The Now and the Not Yet

Lughnasa                                                                    Labor Day Moon

A curious bifurcation. Friends comment on how well my life’s going. I’m not feeling it. Kate says look at the big picture. That’s what they’re seeing. Time with grandkids. Settling into the mountains. Healthy dogs. Cancer season mostly over. Loft getting put together.

When Kate suggested I look at the big picture, I replied, “It’s not in my nature.” My comment surprised me. What did that mean? “It’s not in my nature.”

In the moment I meant the larger trajectory of my life always gets swamped by the quotidian. The generator, damn thing. Rigel’s cast. Aimlessness. Sleep. That’s what gets my attention, my focus. It’s the way of generalized anxiety. Yes, I can back off from the day-to-day, know that these things are transient and the bigger things more lasting, but I get dragged right back in. Gotta change our home insurance before October 31st. Like that.

But more to my question, what is my nature? What does that mean? I mentioned a while back I’m reading a book called How Forests Think. In it Eduardo Kohn makes a strong, a remarkable case for animism, identifying animism with the Selfhood of living things. Self, if I understand Kohn right, is the gathered experience of not only an individual tree, dog, human, but of the evolutionary and genetic inheritance each individual bears. In this sense my Self is the culmination of human adaptation over millions of years, specific adaptation in the instance of my particular genetic family and the moments since my birth that have shaped who I have become in dynamic interaction with those genetics.

I’ve always had a strong view of Self, that emergent being/becoming we each are. (BTW: we, in Kohn’s vocabulary, includes all living things) Thanks to many years of Jungian analysis I have tended to articulate Self in relation to Jungian thought as an entity rooted in the collective unconscious, born of the struggle between persona and our genetic tendencies, or, said another way, between our adaptative responses to the world and our animal inheritance.

It is in this sense that I meant it is not in my nature. Over time, thanks to events subtle and gross, I have learned to focus on the thing not finished, the matter with something left to do. That moves attention away from the completed, the resolved. Things like settling into the mountains, presumptively cancer free, time with the grandkids recede, get placed in the room marked o.k. for now.

So my nature is the sum of me, the skin-bound memories (another Kohn term) and the adaptative ancestry from which I descend. Here’s an interesting point about genetics and adaptation that Kohn makes, they are future oriented. That is, the adaptations that stick are, in essence, bets on a future that will require them. So, though they come from the past and manifest in the present, each adaptation represents a subtle reorientation of the species to a time imagined, in the most physical of senses, to have similarity with the near past.