This is a view of the Roanoke River with a half moon rising in Wasena Park, near my home. The scene calls to mind a song “Moon Draws Water” by a dear friend of many years (Bob Sima). His work immediately resonated with me. We both are lifelong seekers, eager to understand life and share joy. Although we haven’t spent much time together of late, I know we are forever bound in spirit. We connected when he had just released his first solo album and was making a big leap from a standard job into following his calling. His courage has always been inspiring; his heart even more so. That moon is still tugging at me, to more fully let go, but we both continue to learn and grow. 

It’s a fascinating thing how the moon’s gravitation pull causes the jelly-like skin that are the oceans clinging to the earth’s surface to change shape, essentially causing the tides to ebb and flow. I’m not sure just when our science “verified” this phenomenon. It also intrigues me that, as far as I understand it, science still can’t quite pin down what exactly gravity is… but really, very little can be pinned down. 

What’s a river, after all? Hardly a static thing. We use arbitrary boundaries to define where a river “begins” and “ends” but these concepts can’t begin to convey the essence of a river. All rivers are constantly shifting, filling and pouring out, eroding banks and evaporating in the sun, all the while teeming with life. Try as we might, life can’t be catalogued nor contained nor controlled. 

I like that there’s lots of room for mystery. All the bright mature people I’ve ever known acknowledge that the more they learn in whatever field, the more they realize how much they don’t know. Humility can be hard to digest, especially when we or someone we love is experiencing health issues or in crisis. We ache for something concrete to ease suffering. Sometimes the bank of accumulated knowledge (whether our science or ancient wisdom) allows us to find ways to do so. But not always, and then we’re challenged to not let the unknowns and uncertainty veer us into anxious chaos.

In the last couple years, close friends and family members have found themselves in the crucible of major challenges with their health and/or circumstances. I’ve been very fortunate yet my heart aches for them. Much as I want to alleviate their struggles, some have passed. I’ve come to sense often the best I can do is to just try to be there for them, like this river, whose flowing constancy wordlessly soothes my own heart and mind. 

There’s a subtle balance between effort and acceptance of what we are handed in this realm of lived experiences. It seems to me it’ll be ongoing until I transition from this life. Like those ebbs and flows of the tide, periods of smooth sailing and rough choppy challenges are part of the deal of being human. It’s learning how to maintain a deeper peace, to “walk on the water” during the inevitable storms as one famous metaphoric story has it. 

All we know is constantly changing: our situations, our bodies, our ever-shifting emotions and momentary desires, every breath, indeed, every tree, each river, even every mountain is rising or falling. Disturbances are never the precisely the same, even our joys come and go. Which begs the question, why does our science attempt to identify all we know as if there are separate, independent components, even as our physics has “proven” there is more space between molecules than solid substance? A cynical argument could be made that we have to identify things in order to own them! Of course to a degree it’s a useful method, naming things and conceptualizing abstract ideas, but it seems to me it can encourage, and in many ways has led, to a disastrous misunderstanding of life’s flow and our place within it.  

Whatever the reasons our science evolved this way, when it becomes dogmatic, intentionally or not, I feel it’s often masking vast societal insecurities. Whether on a communal or personal scale it feels a desperate desire for control, an attempt to block the current, a resistance to change.

We mostly live within a societal masquerade. To reveal the illusion and recognize we are NOT separate beings and that we are not separated from the world (which we’ve so dutifully catalogued and exploited) but fully integrated within  — would crumble the foundations of our modern society and industrialized world. To genuinely recognize that how we treat each other and interact with what we refer to as “nature” directly reflects how we view and treat our selves would reframe our way of living. 

To face the mirror of our age would be to accept our terribly murderous and reckless heritage. To even question, let alone embrace, letting go of our consumerist paradigm would require rupturing our collective cultural as well as our personal psyche. 

And yet, to not change the way we live and our world currently operates, seems destined to encourage evermore suffering. I dont see that the “tools” and approaches that have created our problems (sorry, billionaires club) can possibly  lead the way to get us beyond them. But it’s not as simple as pointing toward “others” who happen to have attained a certain social status. The process of accepting and manifesting change has to happen within me and my non-billionaire friends and acquaintances. Even if the path ahead is a bit mysterious and the precise methods are still murky, it feels to me my obligation and duty to begin walking it. Maybe the sweet moon is drawing me more than I realize.

Although I already intended to share this here, I have to smile when I actually pause to notice the Facebook prompt: What’s on your mind? Here we are, so fully  immersed in our abstracted, digitized-data driven world, that we need not only answers to our questions about how to get to our friends’ homes, or what a word means, or the answer to some other trivial tidbit of information plucked from a trillion data-bytes in some symbolic cloud, we almost fail to recognize these tools have begun to ask the questions for us. 

How wonderful — soon we’ll no longer need our own curiosity! We’ll instead be prompted to ask only particular questions that fit within the parameters of our interests based upon the algorithmic personalized frameworks (prisons?) we’ve nurtured by the other questions we’ve been asking for the last decade. In my desperate attempt to be rebellious, I never use Siri (conveniently capitalized just now as if it’s a proper noun by my auto-correct). I suspect this resistance is futile and matters little, as every time I’ve “killed the mystery” or made the decision to not try to use my own memory and typed something into the Gooog, it got registered and saved somewhere. Like it or not, our “online identities” have essentially become databanks of useable, “valuable” (AKA: profitable), manipulatable, likes and beliefs. Maybe it’s just as well, exposing the fragility of the concept of our uniqueness.

I do recognize the irony, that I’m not only making use of the technologies in typing this but in a more involved way, sharing “my thoughts” via social media. Convenience and technological efficiency always have trade-offs. So using this keyboard and internet connection sits within me with about the same degree of satisfaction as the convenience of driving my car a long distance does compared to the trade-offs of walking the journey. I get there faster and with less personal energy, but the convenience of my driving “costs” the world far more energy and I miss out on an incredible array of experiences and opportunities to grow. 

By typing this onto Facebook, I reach more folks with whom I may share my thoughts, but never get an in-depth face to face (or I should write in-person, "bodily presence to bodily presence" because we also have this "facetime" thing that I also almost never use) discussion using this route to communicate. Do we even consider how much is missed by sharing only via screens? What of a friend’s body posture, the touch of a hand, the warmth of their voice in response, the exchange we receive through their felt presence?  Clearly I'm a bit conflicted about it all. 

Yet what about books? Or handwritten notes? Don’t they also dilute the sharing? Writing one's thoughts out in any form is different from and begins to alter the experience of sharing our thoughts through speaking and dialogue. It's a trade-off that humans have accepted since we began mark-making as a way to share concepts eons ago.  

Clearly I don't have answers. But I am glad I still can formulate my own questions. And I don't intend to ask Doctor G, or that upstart new intern, AI, for a response to them. I like the type of clouds I can see reflecting the sunshine, hovering against the clear blue this morning, the kind that carry my mind beyond itself, and real water that sometimes gets dumped on me, splatters against the rocks, hushes the noise, cleanses the earth, and nurtures life. 

I prefer wandering my own mindscape and landscapes—like the ant in front of me, making his trek up and down the Black-eyed Susans that I cut earlier and placed in water from a cloud somewhere. They seem content enough, as the sunshine touches them, fulfilling their roles within the larger scheme and manifesting their duties, each in their own way, yet indifferent to their individuality. It seems it might serve me better to look to them for guidance, instead of disembodied digital voices or pixels on a screen…