Comparative Nowness

In the late 1800s photography was incredibly novel and factual. As the new category of art and journalism took form, every picture printed and published was believed. It became the record of verity, and a ledger fo detail the levels of which were undisputed. To the masses, if it was photographed, then it was so. 

Fast forward 220 years, and comparatively if somebody in 2020 saw a photograph, the likelihood of a hint of skepticism regarding the factual reliability of the image and the integrity of the photograph is increasingly possible. To this degree, the believability of our world is becoming increasingly less reliable. Most people nowadays, those who are text savvy enough to witness and partake in online meme culture and new media information outlets, are certainly aware that what is being presented on the World Wide Web could in fact be fake, and that a personal discernment need be exercised to vet content properly. Perhaps traditional news print and anecdotal information of the 1800’s was viewed with the same skepticism. Then along came photographs; then along came the climate crisis.

Now, let us compare the photographs of the 1800’s to the existence of animals and species in the 2000’s. Each preoccupation exists in that century as fact: valid is the image of Yosemite National Park to newspaper readers as the reports about endangered blue whales are to modern travelers. (Thank you Ken Burn and David Attenborough, respectively.) To the people of the time, an encounter with a story of a whale or a picture of a pristine valley was a memory of the present moment. In other words, those readers and the sea tourists both lived their lives according to the best practices they knew, and they lived in the moment. I wonder, who in the 1870’s and who in 2019 thought about their natural experiences as being the last of their kind? Is self reflexivity a condition of increasing modernity? Is questioning the present moment a human trait?

When something old is presented to us, we believe it to be real. Will someone in 2240 believe that whales existed because of a photograph, and not because of a story in which someone encountered the dying, giant swimmers? Could I be the last generation that believes that nature exists the way that it does? 

I may be a part of the last generation to experience whales and nature as things that exist in real life, and not in photographs. I am in the year 2020 and I am 29 years old. As it stands, there is a literal mass extinction happening on a scale that is almost inconceivable, all around me, and for better or worse mostly out of sight. For what I can see and actually appreciate, the species in front of my eyes in the world that I am experiencing through my own life, that is like the photograph of the 1800’s. The same truth - as a felt sense of reality which came from a now faded picture of California - might be the same fading truth of the existence of species like blue whales, squirrels, yellow bellied warblers, beetles or any living thing in contemporary time. 

It feels inconceivable for someone in the year 1870 to question the validity of a photograph. It also feels, to say the least, odd to consider someone in 2021 questioning the validity that birds still fly in the sky. Both these concepts are accepted truths, until adjusted to the contrary. The progression might come from the passage of time, the social media sphere focusing attention on a future crisis, or the ambivalence for the natural world in general. Is that the trend, then, for novelty in nature to diminish once it is exposed? Once something is reproduced ad nauseam, a healthy skepticism perhaps deters us from believing the present moment, and then in turn just the facsimile. We then shift our faith to the old, or the new, telling us how it was/what it will be. 

Pondering the privilege that I could chose to travel great distances to witness species that still exist on earth, tomorrow, just so I can say that I saw them may sound like unacknowledged entitlement. Yet I know traveling is harmful to the environment on some level, and I for now chose a photograph of yesteryear or a story of yesterday instead. This in the hopes of enriching an attitude of gratitude for the comfort that I have and live. I place my trust in the pictures, in the stories and in the present moment. As far as I know, the natural world exists. Solipsism aside, I can see retroactively how engaging nature - like the increased tourism of Yosemite and the mismanaged arboreal surroundings because of non-native caretakers running the show (see the tree burning practices of the indigenous Californian tribes) - can deteriorate it beyond recognition. Perhaps it is time to live in the pictures, the tall tales of tall trees, and let those thing exist without misguided human interference.  

The Human Wallet

Capital moves throughout the world. Money exchanges hands, pockets, and accounts. On any given day, I feel like one of my main roles and programmed purposes in life is to move money from one place to another. Either I move funds from my checking to savings account, I swipe my card to purchase a coffee, or I cancel subscriptions to online supplement deliveries. I am astonished, when I take a step back, at how many interactions are about monies. HOA group meetings are mainly concerned with budget. When these Boards approve services that are finally utilized, seeing tree trimmers or trash collectors on their job is because money was moved from one account to another. Those workers, then, are given funds which they then deposit into accounts, which in time gets transferred to another account and…ad nauseam. The process just keeps repeating, on any scale, cash or card. And at the end of the day I feel like a human wallet.  

I feel like a symbolic wallet when it comes to money - of course because that is traditionally what wallets are used to keep accessible. But I also feel like a wallet when it comes to food: my body as the vessel/purse, food stuffs come in, hangs around other food, and then is deposited outside my body later. The kinds of foods directly effects the kinds of depositing of energy that happens later. If I deposit processed chemicals, modified starches, and sugars into my body “wallet”, the return on my investment becomes an unhealthy exchange of that energy towards others. The disease, discomfort, lack of health and vitality are the symbolic transfers which I am in charge of moving from one person/account to another. 

It would be worth linking to see the connection between the food we eat and the movement of capital. If we are creating culture by forming society based on our how we spend money as our choices, then we are responsible for the Big Agrarian industries. Our purchasing power is a vote, it’s a voice, it’s the social currency we obtain, horde, and invest. Given the current health crisis related to Covid 19, it is paramount to examine the state of the bodies which are being affected. Chronic disease, stagnating life expectancy, immunity deterioration, inflammation, hypertension, diabetes and obesity are just a few afflictions wreaking havoc on the American and Global public. What the heck are all those illnesses doing in our life? Did we bring them upon ourselves? 

We move money indirectly into our bodies. We are buying our health complications and our health liberations. If we use whole, plant-based foods as money in our human “wallet”, perhaps the exchange of energy towards others won’t be riddled with fear, anxiety, depression, and violence. We are not healthy, as over 40% of Americans are obese. That is NOT health. Our community, is NOT healthy. As Charles Eisenstein states in his essay The Coronation: “Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.” We are more sick now, and currently a virus is burning holes in our pockets. Our wallets are depleted, from money and from health. Counter to the standard American diet, the wellbeing of spending money on organic fruits and vegetables is long lasting. The health investment is a high-yield portfolio that cannot be taken by a virus. If we, however, spent our money on low quality, processed and highly refined foods, not only does the virus rob us of our physical wellbeing, but our low-yield portfolio of “health” disappears right along with it. 

Now let us connect the way we invest our money to the health of the planet. Divestment is the opposite of investment - it simply means getting rid of stocks, bonds, or investment funds that are unethical or morally ambiguous. Many people know that oil companies are funding extractive industries. They can be classified as morally ambiguous and/or unethical. The continued operation of these industries, by our demand, keeps the air polluted, the waters toxic, and our bodies at risk. Many people don’t know how to take on this massive monster that is Big Oil using Big Money to destroy the Small Planet. But we the small people of this small world have one big advantage: our money. 

Our bank accounts, our portfolios, universities, retirement funds and religious institutions are all active participants in the investment and money market. These companies hold assets, and those assets are invested in stocks and bonds. Some of these institutions might not even know where their money is invested. But just like you manage your money and decide to buy a steak or a vegan meal, these big institutions hire investment managers to put their monies into Big Oil or Alternative Energy. If we, the people who own this money, pressure the institutions to divest from fossil fuels, then those institutions tell their investment managers and then divestment helps break the hold that fossil fuels have on our economies, governments and livelihood. 

So ask yourself, are you in charge of your ‘human wallet?’ When you buy groceries, are the majority of products seemingly predetermined to contain subsidized, harmful ingredients? Is there a cultural bias towards certain foods, or are we subject to institutionalized doctrines, programmed through media outlets that benefit from selling certain goods? Regardless of the size of the store, most aisles have similar products, in plastic bags, with additives, marketed with bold colors and fonts. Who is your investment manager? Well, it’s you actually. You run your own “body bank,” the safe for deposited value in the form of food, water, medicine, thought and energy. Are you free to rebalance the value of your assets and investments, and perhaps reinvest in whole-plant based foods, alkaline water, non-toxic/narcotic medicine, affirming thoughts and confident energy? Or, maybe you and I are caught in the cultural tropes of meaning and goal setting that have guided us to making specific choices based on “free will.” If that seems like a stretch, consider that your mental state is a direct result of the invested ingest-ables you purchase with your money. You are a repository for products, and the more pure, diversified, and environmentally just your shares of ‘wealth’ become, maybe reinvestment of your worth becomes more attainable. 

Perhaps we are not just pushes for dollar bills, runaway capitalism and pills. Maybe we are inherent and inalienable capacitors of human life, and the freedom to question, chose and progress is possible. It then might be possible during this Covid-19 pandemic, where the world has a pause, moments of silence, where we can reflect on the abstract and the concrete.  

Connections, Constellations. Chemicals.

HOW IS IT ALL BUILT. What is the shape of love as it moves through all existence? Does that mean carbon, helium, zine, gold, creatine, DHA, serotonin, all these have love in them? Does love come from within us? Where would it originate? We are the ones who feel love, our perspective on any situation can be either love or any myriad of emotion. So because it seems in our capacity to love, the function and origin of love is in us, our cells. Gold in you loves; zine has love; silver contains love. Every tissue and cell made up from their trillions of parts have love in them. So then do strings and quarks also have love? They must - if gold is made of atoms and we are made of those atoms, and we feel love, then quarks feel love also. 

Or, love comes from another source, and that love is endowed unto us. If so, we then connect to it as we fall in or give love, and because love comes and goes and it just happens, then that love must be everywhere, at all times. So either humans chose love, or it is given to them. Iin both cases, this act pursuable through switching perspectives gives zinc, gold, DHA the perception of participation, so those molecules and particles also love, only because of something else making them. They are in service of a connection of action, and their function is now cogged in the machine. They have to if we chose to participate, as they are the one participating with us.

Choice or Doing: either the capacity to love is writ by humans on the idea that love originates and emanates from our natural, Earthen selves, or we are presented with an A/B decision to love, making the author of said multiple choice a force outside ourselves. And what to be extrapolated from this inquiry if not that the very idea/feeling/truth of love is perceived; from our sensorial subjection, the species has attempts on record the world over in pursuit of describing the lived phenomena of love. History and herstory can be attributed to many a story about love. Greatness in loss, and achievement, can arguably be traced to the ideal of love permeating all goals and desires. So the rising inquiry becomes contextualized to cultural evolution. Love is perceived by humans and somewhat utilized to forward progress the species. Is it really something more than a human-centric motivational perspective? Does it come from a Divine source or have humans been conflating and grandstanding in the harnessing of this feeling turned concept - to then elevate personal or tribal success? Is the divine motivation to make humans dance the game of devotion, as the chess match of Time is played out by the granting instigator, who benefits only by our birth and death - because the more of us exist, the more chances for love. If it does come from within, at the subatomic level, then what goal other than reproduction would quarks and strings be aiming for? The detailed and intricate highway system of perception as hierarchical from cells up to eyeballs structures a gating system for a seeming reason: either quarks recognize energy and likeness of other quarks, or the functionality of quark love sublimates the need for the complexity of human design to filter all things into distilled feelings. And then these feelings are expressed in chemical terms, as more definable signaling of a perception becomes smaller and smaller interactions. I wonder why are chemicals the way they are - how come dopamine function like X and not Y? Is that a Divine maneuver, and X takes Y as the least resistive assignment? Or, are these parameters and designs of chemicals a larger version of quark love? Are we all the sizable, adaptive, carbon beings of quarks learning to love, and we masquerade on inquisitive rumination so feeble yet all encompassing?  

The Earth Can Take A Breath: A Silver Lining to the Covid-19 Pandemic

3.16.2020

For more technical information on the Covid-19 Virus, please research updates from trusted medical institutions like the World Health Organization and Federal/Civic agencies for real time news. What follows below, instead, is a new, non-scientific perspective:

This is truly a people over profit time in history. For many, this is a stressful time: those with kids and elderly in their care have many variables and worries to consider. Many consolations will take place in people’s careers and pass-times. The whole world has been forced to reconsider how to pass the time; no longer are sport events, amusement parks and travel a reliable outlet to pass the time in this fragile reality. The common areas of modernity have been placed on lockdown. For what seems like the first time in modern history, there is less to do available to the masses. Those in power are reprioritizing their measurements of success by having to adapt to the current market. When our health is at risk, it is fascinating to think that money can be re-evaluated to hold different energetic worth, that large institutions can adjust the value of commodities with the flick of a pen, and that when our lifespan on Earth is threatened, the priority doesn’t need to be the stock market or the national basketball association, but the wellbeing of the citizenry.  

Now that humans are being quarantined, what do we do with this time? Do we take many, many poops to justify the toilet paper we bought? Sure, but we can also eat less and make those dead tree sheets last a little longer. We don’t have to use so much. We now have time to reflect on our health, mentally and physically. We can practice both effective hand washing and brain washing. Face it, we are programmed to live in this world. Society is a maze and our free will is sold to us as the comfort within the laws upheld by taxation. Have you ever stopped while walking in a store and asked “so this is life?” Well, now this is life. Now we get to face our mortality with a feedback loop of bravery and spiritedness. Now, new thoughts can permeate. Less is sometimes more, and we can take mental stock of the amount of ‘less’ happening in every facet of life. Perhaps during this Viral Environment, the next great book will be written and those words will inspire and save millions through its message of love and care. Perhaps relationships that are toxic will be forced to deal with each other and those liberated souls will then interact in empathy to the world once the Coronavirus vaccination is discovered. Perhaps the elder generations will finally see that the youth have been yelling about: that the systems which run the world are prioritizing the wrong expenditures of our finite resources, and that a revolution of mind, culture and planet is needed to ensure the health of our species.

What we are experiencing can be described in my term, “illness realization”: the understanding that we are all on this planet together, what affects one person affects another, and that lifestyle changes towards prevention will slow the spread of the unknown. We have to also face the fact that this “illness realization” is akin to the climate crisis. Put another way, the reaction to the Coronavirus is the reaction to the Climate Crisis that we all need to take. The same response that government and state agencies have taken is EXACTLY what protesters have been calling for: to realize that we are in a climate crisis (the virus will spread), that we are all affected by this (the virus knows no borders), that it will happen to everyone (we are all human), and that mobilizing to massively uproot business as usual and change our habits ensures preventative measures are implemented (reduce our emissions on a global scale and prevent global temperature increase). 

Let’s take time to ask ourselves: where can I improve my behaviors to ensure the health and wellbeing of the planet? What policies are not serving my physical and mental prosperity? If there are groups of people telling me the system is broken, what are they actually talking about? We can increase our curiosity to engage and interact with all groups who have a platform, and we can reconsider our societal tranquility in the hopes of preventing more DIS-ease between us. So take a breath. Meditate for yourself and for the world. Be easy but inquisitive about your health and how you can live a prosperous life. Certainly we aren’t living that now, half the world seems shut down. That must mean something is wrong. What might be off about the state of the world, and your internal state? What new behaviors - like washing your hands more - can become part of your daily life to ensure that no more illness, negative energy, or hate is spread through the touching of one soul to another?

Many will not be fortunate to work remotely, but certainly by working from home we are driving and polluting less and this saves on gas consumption. Our monies are now being spent in different ways and this provides fresh insights into what we truly value as a species when push comes to shove. (Hopefully there is no shoving.) It is easy to imagine that there is a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions globally. Businesses are reducing usual practices: large events have been cancelled, and markets and trade have begun to decline. Practically, the normality of beers being sold at bars, food being sold at Disneyland, and services of all kinds being sold to customers is now a surreal memory. Priorities are shifting. Understandings are happening in all sectors of life. It’s ironic how the normal arguments against medicare for all and debt forgiveness, for example, seem ludicrous once humanity is faced with an overwhelming viral crisis. Our human race is facing en-mass the need for doctors, providers, and medical facilities, and only when those who can’t pay their way out of risk realize they too are fallible to illness does the need for universal healthcare become a reasonable policy choice/shift. In other words, those in charge of Big Pharma and Big Medicine are just as fragile to illness as anyone else alive. The difference, now with Coronavirus, is that those same people can’t rest assured they can pay their way out of harm; the spread of this virus as an inevitable wave of probability coming their way reminds them they are human too, and their health is actually their wealth. 

This is a strange, unknown time in our collective story. We can’t pay our way out of a crisis. Humans are relying on federal institutions staffed with both competent experts and idiotic representatives attempting to fix global issues. And yet through the systemic edifice, people are really what matter. The time we spend with love ones, in good health, is an antidote to despair. The system feels too big to tackle, like a swollen network with complications beyond cognitive grasp, but the fact remains: the system is run by people and they are human, we are human, and we all need each other. We have built this society, these pathways of thought, and these modalities of conversation and culture. Yet they are falling short of the deeper, existential questions and topic we need to be discussing. At least now, once we are secure in health and find the time to do it, we can breath and know the Earth is taking a breath with us. How can we reset…?

So drink alkaline water, get more rest, keep your surroundings clean, eat whole plant foods, and take care of each other by understating we are all the same.