Tag: Commumity

Doing ‘Research’ On The Internet

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Whenever someone tells me that they’ve arrived at a certain conclusion after doing research on the internet, I feel a certain skepticism arise. What I’ve encountered, too often, is that what people mean by ‘research’ is that they plunged into the endless astral abyss of the online world in search of confirmation for something they already believed, discarding anything that pointed in another direction. This style of journey very easily draws a person into one or another of the countless maelstroms that crowd the vast oceans of ideation and imagery. These are popularly known as ‘rabbit holes’, implying a maze of subterranean tunnels that lead nowhere else but in circles.

In an age of growing animosity and paranoia born out of divergent views of reality, this approach is rarely reliable. Too often it leads to delusion and at worst it can be deadly. When a person is online they’ve essentially parted from this physical plane and entered a bardo state, where every kind of illusion, every spirit, every angel and every demon abides in their own pocket universes, and every separate pocket at some level is connected to every other.

These days there’s a great deal of imaginative speculation around the concept of multiverses. For anyone who has even casually investigated the lore connected with the occult or magical worlds this is certainly nothing new. Neither is it strange territory for anyone familiar with the hallucinatory frontiers revealed by mind altering substances. For the experienced explorer the pitfalls and dangers inherent in crossing the boundaries between worlds are quite familiar.

Actually, we cross those boundaries whenever we open a book, go to the movies, listen to music, turn on television or the radio, or look at a painting or photograph. We do it when we meditate, when we daydream, when we tell each other stories. If we are truly present and open we immerse ourselves in parallel dimensions when in church or temple. Everyone living in the universe of electronic media is used to migrating between radically different realms from second to second as they are bombarded by narratives and counter narratives continually interrupted by commercials and trips to the refrigerator.

We’ve come to consider all of these journeys to be safe and well contained, but this wasn’t always the case. We had to learn how to receive and to navigate as well as to comprehend what we encounter through these myriad windows and doors. Mostly it’s been a matter of submiting to the conscious intent of the authors or composers who guide us through worlds they’ve created. This is an act of trust and surrender, taken more or less with conscious and specific intent and the assumption we’ll be let off the bus more or less at the place from where we embarked.

When the photograph was invented the linear dimensions of time and space were irrevocably breached. The four dimensions of spacetime are reduced to two through an entirely mechanical and alchemical process, independent of the impressionistic intercession of a painting or a drawing. A photograph is more than a mere impression, it’s an actual artifact, in which a particular moment continues to exist, and can be endlessly reproduced and experienced in succeeding moments.

The internet as we know it today didn’t really emerge until the graphic image took its place beside the display of text, along with the innovation of hyperlinks that could connect any image or text or sequence to any other. At that point the dimensional breach first created by the photograph became an explosion that began to tear our world into countlessly proliferating fragments, challenging all of our existing conceptions of civilization and order.

I entered the virtual world in 1984 when I purchased my first Macintosh computer and connected the dial up modem to explore various discussion groups and communities springing up all around the world. Very early on I began to learn about the power and potential toxicity of the words and images I encountered and expressed online. In those days conversation dominated commerce. There were no smartphones. I felt like an explorer on an island newly forming and expanding under my feet. Most of us who were there have some nostalgia for those times gone by.

Two or three generations later not only content and delivery have evolved but whole new languages are being invented online almost daily. The whole world is being absorbed and transformed in its encounter with virtual dimensions. I sometimes wonder if there’s anything of value an old timer can contribute as the tides sweep us all along.

Be careful. Question everything. Beware of obsessive or reactive behavior. Notice how your online activity effects your relationship with the offline world. Have other people in your life. Try to be kind.

It’s all too easy to get lost in an ocean of chaos. We become desperate for a coherent line or narrative that can make sense of it all. There are as many lifelines as there are points of attraction. They are all hard to resist and not all lead in healthy directions. We’ve spent centuries learning the tools of reason, science and intuition, in order to navigate our way through an increasingly complex and conflicted environment. We will need all of these tools to survive. The choices we make in the virtual world are no different from the choices we make in the physical one. Each affects our friendships, our affiliations and our very survival.

Research tip: Don’t get lost in the library.

Kerouac Mourns His Cat

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I remember the oceans

the waters

the women

the moments filled with friends

every sin

I remember too much

I remember everything

mind twists the moments

Into tales

truth is no companion

no more room left here

for those left behind

loneliness rises like the tides

Trials

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I just imbibed two healthy pints of Scotch Ale, a small handful of psychedelic mushrooms and a chunk of potent marijuana brownie…while printing 32 greeting cards so that I can replenish my rack at the grocery store and contribute to my gasoline fund for future trips into the present.

I’m hoping that some combination of the above will somehow blast me out of a sense of helplessness in the face of all the craziness and suffering, although I know it’s not really my responsibility and that I’ve done my part to advance this whole contraption…

I’ve been watching VICE NEWS documentaries looking into the darkest corners of the world, watching ‘Severance’ and ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel about a Christian youth group and reliving so many moments in the deep past in order to write about them, and writing about them, and wondering if this voluntary isolation from all the world matters anything at all.

I can only bear witness:

“This happened…this is what I felt.”

There are moments

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There are moments

Hough – 1966

I stand on the corner of Euclid and Liberty, the University at my back, the edges of the ghetto across the street and about a block away, the rotating flashes of cop cars at a blockaded intersection. It’s a little past the curfew, but I’d been pulled by some compulsion to come this way and have a look.

I participate in a summer college prep program that’s part of the president’s ‘War On Poverty’. Two nights ago, returning from a concert in the suburbs with a small group of students and counselors, we found the lights around the dormitories and in the courtyards mysteriously dark. The dorm entrances were locked, and everything was weirdly quiet. When we banged on the doors to be let in, a counselor furtively appeared and breathlessly asked us where we’d been. Someone earlier had heard gunfire at the edges of the campus and everyone had gotten quiet and had hunkered down in their rooms. Coming inside, we found the lights inside the hallways and in the stairwells also extinguished. So we hustled into the elevator and took it up to the second floor. When I started down the hallway toward the open door of my corner room, I saw that a couple of people were sitting on the desk and gazing out through the wide window. As I approached, I realized that the whole horizon of the city appeared to be on fire. The people in my room, friends of mine, had families living in those neighborhoods that were on fire.

The next few days were strange, as if we were living in a war zone. One evening we sat on a balcony, watching National Guard convoys streaming out from the college into the neighborhoods. Earlier in the day they’d descended from the armory up the heights and set up camp in the sports field next to the dorms. As darkness fell they proceeded, guns at the ready, from the wealthy halls of learning out into communities seen as epicenters of unrest. I’d begun to look at the architecture and arrangement of University buildings as a literal fortress against the poor. Troops and supplies were channelled down a wide highway into the campus. The university was like an island of higher learning, with the upper middle class heights at it’s back, surrounded on three sides by the ghetto.

Earlier today I watched a Guardsman playing Gershwin on a grand piano, in the student Union.

Tonight I have to be a witness, so I walk right up to the borders of a frontier, where the stores are closed and everything is tense, but quiet, in the aftermath of a receding wave of explosive anger. I can sense that there’ll be more waves, perhaps many more, to come. Given our history, maybe in 50 years the geography will have shifted, but we may still be under siege. At this moment, I stand in the shadows, on a quiet corner, watching a scene of roadblocks and paranoia, wondering whether its safe to cross the street.

Cleveland

Robert, campus shaman, student of medicine and law, late night DJ, always scruffy and aromatic, with lank and greasy looking hair and patchy beard, wears like a primitive vest the fuzzy unzipped liner of his trench coat. He stands behind me, holding a pair of wooden shoe trees, one in each hand, occasionally rattling them imperiously. We are thirteen stories up, on the roof of Robert’s dormitory, surveying a landscape of lit up buildings and the strange activity below. A group of our friends are wandering in a group that gathers to sit in a circle on a concrete plaza between the fountain and the lights. They’ve taken to howling like a pack of wolves.

A week ago we sat down during rush hour in the middle of the busy street that bisected the University, protesting the war. More than a hundred students joined us. Traffic stopped, the police arrived, and we spent hours being chased across the campus lawns, dodging cops on horses and clouds of tear gas. That evening Robert and I ran ahead of a mass gathering of demonstrators at the Student Union, to post ourselves on either side of a stairway leading into the ROTC building. As we sat awaiting the impending march, the president of the University and a coterie of deans and professors, having been roused from their evening cocktails, approached the stairs and asked us who we were. We dutifully replied that we were “Gargoyles”. The bewildered clique of administrators and elite instructors retreated, just ahead of the mob of students that soon arrived to occupy the building. As the excitement subsided and the party began, Robert and I walked over to his gig in the basement of the student radio station. All night we played ‘Carry On’, the first song on a new release by Crosby, Stills and Nash…”Carry On, Love Is Coming To Us All…”

This week ‘Students for a Democratic Society’ are in town for a national conference, organizing against the Vietnam war. A slew of delegates have arrived to share space in the dorms and make use of various classrooms and student facilities for councils and teach-ins. In advance of and perhaps in preparation for their arrival, the campus is awash with a plentiful supply and variety of cannabis and psychedelic product. When evening arrives, for the first time ever a general state of paranoia has vanished, towels as smoke barriers are removed from under doors, all doors are thrown open, music and parties flourish everywhere. Thus a great anti-war gala and political convention is launched.

Withdrawing from the celebrations, I retreat to my dormitory room, having ingested a quantity of LSD. I feel the need to be apart from the company of others while being launching into this chemically triggered revery. When I enter the dark room, all is quiet and empty and reassuring. Before I can take another step, the calm and familiar voice of Timothy Leary breaks the silence. It issues from the speakers on my stereo that I’d earlier left tuned to the campus ‘underground’ FM station. The voice sad, “Sit down Ralph”.

Frozen in motion and completely astounded, I obediently sit on the edge of the bed near the door, and listen.

The good ‘Doctor Tim’ takes me on an amazing guided tour of my own nervous system, the surrounding universe and the whole history of evolution that leads to the miracle of my human DNA. As he speaks my mind is gently and relentlessly forced to open, in stages. I hitch a ride, from the perspective of our amoebic ancestors, through the unwinding narrative of the evolution of my brain, on to a transcendent vision of a common destiny that’s beyond all space and time. The whole time, out of time, I hardly move a muscle, sitting on the edge of the bed as the story unfolds. Finally I’m talked gently into a safe landing, back in the room I’ve never left, and in the present dimension.

I carried the puzzled surprise and synchronicity of that evening in my imagination for many years. At times I questioned whether the experience was just an elaborately constructed hallucination. Otherwise I viewed it as some kind of unexplainable and secret initiation. Decades later I came across the account of an early psychedelic session, guided and taped by Timothy Leary with one of his grad students at Harvard. The student’s name happened to be Ralph Metzner. Mystery solved?

Colorado

Hitchhiking across the deserts and plains of the southwest, between California and Utah, I’m stranded in a small town with a growing band of fellow travelers. We’ve stood around for hours, having left Salt Lake City going east, descending on the other side of the Wasatch Mountains into a community at a crossroad for tourist and trailer park families. As our numbers keep growing it becomes increasingly unlikely that anyone in middle America will stop for a scary looking gaggle of long-haired young people.

Fortunately there’s a U-Haul agency in town. Someone has the inspiration to pass a hat, in which is collected enough cash to rent a truck, big enough to hold us all, pay for gas, and pick up a few stragglers along the way. We load up and cruise through the night, across the sage covered flats of western Colorado. We finally arrive in the early morning at Granby Reservoir, near the base of the high Rocky Mountains, where a growing campsite of wanderers gather for their walk up mountain trails to the site of the first Rainbow Gathering.

Negotiations have commenced with nervous ranchers and farmers that have set up a roadblock on the road between this camp and our destination. With the help of a sympathetic rancher the barrier is dismantled and we’re able to complete this last short stretch in our pilgrimage. We’re ferried by school bus up a dirt road, from the outskirts of the small town of Granby to the borders of national parkland. A steep winding trail leads us up to a wide meadow that borders a small alpine lake, surrounded by pine forests and overlooked by snow covered peaks. Strawberry Lake. A banner stretched across the final leg of the trail welcomes us “Home”, to this temporary collective refuge in the wilderness. Pilgrims arrive from all directions, most of them escaping the cities in this crazy nation with its crazy politics and prejudices, after years of frustrating struggle in the political trenches. We were looking for some better way forward, or maybe some kind of magic to manifest in the natural world.

I take off along a narrow trail that skirts the edge of the valley, hauling my rucksack and heavy sleeping bag, looking for the perfect spot to set down. In my pack are copies of the first Whole Earth Catalog and the Oxford Annotated Edition of the Bible. I walk beneath pine forests swaying in summer breezes, listening to the soft whisper that carries the sound of not so distant drumming, and the scent of community cooking fires. Finally I come upon an inviting patch of level earth beneath a sheltering tree. The ground is flat and covered with a carpet of pine needles, a little elevated from the path. I decide this is my place, and lay out my sleeping bag and pack. Carefully collecting small pine cones, I place them in a border around the space and outline a welcoming path to enter for anyone who might pass by. I’ve claimed the spot as my own magical circle in the wilderness. All are invited to share.

For hours I sit, listening to the constant sound of drums that come from clearings around the meadow, were people gather for food, conversation and rest. Through the treetops I can see distant snowfields just below the mountain peaks that loom above. Where I come from there aren’t any mountains, except in movies and fairytales. After absorbing the awesome landscape for a bit, I walk down a path that continues to the center of the meadow and the shore of the lake. A council, made up of whoever chooses to attend, gathers continually to tell stories of their journeys, to relate prophecies and mystical visions, and to discuss plans for the days and the ceremonies ahead.

We are dreamers who grew up in the shadow of violence, wishing for a better future. Many like me, had been to the Woodstock Festival or something like it. We’d witnessed the sheer power of our collective will, for better and worse. We hoped that here in the wild, away from the electricity and the crowds and the dependent delusions of civilization, we might encounter some revelation to guide us forward on a path toward some sort of universal peace.

On the last day we gathered in wide prayer circles on top of a high plateau that had been sacred to the displaced people who once lived here. I stood in a wide circle, surrounded by all of these mountains, and hundreds of people praying or chanting or being silent. We were all are waiting for a sign. In the middle of a moment of collective silence, the voice of a single person interrupts. The voice comes from a tall dark man with a shaved head and an incredibly open smile. He’s wearing saffron colored robes, his accent is rather thick, and his presence suggests simultaneously calm wisdom and innocence. For many, the voice is a rude interruption. For others it’s a guide.

For me, I came to realize in the years that followed, it was the sign.

Orlando

We arrive on a special flight from Denver to Orlando to attend the event, on a plot surrounded by Florida forest, a couple of miles from Disneyworld. We work in a community grocery store run by Divine Light Mission, an organization built to spread the words of our teacher and master. To keep the store running during the week long celebration, a skeleton crew is left behind during the first half of the event. We tend the shelves and counters and listen in the evening to the talks and music broadcast across a short wave connection in a downstairs office. For the final days we’re brought across the country to fully take part in the festivities.

The first morning after arrival I’m assigned the duty of porta-potty supervision and sanitation. By late afternoon I’m switched to service in the darshan tunnel, where I attach gardenia blossoms to the silky blue fabric of the walls. Through this fragrant space each one of the thousands of devotees will walk, to receive a moment of attention at the feet of the teacher. From toilets to tunnel is a journey of a few yards that feels like a journey between dimensions.

The Florida weather is clear and immaculate, an occasional bird or butterfly drifting overhead in light warm currents that carry the scent of ocean air. I sit in a grassy field next to a row of my traveling companions, at the front of an audience of several thousand people. On stage before us is a colorful throne surrounded by flowers and framed by cascades of cloth drapery. Just below the front of the platform a small band of amplified musicians sings and plays a mixture of devotional tunes, interweaving elements of American folk and rock with Indian themes. Everything harmonizes in this soundtrack for a large summer celebration.

The music weaves a rapturous spell over the crowd. A vacant field is transformed into a village, in a corner of heaven. From nothing we built a small community in a matter of days, with campsites, showers, latrines and international kitchens. A multicultured army of people that spoke every language on earth, shared a common will, to celebrate life and love together and have an opportunity to be with the one who brought us together.

In the afternoon we sit, entranced in a state of near ecstasy and expectation, until the teacher, dressed in a ceremonial costume evoking a Hindu deity, steps from behind the drapes and takes his seat upon the throne. As the band launches into an electric version of an ancient hymn, he beams down at his audience, like a rock star overseeing adoring fans. Suddenly, a young woman, dressed in a colorful sari, stands up from our row at front and center, and begins to dance. As she gracefully sways to the music, her arms in the air above her head, the colors she wears swirling around her, the teacher stands in resplendent grace, and begins himself to dance.

In that moment for me the time stops, the birds and butterflies for an instant are frozen in flight, and the sunlight and breezes pause in expectant silence. All of my attention is carried by the dance, and all of time and space stops as witness, and there is no separation between anything that exists in the world.

Idaho

The child held her hand as they cross the road in the middle of the valley. Where I stand, at the edge of a forest where the highway begins to climb on its way toward more distant heights, the wide alpine valley is in full view. In its center is a row of buildings along the strip, tiny in the distance. There are the resort cabins where we sleep, beside them a restaurant and convenience store, all perched above a meadow bordering a meandering creek. Across the asphalt what passes for a village includes a widely scattered collection of residences, a real estate office and a clinic. Behind the town and clinic is a small lake bordered by wide pastures, that eventually ascend to the edges of forests which sweep in graceful steps upward toward the distant Sawtooth Mountains, arrayed in sharp display against an endless sky.

The woman and child below are my wife and four year old son. They cross the road to climb a short path toward the clinic. Having come down with a mild but persistent cough that afternoon, and having a history of asthma, my wife decided to take him to the doctor for a cautionary checkup. Meanwhile, I take this short walk in the hour before dinner.

Before I come to the edge of the tall trees on the top of the ridge, while I watch my young family below, so exposed amid this enormous vista of primitive majesty, when my sense of time and space is suspended. Beneath these vast mountain skies, in the shadow of these mountains, I feel something within me expanding far beyond the usual boundaries of affection. For a moment my feelings embrace it all; people, mountains, valley, stream and village. More than at any previous moment in my life, everything I witness is enveloped within a boundless atmosphere of love.

Then I turn again toward the trail, and that feeling is lost to the winds.

Black

Living in the middle of a White Sea
I apologize to John Mike Thom Daryl Sonia Jamal Ken
Nicolle Tameka Jolene Diane Erika Barclay
Malcolm Shirley Joshua Sergia Nathaniel
so many more

To all those who succeeded
Who got to their goal
Because they were brilliant and creative
and got lucky
And those who didn’t
And those who died going under
While I didn’t do anything special
floating in a world of white dreams
white luck white privilege
without trying
Because I could
Because I am
Because I’m lucky
I am sorry so sorry
You were my friends
I allowed myself to be pulled away
and lost you
I forgot your names
but remember your faces
Now I live on a mostly white Island
Far away from you
Your streets your beautiful homes
Your inviting arms and spaces
I don’t know how to return

The night I drank too much ‘Orange Flip’
and threw up in your basement
on your mothers dress
You drove me back
To my house on the West Side
The white side
Where it was dangerous
for black boys to be seen
we were boys
so brave
You left me on the front lawn
Because it was after dark
Now I know that you were afraid

The women used to run their hands
through my hair
amazed at how light and fine it was
I would offer it now
toward reparations

Cities On The Sea

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For a child a backyard can be the wilderness, or the ocean or an island of mystery. For a young person on foot or on a bicycle the city is almost infinite. For a grownup with a car the city is an endless maze of turns and corners, backstreets and cul de sacs and the lifeless arteries of freeways and bypasses. For those whose life is made mostly of flyovers the city is a patch on the landscape, part of a network of patches connecting airports and terminals and waiting areas.

At each level details are missed or lost.

The child never tires of the cracks in paving stones or the creatures found among the grasses. The mysterious realm outside of safe boundaries is overcome by imagination without limits. A porch becomes a spaceship or the ramparts of a castle. Every angle and corner is explored repeatedly and new wonders are constantly revealed.

The world beyond fences and borders opens to foreign lands and neighborhoods and secret haunts beside creeks and rivers and under bridges. In every direction the familiar gives way to novel possibilities and pathways. There are people and places that reveal themselves like secrets and anyone who dares can find the hidden spaces populated by teenagers and wanderers and sometimes the homeless poor.

Cars take us far away into foreign places while detaching us from what we know or what we can really call home. We are caught up in the proscribed flow of traffic designed to conduct us past the details of place and time. We become tourists or commuters, always just passing through to arrive somewhere other than where we are. We begin to live in bubbles and we call this freedom.

Those who flyover begin to look elsewhere for a sense of being unconfined. Living in prisons of wealth or notoriety we dream of another existence outside or beyond the worlds we know. We dream of space colonies and going to Mars and look upon the earth as a place to transcend or to escape. We look at situations as confrontations or problems to be solved and tend to forget about both the earth and the oceans as places in which to thrive or to simply be.

Meanwhile the waters rise.

Jeff Bezos sees the salvation of the earth in building vast cities in an environment entirely hostile to all biological life. I understand both the impulse and the fascination. I’ve been addicted to dramas about outer space since I was a small boy. I consider myself somewhat of a ‘trekkie’ for whom science fiction is one of my favorite literary genres. Perhaps this is because of the metaphorical value it offers in representing our moral quandaries against the frontier background of an imaginary universe. Maybe it’s merely an offshoot of the magical thinking that filled my adolescent fantasies.

The myth of the frontier we are told, is a necessary creation of the human urge for freedom and novelty. Ironically, the realities of survival in outer space run absolutely counter to all but a momentary sense of real freedom. Whether we journey in a small capsule or a giant artificial metropolis we will find ourselves confined within a tin can in an airless void bombarded by deadly radiation. The rules of existence are many times more restrictive than anything we face on the surface of our own planet. Even if we find other worlds ‘out there’ that are compatible with some form of life the odds are extremely thin that it would be compatible with our own. Ironically, my favorite novel by my favorite writer of ‘hard’ science fiction, ‘Aurora’ by Kim Stanley Robinson, offers a sobering argument questioning the likely success of such an endeavor.

True, the endless mysteries of the universe are irresistible to our insatiable curiosity and I look eagerly forward to their continued exploration and unraveling. However, the idea that we can save or preserve our species’ existence by launching a significant bulk of our population into outer space appears to me increasingly absurd.

Even in terms of mysteries, not to mention frontiers, we live on a planet that’s more than 3/4 covered in water, and we know less about the depths of the oceans than we do about other planets in our solar system. Yet, water is not only the element that makes our carbon based life possible, it’s teeming with the material that makes it sustainable. Our rapidly rising crises of global warming, population density and urban decay are most profoundly influenced by conditions in the oceanic environment. The oceans, congruent with a thin layer of atmosphere, not only generate and regulate global climate conditions, but are the essential medium for the rise and spread of our civilization. It’s the impending rise of sea level that may be responsible for our eminent decline.

Given this rise, which we apparently have little collective will to do anything about, many of the world’s coastal urban areas and a not a few nations and principalities will be underwater by the end of the century. The rise in global temperature has already lead to long term drought, increasingly devastating weather and extreme weather events. The collapse of whole agricultural systems leads to the migration of populations and the civil unrest and wars that result. We are now forced to look toward shorter term and perhaps less visionary solutions than building inhabitable colonies in outer space.

Closer at hand, requiring less expenditure of energy and investment and more attainable with our present levels of technology are solutions that take advantage of the very environmental circumstances in which we are enmeshed. We can build cities on the seas.

While Bezos, Branson and Musk compete to leave the earth completely and Zuckerberg urges us to leave our bodies, current pioneers in the field of cohabitation with the seas are citizens of Africa, Japan, the Netherlands, and Kuwait. The Africans see the promise of the oceans, the Japanese are simply running out of room, the Dutch live in a nation below sea level and the Arabs have an excess of wealth to invest in massive engineering projects to extend their real estate to incorporate ocean, marsh and desert. These are just a few examples of the imagination going into claiming the ocean for future real estate. Similar and diverse projects like this are being proposed or built in many other places.

The problem is that many of these habitats are being built for the very rich as suburbs on the sea, with high end shopping malls, vacation villas and places where the winners in capitalism’s lottery can park their yachts. So far the largest man made presence in the ocean is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. What needs to be conceived, designed and built should house, clothe and feed many of those displaced by the widening deserts, increasing floods and the resulting migrations and wars over shrinking territory. It’s precisely the widening divide between rich and poor that’s the corrosive leading to society’s unrest and failure.

The oceans are both the source of our lives and the life of our civilizations, and is the one resource that can never be fully subjugated or tamed. Desperate and afraid of what we’ve done to our earth we turn our wealth toward the heavens and are apparently willing to risk everything to escape our collective fate. We spend centuries hunting the keys to the mystery of life and death only to find that the mystery will never surrender to our terms and every attempt to transcend it leads us closer to our inevitable demise. Many of us feel helpless, so we build walls against the rising tides.

To those who wish to escape, I wish them well. Perhaps when they’ve travelled far enough they’ll find and bring back elements that can help us to thrive. To survive they’ll have to carry with them fragments of our living earth, the water and plants and air. Perhaps they will someday return with other treasures. In the process of their cold journeys maybe they’ll uncover secrets that will help us all to live. Will they ever find another place that feels like home? Not likely.

So flee you brave and wealthy men. You’ll remember us and the blue earth, and when you are drawn to return by the ocean’s breath perhaps you’ll be able to teach us the value and necessity of preserving our home. When William Shatner, one of the early captains of our imaginations, returned from his brief journey (via Bezos’ Blue Origin) beyond imagination and into the edges of the real void his tear filled comment was, “This is life and that’s death.”

Decades ago in the late sixties the Italian architect Paolo Soleri proposed the construction of aquatic cities, both free floating and adjacent to continental coasts. His designs are essentially modular in both vertical and horizontal directions. Starting from a central core that incorporates basic living, manufacturing and food production facilities, these cities would grow outward organically in concentric rings around a common core, to incorporate expanding populations and ever evolving priorities.

From his book on urban theory and design,

‘Arcology: The City In The Image Of Man’

”Life came out of the sea when the time was ripe for a next step toward complexity. Then the ecological flood came to cleanse the earth and let the “elected” few re-engage in the homogenesis of the earth. The biological flood invested in the human species is now edging man toward the same seas that eons ago saw the exodus of some of his creatures.”

”Ecologically the seas behave as a many layered medium. One could almost say that the earth has one layer of ecologies and the seas have a whole thickness of ecologies wrapped one around the other. It could also be observed that it is the element itself, water, that makes the biological “thickness” of the seas possible and that it is also the cause of their great homogeneity, stability, balance and diffusion. These elements of relative homogeneity, stability, balance and diffusion are the characteristics that, combined with fluidity, make sea arcology relevant.”

Once I lived on a beach along the west coast of Florida. There was a house, like a shack that had survived hurricanes and floods and now stood alone amid the retirement cabanas and motels. I would sit out on the porch in the shade under a billowing parachute awning and look out at the Gulf that every day showed a different color and mood, sometimes restless, sometimes calm, the warm ocean currents bringing close to shore the food for seagulls and pelicans. Sometimes I would wade out among the waves and look out over a seemingly endless expanse of water and sky, feeling humbled before the face of the deep.

Now I walk beneath the desert sun and think about the ocean. It’s as if it calls me back across these millions of years and many thousand generations. The desert plants echo the shapes of coral and anemone, and I reflect upon the life we lived before learning to scratch out our lives across the land. Now the land needs to heal and we need to relearn the lessons of the sea, of change, and of a life that’s forever born out of water.

R.E.M.