• Tag Archives complexity

  • The Simple Life. Bah, Humbug

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samain                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

    “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. I say let your affairs be as one, two, three and to a hundred or a thousand. We are happy in proportion to the things we can do without.” – Henry David Thoreau

    (Walden Pond, 2010)

    When I bought my farm up near Nevis, Minnesota, Thoreau and I would have been on the same page.  The Peaceable Kingdom had its own well, a septic system and heat provided by the forest I owned.  Of course, that year the simple life saw a divorce, the temperature hit -50 and a heavier yet reliance on beer and scotch.

    Don’t get me wrong.  I think simplicity is a beautiful thing.  Then again, so is complexity.  If my body simplified itself, there wouldn’t be much me left.  If my consciousness simplified itself, the rest would slip away.

    There will always be, of course, the few who take the Taoist monk approach, a life lived close to nature.  There will be, too, those folks who just find wilderness better company than the rest of us and who’s to say they’re wrong?

    Me, though, I love samsara, this whole roiling, boiling mess we have for a place to live.  I love computers and television and movies and books, philosophical and political thought and action.  I love relationships, messy and unwieldy and complicated as they can be.  I love art, often complex and difficult.

    I suppose this means I’ll never have a Walden experience or the insight of wandering through the Tao.  I’m ok with that.  If you need simplicity, then seek it, make it so.

    As for me, give me complexity or give me, well, what?  Greater complexity.

     


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Literature Myth and Story 📎and tagged

  • Emergence

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                       Waning Thanksgiving Moon

    One of those days.  Snow brought our first drive way clearing by John Sutton, but not until both Kate and I had left.  I did the sidewalk.

    The drive into the Sierra Club took about 15 minutes longer than usual, but I made it to the first interview on time.  I spent the next 3 hours with Michelle and Margaret as I will tomorrow, interviewing candidates for the Sierra Club policy position.  One candidate referred to us as the big boys at the State Capitol.  Hitch up those britches and let’s get to work.

    On the way in and back I’m listening, as I mentioned yesterday, to lectures on Big History.  A topic important to Big History and important to me is the quality of emergence, a key mark of complexity, the theme that holds all the various epochs since the big bang together.  Emergence refers to qualities that become evident only after two or more other elements combine in some patterned way.  The easy example is hydrogen and oxygen.  Examine the two of them separately and you would not come up with the emergent proper that comes when you combine two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom in a certain way.  Water.  Another, more complex example, is a human.  The individual constituents of the body, chemically, do not suggest the possibility of life if combined.

    Emergence fascinates me because it is used by a few thinkers to reimagine the sacred.  I’m not sure the exact line of thought but it has my attention right now.

    Then, when I got home, to a plowed driveway, I slipped and slid my car into a snowbank, a snowbank we had paid John Sutton to create.  This entailed a trip to the hardware store for granite grit, a session with Warren, my neighbor, who came to my aid with a tow rope, then scattering grit on the slope of our driveway.  Then, finally, I could get the car in the garage.  Minnesota is a place where sometimes getting the car in the garage at night is an accomplishment.


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Work Our Land and Home Weather +Climate World History 📎and tagged

  • Simple, eh?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                    Waning Wild Moon

    Tomorrow Allan, the Grout Doctor, operates on the steam bath.  It’s been in place for 12 years or so and has some missing grout, some iron deposits, some loose tile.  He’ll give it an acid bath.  Sounds like the act of a vandal, but no, we’re going to pay him to do this.  After the acid bath some other folks will come and take out the current door.  Then, Allan will return to remove tiles and fix grout.  The door people will come and replace the door. Allan will come back and seal the entire steam bath.  Then he’ll come back  one more time and seal it a second time.  Hopefully, by this time, the tomatoes will be ripe and we’ll be able to send some home with him.

    Simplicity may exist; it might.  Somewhere.  The world, however, has layers of complexity all the way down and all the way inside and all the way outside.  Think of it.  Our own cells, the cells that constitute our bodies, our very selves, are a minority population, only a 20th of the total cellular life in and on our body, the other 19/20 composed of microbes living in symbiotic relation with us or just living on or in us.  Complexity outside the human body begins with the other 6.8 billion people out there, but includes all the other animals, plants, fungi, rocks, water, air, chemicals everything and then of course we leave the earth and there is the solar system and our local galaxy and our local region and then the rest, all the rest.  In the end though there may be nothing quite as complex as the human mind, consciousness, which consists of a blooming, buzzing confusion (to borrow from William James) of synaptic pulses, stored memories and sensory input.


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