In a world exploding in the fire of ethnic and religious hatreds, I see fear and its grisly gang of distrust, divisiveness, separation, slander, reprisal, greed, fraud, distortion, and duplicity slithering through the dark halls of governments in each of the four hemispheres. It matters not which hemisphere you choose; each has its despots with fingers on the trigger as they suck the life energy from the people in a bid for the power of control. In their anxiety about life's uncertainties and the irrational fear of the future it spawns, their sense of security depends on this control to suppress the imagined portents of personal annihilation.
In such a world, it is difficult to remain consciously aware of the miraculous beauty of form and function that surrounds us. I am particularly blessed in that I have been privileged to travel in many lands, near and afar, from ocean strand to lofty mountain, from parching desert to steaming jungle, and in each have I found beauty unsurpassed: it may have been the odor of jasmine along the Nile, the smile of a Nubian child, the soft touch of a Chilean fern, the iridescence of a Nepalese sunbird, the fuzzy face of an Austrian edelweiss, the intricate structure of a Japanese Shinto shrine, the alert stance of a tiger beetle on a jungle trail in Malaysia, or the leap of a flying fish in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Each experience is a snapshot, a touchstone along the continuum of evolution through which the eternal mystery of life unfolds.
Part of our inability to grasp the eternal mystery with our intellect is that no two things in the universe have ever been—or ever will be—exactly the same. Therefore, no two things can ever be equal—only different and complementary in their service to planet Earth. Moreover, all life is composed of physical relationships in ever-changing patterns and rhythms that both affect life and are, in turn, affected by life. In this sense, life not only is pattern seeking and pattern sensitive but also is guided by the eternal rhythms of the universe. As well, every life form is a microcosm of the whole—from the most simple to the most complex.
Everything in the universe is thus connected to everything else in a cosmic web of interactive feedback loops, all entrained in self-reinforcing relationships that continually create novel, never-ending stories of cause and effect, stories that began with the eternal mystery of the original story, the original cause. Everything, from a microbe to a galaxy, is defined by its ever-shifting relationship to every other component of the cosmos. Thus "freedom" (perceived in the classical sense as the lack of constraints) is merely a continuum of fluid relativity. Hence, every change (no matter how minute or how grand) constitutes a systemic modification that produces novel outcomes. But, not all feedback loops are competitive; many, although hidden from casual observation, comprises reciprocal relationships in which life serves life.
©chris maser 2009. All rights reserved.