Where Does Wonder Lead?

“A personal journey from crisis to starlight and back home again”

There are many ways to circumscribe the idea of the metacrisis, and certainly there have been many notable and useful views put forward on the subject. Nonetheless, this idea has a way of getting underneath our various conceptions and refusing quite to hold still while we gain our bearing in a matter of practical approach. In conventional terms this can present as a problem while the crisis is real and consequential and our points of leverage seem always to find footing in something fluid constantly letting go. Where to begin, or have we?

This particular inquiry into which we drop today began for me with a soft and momentary image which now lives in an ephemeral corner of my mind, like the sounds of gentle lake waves lapping at the shore quietly under dark and starry skies. There is something quite beautiful here in spite of ferocious threats at the corners of the frame reaching, stretching towards the center with terrible claws and fire in their eyes. Who am I in this image, and what are these various forms which make up the texture of the story?

For some time away from the quill, I turn to these pages today feeling a little rusty and cutting through the subtle layer of ink drying at the top of the well. Tap tap tap, slowly something limber returns to my heart, mind, and veins of action. Let me see if I might find something worth sharing here in these shuffled notes and cobbled apparitions…

I know that I want to touch on something of the nature of our humanity, something about where we find ourselves, and something that has to do with what we find when we look deep into the picture, through the forms, through the colors, through the canvas, and beyond the fibers in the fields flush with wind and sunlight, water and soil, vast skies and subtle stirrings of life.

Perhaps now we touch for a moment back to the title, a first chuckling echo of wonder as the ground from which we step…

There are so many ways, so many doors and windows through which a person might step into this world.

Some tumble, awash in the currents and flows of a river from birth to death, catching joys and sadness, terror and surprise, restful moments and agitation in various measure as the stream of their life bubbles up, follows gravity, and enters the ocean and the sky and the clouds and the rain once again…

Others launch themselves into the fray, all ego and desire, blind to consequence, heaving through the viscosity of being grasping and struggling, cheering for the success of momentary gains and crying out in loss and longing when things don’t go their way.

Some come with a sense of duty, meeting themselves in the face of all their relations and striving to hold counsel with wisdom and humor, shoulder to shoulder with familial bonds standing ground in the nobility of something much greater which holds them in sacred trust while they build, to their best, wellbeing from the lessons of the past and embark each new day with reverence and determination to hold fidelity in the face of perceived confusions and deviance streams.

Let me not belabor this point but only suffice to say that we are many, our paths each precious and unique in the widest boundless state of being. Looking from you to me, to others out there, and to this, all of this named, unknown, spoken and beyond words, we must admit the presence of wonder, grasp as we may, something slips between our fingers and out of sight.

In the subfield of population ecology, we see the phenomenon of “population oscillations” describing the gentle ebb and flow of numbers in a given population as they meet year-to-year with the various flavors of food and habitat abundance, fluctuating numbers of predator populations, and other factors determining their state of flourishing or contracting in their containing ecology at large. Like tides on the ocean shore, these oscillations don’t follow with metronome precision, but wash inorganic patterns around strange statistical attractors which themselves ebb and flow in nested fractal underlying evolutionary patterns of their own.

Think of a river lapping at its bank, fluctuations in upstream patterns of precipitation, rock slides and other perturbations to the flow; while at the same time carving an ever-changing and meandering course through the landscape while the continents beneath gently drift and tectonic plates slowly form new mountains and valleys that will themselves bring new rivers, new seasons, and new tides…

At a local level, within these oscillations, we find also the quality of extreme tidal highs and lows. These edges of the bell curve touch into and reveal the profound sacred fragility of life. These extremes are more susceptible to catastrophic collapse and transformation. We ourselves, the human family, can be said to be standing on one of these precipitous edges, having only recently subsumed the globe itself to the force of our collective identity and its surging ideologies of evolutionary success.

In this symphony of the human being, having played now for just a few million years, a variety of themes have been developed, and many variations on these themes. Harmonies have developed, risen, crescendoed, and tumbled away to form new melodies in the long arc of this marvelous and sometimes haunting song. We find ourselves today in the midst of a cacophonous churn, billions of individual instruments around the world all chiming in, some loud and sweeping, others nearly lost like tinkling bells in a thunderstorm.

Some small number of us see this moment as a threshold of manifest destiny, our undeniable greatness stands poised to leap from this primitive planet into the outstretched arms of unexplored space; we going boldly where it is our birthright to venture further into the vast and tameable wonders of our boundless material domain. We, the great gods whose purview and birthright it is to conquer one savage frontier after another, bringing them into our kingdom and under our dominion to wrestle ever greater certainty from the mystery. Forgive me if I’m a little plain in my skepticism of this view.

Others find ourselves questioning, peering behind the curtains of this apparent popular success, and wondering when our ecology might wash back against our favor and with what force, and what degrees of devastation. Within this are those seeking sufficient power and economic stability for themselves to weather the storm as the righteous few whose progeny will be better deserving than the unwashed masses caught off guard and lost in confusion. Still others seek to raise the alarm, with optimism and positive regard calling out and declaring ways forward that we must follow if we are to collectively endure.

For most of us however, this large-scale dynamic in the pattern is lost in the cacophony of daily life. We struggle against systems bursting at the seams, hoping or fearing that the latest tides of our political favor offers some certain clarity to be cheered or railed against in this moment of turbulent transformation. Truly many of us remain oblivious even to this layer of the music, quietly plucking our own strings in our daily search for the melody that brings a momentary peace to our minds.

Make no mistake though my friends, in terms of our own lives, and possibly the lives of trillions more on this planet itself in this very time and perhaps quite longer, the stakes of our involvement are very high indeed.

Our friends at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion in the Introduction of their recently released work, First Values and First Principles offered under the pseudonym David J Temple, described quite succinctly the impact of our apparent popular success:

“Industrialized means of extraction and pollution have reached planetary scale and are now pushing the very limits of global ecological boundaries, dysregulating the biosphere as a whole. As much scientific research has demonstrated, this will quite possibly lead, within a generation or so, to the crossing of multiple tipping points, resulting in an unstoppable degradation and simplification of all Earth systems, as the biosphere cascades into a self-re-enforcing death spiral: dead oceans, desertification, the ending of seasonal rhythms, and a catastrophic depletion of biodiversity. This is the death of Gaia—the end of the biological life support system of Earth—and if humans continue to survive, it will be in conditions of unimaginable extremity.”

This is stark, but very real. Let us not rashly react however but take for a moment a step back to see if we might find a vantage point from which to settle our hearts and find a way to embrace this moment, no less full of mystery and sacred blessing than any other.

I opened these pages with a reference to “a soft and momentary image,” let us return now to what caught my attention.

If we step away from this front row seat to the many layered poly crisis playing out in the resounding music of our time, if we find a way not just up to the balcony, but out the open window and clamber up the ladder onto the roof under the stars and listen now to the echoing song drifting aimlessly into the night air… If we find our feet light and breaking contact with the gravel and tar, our bodies lifting and drifting gently skyward, and if in this we discover the city and the hall and the sounds of everything, our very selves drifting not just upward, but inward, our bodies now light and the times of our life held, there our birth, here are being, just there ahead our passing away, the locus of our sight itself moving from our little round eyes to the ground of our minds awareness itself, then something new comes into focus…

Night falls away, the music drifts quietly into the background, a vast and boundless space opens up beyond the edges of our identity and even those conceptions of perception itself give way. Here in this profound freedom, drifting in Majesty, we peer out and there coming into focus lies a marvelous jewel planet, blue and green and white and beige (perhaps too much beige and gray) and sparkling in a vast ocean of space. This precious and unique spectacle twinkles there, calling us back to ourselves, this is our home. What an incredible gift to find in all of this darkness and possibility, a practical place of our birth, the ground of our mothers and fathers, the home of our food and friends and passing away, the land of our ancestors and all their relations, now ours again in this small and incredible gift of ecological marvel and evolutionary flow, the living ground of everything beautiful that we have found coming into these bodies and looking out through our senses.

This jewel rests in a sparkling velvet, the soft cushion of a boundless and wild universe that has filled us every day for eons with a wonder that transcends again and again our daily work of shelter and sustenance and the simplest gestures of co-creation. What, we ask peering outward, is this incredible Majesty!? Who are we to find ourselves here! This, out there, so beyond our reach and so tantalizing to know…

What wonder fills us now and what wonder is this that has driven our popular expansion now threatening the very vitality of this jewel beyond all conceptions of limited value?

Let us turn our gaze from these myriad forms of the world in its becoming and its ebbs and flows, let us turn our gaze for a moment into the wonder itself.

For me when I sit quietly for a moment, letting my attention drift into the wonder, I find my own heart, radiant with energy and flowing in the fullness of this body tingling here in the harmonic vibrancy of a quantum field manifesting as atomic dance and worldly form. I find the constant arising and passing away of fluctuating vitality, the quiet and deafening din of awareness perceiving itself in endless kaleidoscopic patterns of emptiness and form, color and brilliance and dark.

The wonder is everywhere and nowhere and I am that, flashing with a fire light of love in my eyes twinkling out to touch and embrace this awesome wholeness, my very own being, fragile and perfect and terrible with a beauty mirroring the unspeakable greatness of something so pure as to be called divine itself.

This precious jewel planet rests in the center of my velvet heart, tender and vulnerable like my newborn child and just as compelling for my most skillful care and fierce protection. Each and every life crawling and swimming and flying and burrowing and drifting through its fragile face, each one a vital cell of this living body and every one deserving of all the nurturance I can manifest through this mother’s longing that arises like a wave surging in this melody moment of our time.

I am not just me, I am life itself. I am more than life, I am this profound and evolutionary impulse arising as in endless song of trans universal transformation, I am light, I am loving embrace, I am indeed life itself. I am also me sitting here on a Saturday afternoon, metaphorical quill in hand, member of an audacious species whose very success in striving has brought about this planetary moment of uncertainty.

Like countless other species our own population oscillation has expanded to the very latest edges of our habitat and seems likely to ebb away from those shores in the great fluctuations of time. Unlike countless other species however, you and I and we can “see” this moment from a certain point of view. We are not just foraging for food, retreating from predation, and following our biological imperatives for procreation. We are doing all of that, but we are also plunging deeper into the territory of wonder and the exploration of this frontier changes the game in many ways.

What again is this metacrisis, this thing that seems so wily and unwilling to hold still? Perhaps it is useful to say that this crisis is our very selves, our very self reflective realization of the wonder that it is to be at all. The world is breathing us, the past few million years a great inhale, our being expanding across lands and ocean and space to this fullness that we now are. And here we awaken…

Many wisdom traditions point to this place between the breaths, indeed the Sufis refer to the breath within the breath as the home of divine majesty itself. Many practices direct our attention to look here for the ground of self-realization, divine grace, or profound enlightenment of the great perfection. What if this might be the very heart of the metacrisis?

What does it mean for a species to look directly into that empty space between the breaths of its own evolutionary unfolding? What does it mean for a species to awaken and discover its profound nobility, not as dominion over, but as the loving heart within all things?

What wonder do we find if we listen carefully to the voices of thousands of ecosystems, billions of lives, trillions of growing, evolving, and beautiful beings calling out in pain under the boot heel of our techno-industrial “success?” What duty does this call us to in finding our way back from our exploratory frontiers, to the heart of our shared home and the crumbling foundations of our place in nobility?

It’s easy to wash around in our senses of certainty about this important thing or that, this social political ideology or that, this economic opportunity personal just to me but at cost to you. In fact, if we let our view collapse into the certain viscosity of our little lives in moments to moments, it’s easy to neglect this breathing body of our existence, cost chasing the sugary goodness of our childish desires, we might run blindly into the thoroughfare of that evolutionary stream dispassionate to our little feet and rushing through with a new cosmic byway of some other profound inquiry already underway and with momentum beyond our perception.

For myself, I choose wonder, I choose tears of beauty and sadness. I discover there such an invitation to life, to living and loving and feeling fully the comings and goings of these fragile bodies and the beautiful possibility of the song flowing within and throughout…