Small Arcs of Larger Circles Read online

  On a personal level, you and I together are much, much more than one plus one. We are as many as we are able to be, and less and more. A single conversation between a married couple is evidence of enough of the shortcomings of logic. Who speaks truth?

  Mental mono-cropping is imprisonment. Emancipate the ideas and they will burst into co-evolutionary bloom in a nearly unreadable knot of spiraling influences. They will be untidy in another way. They will leak into each other.

  Biology is history is communication. Anthropology is architecture is agriculture is what some old women have known all their lives.

  But, if expertise is specialized, then strangled, profiled ideas become the currency, and I am broke and we are broken.

  (inter)Facing an Ecology of Mind…

  Ecology: …the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.

  —The Merriam-Webster Dictionary

  If you want to understand mental process, look at biological evolution and conversely if you want to understand biological evolution, go look at mental process.

  —Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

  The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.

  —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

  I like our garden best of all, it is bushy and happy and free… kind of in the style of 1970s’ pubic hair.

  —My daughter, upon our return home, after a walk

  through our neighborhood of very manicured gardens.

  The idea that ideas are fixed or permanent is just an idea, and it’s one that can change. Being stuck is a bad idea made of other bad ideas. ‘Ecology’ is often relegated to meaning simply ‘nature’ and our use of the word ‘nature’ is haunted by the implication of a human world that is separated from the environment that we need if we are to survive. This is very strange. I am not sure how this happened. It would seem to me that ecology should have bubbled up inside all the other existing realms of study and provided a sort of grey matter between them. On a good day we understand ecology as a living pattern of relationships, a co-evolving set of relational dynamics between parts of a system. We are used to seeing ecologies within elements of a landscape, or pond, or even our own body’s balancing of the functions of different organs. My father took this pattern up a level. He took it into the realm of ideas. I like to think of Steps to an Ecology of Mind as a garden of thoughts growing, changing, dying, and even composting in relation to one another. It is a dirt-under-your-nails transference of biological patterns onto conceptual and epistemological habits. ‘An Ecology of Mind,’ as a term, is a thinking tool that allows ideas to be flexible and alive in relation to one another and the outside world.

  Take, for example, the body. My life is more than the sum of my digestive cycles and heartbeats. The natural world does not end with the physical or visible parts of a system. What I ate for breakfast may have been, in part, nutritionally oriented, but it was also determined by the seasons and those with whom I ate it. While digestion is surely chemical and mechanical, it is also subject to emotional conditions. Those, in turn, are part of a large field of cultivated and volunteer ideas including those that inform personal history, our cultural models of success, emotional scar tissue, and so on. The determination of something as simple as the quality of breakfast cereal is a complex idea that carries along in its wake a long string of influences ranging from developments in agriculture to physical labor and politics, to social demographics and eventually to the place we call taste… but it is just an idea made of other ideas, in a living world of ideas all pushing and pulling each other. They don’t sit still.

  The term ‘An Ecology of Mind’ challenges me to ask myself: which thoughts are flourishing, which are composting, which are just budding, which are ready for harvesting? Also, I might ask myself, is this idea a seedling for a future learning, or a weed? What are the stimuli that came together to produce this idea?

  Seeing that the infrastructure of my ideas resembles a garden has its benefits: I may be able to get free from the concreteness in which I seclude myself. Even to be a bystander and watch the ecology of my thoughts evolve is a step toward a larger understanding of my motivations. Familiarity with the context of my own conceptual agriculture may not solve any problems, but it does give me a little leverage with which to make choices.

  Ideas change; in fact, they never stop changing. Thought patterns I assume to be permanent and pervasive—like what is a circle, identity, god, money, language, dreams—are not perceived the same way from culture to culture, or even from generation to generation. Within the semantics and vocabularies of the world’s languages entirely different emotions exist. Ideas are living things. I am suspicious about separating the intellect and the emotions. I am more comfortable with them being entangled. Not that I am condoning overthinking or intellectualizing our emotional responses, but the way we feel emotionally tells us a great deal about the way we think. I believe that it is wrong to exploit people and nature, so I am angered and saddened when I perceive exploitation. The idea and emotion are indivisible. The reverie of beauty I might perceive in a forest is an integration of several impressions, which form a vision I am moved by. But to see it in this way is not to be cold and intellect-oriented; most ideas live in the body’s reading of its environment. I know, I feel, I believe, and so I frame my knowing, feeling, and believing into a sigh, or language, or artistic expression.

  Conceptual concrete is optional. There are gobs of ideas out there to get stuck on and build castles upon. They are harder to change once they become foundations for other ideas. A lightness in the way we hold thoughts gives us room to learn, to shift perspective, and to keep a rigorous humility of confusion. It is not the norm to celebrate the changing of position on an idea. There are depths at which ideas of how the world is put together are so integrated into life that they have become invisible. Those are the ones to watch out for. They sustain other ideas, and ideas about ideas. They seem unchangeable. But, pull a single thread loose and the whole tapestry can be reorganized.

  To begin to think differently at this level leads to rethinking everything. It is a shift in perspective, in the way I feel, in the way I define, in the way I see the world, and what I do in it. Inevitably this kind of change leads to the arrival of a new version of myself as part of an integrated context that includes moving interrelationships with the people I love and those I don’t even know, as well as the realm of communication and the natural environment of which I am a part.

  Just keep going; don’t stop. Keep pulling the thread and mental process and biological structure will come to mirror one another. A moment ago I said that ideas are living things, now I’m going on to say that living things are ideas.

  If I can begin to see an ecology of my ideas, thoughts, and cognition, then I can begin to see mind in ecology. This is a big shift. The interaction of each organism in its inward and outward relation to its ecology is boggling to hold in sight. The interrelationships of the biological world are functioning with an intimacy similar to that of my own thoughts—can I not see the leaves of a plant that turn themselves toward the sun, or the seduction of the colors and perfumes of a flower that lures the bees?

  The world around us is far from inert. ‘Mind’ as we are speaking of it here, in Gregory’s usage of the term, is a way of noticing the intelligence of the world under our feet. Our co-evolution with the flora and fauna is so often seen from just one perspective, but, as Michael Pollan discusses in The Botany of Desire, the plant world is not so innocent that it did not notice the dominance of the species that humanity favors. Some plants, in making themselves attractive to us have secured their evolutionary position. Biological adornment is as shameless as the adornment of the fashion world. Bees and butterflies, insects, birds, and people have color attractions that appear in plants. Did we grow to love the colors because of the plants, or did the plants increase their color because it helped their survival? Co-evolution i
s always biological communication.

  Like the plants, and our interactions with them, forest animals are custodians of the species that serve them. We can extend to all of biology the presence of mind, and the rightful claim to an evolutionary narrative. The multiple perspectives of an ecology are the web of interaction we call biodiversity. The giant conversation that is nature will be made sense of differently by all of those present, including the protozoa. 7 billion humans, 8 billion other species, they all have another version of the relationship. Each has a perspective, each has a changing narrative, each in relation—umwelt.

  An ecology of mind, and a mind of ecology—it cuts both ways. Their story, that of the other species, is my story. But ours is their story… finally a larger OUR story. Ideas are co-evolving within our epistemology and our environment, and the biological structures of our world respond in a communication pattern I am just barely able to recognize consciously. Listen carefully to the change in the patterns of the wind, to the smile of a dog, to the song of the whale, and to the microscopic organisms that hold the ocean’s species in harmony. What I am calling ‘mind’ within the body is easily visible in the intelligent compensatory behaviors of temperature regulation and metabolic equilibrium. But an extension of that compensatory communication to the question ‘do trees think?’ reveals a sticking point in our thought garden that we would do well to weed out.

  The eye altering alters all

  —William Blake, ‘The Mental Traveller’

  I am an ecology within ecologies. Who are you? And what thoughts are we fertilizing together? How is thinking being reflected back through relationships with others, including the other species? We might have an ecology of culture, ecology of linguistics, ecology of economics, and so on. The notion that nature (not us) has the burden of ecology to contend with, while we ‘thinking’ humans insist that we’re the only species capable of making meaning—this is an argument about cognition that will point most people to the brain. The mind and the brain are not the same thing. One is in the head, and the other is spread everywhere.

  Identity with an I

  Who am I? Grammar incorrectly suggests that I am singular. A verb conjugation for plural first person is missing—not for we, but for I.

  That singularity is a semantic, ideological, epistemological, cultural, biological, ecological, evolutionary, epigenetic, gender specific, nationalistic error.

  That singularity is a great violence, and silence to all that I am in plurals. The pronouns are misleading. ‘I’ carries the suggestion that I am somehow individual, independent, when interdependence is the law.

  ‘We’ seems to be a more inclusive choice, but it erases the multiplicity of perspectives. Which ‘we’? ‘We’ as in western civilization, (whatever that is), or humanity, or the entirety of life? What does ‘we’ mean? As a white girl I better be damned careful with ‘We’—assuming the right to speak to experiences I do not, cannot know. ‘We’ is less independent, but not conducive to multiple mutual learning.

  ‘You’ separates us, points a finger, sets us up for confusion.

  ‘They’ is an illusion. ‘Us’ is somehow not ‘them.’

  When I lived in Thailand I learned to use pronouns to reveal relationship, but it was so complicated I finally just began to use my name. “Nora is hungry, Nora is your friend.” Third person, first person, second person, all at once.

  Perhaps using all the pronouns will generate a healthy confusion. I am we are you includes they. My childhood English teachers are rolling their eyes.

  Let them. The world is burning. We are not seeing the integrity of life. Grammar needs to evolve.

  What there are no words for is often un-seeable. Can you see the plurals that I am? I presume you have some of the same plurals. That presumption makes you hard to define.

  Here are mine: Me, I, Nora. You, am, are…

  Over 10 trillion organisms make their community in and on my body. I cannot live without them.

  They are in my eyelashes and brows, they are on my skin, they are in my mouth, in my organs.

  My gut is home to billions of living things without whom I could not digest my food. I would not have energy for my metabolism; I would be suffering great enzymatic and other imbalances. I would die.

  Nine out of ten cells in my body are inhuman and belong to the larger ecology.

  All of those creatures live in and on me.

  My health is their health; their health is my health.

  When they are hungry I am hungry, when I eat too much sugar they overproduce in particular populations.

  My mood, my urges, my instincts are enfolded with them.

  I am not only what is in my body, I am also my personality, my culture, my emotions, my spirit.

  Finding where exactly the outside world ends and I begin—is not so easy.

  My culture influences so much:

  My ideas, my language, my eating habits, my music, my clothing, my education.

  And somehow, under closer scrutiny none of those things has a clear root either.

  Languages are compiled across time and movements of people,

  As are recipes,

  And religious traditions.

  Even plants and animals move around the globe.

  A child of the North American 20th century I can identify with rock & roll.

  But music too is a combination of so many histories,

  Instrument-making that includes the Middle East, Asia, Africa, England, the US,

  And the special voices of talent that have touched it on the way.

  Look closely and there is no exact root, no ‘there’ to be found at the core of rock, or classical music, or the music of any other culture.

  Surely then, I must be what I know.

  Knowledge is how I can define and separate myself.

  I am who I am because of what I know.

  However the clarity of what knowledge is is questionable,

  My experiences are all framed and digested through the particular lens that my culture, my family, my fears, my breakfast have all helped to edit.

  My education is the strange collection of tools that have been selected as important.

  But education now is not what it was 100 years ago, not what it will be 100 years from now.

  What is it important to teach the young coming into a society?

  Well, that depends on the society, doesn’t it?

  So the education that has been chosen is fitted into what has been decreed as valuable information for our way of life.

  Yet, we seek to live differently than those who have come before.

  ‘Who am I?’ is a question that contains a treacherous mistake: it presumes I am independent.

  It is a lonely, lost question.

  That ‘I’ can be Isolated, Insulated, Ignored. That ‘I’ can be Insignificant.

  I can imagine that I am just the person in my head and the skin bag I live in, pretending that I am not:

  my mother and my father,

  my children and my friends,

  the food I have eaten and the thoughts I have thought,

  the heat of the sun and the mold in the earth,

  the streaming water.

  I am the embers in the fire,

  A microbiome of 10 trillion creatures,

  the land, ideas, and names of my nation,

  the current embodiment of 200,000 years of homo sapiens movement around the globe,

  a traveler, a filmmaker, a mother, a researcher, a friend, an artist, a cook, a photographer, a poet,

  70% water,

  the rest is mostly muscle and tissue, bones and squishy stuff.

  Still, the me in the skin-bag is me. I love, I think, I learn, I communicate, I reproduce, I give.

  I am an integrating process of variables interacting.

  Integrating in integrity.

  Integrity with an I.

  Integrity is loyalty to the ambiguity of my own edges, and permission for you to be blurry too. I do n
ot need precision to know myself, or you. I need room for all of our selves to hold counsel.

  I ‘am’ complex.

  I am a dream.

  I am an ecology of selves.

  We, the internal aquarium of trillions of creatures, my language, my culture, my love, my ideas, my family, my nation, and my breakfast—ARE. And we ARE not separable from the particular version of a person that is me.

  We were fed an illusion that we could choose a singular identity.

  We cannot continue this illusion.

  Choose a new perception of identity, or justify the singular nationalism, the walls, the edges of reduction around definitions of gender, race, profession, religion, and live in a battlefield between false nations, false identities, false separations.

  Before all else we are of the ecosystems.

  ‘I’ will be different tomorrow. So will you, all of you, us, they.

  We are Wine

  Steeped in history, building a shadowy bouquet,

  Unable to reassemble ourselves as grapes,

  We are wound into a richness we cannot undo.

  Beautiful still, and with a destiny that is vaguely related to vines—

  We still know water and wind.

  We know the stories of the keepers of the casks,

  We know versions of civilizations that sing.

  There is goodness.

  A look to a future of solutions is a potion table of bubbling mysteries,

  Soaked in folded learnings, lost threads, unseen outcomes.

  We are not

  And yet

  We are grapes always.

  Policy for Governance in the Future

  This is a letter I wrote to my friend and colleague Anders Wijkman. He was given the job of chairing a Task Force on developing a climate strategy for 2050 by the Swedish Government. In our conversations he was fraught with questions about how one could even imagine what technologies, issues, and crises a society would face 35 years from now. His plight was poignant.