Sea-Change
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
Thank you, Bill.
It is the dawn of 2023, war persists in the Ukraine (and beyond), the US House of Representatives is ground to a halt, our friends in Sri Lanka piecing their way through after massive dissolution, ding-dong, it is time to awaken into something rich and strange…
Everybody Knows the gig is up, and there are increasingly rich perspectives on just how it started, the nature of its course, and how we come to be in the midst of the meta-crisis today.
If you follow the links above, you’ll learn that there is truly a wide and wonderful conversation of wisdom perspectives burgeoning in the ecosystem of our collective minds. I will attempt to steer clear from adding any cacophony to that emergent symphony, and try to keep things a bit simple in the interest of inviting some sense of security in a place for our feet.
I don’t intend any miracles, and indeed any sense of security that may arise does so in spite of the ground being quite literally on fire.
Nonetheless, the view I am exploring attempts an embrace of unbroken legitimacy in a timeless river of compassion. Put another way, we are just where we must be, and fanciful flights of what might’ve been belong not to us, but perhaps some other beings in another Kosmos, or another mind.
When I think of the state of our world, a particular flavor of image often comes to mind. Scenes of forests, deserts, jungles, plants and trees and seeds, mushrooms and mycelia, roll through in timeless fast-forward, ages rolling across the surface of the earth, change is their living breath.
Desert gives way to forest and vice versa, soil liquefies and becomes leaves, sky rains down to ocean, the whole affair the living body of a divine mind. Such awesome unbroken transformation, a subatomic dance manifesting as an ocean of sky…
We are that endless song of broken hearts and new loves found. This earth from which we arise ever a cradle of these transformation.
But, as usual, I digress…
Where was I? Oh yes, where are we?…
March 20, 1602, the Dutch East India (Trading) Company began with a vision to transcend national borders and expand its powers and reach into and around the globe.
In 1804 Richard Trevithick developed the steam powered railway locomotive, and 33 years later the first railway line was built in Russia between Saint-Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo. Continents began to shrink…
In 1886 Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, proving the work of James Clark Maxwell, introduced us to radio waves, and by 1895 Guglielmo Marconi brought the radio into being. The boundless sky is listening…
January 1, 1914, the Wright brothers invention comes to the masses with the first commercial airflight, courtesy of Mr. Tony Jannus.
Colonization of the Americas by European fortune seekers and settlers began in earnest about 500 years ago, picking up steam and shifting into overdrive on its decimation of indigenous cultures within just a century. These events set the stage for the emerging American invention of algorithmic capitalism to sweep the globe with its particular brand of consumption centric entrepreneurship…
Of course now, commercial air travel, radio and other telecommunications, transcontinental shipping, and corporatized global economics, are all par for the course.
In essence, over the course of the last 400 years (give or take a few centuries) the enterprise of the human species has quite materially overtaken the globe. This is not just the dawn of a new era, but the dawn of a epoch.
If we consider the evolutionary journey of a species to be that of a fluid system (and I do consider this to be so ;-), we can see that as that species transmigrates between stable states of predominant expression, there will be periods of turbulence in the interim between one and another order of relatively laminar flow through a given epoch…
The disconcerting turbulence found in nearly every aspect of our world today expresses this very dynamic in action through the lens of our human engagement and experience.
While individual humans have roamed the globe freely since time immemorial, and bands and groups of these individuals have certainly practiced collective nomadic lifestyles, we can make some general distinctions surrounding the way increasingly large collectives have expressed their geographic inhabitance. I.e. Small (tribal) groups, city-state centralities, empires, discrete nationstates, and next, sociopolitical organizational structures bounded not by oceans and mountains and rivers, or even ideologies, but rather just our literal planetary atmosphere.
Sticking with Bill’s metaphor above, the age of patriarchy has seen its day, while we are certainly left with some gifts from that time, it is easy to sympathize, and perhaps even side with those nymphs.
We are, today, for this course of time and evolution’s gradual wear, on the precipice of this new paradigm of existence. Just as a city state differs from tribal life, so too will a global human poly-culture differ from a world of nationstates.
While our history of disparate geographic sociocultural experiments has predisposed us to advantaging the utility of “away,” we are faced now with the empirical demand to renegotiate our relationship to such a term.
Living in small bands, the environment itself can often metabolize and take “away” the excrement and other externalities of our collective existence. Gathering in larger tribes, while still relevant to this mode, can also push us to leverage “away” by moving ourselves – to follow a food source or migrate for seasons… From our point of view, the environment itself goes “away” and heals from our passing.
As our industrious colonization of a “home” expands into more permanent and more populated built environments, our waste and “resource demands” could be relocated “away” to places we only visited for those purposes, but would likely not wish to live ourselves.
Empires expand this mode, externalizing the scale of impact on “away” to even larger and more destructive expressions, soiling not only corners of an ecosystem, but whole territories of habitation and the homes and cultures of others.
The opportunistic (and to the reasonable mind, necessary) lesson of the day for our species lies well within the territory of a new unity in which, as in the words of another poet:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
The world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
Doesn't make any sense.
…does away entirely with this utility of our long beloved “away.”
Perhaps by now I have found my way, wondering through these words, to the point of this piece… The nature of our evolutionary journey has, today, brought us to a performative injunction:
We are compelled by substantially irrrevocable circumstance to determine modes of being that include the healthy thriving of all the members of our living community. No more can any of us imagine our own wealth and opportunity to persist in the face of, or more to the point, on the backs of impoverished others.
This means developing and defining synergistic boundaries between and amongst both individual and collective expressions of culture, and a new and integrated relationship to the vast diversity of wild living systems, flora, fauna, and otherwise who for each and all a part of our living home and selves.
No longer can we colonize and neglect the negative impacts of such an action, as those negative impacts we create will impact us with increasing directness and urgency until we either break or change our ways.
We are compelled to enact new orders of conscientious expression in the way that we “design” our processes and systemic structures of feeding, clothing, raising, educating, transporting, organizing and economizing ourselves.
These are not descriptions of singular, monotheistic supremacies, indeed there will be diverse ecosystems of expression of each of these, the unifying factor remains that each of these expressions must effectively synergize itself with it’s neighbors and the wider world.
Doing this will inculcate, test, and refine new expressions of cultural cohabitation, socialization, collective civility, and moral community.
The actions and practices of our daily lives in these evolved context will be as distinct as those of the forest dwelling Amazonian tribe member, to that of the city merchant or schoolteacher.
Not only are we inhabiting a new world space that demands conscientious participation in the development of these new forms, so to will these new pressures shape and be shaped by our inner attitudes of love, care, resilience, and creative engagement.
In short, we are undergoing an all aspects change of the human identity, there are few, if any territories of our being that we are not today invited to reimagine and to reinvent.
We all doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.
Hark! Don’t you hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
