The Cascadian Wanderer

There are eagles who fly far above their fellow avian pedestrians pecking at the ground below. Their wings surf the leading edge of energy waves emanating from the core of contemporary human collective consciousness; they explore nuances of wave and curl and break, and carve information-rich patterns in the skies for those with eyes which see such things: the poignant intersection of mortality and entropy; the orchestral complexity of consciousness, coalescing out of chaos into an instrument capable of profound dissonance and complex harmony; the piston of the heart, pumping life from its ancient origin ever onward, slowly extinguishing the vessels of its passage, heedless of any notion of holiness or worth.

I cannot tell you how to gain those heights. It is a visceral, elemental, mystical connection. Perhaps – if you observe, and think, and learn, and grow – perhaps you may one day find yourself there, mutually exploring with like minds and hearts the headwind pressures of our human passage, to divine the meaning which paradoxically emanates from the soulless engine of evolutionary biology.

I was born at the end of an age when the ancient paradigms of war and peace and conquest and security had proven to be filled with naiveté, a time when humanity began to collectively ask questions and seek answers to their arrival at the failure of old ways and means, motivated by the impending doom augured in the obliterations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When he witnessed the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945, a piece of Hindu scripture ran through the mind of Robert Oppenheimer: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It proved to be both a precise appraisal of the moment and a prescient vision of humanity’s inherent fatal flaw and, now, seemingly ordained future. Today the planetary bomb humanity has built and set to ticking is governed by a decaying switch, and soon that switch will not be an option.

When I came of age it was in an era riding the steep elevator of the industrial revolution, which had produced enough leisure time to support an unprecedented population of poets, philosophers, thinkers and theorists, and provide them with time to consider and reflect upon our existential condition and create a fuller appraisal, a deeper understanding, and a broader perspective of the human condition. It was a vibrant and revolutionary era which took new measure of the old ideas regarding life and death, good and evil, truth and lies, reality and illusion, and derived and set in motion new options for thinking and acting and being.

Fifty years ago the soaring eagles of humanity found themselves tumbling in waves far removed from the time when our collective consciousness was essentially a linear spear and they were a vanguard existing on its leading edge. Suddenly the tip of the spear had exploded in a spherical ball of nuclear energy which produced a chaotic array of vectors emanating in multiple directions from its core; an unprecedented amplification of energy struck the human continuum and while the ground shook the eagles began to recover and soar again into expanded dimensions. I am still there with them, how and why I know not. Yet somehow I sense them, seek them and find them, and in their presence I find recognition, validation, and contentment in who I am.

—

And now, at the end of this short, curious and rambling reminiscence there comes certain clarity like a burst of light out of a dead star. There may come a time when eagles are only eagles, and no longer metaphors. Yet I have lived in a time when they were both.

There are eagles here, where I live. In the spring I see them in solitary flight, riding thermal swells ever upward. In the early summer I se them in numbers ranging wide across the skies, raging in territorial combat. In the early autumn I see mated pairs swoop low and arc between the trees of the wood and then rise up together into open sky in the pure shared joy of flight itself. They mate for life, you know.

Eagles don’t have to believe in God. They know they are God. They know this because when they find their mate, they love their mate – with all their heart and mind and soul and strength. When that happens, the very first commandment of all is realized, and God is revealed.

We are miniscule points of miniscule points existing in a mind so large the galaxies are mere neurons, and the event horizon of black holes defines the boundary of a single synapse. Drill down through all the galaxies, drill down through all the stars. Sort down through all the planets to this one, sort through all the life forms, sort through every human being who ever was and ever will be – and here we are.

We are the most improbable of the improbable. We began as atoms in the great expansion at the beginning of the universe, coagulants of stardust seared in quantum shock waves, cooked in boiling bowls of granite; proto-proteins churned and pressed and fired by heat and pressure and lightning, hurled into oceanic depths until the genesis of the thing which rules us washed ashore, the thing as ruthless as the universe which made it: Life.

It is an engine plowing down the track of time, accreting layers around the first vivified amalgam of stardust which held it, until here we are, sentient tools of its stoic imperative. We are elaborations of stardust, instruments who serve a master which leaves only our death in its wake.

We serve as scout, calculator, navigator, and inventor. We explore the ground, devise paths, chart journeys. We create gods and wonders and illusions and dreams and build libraries and churches and citadels to house and sustain them all. We learn: fire warms, the wheel reduces toil, seeds grow, water sustains, sunlight illuminates and darkness obscures. We are instruments, in service and servitude to life itself.

If we should lose our feet and legs and hands and arms, if a curtain of blood drowns our brain and we are no more – cortex obliterated and consciousness smothered and only a lump remains – still we are ruled by the goading enforcers embedded deep in flesh and bone; still we are ruled by the stubborn muscular matrix in the deep mind where our master demands: Breathe lungs, beat heart! Live! The sum of all things derives from this source.

There is no thing greater than the sum of its parts; the sum of anything is the thing itself, quantified in a complex formula which contains legions of factors and myriads of variability.

Water in a container takes the form of the container, and when we pour the water out it is still water. The water when contained is not a gestalt product of the sum of the two conditions. Water in a container is not a greater thing; it is simply the product of the sum itself.

It is not so with consciousness. We are pleased to think that consciousness is separate from its container, and when the body is removed consciousness will, like water, return to its essential form. This is not so. Consciousness is the body and is not separate from it. When the body dies, consciousness dies with it, and in that moment the complex sum of an entire, singular universe blinks out.

What is real and what is not real? Is reality defined only by that which remains when consciousness is absent? When the conscious beholder of sky and stars, mountains and rivers, and light and darkness is removed and only the elemental energies and resultant forms remain, is that what is real?

If reality is defined by what remains outside of consciousness and yet both are real, our dualistic perspective of this fact implies the existence of an absolute reality, and also a relative reality, a subset of its source. Thus the creations of consciousness become real to consciousness itself.

This is an unnecessary fallacy. We do not have to think in order to be; we are. We are a complex sum of the universe, servants to a simple mandate. We are painfully finite, exquisite elaborations of stardust, conscious for a moment on the timeline of the universe and then gone. Yet we are real. Our every thought, feeling, dream and creation is real, because when all is summed, and every factor and variability accounted for the answer is, simply: One.

It is all one thing.

So keep this in mind, my reader: The action is not in the answer, it is there in the things summed. It is in that momentary universe you create and live. It is in the reality you are. It is in the structure you build and populate with love and faith and hope and speculation and imagination and yes, even every delusion you make real.

————
The Hands of the Carpenter

We lived in cave and cliff and longhouse and igloo and skin tent
We lived in forest and on plain and mountain
In ice and desert, on water and land

Now we live in lumber and steel and glass and concrete
Far from the forest, far from the sand
Far from the earth where we began

Yet down through time and across all ages
Something binds us all together,
All our bodies and arms and hands

Arms gather the beloved to our body
Hands hold and shape the caress
Of all we love

Yes, hands make weapons
Arms push away
The body has desires which corrupt in the absence of love

We die.

Yet
Love…

Yes.
Love lives.
Love carries us on.

————
Two Songs and an Epilogue for Every True Love

1. The Song of One: Quasimodo

Grief breaks the backbone, bends it double
It scuttles streets beneath eyes repulsed
In revulsion at its burden

It bears a bag of meat slung over its shoulder
Carrying every curse inflamed in flesh
Remembering the kind eye, the cooling caress

Dead now
Safe from all covetous priests and cozened congregations
In the dark crypt death consumes their consummation

The sum of all good and evil is known
The balance point between poles is posted
The farthest reach of dark and light revealed.

The entwined bones tumble to dust
Swirl in a soft whirl of wind
Rise to the stars

2. The Song of Two

One day I praised her and she demurred
Standing in the center of her brilliant beam
And I, and eye, knew, and

Eye and I replied
“In all the worlds, in all of time
There has to be One who is highest

Best, most beautiful
Brightest
Why would you think it is not you?”

Eyes rode out to eyes then
rode back again
Each saw the other of the One beyond the end

Beyond all thoughts of aughts and noughts we knew
We knew
We knew

It was true.

Epilogue

The entwined bones tumble to dust
Swirl in a soft whirl of wind
Rise to the stars

It was true.

Every once in awhile I discover a brilliant light in the contemporary human universe. That’s why I’m writing now, to introduce you to Maria Popova, who has an extraordinary mind and expresses herself in extraordinarily articulate annotated essays which often prove to be feasts which fill both the heart and mind of the reader. Popova is well worth the time invested to read her work. Her blog was formerly known as “Brainpickings,” and is now “The Marginalian.”

Here are links to three of her essays. I hope you find her work as satisfying and worthwhile as I have.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2021/06/13/alan-lightman-probable-impossibilities/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2020/12/25/brian-greene-rilke/

https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/09/03/rilke-love-marriage/

“There are such relationships which must be a very great, almost unbearable happiness, but they can occur only between very rich natures and between those who, each for himself, are richly ordered and composed; they can unite only two wide, deep, individual worlds.”

You are a human being. You were born in a crater under the stars which is coliseum and arena and amphitheater. It is a bowl filled with fog and shadows, good and evil, ignorance and stupidity, sophistication and intelligence.

It is your lot to learn how to navigate the ground here.

It is your privilege to create yourself here.

It is both your curse and blessing to be assaulted and cajoled by sometimes random and sometimes organized experiences of beauty and baseness here.

Fog is pierced by a lighthouse. Shadows are revealed by a lantern. If you choose, light becomes a tool which drills a hole through murk.

Yet can you wring even one atom of light out of an ocean of fog and shadow?

Where then from whence does such light come?

It has come here with you. Here it will either smother or flare. Be careful. Pay attention. There are many shadows and much fog in this place. Ask yourself: “When Diogenes searched the dark land for a single true person, did he ever realize that his lantern revealed one? Did he finally see that it could be the person who held the lantern? Or was he doomed, along with his light, to be forever consumed by shadows?”

Take your light often to the rim of this crater, and let it be replenished by the sun and moon and stars. Return then, and feed it to love and all that is good, and use it to illuminate the shadows wherein selfishness and evil lie.

Before my beloved died we believed we would still be consciously connected after her death. If ever there was a bond which could transcend the curtain descending between us, we were certain that it would be the great love we had for one another.

After she died, I never heard from her again. Part of me died with her, and part of her remained with me, yet her ghost and the lovely shades and memories left behind have offered little solace in the profound loss of her presence in this life.

Whether it comes as the result of profound bereavement, or one’s own impending death, or in simple contemplation seeking the truth and reality of human existence, a definitive answer to the perennial and primal question of life after death has eluded humanity. Our objective regard of the far country beyond death is obscured by powerful and complex innate perspectives embedded within our biological nature, and then projected outward to form our perceived reality. We see what we are, and when we look for what is, for what is beyond what we are, our consciousness encounters veils, curtains and walls created by what we are.

The unsolved question of history, sought by consciousness down through the ages of humanity, is whether or not consciousness can exist beyond its own continuum. We can not assert an answer to the question. Many have done so, yet their assertions have been marred by speculations relying on ambivalent possibility, imaginative or visceral fancy, and belief – all elements present in the continuum of consciousness, yet absent in the universe which we regard from inside our own cognitive bubble and translate into terms of our own. Sentience beholds that which exists outside its own continuum, yet it translates that vision into its own meaning. Meaning is the intrinsic signifier defining consciousness itself.

The conditions which shape our consciousness, and simultaneously limit it, are our neurological complexity and our embedded biological evolutionary mandate to survive. A certain measure of obfuscation appears in our line of sight as a result of these conditions when we attempt to look at death without ascribing to it qualities and characteristics which give it meaning to us. Like everything else consciousness encounters, a translation is made. In our regard of death the returns have been, to say the least, contradictory, confused, complex, and often fraught with hopes and dreams which have become stories and then myths and then beliefs.

The information we gather about what death is confronts us with a formidable, complex structure of cultural ideas and evolutionary biological mandates. When we begin to assess this information in order to form our own conclusions it soon becomes clear that humanity has not so much given death a proper objective regard; it has instead given a great deal of attention to how it regards death. Hope and desire, fearing what death might mean, rise to counteract that fear, insisting that the dead beloved one lives, that the self will never die, that all the instances of ending which are embodied everywhere in the continuum of life and the universe are not what they seem to be.

Humanity has proven that it can see what is without being befuddled by such bias. Science can look at the motion of the stars, the birth and death of galaxies, the nature of matter and other phenomena, and in the resultant translation by human consciousness a matrix of understanding can be constructed which is consistent, coherent and reliable.

Trees fall and crumble into dust; stars implode and planets die; those with us die and are with us no more, we hear their voices only in our minds, and never do we hear from them again. Oblivion presents itself as fact and yet our hope, our desire, is that it is not so.

Is there life after death, an afterlife? The word itself reveals our bias. Afterlife – it is a word which skips blithely over the fact of death and the evidence of oblivion into another life, a reflection of our profound and innate hope and desire to be alive, and even more so that our dead beloved lives, and is not gone from this universe.

I place my hope in the fact that what we know is not all there is to know; that perhaps there are continuums which our consciousness continues to live within, intact and vibrantly alive, which we cannot know of while here in this one.

I place my hope in the observation that life tends to rise to ever higher levels of organization, and that the life energy of which we all consist is not, here, at the highest level which exists; that the energy which has produced us moves our consciousness, intact, to another plane.

I place my hope in the desire I have that my beloved is still alive, that the one with whom I found love and peace and fulfillment and realized the highest potential of this continuum, might even now be, and forevermore will be – alive.

Yet now I release all those hopes and fears in the stark clarity of my own realization of what death truly is, and find comfort in this quote from Alan Lightman’s novel, Mr. g:

“At the moment of her death, there were 3,​147,​740,​103,​497,​276,​498,​750,​208,​327 atoms in her body. Of her total mass, 63.7 percent was oxygen, 21.0 percent carbon, 10.1 percent hydrogen, 2.6 percent nitrogen, 1.4 percent calcium, 1.1 percent phosphorous, plus a smattering of the ninety-odd other chemical elements created in stars.

“In the cremation, her water evaporated. Her carbon and nitrogen combined with oxygen to make gaseous carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, which floated skyward and mingled with the air. Most of her calcium and phosphorous baked into a reddish brown residue and scattered in soil and in wind.

“Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere. In sixty days’ time, they could be found in every handful of air on the planet. In one hundred days, some of her atoms, the vaporous water, had condensed into liquid and returned to the surface as rain, to be drunk and ingested by animals and plants. Some of her atoms were absorbed by light-utilizing organisms and transformed into tissues and tubules and leaves. Some were breathed in by oxygen creatures, incorporated into organs and bone….“

She said there would be more after this life, that she could sense it waiting: no end, just more. She was right.

The sun sinks down to the edge of the western horizon, and an ancient traveler pauses near the end of the long road to take his reckoning. He summons the gift given to him so very long ago and a small globe appears in his hands. He raises it above, holds it facing into the fading light, turns it with his fingers.

It is nearly all in shadow now; only a slight crescent of light gleams on its edge. He turns it around in his fingers and always it is the same. He knows it is a globe, the turning and the feel of it in his fingers tells him that. Yet his eyes have never seen more than half of it.

“Near the end, it seems,” he thinks, “yet still a bit of light to follow until darkness comes.” He slowly lowers his hands, and as the globe fades and returns to its place in him, he remembers.

He was wrapped in soft swaddling and knew little more than light and dark then, and comfort and discomfort, and what was above and what was below. Yet that day his mother and his father appeared above him and spoke in a language he understood.

His mother spoke first: “My clan is the Earth clan. We are mountain and rock, water and clay, forest and charcoal, sinew and gut and muscle. We are strong and neither disease nor enemy can conquer us. When war comes we either win or die, there is no other way. We are warriors and builders and farmers. We fight, we create, we transform, we plant. We are determined and stubborn, and we endure. We are wise and our memory is long and we know many things. We seek in all weathers the One, and do not rest until we find Him.”

Then his father spoke: “My clan is the Sun clan. We are air and light, sun and sky, ocean and stars, wings and cloud and thought and passion. We are restless, fearless, free, and fly through thunder and lightning. We soar and no enemy can trap us. We ride the high currents on the edge of the atmosphere and observe the whole world below from a distance. We see things others cannot. We are philosophers and prophets and adventurers and poets. We make visible the threads which tie all things together. We seek in all weathers the One, and do not rest until we find Her.”

His father laid a leaf beside him; its veins were to remind him of his mother when he flew above the earth and saw the veins of earth’s rivers below. His mother placed a feather next to it; its veins were to remind him of his father when he soared above the mountain top in moonlight and beheld the veins of light streaking through the endless sky above.

Then they placed the world in his hands, a globe of gleaming light and brilliant, nameless colors, saying; “This is yours now. It has come down through every clan from the first One, from the first Father and Mother, and will be with you every day on the long path ahead.

“Your eyes will ever see only half of it, yet when you turn it with your hands they will tell you what it is. This is the first lesson. To know anything you must both see and feel it.”

“See how it gleams for you now in the rising sun behind you? See how there is only a mere sliver of darkness at its edge? This is when you begin, the shining morning of your life. This is where you are; wrapped in light. No matter what point you are upon the world you see, no matter how you turn it, you will find yourself there, surrounded by light.

“It will not always be so. As you travel onward the sun will rise, and by mid morning a quarter of the world will have shadow upon it. At mid-day the shadow will cover half; and so it will go until you reach the sunset, when the days of your life have filled with shadow and only a sliver of light remains shining on the edge of a vast darkness which covers the globe.

“The darkness is filled with many things; dead warriors, burned crops, broken wings and smoke-darkened skies; shattered hearts and regretted acts and all things ever said which were ever lies. There too may lie the crater of your deepest bereavement; the grave of your beloved, with whom you found the One. The one you cleaved to in the light remaining, now lost, dying first; a grieved ghost lingering in your loneliness.  

There, at the end of day, you will know the beauty which ever is, and the ache which will ever be. There you will join with all the gathered joys and sorrows of all your days, and you will remember what was there: 

There was the open road, which holds freedom and loneliness; vast vistas of spirit-filling grandeur which inform the self of its uniqueness in time and its intrinsic insignificance in the universe at large. There was the road less often taken, that crossroad where fulfillment and realization are ahead and yet many regrets lie behind. There were the craters of bereavement, where memory collides with loss and the afflicted find themselves stunned and insensate wanderers. There was the beauty of the last adventure, and the knowledge of death waiting at its end. There was the beauty of goodness and compassion and wisdom and love and community, and the ache of knowing they can be absent in this world. There was the peace and privation of the solitary life. There was every beauty and every ache, woven through it all.

“So thus, dear son, this we say to you now: look to the light. The One is there. Seek there, and you will find. Do this, and though you find yourself alone you will not lose the One of Her and Him. When the last day is done and the journey finished, stand in the last splinter of light.

“Stand there, and looking back you will see all the days behind glowing in soft light. Turn then, and look forward, and follow the light to the other side of this globe. There you will discover your beloved One waiting, gleaming in a boundless field of light, and together you will follow the sun down below the horizon and into the stars beyond.”

Dear ____

The things I find myself writing these days are often short and while they mean something to me I often have the feeling that my perspective has become so personal that if I shared them they would either make no sense or seem to be superficial to others unless I explained the content with a lengthy preface and explication.

The other morning I was on the front porch thinking about the fleeting mortality of human existence, ours and the lives of our ancestors, and the coming to and going through and passing from this life we all share. Later I wrote something which conveyed the essence of that moment to me. I’d like to share it with you, because I think you will understand it.

There’s A Reason For Everything

On the porch with coffee this morning I wonder if there is a reason for anything until we give it one. And so I give a reason to this thought which comes while a chain of geese who winter on the valley floor here fly between me and the morning mountain skyline to the southwest, and the edge of morning flares along the eastern ridge.

And as quickly as it appeared, the thought is gone.

—–

Dear Bob,

“There’s A Reason For Everything” has the quality of a koan, or one of those moebius strips – the rational brain can only follow it so far, and then something happens… we come so close to the edge of functionality of the subject/object duality that it starts to wobble and break up, like all those phenomena that are imagined to happen as you approach the speed of light, at the wobbly edge of what the brain will do…

It’s making me think of a line from Rilke which I have seen quoted but never been able to find in any of the poems of his I read, along the lines of ‘We are bees to the Unseen’…

—–

Dear _____

It is a koan. I especially like your use of the word “wobble,” it’s just a perfect word to describe the back and forth oscillation we humans experience across the line of demarcation between being and seeing, of beholding versus perceiving – of being engaged on the one side with the simple facts of our holistic divine existence and then wobbling across the line toward the pole of reason, mind, words, personality, and actions. We wobble between that immutable essence which we behold in its timeless unity and wholeness and the place where our individual perceptions apprehend it and translate it locally in our own experience.

The Rilke quote is this one:

 “…we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. … It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”

This is that place where the divine and existential unite. Rilke’s remark resonates particularly well with me in its embrasure of living a full, passionate life and his recognition of the spiritual honey gathered from a full-on, sometimes wild engagement there.

Rutger Hauer’s “Tears in Rain,” the final soliloquy of the warrior cyborg in the movie Blade Runner, is considered one of the best death soliloquies in the history of film. I think it is one of the best affirmations of the passionate life as well.

Yes, ultimately the piece as a koan is meant to conduct the beholder from the place where we wildly collect the honey of our particular lives to the moment when “something happens” and we are aware of the “great golden hive of the invisible” made visible in the mountains and the geese and sky and edge of morning and end of night.

It’s that transcendental edge, the place where we are, in your words, at the wobbly edge of what brain will do, where suddenly the local mind disappears in the presence of the great mind. We are as ancient as the mountains; the very molecules which constitute us are simultaneously flying in the geese; the photons in our very atoms are dancing in the corona of light on the mountain ridge at the edge of morning, at the end of night. And when we die – as the soliloquy says – “all those… moments… will be lost in time, like tears… in… rain.” And they will be found there, too.

It is the place Wallace Steven’s poem “Sunday Morning” arrives at in its end:

In the mirror he sees a gnarled, tree-bark face on the skull of a wizened monkey. The rheumy eyes are sad with remembrances; the shadows of past joys, the cauldrons of his nurture, the tempering forges of his nature. He isn’t happy about it. He isn’t unhappy about it. Entropy is stamped across the face of the earth, he thinks. I see it everywhere. This is my place there.

Perhaps the best way to rage against the dying of the light is to put a bullet in your head, he muses. End with a bang, not a whimper. It is a difficult thing to do.

He knows – so far he has not been able to do it. It is an act suspended in the netherworld of paths, floating in that void between devout desire and consummated achievement, constrained by the meat-embedded dictate as old as life itself.

It is a cruel and stolid taskmaster, unmoved by higher thoughts. It is heedless of the indignity it enforces at its end, insensate to the ruin it brings to all the realized and fulfilling beauties of life which have come before. It does not ease pain, does not soothe misery, knows no compassion, and recognizes no event horizon for its own end. It is a mindless engine driven by one unbending dictum; it must survive.

It always dies. It is a fool in the machinery of life.

He regarded the face in the mirror a moment longer. Then he turned out the light and went to bed, and dreamed of dead people and places and things.