Zenurbia

Straight Line to Nowhere

Straight Lines are simple.  Straight lines are seductive.  They are cocaine and corn sugar for our  brains.  But straight lines are just ideas.  They don’t really exist except in a math text book on geometry.  Straight lines, goals and the notion of progress are an integral part of our modern world.  We get high on the idea of efficiency.  Productivity becomes the false idol that drives the modern economic engine.  But these straight lines to nowhere are merely human constructs, and ones with a very recent history.

While science and mathematics have helped us understand the laws that govern the natural world, those same concepts that are useful within the intellectual boundaries of math and physics today sever our connection with that world.  The more we understand our world, the less we feel a part of it.  Knowledge is like the story of Adam and Eve.  We have tasted the apple that bestowed consciousness while paying for that knowledge with a loss of grace.  We are cast from the garden of Eden into a world we think we control, but which in fact we simply misunderstand.

The force that through the green fuse, drives my green age…- Dylan Thomas

There are No Straight Lines in Nature

The Big Bang

Dandelion Fireworks

In case you haven’t noticed, nature is not linear.  It is creative, cursive, complex, episodic, Big Bang, discontinuous, shooting star, crazy wild!  Look at the pictures to the left.  Compared to the straight contrail in the top photo, they are full of color, energy and motion.  Nature explodes!

Have you ever sat in a garden quietly watching the amazing world around you?  The riot of morning glory cascading over a fence;  the silvery leaves of an aspen shivering in the wind; the sound of birds singing in the underbrush; fat bumblebees droning like dirigibles among the geraniums; squadrons of ants attempting to herd delightfully oblivious aphids; snails sliming  their way across the patio while worms corkscrew through soil as darkly silent as the grave.  The grass hums in the bleached light  of summer like a high tension wire.  A light breeze tickles the wind chimes into bamboo laughter.  A million things bombard the senses, and yet you feel strangely calm.  You feel a part of this complex crazy world even if you don’t understand it.

How different is the modern work environment!  Square cubicles, where workers are boxed like eggs.  Straight lines, perfect grids, quarterly goals stated with precision.  Check lists, to do or not to do, that is not the question.  Plan for tomorrow, forget about today.  Gross domestic product rather than gross domestic happiness.  Business associates instead of friends.  Busy is good.  Efficiency is god.  Be productive!

Work Makes you free?

We live in a world dominated by the concept of economy, of inputs and outputs.  A straight line equation.  In doing so, we deny both the reality of nature, and our place within it.  We deny ourselves as well.  The entrance sign outside the Auschwitz concentration camp read “Arbeit Macht Frei” – Work Makes You Free.  We may have defeated the Nazis but we adopted the philosophy.  Maybe it’s time to ask why?

Two Good Reasons

The modern world has come to a crossroads.  We are beset with many problems of our own making.  Global warming, rocketing depression rates, increasing obesity, peak oil, decreasing bio-diversity to name but a few.  All point to a collision course with the natural world.  The economic model was “good enough” to get us here but like an old car past its prime, it will not take us much further.  We need to seriously question where we are going, and why we are trying to go there.

Secondly, we will need to be creative to imagine another way.  Creativity, like nature, is not linear.  Creativity snatches moments of order from the disorder around us.  We need to balance like a surfer catching a wave, aware of the fragility of the experience yet exalting in it, before vanishing beneath the blue waters.  We need to understand our impermanence and make our peace with it.  This is a huge leap.  No other living thing on this planet has had to embrace the ultimate futility of their striving.  But mankind must do this to save both himself and the planet.

Catch the Wave!

The economic model has looked upon the world for too long as simply part of the supply chain.  By doing so, we will shortly find ourselves at the end of that chain.  The earth’s resources are not unlimited.   And we are not separate from our environment, nor immune from its disasters.  We must use less, do less, consume less.   But the human animal is a restless creature unless distracted.  We need to engage our creativity with a new dynamic based on pleasure.  Not just hedonistic indulgence, but pleasure of all kinds.  From the frolicking play of children to the noble pleasures of charity and service, we need to move away from the more psychotic elements of the corporate model to ensure our safety and our sanity.

Can we do this?  I really don’t know.  It’s never been tried before.  But somehow we need to enlist both the artistic and the scientific in this quest.  The artist alone already sees the beauty in this world but can only reflect it back within a frame.  The scientist sees the world in the words of T.S. Elliot “…like a patient etherized upon a table”, awaiting dissection.  Is there a middle path where one can be both aware of the beauty of the world and our true insignificance – the juncture where the physical world washes against the infinite sea of the unknown?  I hope so for our sake and our fellow beings on this beautiful planet.

Where the vast ocean of the universe breaks on the shores of human consciousness, the bravest will venture out to surf!

Optimal Simplicity for the Impatient

• The economy is like Frankenstein’s monster.  We created it but we have lost control of it.
• The smallest bit of plankton is as important as you – maybe more important!
• We cannot think our way out of our present predicament because we’re just not that good at thinking.
• Beauty and pleasure are better signposts than Gross National Product on the path to enlightenment.