It is too bad that most often I do not choose to, or do not get a chance to put down my thoughts when I am noticing the good about me. I don't know if it will work, but I'm going to try to do a little of that now.
It's very tempting to fall back onto the same things that have awed and inspired me before, and there's a good chance that I'll do it again, but I want to try and capture it in a new way and explain it in a way that I haven't thought before.
So this time I won't be starting with how complex the world is. Nor how science lets me see more than seeing. Not with the light of the clouds, the quirk of a video game, the feel of the breeze, nor the elements of taste in a cup of tea. (Though I heated up a cup for the sake of this little endeavor)
What's unexpected then? what can I surprise myself with? What have I not tried before?
This is exactly what I am asking myself. I have all the confidence in the world that I can start anywhere. I'd start with the most extreme examples (of mediocrity, of negativity) if I didn't think it cliche. No, I'd rather settle on something more unusual, less grandiose, and perhaps a bit bizarre. (err, I mean intriguing)
Ecology.
You'd think it would be one of the things that I'd always start with, for things that amaze and inspire me, but I seem to rarely give it as much serious thought as I really really ought. The enormous contradiction is that I want it to be my life's work, and yet I haven't put nearly enough thought into phrasing coherently what exactly makes it endlessly fascinating. What spark of impossible reality blooms in the field.
That itself is part of why I believe ecology is my calling. While many other subjects -- indeed, I'd theorize all subjects -- delight and engage me. I can't recall a time when ecology had to be explained or unlocked for me. The real energy of physics had to be translated and brought to life. Oh, it was! Vividly and marvelously, but it wasn't always that way. The sheer size and majesty of space I recall visualizing for the first time in front of an exhibit inside, I think, the San Francisco Tech Museum. The delight of words and multiple meanings is something I am coming to enjoy deeply, but I still find it finite and variable, it doesn't have the solid, impenetrable wonder that other subject do (, yet!). Philosophy is impressive and pure enough, and it is something I have great expectancy for how universal and beneficent it will prove to me to be, but I do not have any certain answers within it, and perhaps I never will. I feel it is still too new prospect for me. Countless other subjects I have a huge appreciation for (geology, mathematics, videogames (read: interactive media) history, programming, art) and yet each I cannot help but notice how I gained that appreciation. What I changed from, to, and what entirely new areas it opened for me. I can speak of how I was aware of so little before, or cared so little for before I knew them better, and how much that has changed! But first I should look to the original thing I set out to do. (Maybe a few hours from now I can start on that, and I would very much like to write of that, it's too true.)
Ecology. Ecology just, completely, automatically is so very very interesting. I cannot say why life is specifically so much more fascinating to me than the abstracts of how things happen in physics, or the building blocks of chemistry, or the elusive truth of words. Perhaps it is because of the same reason I am fascinated with motion. It is so mysterious in how I cannot pin down exactly everything that is causing the things I observe, and yet.....! And yet I know that everything is there, all the information is there in front of me. And with such absolute certainty and clarity. And with such beauty. Beauty in how it all comes together. Beauty in how it can all be taken apart. And beauty in every step in between. The higher levels of the idea, the execution, the act of taking it apart itself. Everything, everything is beautiful and everything merges and winds together. Inseparable and yet we /can/ artificially separate it. And I can’t tell if doing so makes it more or less beautiful. Probably both at once.
Ecology is like that... like that simple example of motion, only infinite beyond understanding.
Instead of concrete abstract laws of physics there are (just as absolute) laws of nature that are ever modifying themselves. Instead of one action, there are a thousand, all in unison and all in complete /perfect/ opposition. Everything is a horrendous accident and yet, so completely at the same time a marvelous plan that cannot fail. Life acts miracles, but only because we don’t understand it. It can surpass insurmountable odds, but only because we are so limited in our own imaginings. Life acts so definitely and so lifelike, and then turns around and acts so very un-lifelike. Fragility and immortality. It is so impossibly imaginative because it is so very very mindless. Yes, there is the wonder of how fractals and geometry and numbers emerge from randomness. But it’s so much more than that. It is such a fantastic wonder, but how extremely limiting a wonder when life does so much unimaginably more. We haven’t even dreamt up 99.9999% the formulas and mathematics that life has, why stop and wonder at the phi we found in a sunflower?
How very very humbling, and yet how very very empowering ecology is. We can tinker with it, we can even improve it with our mindfulness. And I can laugh and say we can never improve it because we do have minds. We do optimize and plan, and look how life manages so much better because it absolutely does not optimize and plan. It ends up optimizing, but only by avoiding optimizing. By being imperfect, yes, but also by dealing with the inherent random disasters that all life must be able to accommodate for.
I’m speaking of genetics. I’m speaking of behavior. I’m speaking of interspecies interactions. I’m speaking of all the strange subsystems that emerge and blend and make up the way it interacts. Life probably (provably?) interacts with ever increasing levels of complexity too. There is the obvious answer of replication, single cells, multiple cells, colonies, and gaia-like proportions, but I think that too is perhaps too limited a view. It plays with it’s own laws of genetics, it’s own limitations of individuality, (both individual and species scales) it’s own systems of systems of systems.
And everything can teach us something. New ways to think, new levels of interaction and thought and logic. We can use the results, divine the sources, combine the parts, and tease apart rules. Strangely, we can do that. Maybe through tricks of our own minds. Maybe because we are part of nature herself and we can never escape her just as she can never escape us. I don’t understand how we can do it, just as I don’t understand most of what and how and why she works. But it’s that motion. The answers are there, present in the processes everywhere around us. Back through time, now and forward. Always moving, changing, reforming, always the same and yet never ever ever one thing.
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