it. I belong in the soil. The toil of gathering energy from whoever and whatever to do the daily motion is exhausting. I will not let the photon down, though. It has traveled all that way to show me the leaf. I will support the leaf's fall and grant creatio ex nihilo. A play moving me beyond myself. I and these atoms around me, the only observers. The dry leaf, yielded to the flow of energy, now takes on a new life. A life within me. I will give some of my energy to keep it's form alive, it's story powerful. And now, as this ancient language populates a datacenter in some cold place with 1s and 0s, the leaf becomes immortal. It may not live in me forever, but it will be represented as long as little bits of sand are refreshed in a far away place. If the photon traveled this far for me to see such a beautiful thing, the slow falling of that tender brown creature, I will commission its peers to make its journey immortal. Praise be. All is a grand defiling of simplicity. There is no simple occurrence. Yet it is all simple. It is all unified. It is all connected. This is the Tao and the gospel and the dharma. Praise be.
Today I'm thinking about how things like me (paper bags full of sponges) build boxes from sticks and metal. We stay in these boxes for most of our lives. I have spent under an hour today outside of a box. We connect them to each other with long rust-colored string, then again to a far away place that scrapes and brews and gives us light, heat, and shock. Each of those places being dependent on their environment. Some use gravity moving torrents of water about, ingeniously converting rapids into electricity... Others dig deep into the shifting, dusty surface that gravity has glued us to.. then, get this, they draw out a dark, thick, liquid and use other materials that have been sucked from the surface to change the liquid's form and structure... then! they move it through large suctiony tunnels or in boxes that roll.. The slightly modified liquid is then set aflame!! In "controllable" ways (whatever that means). Explosions like this give things like me our power.
Anyways - our whole lives in these boxes! When I say life I mean to say the between: when I am clearly on my own, detached from my mother (when it comes to flesh), to the time when that thumping in the center of myself quiets and little explosions don't happen within my own particles anymore.. The between is 80-90 years on average (a year being a representation of how long it takes our rock to fly around a perpetual explosion that is far away). Most of the between is spent in these boxes put together with small spikes and sticky side-products of the dark, thick liquid mentioned earlier. Most of my peers move from box to box for their entirety. Over years, we fail to understand the between outside the box. What is fundamental? What are the challenges our tribe has overcome? What is our legacy? What pains threaten me now that my great great great grandfather solved? These other beings that still have the thumping are beautiful and have invented peculiar strategies to spend their years (as if they have it forever). Each moment is fleeting. The days are evil. Somehow: I "think." Somehow, a representation of the things my fleshy apparatus comes into contact with is reconstructed in a piece of wetware. It's a couple pounds, runs on 20 watts of power, produces 10^15 flops of computation power, it self-creates and replicates. It mostly exists in hiding. Quiet forces flow from this strange wet sponge in my head through all my other sponges wrapped in this squishy, tough, tan sheet of paper. It's all more complicated than that of course. Each thing flows into another to stay flowing. Each sponge is adaptive, yet has a purpose and a peak form of function. Many of my kind are obsessed with making each sponge do the best job it can (they call it health & nutrition).. The thing is we don't really know them! To understand them, all we can do is tear them apart and look at them or put things in them and see how they respond. It's funny to see these games take place. I play them as well. I love that game. It changes how I feel. It changes the representation of myself in my alpha-sponge, the one with the ruling power that is semi-self aware.
Today may I be organized in my principles unruly in all else.