“You think you have it fixed.
It is unfixed by rule.”
Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 1998 VI

Hello Dear Friends,

I won’t say much about how long I’ve been away from writing. Suffice it to say, it has not been my preference. Life and my many wonderful projects keep me moving day to day, and so I must take my opportunities when they come. Here is an essay I’ve been thinking about writing for at least 9 months now:

We are currently rewatching the very funny, goofy mockumentary Parks and Rec. The themes explored through the ridiculous caricatures are almost a kind of case study of various personality types that is cathartic to experience and surprisingly insightful, even as it makes me repeatedly guffaw. One character that I love is Chris Traeger, played by Rob Lowe. Traeger initially comes to Pawnee with his friend Ben Wyatt to address the city’s financial insolvency. Chris is impossibly upbeat and positive, while Ben delivers all the bad news, a classic good cop/bad cop partnership that is simultaneously effective and hilarious. Chris is a fitness junkie, running miles and miles every day and taking every health supplement known to humankind. He never stops smiling and charming and is relentlessly optimistic. Some of the funniest episodes involving Chris have him coming undone when he is forced to confront a situation that he can’t spin in a positive light. When Chris faces the specter of his own mortality by simply contracting a cold, he spins out into a depression that leads him to (obsessively) start seeing a therapist. Chris is fragile, even while vigorously projecting an unceasing upbeat pollyanna vibe that would seem entirely insincere if you didn’t feel that Chris himself is the one that most needs it to be true. He is a control freak and “spin jockey” par excellence.

I see some kind of genius in whomever dreamed up this character, because he strikes me as emblematic of our fundamentalist modern ways of living, speaking and thinking. Chris has a funny habitual figure of speech that he uses on the show, and this is why I bring him up. Whenever Chris is trying to project his ever-positive world view onto someone in conversation, he uses the word “literally”, as in “I am literally the happiest I have ever been to see you right now,” or “You literally did the absolute best job I’ve ever experienced.” If you care to get a taste of this funniness, check out this video montage.

This use of the word “literally,” literally makes me laugh every time I think about it! This word is overripe in our culture today. It is used in so many contexts and conversations.

Some folks say things like “We believe that everything in the Bible is literally true.” Others might say “You can’t argue with facts and it is literally true that the world is millions of years old from the fossil record.” In casual conversation, I often hear people telling a story what someone literally said or did. In these cases, I’ve noticed this is often meant to build a sense of indignation about something; as in: “She literally said that to me, can you believe it?”. But what do we mean in each of these cases? These examples, and the funny amplified example of the character Chris Traeger are the stimulus for me to write this essay, to have some fun and playfully explore “the L word,” and its facets of meaning.

When Chris says he is “literally the happiest”, I think what he really means is “really really really happy,” or “supremely happy”. Chris doesn’t mean “literally”... he means “hyperbolically”… and everything about him is hyperbolic. He is exerting incredible energy to spin everything in his life, and the word “literally” is a vehicle for this effort.

What about claims that the Bible is “literally” true? Well, here the reference seems to be to the actual words of the Bible in their plain meaning today, usually in an English translation. I am here trying to represent a viewpoint that I don’t personally hold, so if anyone feels I am being unfair in this portrayal, I welcome corrections. But Biblical literalists as best I understand them are saying that one must read the words of the Bible as they stand, without interpretation or correction. The words and the words alone are one’s direction and orientation.

I will leave aside the fact that the Bible was written in a wide array of styles, in several different ancient and classical Mediterranean languages across many cultures and centuries. Biblical literalists might respond that this does not matter since they are the direct words of God anyway. But I will briefly mention the immediate question that must come to such a viewpoint: given a literal reading in the sense described above, what is to be done when one part of the Bible directly contradicts another part? To take one of a legion of examples, and one which I teach in one of my college courses these days: it says in chapter 1 of Genesis that God created human beings on the Sixth Day, after the plants and trees (they came on the Third Day). It also says that that male and female humans were created together.

Gen 1:27: “And God created the human being in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them.”

(I am using the Alter translation of Genesis, the one that is assigned reading in my college course. Robert Alter is a true philologist, a lover of words, and his careful translation of the original Hebrew into English, along with the copious notes he provides to accompany them, make the multilayered meaning of the Bible come alive).

Then in chapter 2 it just as clearly states that God created Adam before any grasses or trees, and then only later created Eve

Gen 2:5-8 “On the day the LORD God made earth and heavens, no shrub of the field being yet on the earth, and no plant of the field yet sprouted…then the LORD God fashioned the human, humus from the soil…” .

So, a clear contradiction. Yet, experience has taught me that such arguments do not serve to move the conversation forward with anyone. For those motivated by Biblical literalism, such contradictions can always be explained away. The usual tack in this case is to invent plausible plot-smoothing hypotheticals, like the second story fits perfectly into the first as a detailed montage of the happenings on the 6th day when humans were created. The motivation is to cleave to the notion that the plain words of God are right there to be read and the Bible tells one continuous non-contradictory story. It’s quite difficult for me to resist playfully interjecting in these moments that, in order to defend this kind of literality, one has invented quite a bit of additional meaning; but let’s move on.

Despite the very different context, in biblical literalism I see the mood and motive as much the same as that of Chris Traeger. That mood is fragility, and the motive is protection from that which one rejects or fears. One wants to look at the world through one, unshakeable lens, one solid point of view, and ultimately, one wants to predetermine what one will see whenever one looks. There is a myopic conviction that one must look at the words on the page as having no depth, no fuzzy edges, no history, no connection to prior generations, and absolutely no changeability. I confess I struggle to understand this point of view, although I accept that many hold it. In fact, my curiosity about the true motivations for those that hold this view is part of my reason for writing this essay. But, the words I am writing at this moment already have so many levels of meaning, so many nuances, that I find it impossibly restricting to accept a unidimensional literal reading of any text, let alone something as richly adorned as the Bible.

Lest you think I am only picking on Biblical literalists, let me hasten to add that, as I have written previously and recently, science as it is popularly represented, usually taught (and, more and more, practiced) in the last 75 years or so does a remarkably similar dance. In science, if one does not or will not speak the language of reductionist particle-based thinking in tandem with empirical repeatable measurable results, one is simply speaking of conjecture or superstition. But if one keeps one’s language to the level of the “literal,” which in this third case means “represented by mathematical equations and physically measurable in SI units,” then one is on solid ground, safe from any scary interference from those parts of the world that do not submit to such a scientifically literal interpretation.

So, each one in their own way: Chris Traeger; religious literalists (and even some religious scholars); and science teachers and populists (and even some scientists) are using this word, “literally”, to mean something that is much less about fact and much more about deep emotional attachment to a certain way of looking at the world.

What I find comic-tragically funny, as portrayed in Chris Traeger, is that the word “literally” itself is multilayered..it is not literal! The word literal comes from roots that mean “by the letter”. One thinks in this context of the saying “following the letter of the law” (This, of course, is not a literal phrase!). The opposite of “literal” in today’s parlance is “metaphorical”. The word metaphorical means something like “to carry beyond” and we understand that when one is speaking through metaphor, one is invoking something known, often physically experience-able, in order to evoke understanding of something one wants to know, something else that is usually deeper and less tangible. One is speaking about one thing to try to describe something else that is unreachable through direct speech.

But literality denies the validity of this carrying, this reaching beyond. One must focus on only the plain meaning. The “letter of it” alone.

OK, fine, we can try to do this. But when one does, things get immediately topsy turvy. One asks, “But what do the individual letters signify, and where does the meaning of the word really (literally) reside?” It’s clearly not in the letters themselves, but somehow in the combination of the letters, the sounds those letters make, and the meaning they signify. But if words are signifying something other than the letters, then words are…metaphorical by design! A moment’s thought about any word at all (but let’s take the word “literally” as our nexus of paradoxical inquiry) leaves us to realize that, dictionaries notwithstanding, we cannot literally point to the exact meaning of any word. And even entire paragraphs do not provide sufficient context to fully flesh out all the nuances of the meaning of the single word: “literally”.

The scientist, “Tom”, with whom I shared a panel discussion last spring, and with whom I’ve had several stimulating follow-up discussions, told me that one takeaway from our interactions was that in his teaching, he was going to try speak even less metaphorically and stick to “literal” scientific evidence and findings. And this is exactly what materialistic science continues to strive for: scientific “literality.” Never mind that science today does not ultimately deal with words at all, but only numerical quantities. Alongside those numbers, science has invented a number of specialized jargons that are supposedly clearer and less metaphor-infected than the plain ones we’ve been using for millennia. But this obfuscation with coded language simply hides the metaphorical meaning under the rug.

My response to biblical literalists and science teachers alike that wish to cleave to literality, with lots of warmth and hopefully some disarming humor, is “good luck with that”.

If even the literal meaning of the word “literally” cannot be found, perhaps we, like Chris Traeger, have painted ourselves into a very fragile corner. We might want to ask ourselves whether this kind of myopia can be sustained, and at what cost. I believe in and have experienced in both scientific and theological/biblical literature rich veins of meaning and authentic exploration, but the current popular contests between who is most “literally true”--which I take to mean most really-really-rock-solid-we’ve-nailed-it-down-and-nothing-not-God-nor-humanity-nor-experience-can-ever-change-it-forevermore)--such contests truly bore me to tears!

I am not trying to fight the current obsession with literality, not really. I’m simply trying to bring it into the light. I can see it as the next step in a progression we’ve been on for a long time. I see prior steps, for example, in the Christian Reformation when Jan Hus and Martin Luther and John Calvin and others began to insist that sola scriptura was the new gold standard for faith, and rejected the apostolic succession of human beings as represented in the Roman Catholic Church. And, going further back in time, I see this same trend in the insistence that true Muslims must learn and recite the Quran only in the original Arabic, because each word was chosen divinely and exactly. If God spoke words directly to Muhammad, then it is entirely reasonable to treat such a gift as a most precious pearl of great price. Similarly, if the mathematics of atomic theory have proven so powerful in certain realms, it is understandable why someone would want to revere that mathematics and bask in that power, even invent new technical languages to reify and codify it.

But, “literally” has us terribly stuck these days. Most human beings still use words, and they use them best when they use them flexibly and with at least some consciousness of various levels of literal and metaphorical meanings. Even children with limited maturity and vocabulary can infer various levels of meaning from our words, often with charming effect. This is a big reason why they often say the darndest things, because their word usage is so fresh and flexible that it takes unexpected turns. The false power of “literality” is the imagination of “fixing something for all time”… but as soon as we think or speak that phrase…we must inquire into the metaphorical nature of “fixing”, and the metaphorical nature of “time”, and there goes that apparently solid foothold as well.

Owen Barfield spent a lot of his life writing about the progressive perpetual transmogrification and inescapable metaphorical nature (non-literality) of words, and so I don’t feel that I need to treat this subject with a rigorous debate, as he’s already done such a thorough job. I can just point you to read Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry to get you going. Then read Poetic Diction, and you will have a grasp of the evolutionary and always elsewhere-pointing nature of words.

Literality, the belief that the words, or the equations, or the feelings alone carry all of the meaning, is an idol, and I recall idols being prohibited in quite a few religious traditions. Idols make you fragile in your thinking. Idols can make you sick; they make you fearful that your house of cards may fall. Because of these effects, idols that you carry subconsciously can make you a menace, especially to those over whom you hold power.

I want to make clear that I am not in any way speaking against deeply held conviction. The feeling that lies behind the word “literally” is very real, and is perhaps better described as “what I’ll go to the mat for,” “what I stand on,” or even “what I would die for”. Such convictions, when they are grounded in affection, one’s neighbors and true experience, are the stuff of humanity itself. But “literally” is a kind of scapegoating of your deepest held convictions. It’s saying “It’s not me that’s making this true, it’s that book/formula/mathematical law.” It is obscuring your active role in manifesting truth.

I’m not really trying to make any ironclad case here, I’m just playing with wonderful mysterious words. Like the funny character Chris Traeger, I am playing, prodding and poking at a few obvious chinks in the dam, because I would like to see words and their meanings flow again. I’d like to see the high walls of specialized, flat and encoded language come down from their roosts and commune again with regular speech and regular folks. Like the flow of thought and the flow of water, new meanings within languages (as long as humans actively use and speak and embody language and resist delegating the task to human or AI overlords) will continue to appear at the cracks and margins. Idols have been around for a long time and so, naturally, God has been warning and instructing us as to how to avoid this pitfall. Extreme precision, fundamentalism and literality are a bubble just waiting to burst. The waters truly can only be held back for so long. Rivers of real words continuously form new tributaries and, over time, entirely new oceans of meaning. The depths will never get any shallower except in our idolatrous imaginations; but we can loosen our grip on any particular meaning and learn to swim in the ocean of meaning itself. And this, of course, is what true literacy is: An increasingly facile ability to swim with confidence in the ocean of meaning that comprises our human and divine worlds of words.

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:
Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.
			-Rumi, 1207-1273, Sufi Muslim mystic and poet.

Photo by Elimende Inagella on Unsplash

Continuing in my stated project of trying to share the number of things I’ve been up to in the spring that have taken me away from publishing. Here’s another thing: I preached a sermon. Due to having one pastor on sabbatical at my church and the resulting need for guest preachers, I was asked whether I wanted to give the sermon, specifically on the Sunday when we were going to celebrate Earth Day. Folks know about my ecological passion, so it seemed like a natural fit. However, when I checked my schedule, I found that I was already slated to teach Sunday school on that day to my daughter’s class of adolescents. Specifically I was supposed to be teaching them about the book of Job from the Hebrew Bible, also known as the Old Testament. And, then a kind of mini-inspiration hit me, which I chose to run with: I could do it all at once!

Thus I conceived of a plan to preach a sermon about Job that included the Sunday School kids and the congregation in the sermon.

Since our church video streams our services, I was able to extract my sermon from the service and share it here with you. The video is at the bottom of this post. What you will see is a two-part video with a break in between. I’ll explain the break below, and try to set you up to understand what you’re seeing should you choose to watch it.

At our church, we have a “Time with Children,” in which the pastor or whomever is preaching that day gives a mini-message to the younger kids. I began my Time with Children by telling the kids about: the dragon in the book of Job! You heard that right, the Bible has a dragon, and an awesome one at that. I spoke about . . . well you can see what I spoke about in the first part of the video. This is the first time I’m uploading video to Substack, so let’s see how the technology works.

After the children’s time, I brought some of our church youth up to the front of the church. Out of consideration for their privacy, I’m not going to show you that part of the sermon, but I’ll describe it to you here.

I had a series of questions that I asked them. They were “imagination questions,” questions where I was asking the kids to draw up images of things in nature to which they were attracted.

Here were the questions I asked.

1. When you imagine nature's majesty, what do you imagine most/first? What image comes to mind?

2. When you imagine nature's power, what do you imagine most/first?

3. When you imagine nature's weirdness, grotesque-ness, wildness what comes to mind? (Something appropriate to share in church!)

I had shared these questions with the youth at church ahead of time, so they could ponder it and come prepared with an answer they liked.

If you’d like to participate too, perhaps you would like to pause here and dream up some answers to the previous questions yourself before continuing….

Here are some of the answers the kids gave:

1. Nature’s Majesty: Forests and big tall trees. Powerful waterfalls.

2. Nature’s Power: The Sun, provider of heat and light. A dandelion and its ability to grow just about anywhere.

3. Nature’s weirdness, grotesqueness, wildness: Tardigrades, also known as water bears, microorganisms that can live in very harsh environments, even the vacuum of space, and reanimate when conditions improve. Cockroaches and bugs in general because they are indestructible and gross!

I provided my own answer to the third question, which was…parasitoid wasps! These are wasps that lay their eggs in a host caterpillar. The eggs hatch and, as larvae, live upon and slowly consume the caterpillar, making sure to keep the host alive until they are ready to transform into wasps. At that transformation, they leave the caterpillar behind, who then dies, having been used as a womb and as food. Wow, wild!

Reportedly, even Charles Darwin had trouble accepting this element of nature when he learned of it, since it seemed so grotesque. And yet, I shared with the congregation that our aversion to something like parasitoid wasps is much more about us than nature. We have a strong habit of thinking of nature’s ways as barbaric, violent, cutthroat, or vicious. And one could see parasitoid wasps in this way if one had the inclination. Today we have an impoverished sense of wildness that usually puts it in terms like “law of the jungle,” “survival of the fittest,” etc that are biased over-simplifications. These reductionist neo-Darwinian notions don’t even do justice to actual ideas of Darwin, and reflect much more about our culture today than anything universally true about Nature. So, I don’t think of it in this way at all. Rather, I see an entangled relationship between the caterpillars and the wasps and the ecosphere in which they reside; some caterpillars in a mysterious way “give their lives” to raise wasps instead of more caterpillars. This brings balance to the ecosystem, since too many caterpillars would decimate the plants (and our gardens, so we should be grateful for these wasps!). In this way, the wasp serves a similar function to wolves, preventing overgrazing, as Aldo Leopold wrote about so eloquently in his essay “Thinking Like a Mountain.”

Then I asked several more questions:

1. What’s your favorite sea creature?

2. What is the most awesome weather or astronomical event to you?

3. What is the most magnificent animal you know about?

4. What is your favorite magical/mythical animal?

Again, if you’d like to play along and prepare yourself to watch the video, feel free to imagine your own answers. Here were their answers:

1. Favorite sea creature: A dolphin because they are super smart and friendly. A dragonfish (great synchronicity there with my sermon), because they are horrifying!

2. Favorite weather or astronomical event: A solar eclipse because it was so awesome to watch. The planetary alignment, because it’s super cool how planets can align like that. Just after a rain, I saw a circle rainbow formed around the sun, and it was really pretty.

3. Most magnificent animal: A “sparklemuffin spider”. It’s found in Australia and is really brightly colored, beautiful and deadly! Cats because they are flexible, delicate and very smart. An octopus, because they have so much intelligence in their tentacles but only live for a year.

4. Favorite magical/mythical animal: The crommyonian sow in Greek mythology because it’s a really big murderous pig, and I think that’s kinda fun! Also from Greek mythology the hippocampus: half horse, half fish. It can swim really fast and carry heroes quickly across the water.

After gathering all of these excellent imaginative responses (I took a moment to point out to the congregation that these kids were so fun to work with because they consistently had such wonderful contributions every day we had Sunday school), I had one more set of questions. This time they were questions that were intended to be answered inwardly. They were “What does it feel like…” questions. Again, I invite you to imagine and feel you own responses.

1. What does it feel like to gaze at a calm lake at sunrise?

2. What does it feel like to be at the shore of a stormy lake with huge breakers beating against the shore and wild winds?

3. What does it feel like to look at your favorite constellation in the night sky?

4. What do you feel as you see and hear sandhill cranes calling as they fly overhead?

Finally, after all of this significant imaginative and feeling preparatory work, I thanked the kids and invited them to sit down. I asked everyone, and I ask you now, to carry as many of these images and feelings with you while you listen, and if you click on the video, you will see and hear what I said about Job, about God, about dragons and wasps, about imagination and about wildness.

I hope you enjoy. As always, I welcome your responses. Thank you.

Young men, not knowing what to remember,
Come to this hiding place of the moons and years,
To this Old Man. Old Man, they say, where should we go?
Where did you find what you remember?

             -David Wagoner, "Old Man, Old Man"

Hello Friends,

I got caught up and carried away from writing again at the end of a second semester of teaching two different college classes, each for the second time. Now I’ve wrapped up that work (phew!), and hope to come back to my writer’s chair when I’m not out working in the gardens and fields. The beehives and trees and plants are really waking up now and there is much to be done on a hurry-up schedule.

I have so much to catch up on, and so much to share. I managed to write a couple hefty pieces in March and April, but many ideas and events have happened in the intervening time that I’ve wished I could write about. I doubt I’ll catch everything, but let’s start here, with another philosophy of science post that I’ve been mulling for quite awhile:

Back in the first week of March (Wow, has time flown since then!), I was excited to participate in a panel discussion (I previewed that panel in this post) hosted by the college where I’m working these days. The ostensible “hook” question that the panel was deliberating was “Must we choose between science and religion?” If you know me at all, you know that this question is right up my alley and I was excited to discuss it. I had a couple of excellent conversation partners on the panel. There were a biology and physics professor (I will call him Tom), and a philosophy and history of science professor (I’ll call him Joe)… and little old me.1

I am quite intentionally not an expert, not a PhD, but I was pleased as punch to swap ideas with a few of them. I have a deep desire to dig into cultural sacred cows such as the ones represented by the above question. It’s one of the main reasons why I write here.

The panel was tied to a required freshman course that I and the other professors teach or have taught, in which the students read six books from across a huge span of human culture and thought. In addition to the hook question I listed above, our panel had the task of bringing in some textual analysis from a small section of the very first book of the Bible, Genesis 1:1-2:4. This is one of the books we read in that required course. We read Genesis as an important cultural story, as allegory and as literature.

Tom, the biologist and physicist, began the discussion by talking about time. I want to say here, because I am about to disagree with him, that throughout the discussion, Tom was eloquent, clear, and remarkably honest in his depictions, just like a good scientist should be! I loved talking with him. Referring to the way that science thinks about time (as measurable “ticks of a clock”), he explained that, since 1967, the International System of Units (SI, for short) has used an experimental property of the element caesium to define the “unit of time”, the second. It has been found experimentally that when caesium is “excited” by some electromagnetic energy it re-releases that energy at a very specific frequency. Caesium is the element that is used in so-called “atomic clocks,” which perhaps you’ve heard of. In materialistic science, frequency is associated with “oscillations per second” and so one could metaphorically think of caesium as a finely tuned drum that, when electromagnetically “tapped”, emits always the same “tone” or pace of vibration. (Tom also spoke about how much science hates and is allergic to metaphors. But I don’t see any other way to discuss it here, and anyway, that’s kind of the point of this post: what materialism excludes) The frequency vibrations of excited Caesium can be “counted”, and so, by what seems to be an exceedingly backdoor method, we get from a pure chemical element, to “excitation energy”, to oscillation, to counting… to time. Here is the official SI definition, taken from Wikipedia:

The second, symbol s, is the SI unit of time. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the caesium frequency, ΔνCs, the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom, to be 9192631770 when expressed in the unit Hz, which is equal to s⁻¹.

(That’s my emphasis on the two important words there: “defined by.” It’s not saying that caesium energy pulses oscillate at roughly 9 billions times per second. It’s that this exact number of oscillations is a second, by definition. Do you see the difference?)

Totally clear, yes? Well, no, of course not. One could go down a humongous rabbit hole here, but I will try to resist the temptation and just say a few more words before returning to the panel discussion. I remember learning about the SI system of units when I was a young student of science, and thinking, “There’s something rich here that is being presented as cut and dry, yet is anything but.” And I was right in that intuition. Just look at the above definition. Why is it so convoluted? Why do we base the definition of the second on “counting the vibrations” of caesium? 2

Returning to Tom’s line of thought: Time as science thinks of it is that which can be measured through experimental instrumentation in which we have scientifically unwavering confidence. Tom then turned his attention to Genesis and the “Seven Days of Creation.” Perhaps you can see where this is going: Since Genesis tells what appears to be a story of the creation of seas, earth, stars and planets, plants and trees, animals and humans; and since it depicts this creation as happening in “seven days,” Genesis must be rejected as a scientific document. Therefore, as Genesis is not a scientific document, it is not useful to science. And, finally, because science is How We Know Anything is True, by implication, nothing that Genesis says is true.

Joe, the historian of philosophy and science, then jumped in to say some excellent things about why holding Genesis to the standard of a scientific document wasn’t fair anyhow. He called it instead a “polemic”, and a “manifesto”, a story of purpose and relationship, and order and intention, and ultimately, a singular God’s love for God’s good creation. These were all good things to say, and quite helpful to me to set me up to speak last. I wish I could say more about Joe’s contribution, but I’m conscious of the length of my post already.

Super-accurate clocks and ultra-fine measurements are sacrosanct to science because science is built on the supposedly rock-solid basis of that-which-is-measurable. When it was my turn to speak on the panel, I brought up the excellent book The Wholeness of Nature by Henri Bortoft. Reading this book helped me to begin to free myself from the spell of rigid authority that materialistic science holds over so many of us, whether we are aware of it or not. In that book, Bortoft tells the story of Galileo Galilei that we all know so well, but with much additional context. Perhaps you learned sometime in your schooling about how Galileo “disproved” Aristotle’s physics through experiments with rolling balls down ramps and dropping objects off of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.3 By timing the moving of freely falling bodies with a water clock, or sometimes with his own pulse, Galileo was able to demonstrate a startling, truly new discovery: that the rate of freefall of every object is the same, if we neglect air resistance. In other words a bowling ball filled with lead falls at exactly the same rate as a hollow one that weighs one one-hundredth of the other. Galileo did this experiment with precisely crafted balls of various kinds, both in free fall and rolling down ramps. Through meticulous collection of data, Galileo was able to prove his theory within very good precision. He spent a lot of time designing and building his own instruments, and so Galileo’s genius was just as much in his new tools as it was in his eloquent arguments. He set a new mold for how we would pursue Truth. Ever since Galileo’s experiments, science has grasped ever more tightly to the idea that the way one proves Anything in Science is through accurate repeatable measurement. In our materialistic age we’ve extended and blurred the boundaries so much that most people seem to believe that measurement is also the way we know that Anything is True at All. This is what is behind the craze in business, education, politics, etc around “data-driven results”. “ If it can’t be measured (or monetized), then it ain’t real.” says this hyper-fundamentalist point of view.

I see Tom’s line of thinking as the perfect representation of the Galilean approach. While the 400 years that have elapsed have caused most of us to lose the context, Galileo knew exactly what he was doing when he developed his new way of doing science. He was favoring measurement in controlled conditions over natural observation. The truly new thing that Galileo executed so beautifully and powerfully, was prioritizing measurable things as more real than those that are unmeasurable. In his writings, Galileo called these two categories of experience “primary” and “secondary” qualities. Secondary qualities include things like smell, color, taste, texture; and of course situational and emotional content. Galileo intentionally chose to ignore all of these secondary qualities as impossible to measure or experiment with, and therefore out of his control. But measurable quantities were just those that submitted to Galileo’s new method, and were therefore “primary”.4 These included the measurable aspect of time (because you can count your pulse, or run an hourglass or clock and count the grains of sand or the tick-tocks). Other “primary” qualities include length, temperature, and a few rigidly defined others.5

In nature, of course, a feather falls much more slowly than a stone. However, Galileo imagined that, if one could measure the rate of fall, and build equipment that minimized the effect of air resistance (for example, build two balls of exactly the same shape and size but vastly different weights) one could find a deeper truth about falling objects. And there is no question that Galileo was correct in this. When I taught this subject to 10th graders in Waldorf schools, I had a long clear tube containing a feather and a penny. I could evacuate nearly all of the air from the tube using a vacuum pump. When there is air in the tube, the feather falls much slower than the penny. With no air, the feather and penny do, in fact, fall at the same rate and land at the same moment.

Galileo obtained startling new results that shifted folks’ view of reality itself, as evidenced by the kerfuffle he got into with the Holy Roman Catholic Church (that was more about his proofs for a sun-centered solar system… which he found by building more equipment, in this case the most powerful telescope of his time). His trailblazing led a generation later to Isaac Newton who extended and further mathematized his methods (inventing calculus along the way, and introducing idealized entities like “corpuscles”, the precursor to photons). Galileo, Newton and others inaugurated a new age of materialistic science.

And so, ever since Galileo, science is built on a small subset of measurable things. This explains why science is neurotically laser-focused on being able to measure those things. If we can’t measure it, says science, it isn’t real. By extension of this logic, the more accurately we can measure, “the better we will Know” with ever more clarity. I don’t fault science for this. Materialistic science is built on this foundation …and there it must rest. It is exactly the nature of the beast.6

One might think, however, that science would stay humble and circumspect, since it is founded on such a small subset of qualities (measurable quantities, really: that which can be counted) and since it follows such a restrictive methodology. Science should remember to stay in the lane it has built for itself and defer from making claims for Whole Ultimate Truth. Yet this is not what has happened. As the generations have come and gone, and in particular as military-industrial prowess and national superpowers have entwined themselves so thoroughly with scientific discovery, science has staked an ever-larger claim to more and more territory . . .right up to our present day, when science has its own version of an origin story. It’s called the Big Bang, and I bet you’ve heard of it. It is the modern materialistic equivalent to chapter one of the book of Genesis.

This is what the panel discussion was about and what Tom was invoking: That the story of the Big Bang is a scientifically accurate and acceptable origin story, while the story of Genesis is not. This is why I say that if you want to see behind the curtain of materialism, it is crucially important to understand this: modern materialistic science is built on the assumption that one can take only that which is measurable, extract it from everything else and experiment with it, and then from that restrictive data alone (along with idealized pseudo-physical entities such as atoms, or what Newton called “corpuscles”), come to universal conclusions about the underlying deeper reality of the Whole, including all of the secondary things you excluded at the start. Often this is simply expressed as “part to whole” thinking, and it is so, so, deeply ingrained in our consciousness today as to be nearly invisible. All of us, scientists and non-, nearly all the time, when we think, think in this way.

As Tom said, time as science understands it must be measurable, so no one can take the creation account represented in Genesis as “scientific.” And since it is not scientific, it is not real. The idea of a Creative Being speaking and shaping the world into existence over the course of six (measureable) days, and then resting on the seventh has no scientific basis and is therefore useless. We measure time in caesium-arbitrated seconds; a day in scientific terms is exactly 86,400 seconds, so Genesis cannot be called a scientific account.

But wait just a second (pun intended). Science has its own story called the Big Bang that everyone these days learns in school. Of great interest to me is the fact that, if you simply vastly extend the amount of measurable time over which the events happen, swap out the word “Singularity” for “God” and eliminate all of those secondary qualities that science doesn’t allow, the two stories aren’t all that different. But, how does science have the right to be telling origins stories in the first place? Isn’t science going well beyond its purview to do this? Given what I’ve recounted above about the first foundations of science, isn’t this simply science seizing power and territory to be the Arbiter of Truth, by telling a tale about how Everything Came to Be? Stories are by their very nature metaphorical. The tale of the Big Bang involves Space, Time and Energy, imagined as Universal entities that have the power of creation. These are precisely the measurable qualities that Galileo called “primary”… and, unsurprisingly, there are no other actors in this story. How could there be? Everything else was excluded at the beginning.

This is the sleight of hand that materialistic science has pulled over the course of several centuries (there is no group or person or evil cabal performing this sleight of hand. We are all doing it to ourselves.): First, exclude huge areas of experience as inadmissible because they are unmeasurable; then base all of science on only those measurable and mathemat-izable quantities; thirdly claim that all results and conclusions coming out of this practice are the Only Things that are Really True; and finally, go back and write a (much flatter, less interesting, and not-really-all-that different) creation story. Science then congratulates itself on disassembling all Mystery and pats itself on the back by noting that it could not find God in the measurable stuff or the equations, and therefore “has no need of the God hypothesis:”7

In the last portion of the panel discussion, Tom made this very interesting point: there is no Pope of Science. He shared (again, I must say and commend, very honestly) that in all of his science education, no one ever insisted that Tom “believe” certain aspects of the scientific paradigm…but also that, upon reflection, he realizes that he accepted them without question from his teachers.

I so appreciated Tom admitting this, as it gets to the heart of what Owen Barfield calls “collective representations”. The materialistic scientific worldview that I’ve characterized above is taken as a given, and therefore, in many circles requires no defense and no exhortation for people to believe it. It is the reason why we’ve all heard of the Big Bang origin story…and many of us assume it reflects “true reality”.

And yet, while science may not have a Pope, science does, in fact have a Holy of Holies, and it is precisely the SI system. This explains why we go to so much trouble to have atomic clocks in vaults, monitoring them constantly, and why we are driven to build ever more accurate ones.8 Every worldview has a foundation upon which it rests, and this is the foundation of materialistic science. It gives those of us who ascribe to it the feeling of a framework to reality… it has also attempted to claim universal authority to be a supreme and exclusive framework, rejecting all others as “unfounded superstition”. If this sounds familiar, this is exactly the power move that the Holy Roman Empire tried to pull when it held the reins in the time of Galileo and brought him up on charges.

Science did not invent holy wars or heresies, but I do think “scientism” is the driver for the current rise of counter-reactive religious and political fundamentalisms that are growing in so many areas of our world and cultures. The extent to which science gazes at its atomic clocks and insists that all reality is found there is exactly matched by how rigidly fundamentalists of a different kind stare at (only certain portions of) their Bibles and make the same claim for biblical literalism. It’s an approach to understanding life that says, “If I focus hard enough, only on one thing, excluding all else, then I can understand everything perfectly and for all time.” That is fundamentalism, and it is our modern malady, in both science and religion.

Because the scientific universal worldview insists on spinning reductive unsatisfying origin stories and claiming them as “literal and non-metaphorical truth”, we are led to think that we have to choose. But there is no choice, not really. Or rather the choice we are making is a collective cultural choice, and largely an unconscious one. One can no more prove the truth of the Big Bang than one can prove the Truth of Genesis … but at least Genesis is based on total human experience. The world is not built solely or even primarily upon measurable demonstrable physical effects …so say I in defiance of the scientific fundamentalists.

The real world we live in includes so many of those “secondary qualities” that are not secondary at all, but all around us, all the time. Galileo excluded them to launch a new way of doing science. But Genesis, an older, wiser, and richer cultural story, includes them. Genesis includes things like:

• speech (God speaks the world into existence),

• soil (Adam and the animals are made from it),

• smells (in the story of Noah, God smells Noah’s offering),

• feelings (Adam and Eve feel ashamed after they’ve eaten the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil),

• motives (Cain is motivated by jealousy and so kills his brother Abel),

• and love (God loves the whole world and calls it good).

Genesis includes wild complexity, unpredictability, humanity, divinity and many Beings. It includes Desire and Mystery. The story of the Big Bang, as I hope I’ve shown above, can’t hold a candle to this, nor a clock.

The world of Genesis also includes Time, but Time in all of its richness, not just its measurable aspect. (Sometime soon I’d like to write an essay about how I am starting to conceive of time working in a forest floor, as I see there a palimpsest of a more ancient notion of time that precedes our reduced linear “clock time”.) This is why I have no problem at all with the allegorical-metaphorical story of God creating in seven days. A day is so much more than eighty-six thousand seconds. The Hebrew storytellers who wrote this story down thousands of years ago, after passing it orally for who-knows-how-many generations previously, knew this. We humans live within a house of days; we live day by day. We have morning, midday and evening filled with order and creative striving, peaks and valleys of activity, breathing in and out, speaking and listening, thinking and sensing. Our quickening, and our resting, live in the framework of a day and a night. If this is our experience, then why wouldn’t God also create within the demarcation of days?

Storytelling itself is a feature of time. It is the way that we humans have always connected backward in time to our ancestors and their experiences of the wholeness of their world, and also forward to guide our actions into the future. Perhaps the most damaging feature of the flattened materialistic perspective is that it has served to cut us off from that wellspring of ancient storytelling that has always nurtured us, until now. Materialism pretends that it has found Really Real Truth that preempts and replaces all previous truth and makes it obsolete. Following Galileo’s lead, we have collectively desired in this period of human history to try to take responsibility for past, present and future solely through counting and measurement. These are the fruits of that desire: rigid control or the appearance of it, meaninglessness, unparallelled power to destroy, loneliness, and unidimensional stories based on measurement-based fantasy.9

Time is so much more than measurement and counting, and days are far more than a string of seconds. I think this is why, when he was asked by the press to explain his Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein, who was genius at working within the materialistic worldview and demonstrating its intuition-bending quirkiness, and yet did not seem constrained to fundamentalist notions of truth himself; reportedly said with his characteristic wit:

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute. That’s relativity.”

Photo by Büşra Salkım on Unsplash

I guess I’m writing less frequent, but longer, essays these days. I hope you enjoy and find resonance in what I write for you. And, as always please tell me what you think in the comments as you feel moved!

I’ve been thinking a lot about resumes lately, or “curriculum vitae” as they are called in the academic world, an interesting expression that literally means “the course of one’s life”; resumes, and their counterparts, job descriptions. As a corollary to my series on Compensation and Compulsion, my thoughts keep turning to the weird world of “landing a job” or “filling a role” depending on what side of the exchange you happen to be on.

A personal story comes to mind: While finishing my extra year of post-undergraduate teaching internship, we were coached in our classes to put together a snazzy portfolio for our impending step out into the “real world of professional work.” I dutifully collected photographs, student work, memorabilia and lesson plans from my 9 months of student teaching, and, along with my first ever attempt at a professional resume, made a kind of leather-bound scrapbook of my skimpy teaching experience thus far. Armed with this Showcase of Me, I went to my first interviews and was mostly very well received. I remember being escorted out by the friendly science teacher who had been on the hiring interview team at the school where I eventually accepted my first job. Now that the hard part was over and the pressure was off, and because he was so disarming and warm, I asked him, “How’d I do?”, to which he replied, “I’m not sure Jesus could have done better.”

Remembering this early experience makes me smile with some chagrin. At the time, the response I received certainly added to my already-inflated post-college ego. I’ve always done very well in academic settings, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.

Since that time, I’ve sat in enough interviews on both sides of the hiring process to be quite familiar with the structure and norms. Once I became a somewhat experienced teacher, I often participated in interview teams, and have also vetted resumes to choose which candidates to bring in for an interview. To me, there is something interesting and fun about perusing a person’s resume, and then meeting them in person. It feels like putting two halves of a story together. Ah ha, now I see...

And this is what’s on my mind, what I’ve come to think of as one’s Other Resume.

I don’t know about yours, but the resume or CV that I send to folks reads like one Pretty Amazing Guy. He has lots of experience and has organized and led an impressive number of initiatives. He has many years of teaching a wide variety of subjects in science and math with cool titles like Projective Geometry and Organic Chemistry. He has made “improvements” and “enhancements” to programs and systems. He has “interfaced” and “recruited”. He has worked in “leadership, evaluation, consultation and administration”. Etc etc.

I don’t think there’s anything dishonest about my resume, and I don’t actually think it contains much fluff. Having reviewed other resumes over the years, I’ve gathered enough experience to be able to put my own in some perspective. And, now that I’m old enough, I no longer feel the need to, nor do I care to, pad mine with anything other than the Facts That You Are Supposed to Put on a Resume. Even still, as accustomed as I’ve become to resume-speak, obviously this is not the whole me.

For example, here are some things that are also true about me that I would be unlikely to put on my resume: I am an Enneagram Four, which means, among other things, I will try to appear deep and insightful at every meeting, even when I have nothing much of substance to say or simply because I’m bored with the conversation. I struggle with self-esteem, and find myself habitually envying anyone I’m around who has a skill that I perceive surpasses my own. I have emotional ups and downs during the day that I need to manage actively to maintain an outwardly even keel. I get resentful when other people are whiny, because I never whine…but I want to! I have a knack for making other people cry by subtly guiding them to see their own foibles or hypocrisies. I tend to get frustrated when I have been working somewhere for awhile and I reach a place where I’m not learning anything new, or perceive that others are in the way of letting me freely pursue “my work.”

All of the items in the preceding paragraph are what a 12-step program might call “character flaws” and we all have them. They are things I know better about myself now that I’m older and into which I have worked to gain insight. I’ve encountered them especially when things in my life caused me to crash and burn, and I have to pick up the pieces and ask why that happened. I do really try to make less people cry these days! I try to stay conscious of my character defects. I know I have no more and no less of them than anyone else. And I also know that when anyone takes a job, both parts of them walk in the door. So, the resume game is one we all know how to play, and there will always be, with each person, as Paul Harvey used to say, “The rest of the story.”1

And, of course, the same is true on the other side of the hiring coin. I’ve also written and edited job descriptions so I know how these read, too. They read pretty much like a dating profile list of the qualities of the Perfect Mate. We want someone who is “dynamic,” a “team player,” but “able to innovate independently,” while “upholding the utmost professionalism.” To take a typical teaching job description as an example, there are a number of elements that won’t be on the list of desirable traits for a candidate. Things like: We need you to be willing to do some straight-up babysitting. Or: You will be consistently asked to do more with less resources and you’ll have to figure out how to respond when you get this pressure again and again. You’ll also feel pressure to present yourself to parents as an academic pied piper who will cherish their little darlings, but also Prepare them for College and the Real World, and understand, cherish, and challenge them too. There will be kids that you plain don’t like or who don’t like you, for one reason or another… and that will nearly always mean you really don’t like their parents… and those are the parents that are going to be calling you. You definitely won’t be told that you’ll have to work in relative isolation, surrounded by huge groups of kids day after day while longing for adult interaction and reciprocated appreciation for the creative work you're pouring in every day. These are all realities I had to experience and wrestle with myself, so I know of what I speak.

What can be done about this masquerade that we all participate in? Sites like LinkedIn have only escalated the gilded falsehood of resumes and roles that need filling. It is a mannequin world of catch phrases and stilted disingenuity. Resumes and job descriptions are stand-ins for real relationships, and paper dolls behind which stand real people. And, of course, these days you may be hired for a job where you meet no one in person, or you may work in the gig economy of never-ending nearly anonymous interactions, which is basically like a perpetual Groundhog Day Interview that never ends.

At the boundary of exchange between the two sides of this negotiation is, of course, money. In the exact same way that money is a vehicle to force the world to give me what I want, an interview is a way to secure a pipeline to get some of that money. I understand now better than I ever have (not that I couldn’t still work to understand it more fully) that it has been ridiculously easy for me to achieve this compared to most others. My privilege as a white American male with good grades, a gregarious disposition, and plenty of social contacts has meant that I’ve never had to go to many job interviews to land a new position. I doubt that very many white women, or black and brown men or women, after sitting through interviews, were told afterward that their performance rivaled that of Jesus. (This also demonstrates how little people read about what Jesus was actually like. Jesus never “interviewed well” with those who could have set him on the path to easy street!)

We may have other motivations too. As I’ve shared before, I’ve always been quite idealistic about the work I’ve sought out, and therefore always underpaid. In that case, I see the motivation to be one of self-image. We think the role will make us something we want to become. But at the basic level, we are doing the resume/job description vaudeville show to secure a paycheck. What about after getting hired? Well, depending upon our personality types, we may be looking to leverage that pipeline to gain access to wider pipes (a promotion). Or, if our Other Resume is one that we know is likely to endanger our continued employment, perhaps we set about creating a secretive protection around it, so that none of our coworkers finds out about aspects of us that we want to hide. Or, we just try to keep our work and home lives completely separate. I’ve recently watched some episodes of the eerie TV show Severed, and I think that this is one of the dynamics that this psychodramatic thriller is exploring: the rift we drive into our psyches simply by going to “professional” work. I don’t fault any particular person for doing this dance. It’s a dance I know well, and have danced it myself. I am, however motivated to bring the two dancers back together.

If we stay in any job for awhile or attain a level of comfort, security or seniority, perhaps we master the task of “playing our work role” quite well. But then elements of our Other Self start to creep back in in unintended ways. In these situations we may exhibit much worse behavior than we would have otherwise because we have split ourselves in two to gain the position. We can’t come clean about the false pretenses that secured us the position and the role we’ve inhabited… but we also can’t hold the two halves of ourselves apart any longer. We may start to justify quite strange self-serving behavior with any number of narratives that excuse it within the framework of the role we continue to play at work. I’ve sat in many meetings where what is being said is not at all what is meant, but no one can break the veil to get real with each other about something we all on some level know is really going on.

In bygone times when work was more embodied and local, we couldn’t get away with this in the same way. People knew their neighbors well enough to know all (or at least several) sides of them. So, while there were certainly social taboos and rituals that had to be observed, much was understood back then that now is more shrouded by anonymity and non-stop job changes. We knew who was hitting their spouse… and who was being hit. We knew who was a heavy drinker and who was an incorrigible busybody. We knew about folks’ quirks and we knew how different people went about work. We saw people; we saw them at work, and we saw them at play. We often got to work and play together with the people we also lived with. Knowing these things, we naturally made judgments about how others lived their lives. Human beings will always watch each other and talk about each other, but back then there was more of us to see. Today we may pat ourselves on the back for how much of those old fashioned mannerisms and “small town gossip” that we’ve put behind us. But that gossip has just migrated to the water cooler and the parking lot, and because it’s only where we work, not where we also live and play, it is fractured and lopsided, less mature and more mean-spirited. Then when go home to our “other lives “ we watch fantasy personas in entertainment and politics on screens…. but these are even more false than a person at a job interview.

I don't want to give the impression that I’m romanticizing small town life. One would have to go very far back to find times when humans weren't putting on masks for each other in order to elevate their appearance. But the masks today are more fractured, more total, exceedingly shiny, more isolating, less convincing and more lifeless than they have ever been. I think this is why the TV show The Office makes us laugh, cringe, and cry all at the same time. In the show, people whose work and home personas are initially split to great comic effect, over time (and notice they all stick around long enough for this to happen) become much more real to each other and to us. Interestingly, the character of Michael Scott is one who has a terribly hard time with keeping any kind of firm boundary between his work and personal selves, which is what makes him so awkwardly endearing, so funny, and so cathartic for us to watch. And yet the sad fact is that we watch the people in The Office because we all know that the gulf between personas is real, and we know it's simultaneously silly, and over the course of a career, damaging to the soul.

Work that is good and real would let us be good and real, too. This much I know. And by “good” I mean the kind of good that an actual person can be, not the kind portrayed on a resume. Towns and villages once formed not through a hiring process but through a natural process of migration and settling and building families. This means that if you had a nasty neighbor you couldn’t stand, you couldn’t fire them. You just had to deal with them…so, you’d talk about them behind their back at the weekly bridge game with trusted friends to let off some steam. Was this so bad? Perhaps it served its purpose. It gave you the release you needed to keep wearing down your own sharp corners against your neighbor’s at your next encounter.

If we were able to settle in and let down our guard enough for folks to see more of us, and if we didn’t let our addiction to money and our gilded personas interfere with the real work of forming real, messy relationships–relationships to our work, relationships to people and materials, and relationship to ourselves–then work itself could become a healing force, a way that someone with character flaws (aka: Everybody!) could work them out in community. What a vision! Does it seem counterintuitive that work could be a healing force in our lives? Much more often we think of work as that which “takes away” from what we “really want to do,” which is some kind of dream of leisure. But as I’ve already made clear in lots of other writing, I believe that we are made for good work that asks for our whole selves to show up. If we had work like that we would not have to spend time dreaming of what we were going to finally get to do when we “come into our own”, or when we retire and live the life we’ve always wanted to live.

In the fake world of Human Resources (a terrible name that demonstrates perfectly what I’m discussing here!), forming real relationships is actively discouraged while preening our projected image is lauded. I won't go into it deeply now, but I will say that I see many crystal clear connections between this phenomenon, and materialism. If we are free to think of the world only in terms of idols such as electrons, forces, energy, etc, then it follows that we are equally free to think about ourselves, and to make ourselves, whatever we want to be. We are also free to make the world whatever we want it to be, without any thought to relationship nor the consequences for others. Norman Vincent Peale may have brought such thinking to a kind of pinnacle with his book “The Power of Positive Thinking”… and now we have a president (who was raised attending Rev. Peale’s church), acting out this very psychosis in front of our eyes. A true believer in professionalism and careerism is one who thinks that if they simply want it badly enough and play the role in an entirely dedicated way, they will achieve “success”. Such a person is a certain kind of fundamentalist, forcing themselves into a role, in order to force the world to respond in kind, and then pretending that both are real.

Wanting as I do to step out of this straightjacket of pseudonymic illusion, I have already written quite a lot about how one can personally seek freedom from what may feel like the inevitability of never being one’s whole self. But I also want to ask, how could conditions be created where folks wouldn’t have to work so hard just to be a little more real with each other?

Colleges and Universities have a solution to this called tenure. Basically, once you’ve proven yourself and your work to your colleagues, you are given guarantees that you can “be your real self” without fear of censorship or reprisal or loss of employment. In the academic setting this is felt to be important in service of academic honesty and true scholarship. But why wouldn’t honesty be valued in every work setting? And of course, we all know that tenure is being offered to less and less professors, in favor of lowly piecemeal adjuncts, like me! The reason is precisely money pressures.

Apprenticeship, too, holds promise in this realm, where you bring someone in to work under the tutelage of an accomplished worker. They must start at the beginning and offer service in return for learning, and one gives it a good long trial period before one makes a more lasting commitment. Both apprentice and master have freedom to continue the relationship, or end it and move on. This, of course, means that there need to be people who have worked at something worth learning long enough to master it, which is much harder to find these days.

Short of other models for work, what could help make those resumes and job descriptions a little less fake? Imagine if we all included a section of our resumes called “Character Flaws” and listed them! I recently looked at a job description of a very idealistic initiative that I admire from afar, but with which I haven’t worked directly. They included language that made me take notice:

“XXXXXXXX strives to cultivate a work environment that is meaning-centered, stimulating, joyous, collaborative, and humane. All staff members participate actively in decision making and we work to create a culture of peer mentorship, affirmation, and mutual support. The staff works together closely and flexibly to ensure that each member has the paid time off for illness, family, or vacation that they need to thrive.”

I find these inspiring words, and I yearn to see more of this in people’s work lives in practice. The proof, however, is in the daily living of it, not in the words. And even what is written above has the shiny feel of something aspirational, which could lead to play acting. I bet that the executive offices of Google and Uber have similar language, because langage, as we know, is cheap these days.

While I have inklings, I don’t have formulaic answers to the question I ask above, about how we can start to drop the pretense. I don’t think there are formulas. Formulas and models are part of the problem, do you see? But I ask myself the question, often. What many of the above examples have in common is what is called “greater transparency” these days, but I think it goes well beyond that. We need to come out of hiding and let ourselves be seen.

All of this helps me understand why Wendell Berry wrote a collection of poems entitled The Country of Marriage, a title which puzzled me for a long time, but I think I get it now. Everything I've been discussing here—making longer term commitments, owning and accepting our character flaws and those of others, being willing to be seen for who we are—these are all exactly the hallmarks of what I understand it could mean to be married. Sadly, affected as it is by our Other Lives in the Marketplace, for many of us marriage itself has come under the influence of fantasy and masquerade, and it becomes harder to see why I should stick with my spouse if I could just get an upgrade that matches who I dream I want to be. Or I think of my work persona as “the real Me,” and so my married self becomes all the leftover qualities that I hide. The same logic applies when we don’t bother to get to know our neighbors, because we will be moving again soon anyways, or we don’t join a church or other social organization, because we prefer meetings that don’t require us to reveal too much, or anything at all. Of course, many churches and social organizations these days have requirements that you wear other masks, such as masks of imaginary uniform belief.

Without settledness, without quirkiness, without messy realness and commitment to extended relationship—and with the money compulsion still driving the exchange—we are going to have to swim against the prevailing tide to find wholeness. As we can, we should try to awkwardly step out from behind our resumes and professional roles, and wave “Hey” to each other. Hey, I’m here, and you are too. Look at us, a coupla human beings, whole and flawed and messy and real.2

We need to find ways to entice (not compel) people to stick around to do real work with others and, over time, get real with each other. With vulnerability and acceptance, especially acceptance of the messiness of human encounter and the beautiful messiness of real human work, we could drop the masks and revel in the joy and awkwardness of seeing and being seen, even if we aren’t nearly as shiny as we thought we were. Real work is real relationship, and real relationship is what we were made for.

Photo by Llanydd Lloyd on Unsplash

What the hell is going on here?
Took my living and you took my friends
This is a time-bomb and it can happen anywhere
It could happen right here
It could happen to you too

What if it was in your backyard?
What if it was your way of life?
I bet you'd go crazy too
I bet you'd lose your mind too

A lot of people are on the edge
Found the edge a long time ago
You wanna see real anger
You wanna see your sorrow
But the good thing is
We've got to bring the love
And we can't let go and we can't give up

Great Lake Swimmers “Ballad of a Fisherman’s Wife” (Listen to the song here)

I hear and see a lot of distress from people who are plugged into the news cycles. Mostly, and as much as I am able, I am not. While I have absolutely nothing to say about the actual content of the national news, I find I have plenty of observations about the effect it is having. Many people in the circles I most often swim in are very agitated and very worried. Every day, there seem to be portents that point to the rise of a fascist regime, or the collapse of social safety nets that (kind of, not really) supported the most vulnerable people in our country. Just three weeks ago I was supposed to be focusing my worry and attention on the wildfires in California, and now I'm supposed to worry about the mass layoffs of government workers and the way in which Russia’s dictator may soon become ours as well. I am entirely unclear how my worrying helps any of these situations, but that's the clear message I'm getting from lots of directions.

I don't mean to make light of these things, nor am I denying that behind some of the stories there is real human suffering or signs of real fascism rising. I also don’t intend any judgment of any other person and how we each choose to deal with this onslaught. As with everything I write, I’m writing about what I see as much to tell myself as to tell you. I am trying to point out that the stories that come to us by way of invading our minds and hearts through insidious media streaming are causing real damage and have for a long time. With the rise of screens everywhere, doom and woe are ready to leap into your soul through your eyes at any moment that you glance at a device.

I think it's entirely possible, given the decay of our social consensus and the mass addiction to our chosen media sources that pretend to supply us with “facts”, that we are in for some hard times. On the other hand, maybe not. There is really no way to tell and I admit that can feel scary, since many of us also use the news to comfort us that “Everything is OK”, which is just as false. This does not mean that I am not prepared to join the protest, or even civil disobedience when the situation seems to call for it. But I question the fraught emotional landscape that currently prevails, and has prevailed for my entire life, only increasing in intensity. I've previously written about the fact that if the media has you glued to their streaming fear-and-indignation supply, then they've got you right where they want you. They've got you equally pinned if you are cheering for the events they are portraying; or if you are watching and breathing sighs of relief because “the worst hasn’t happened…yet”. As long as they keep you watching, they’ve got you. This is why the news outlets, despite whether they seem to support or oppose him, salivate over our current president. He's the most entertaining fool we've had yet. He keeps everyone on both sides jonesing for more. The third way between these dualistic extremes, of course, is to just stop watching and try to direct your attention to real things. Real things are those that you can have affection for and relationship with. This is why I see such genius when Jesus tells us to focus our life and faith practices on our neighbors, because it's only our neighbors that are really real. (My definition of “neighbors” is the same as Wendell Berry’s: the people, animals, trees, grasses, air, waters, and other living (and dying), beings that you rub shoulders with every day, who you depend on, and who depend on you. In other words, all of God’s creatures in your neighborhood). The State and the Corporation will never be as real as our neighbors. But they will never stop trying to convince us that our attention and fears and worries should be trained on them.

In addition to being distraught, many people also seem angry. Some seem vengefully angry, as they gleefully dismantle the government (or appear to do so on the news) and look forward to dancing on its corpse (they will, of course, keep all the elements of government that allow them and their rich friends to continue to receive corporate welfare from all of us). On the other side, people are also angry, but in their case, the anger takes the form of calls to Resist and Defend and Protect the Most Vulnerable. One wonders, however, why we weren't motivated to do these things two months ago. We have had massive poverty and increasing numbers of vulnerable people for many decades in our country and world, under many presidents. I would point to Matthew Desmond's book Poverty By America and simply say, if someone has so clearly demonstrated the simple things we need to do to change policy so that the poor, both urban and rural, are not a defacto slave class from which we all leech, then why haven’t we started that work long ago? Why is there now a crisis? And what can we actually accomplish when we are in crisis mode?

The answer, of course, is we can accomplish nothing when we are running around either destructively or hand-wringingly angry. The current administration knows this, and this is why they keep taking “actions,” so we will keep throwing our hands in the air and crying “the fascists are coming” or “death to the Deep State”.

I've long understood that we have a society that is addicted to apocalyptic visions. It explains all the zombie and dystopian movies, of course. This is why when progressives obsess about the Climate Change Disaster, I find their rhetoric remarkably similar to that of fundamentalist Christians and others on the right who are focused on the Rapture and end times. We really do need to be careful. If we continue to imagine the destruction of the world, as most of us who are addicted to the news cycles and/or fundamentalist ideology are almost constantly doing, we just might bring it about.

And this brings me back to anger, and to this beautiful song. I submit that, unless we are actually powerless in a way similar to how the poor are, we simply don't understand what real anger feels like any more, because we've substituted in its place a prideful and reckless or despairing and anxiety-driven futurism for the real thing. Real anger wells up when something actually happens to us or our loved ones…not when we are imagining something happening.

Anthony Dekker of Great Lake Swimmers wrote the lyrics to the above song upon hearing about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. He listened to a woman who lived there spill out her raw anger to a news reporter. The title and lyrics tell it all: she is a fisherman’s wife, and because of the “regrettable accident”, their already extremely tenuous existence is now completely destroyed. They had very little, but they loved it. And now they have nothing.

Look at the lyrics of that song again, and perhaps listen to it. Rather than voyeuristically looking into the life of a stranger in distress (as we do all the time on the news to feed our addiction to apocalyptic visions) try to imagine, please; try to imagine being in her place, imagine with your heart: Can you feel the anguish this woman carries, as she pours out her enraged soul to whomever is listening? She’s been pushed to the absolute brink, and right off the edge. Her husband’s livelihood has been wiped away by the greed and carelessness of a humongous oil company. She was powerless to prevent it, and she has no way to keep it from happening again in the future. This is the first and the last thing, it is the only thing. She has had it. She is furious.

Anger is when you are pushed over the edge, when a real boundary has been crossed. Anger in its right role might protect us and those we care about, although in the case of the fisherman’s wife the anger is about what she has already lost and cannot now protect. This immediately gives the lie to the false fantasy that feeds our exploitative armaments industry, that we could ever truly protect ourselves from harm through the industrial violence of bombs, drones, missiles and guns; or that we will be able to protect our exploitative way of life through walls or tariffs (or “free trade” which we all understand now just means forcing our way into new markets for cheap workers). All of these things will only make us responsible for ruining countless other lives as we insulate ourselves from feeling anything real at all. Hot or cold, war is a zero sum game that grows from fear of the Other.

Much like what I wrote about Fear awhile back, I see Anger in our popular discourse being harnessed and mined and twisted into a Death Wish, on both sides. If we are honest, many of us caught up in both Left and Right secretly (or not so secretly) are desiring the destruction of the world, because at least then we will have been proved right about all of our worries.

This is not true anger. True anger, as the song beautifully expresses, flows from love, and when the anger has passed (because we can't keep up true anger for very long; by its very nature it is a release)...more love flows from it. This is because real anger proves to us what is really important, so important that we are entirely lost without it.

And that is why I can’t muster a single ounce of indignation or real anger toward the current President and his idiotic antics. He is signing pieces of paper and making waves simply to draw attention, poke the bear and feed the beast. And the beast is lapping it up, and we are all part of that beast. If you add on top of that our addiction to the usury money economy to this mix, the beast is roaring with insatiable hunger.

It’s possible, reading this, that you might be getting angry at me right now. How can you not care about what's clearly going on, you might say? And I admit, I fear that this post will be misunderstood to mean that I’m advising we all put our heads in the sand. I don't want to have my head in the sand, I really don’t. But I also don’t want to have my mind and heart coerced and co-opted, which we all now understand is exactly what the internet has been designed to do. I've studied the deep illness that I see in our nation and world, and in me, for a long time, and I try to write about aspects of it here, with compassion for myself and others. Although I don’t understand what is actually happening in the highest echelons (and neither, I contend, does anyone else, not even the people who are there) , I've seen it grow and fester under every president I've ever lived through, Democrat and Republican. If this current administration is proving anything to us, it is that we've allowed the government and the media to be a stand-in for our real lives for far too long. We have allowed actors and buffoons to entertain and placate us, to rev us up over and over again so that We, the Good Guys can keep fighting against Them, the Bad Guys, so that the Good Guys can once again control the levers of power. But all the while both sides are always enlarging the imagined divide, always keeping us ever more plugged in, always driving us to futilely wish that someday, what we see on the screen will be cathartic victory over the Devil.

Real anger transforms. It is a boundary that says What the Hell? and then lets loose. It is a release. Whatever is building up in our society is not true anger, it is more like obsessive distancing, non-stop Othering. It is war. Like all addictions, it involves real destruction both without and within, and we’d better find a path to sobriety to avoid that. The longer we all plug into the news circus, the more passive and controllable and combustible we will become. Frenzied activity is not the antidote for passivity. We will get more January Sixths, and it doesn’t matter what side perpetrates it. It will do no good. Unlike real anger, it will create more waves of incoherence. . . and then, in the aftermath, nothing new. No recognition, no love.

The time may come for real anger. So, I say to myself regularly, and I also suggest to you: Stay connected to your neighborhoods and your neighbors. Try to unplug . . .and then when you get pulled in, try again. Stop worrying for worrying’s sake about an imagined disaster or hoping for an imagined Better World. These are both panaceas and drugs. The way to prepare for the entirely uncertain future is simply to be doing what we should have been doing all along. If we unplug and use our love and anger to get to work learning how to live with each other, without the news cycles and constant consuming, we might even prevent an apocalypse. Let's stop playing right into the hands of the media monster that would prefer to keep us drugged up and strung out, so we have nothing to draw from when it's time to be really pissed off.

My prayer is: Keep calm everybody, but don't just carry on. Protect your anger. Don’t continue to listen to the comedians or pundits that make you feel like at least the people who tune in with you to watch your chosen person are sane. Don’t look at memes. Don’t allow yourself to think you actually understand any of it better than anyone else. Don’t let your heart get pulled into either pride or despair. Instead, double down on loving everything and everyone you have that is real: your family, your yards or other patches of ground in your care, your parks, your neighbors, your churches, your faith practices, your schools, and hopefully, your work. Fill your imagination with visions of a good life lived in communion with your neighbors, because there is no other life. Love it all every day, which will be its own reward. And also, love it so that when outside forces, whatever their party affiliation, try to take it from you and your neighbors, or twist it for some Cause, you will get angry enough to say No!! In saying No, you will either find a way to subvert and repel them, or you will go down with the ship. Either way your heart will be whole. Then even more love can flow. We'd better love our real neighbors fiercely, more than any Cause, no matter how we all voted, or didn’t vote at all. The dissolution of the illusion that is happening in government and corporate spectacles and debacles can be a wake up call to us all that, as long as we keep watching and feeding it, it’s never going to stop. There never was any chance of Hope & Change or Making Anything Great at the levels of government nor industry nor finance. We have always had the power to make our own lives, but only in the context of that which we love. If we learn to Love our Real Lives and Our Neighbors Again (try putting that on a hat), we will know when to get really angry, because we will know what we really love.

PS. I want to say that this post mostly amounts to a restatement of the ideas of Wendell Berry, and to a lesser extent, Charles Eisenstein, which I’ve written about many times before. I owe so much to them both for helping me climb out of my addictions. As I said above, this post is really me asking myself, “Is it still true, even in these conditions?” Yes, it is.

PPS. Here’s how the song ends,accompanied by an awesome banjo solo, I might add (I hope this makes you want to listen to it):

You better hurry up and know it, I'm gonna love you till the end of the line.
You better hurry up and know it, I'm gonna love you till the end of the line.
You better hurry up and know it, I'm gonna love you till the end of the line.

This an old postcard photo of the village of Le-Chambon-sur-Lignon, which is profiled in the book The Banality of Good and Evil, a book I read in seminary and which has been another inspiration for this post. By the time World War II was over, the collective efforts of the people in Le Chambon had sheltered nearly 5000 Jews and other refugees from the Nazis and the French Vichy government. Asked afterward why they did so, no one was able to really explain it other than by saying “it was the right thing to do.” Read more about that here.

I recently wrote about the “pseudo-phenomenal entity” the electron. That’s an Owen Barfield term that I like a lot. It denotes an abstract concept coming from reductionist science that has become so ingrained in our consciousness that we treat it as if it were a real thing. Barfield also calls these “idols,” and I think this term is also right on the money.

For the last several years on this Substack, one of the main themes that I’ve explored, and hope to keep exploring, is my support for the stance that I’ve called “anti-materialism”. This is a concept I borrowed and adapted from Ibram X Kendi, who writes about anti-racism. Wendell Berry has a similar approach that he calls “Contrariness,” and he has a great poem about it. Inspired by the “anti-” approach, I’ve made some good headway shedding my own materialistic baggage that I picked up simply by being part of our society today. We are addicted to materialistic idols, deeply so, and attempts to loosen one’s attachment to these idols takes effort, some amount of bravery, and a willingness to “go out on a limb.” That is what, in my own way, I’m trying to do with my writings about this subject here. As a lover of science and a science teacher for 20+ years, it’s important to me on many levels. Here are a few of those levels: First, I don’t want to be teaching idolatrous falsehoods to my students! Second, I don’t want to be tied to idols that prevent me from knowing nature more fully. Thirdly, the joy one can receive from shedding these idols and attaining deeper levels of knowledge can be wonderful.

Now, in this post, I feel I must step tentatively and briefly into popular culture, because in the same week I was teaching electricity and magnetism, I became aware of a podcast that is sweeping the country and was briefly number one on the list. It is really remarkable, again on a number of levels. I don’t like to spend much time in the popular conversation for all the reasons I just stated above, but I couldn’t ignore this one. I’m speaking about The Telepathy Tapes podcast.

In this podcast the host, Ky Dickens, takes us through a documentary journey as Ky explores the claims of a very particular and special group of people and their caregivers and loved ones: those are nonverbal people, most of whom have an autism diagnosis. Ky is a masterful storyteller, and she is telling her story for the “open-minded skeptics” among us. For this reason, she begins the ten-episode podcast from the humble beginnings of her own personal curiosity and skepticism. She takes us through her first contacts in the world of non-speakers. We meet a researcher, Dr. Dianne Powell, and Ky and Dr. Powell perform some informal “telepathy tests” with several non-verbal people and their parents or caregivers. (Dr Powell has done much more formal tests with the same folks, in her quest to establish her research as rigorous, repeatable science.) The stories and the people have great personal interest and warmth, and I found myself carried along by Ky’s narration and description interlaced with clips from interviews and tests with the folks involved. Most of the nonverbal people are children or young adults, and all have learned to communicate through a letterboard. This is simply a board with the letters of the alphabet and the Arabic numerals, so the user can point or tap each letter to spell words.

The story of the letterboards alone is riveting: the innovative use of them, the detractors who have criticized and banned their use, and the raging debate about whether a nonverbal autistic person is even “in there” in any way beyond that of a permanently immature child, and therefore whether one can “believe” that what they tap on the letterboard are their own words (rather than, as the detractors say, the words of the ones holding the letterboards). But this is only the most basic level. In test after test, Ky describes how she and the others she enlists to help her construct, administer and record them, are experiencing that these special people are able to…read minds! They are able to “see” long numbers, words, entire sentences and images that their parent or caregiver sees, but which they do not. And they are able to do this nearly 100% of the time.

I really encourage everyone who’s interest is at all stirred by this to give it a listen. It can bring up all kinds of emotional reactions, from disbelief, to amazement, to skepticism and suspicion, to laughter and warm fuzzy feelings. My wife is currently listening to it, and, while she says she is open to the possibility of what’s being presented, she also says her “charlatan radar” is sometimes on high alert when she listens to it. She is turned off by the repetitive theme of Ky saying things like, “Now, I know it sounds crazy, and I didn’t believe it myself, but, this really happened!” or, “My cameraman was a strict materialist and skeptic, but he can’t deny what he saw happen with his own eyes.” etc. etc.

I find this podcast so fascinating, on so many levels. Setting aside the question of whether “I believe it” (generally speaking, I do), or whether they are somehow conspiring to hoodwink the world (I don’t think they are), it’s the experience of listening to this story being told, and one’s reaction to it, that deeply draws me to examine it further. I can only recommend warmly and strongly that you give it a try, and pay attention to your reactions as you listen to each episode.

Episode 6 is an important pause from the excellent storytelling. Ky spends time introducing the listeners to the thinking behind rejecting or revising materialism as a flawed and limited model. It’s no surprise that Rupert Sheldrake features strongly in this episode, and his contributions as one of the few well-known anti-materialism rock stars out there are solid and predictable. If you’ve never been exposed to Rupert Sheldrake, this is a great way to get a taste of his approach. And, in general, I found myself (mostly) cheering for this very concise presentation of some of the fault lines in materialistic thinking. Ky did quite a good job representing some of the very same anti-materialistic approaches that I’ve been trying to build and advocate for here. However…there is one part of Episode 6 that really caught my ear and caused me to start to argue with what was being presented. Arguing, of course, is a sign that someone else is very close to where you are in your own thinking, and you want to discuss the fine points. In other words, arguing means we almost (but don’t quite) agree. Keep that in mind next time you witness a couple folks (or political parties) verbally duking it out with each other. They mostly agree!

At about minute 28:00 Ky introduces us to Dean Radin, head of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. Dr. Radin says,

One way of thinking about a scientific model of reality is in the form of a pyramid. So most scientists would say that the bottom of the pyramid, the thing on which everything rests is physics, and the next level up is chemistry, and the next thing is biology, and the next thing up from that is, maybe, psychology, and somewhere near the tippy top of this pyramid is awareness. Where the awareness comes from is a big mystery, but nevertheless, that’s generally the way that many scientists will think about the nature of reality. . . .

I really appreciate Dr. Radin bringing up this “pyramid”. All my life this pyramid has been implied and sometimes explicitly taught, and it’s this hierarchy that is the heart of the materialistic paradigm. It is this very edifice that I, too, in my own way, am taking playful pot shots at any way I can to show folks that this pyramid at the heart of science today… is not at all scientific! It lies behind and beneath our science, and colors everything we do, what we choose to do, and how we do it. Rupert Sheldrake calls this pyramid “scientism,” the dogmatic beliefs that lie behind our science today. This pyramid is why so many people feel like they have to choose between believing in telepathy and believing in “reality.” This pyramid is the reason why so many people believe they “have to believe” in electrons and atoms, and squash their dissatisfaction with the way in which these physical models make us feel like something really big is missing, and that a universe of nothing but random particles is flat, distant and cold.

Dr Radin agrees that something really big is missing. That thing for him is: consciousness. Later in the same episode, they cut back to him and this is where my ears perked up. He surprised me when he basically affirmed that the pyramid is correct, but needs just one correction:

He says this:

Materialism works really good…we’re not going to throw away the textbooks. But because it doesn't account for experience we need something a little bit broader. . . . the pyramid is pretty close to correct, except it’s not consciousness at the top, [Ky jumps in here and says: “It’s at the bottom”]. The pyramid of reality is resting on awareness. If that were true, it suggests everything is mental.

This is where I found myself groaning, “Nooooo! Don’t stop there. Take it further!” I don’t know anything about Dr Radin and the Institute for Noetic Sciences. However, judging just by the term “Noetic”, I suppose it’s not surprising that he places consciousness at the base, but leaves everything else undisturbed. This doesn’t go nearly far enough. Deciding that the basis of the universe is consciousness alone, to me, is just as one-sided as deciding that the universe is only atoms and energy. Dr. Radin is preserving materialism, but inserting consciousness as a new idol anterior to the idols which he is not interested in disturbing.

What is the alternative? I’ve been working for several years now with the book The Plant Between Sun and Earth, published in the 1950’s and updated in the 1980’s. Here is what George Adams and Olive Whicher have to say about the very same pyramid in that book (the language is quite different, but see if you can also perceive the hierarchy in the description):

A striving to perceive the phenomena of life through the whole, rather than through the part, receives no help from the ancient, Euclidean, finite geometry inherited from the past. This is why there is a tendency in biology to borrow basic ideas from physics, for though in general the old conception of space is adequate for the understanding of organic matter, it is so only to a certain limit today. It may be said that the atomic physicist allows himself greater ideal freedom than the biologist. This dependence upon physics has undoubtedly been a hindrance to the proper development of biology. It has even been said that while biology in its effort to be an exact science has taken the basis of its ideas from physics, in future the laws of physics would reveal themselves to be special cases of the more universal biological laws awaiting discovery in the future.” (my italicized emphasis)

Do you see what is being suggested here? I’m not sure whether this quotation is going to hit you like it hit me. But when I first read it, hit me it did, like a ton of bricks . . .or maybe “like a big warm bear hug” is a more appropriate image. This excellent book, which takes you on a beautiful journey through plant forms and projective geometry, is an answer to Dr. Radin’s pyramid. In other words, I think Dr. Radin should have been much more bold and turned the pyramid upside down entirely. Dr Radin’s universe (and ours) could be a conscious, alive universe that brings about a multitude of living forms, living forms that manifest physically, yes, but which do not depend on physicality for their coming-into-being. This is very different than saying that everything is mental. The wholistic approach says rather that everything is everything, and nothing gets left out; not consciousness, not living processes, not emotions, not experience, and there is no reducing it to “all mental,” or “all particles”. It is irreducible, and it begins with our own human experience. An inverted pyramid would have the human being at the inverted vertex, raying out and rising up into the entire living, breathing, conscious universe.

Thinking the pyramid upside down has huge consequences. Our obsession with particles, and with matter, drifts away in importance, or is understood only as a curiosity or an echo of the total reality, not fundamental to the basis of our understanding. Rather, we start to see a continuity both up and down in our picture of the universe. One of the saddest things about the materialistic worldview is that it has placed us in our imaginations into a cold, dead, vast nothingness that operates only upon random interactions, without agency and without meaning. No wonder so many people find it depressing, or turn to fundamentalist religion to counter it. However, a world that is integrated would take into account that, as I’ve written about before, our world is self-contained, whole, living and cyclically renewing, and yes, conscious. Rudolf Steiner said once quite openly that everything is conscious, but that the consciousness of things like stones was simply a sleepy consciousness. See if you can get in touch with the sleepy consciousness of the stones, or with the radiating consciousness of the Sun. See if you can feel just how different an inverted pyramid would really be.

I hope this makes it clear that whether any particular person “believes” that the Telepathy Tapes are real or not is not based on logic. It is based on what Barfield calls “collective representations,” agreement we are unconsciously making with each other about our imaginations of what is real. Constrained as we are by our materialistic pyramid, it seems like a huge stretch to accept a new data point like special people that have non localized minds that can see into other minds. Listening to it and dealing with my own skepticism, I found myself internet searching and looking into Ky, and into Dr. Radin and Dr. Powell. I wanted to know if the internet had dirt that proved them to be obviously loony before I went including them in this post. And why do we do things like that? Not because we want to know if it’s true, but because we don’t want to be labeled loons ourselves. Yet if enough of us begin to really experience the living conscious, connected universe, we soon won’t have to check credentials like this, because it won’t be considered fringe, and more and more people will begin to trust their actual experience.

The podcast mentions “the gatekeepers”, those that have kept telepathy research marginalized for 60 years now, and surely these same gatekeepers will be at work discrediting the show. One professor of biology at McGill University has already written a detracting piece (and Dr. Powell has written a responding rebuttal).

My wife is a minister, and so as you might imagine, she’s actually quite practised and comfortable with speaking about transcendental and miraculous things. But she’s married to me, and I’m a science guy… and so I think we have found ourselves surprised to be talking about this show with wonder, curiosity and a fair bit of credulity. It has provided a nice link between her world and mine, and stimulated some good “what if?” conversation. What if there are special humans who have access to a great sea of consciousness? I once again encourage you to listen to the show and ask yourself these What If questions. The show takes us well beyond mind reading of loved ones to things like “the Hill,” a place where telepathic people can meet together, independent of spatial separation; and the Akashic Record, a background of consciousness created by the activity of humans through history, accessible to certain persons, like a kind of World Library where one can go to learn the wisdom of the ages. Rudolf Steiner wrote about accessing the Akashic Record quite often.

Actually, I think the majority of people in their secret hearts have had experiences that, if they felt free to do so, they might call telepathy, even if only in childhood. Feelings of being intertwined emotionally, mentally, or spiritually to other people (or to nature) are, of course, pretty much universal when we are children. Waldorf pedagogy is built on the assumption that young children swim in a non localized sea of collective consciousness, including the spiritual world out of which we each come. I bet plenty of people talk about it in the privacy of their homes and families. I even suspect that many powerful people, even those that are gatekeepers for materialistic orthodoxy, also secretly harbor questions or wonderings about these things. So who, exactly, is invested in keeping this pyramid supreme? I don’t intend to imply a conspiracy here, but why, oh why, is it even a big deal to admit that the reports of these folks are believable, and that telepathy is real? Inside the pyramid of materialism, in the throne room, there sits… really nobody at all (maybe the ghosts of Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon, but I bet they would even tire of it). I see this podcast as a sign that the facade of materialism may really be ready to crumble in a more noticeable way. I welcome it. But let’s not get too hooked on mind and let go of life and matter. That becomes spiritualism, which isn’t really different from materialism. We need to hold it all together: the living universe, the conscious universe, the physical universe, and the universe of our own interconnected bodies, minds and hearts.

P.S. Here is a poem I wrote inspired by The Plant Between Sun and Earth

I’m teaching science at the middle school level again for a couple weeks, currently immersed in lots of studies of electricity and magnetism. I like teaching this subject very much (is there a subject in science I don’t like teaching? Ummm… nope!), and I’m being reminded right now of persistent “growing edge” questions that, while I don’t bring them up in class (it would complicate the picture too much for these budding scientific investigators), I am often dwelling on them “in the background.”

Right now, one of the things I’m thinking about is electrons. When you are teaching about electricity, how and when should you bring up electrons? How should we think about electrons? What is an electron, really?

This is definitely a science-y post, to an extent. But what I want to do is try to only glance at the science along the way of asking what to me are higher level questions, questions that arise while witnessing the narrative bias we have in thinking about and teaching things like electricity.

The electron is something that most adults have some awareness of, of course, through their schooling or popular science. I bet many of us had to learn the Bohr model of the atom, in which we imagine electrons, like moons, whiz around the central protons and neutrons. If you took chemistry, too, you might have calculated the orbital position of valence electrons in certain elements, or balancing chemical equations by counting electrons. This way of thinking leads to the theory behind the arrangement of elements in the periodic table, which I bet most of us have been exposed to. Good and well enough, but again, what is an electron, anyway?

If you have even more scientific familiarity, you may know something about J.J. Thompson’s cathode ray tube experiments in which he, for the first time, established a charge-to-mass ratio for the electron (Thompson called it “radiant matter”). Or you may have heard about Millikan’s experiments with very fine mists of oil droplets in a vacuum chamber suspended between charged plates, in which the first estimates of the electron’s mass were made. Finally, perhaps you’ve heard that Albert Einstein did not win the Nobel prize for his famous theory of relativity, but for his much less-well-known theoretical prediction of the photoelectric effect, in which red light that shines at an electrically charged plate causes it to lose charge. The explanation of this experiment often involves imagining light as particles (photons) colliding with the electrons (also imagined as particles) and “freeing them” from the charged plate. In the popular understanding of this experiment, both light and electricity are imagined as billiard balls pinging each other. Or, they are imagined as “quanta” (little packages) of energy exchange or delivery that can affect each other (don’t get me started on what energy is!)

It doesn’t really matter how much of this you’ve heard of. But, you’ve probably heard of some of it. And it leads to the interesting (to me) question: do all of these experiments and measurements amount to the conclusion that the electron is “real”? And, stepping back one more level, we can ask: “How do we figure out what’s real, anyway?”

Questions like these fascinate me, and I know that they don’t interest everyone the same amount. Yet, I believe they are crucially important, because if it is naively taken for granted that electrons are really real, independent of our experiments, notions and thoughts about them, then we risk becoming fundamentalist in our thinking. We risk digging ever deeper into electron-worship and therefore cutting ourselves off from the full phenomena of electricity.

According to the theory, electrons have a “resting mass” of 9.109 X 10^-31 kilograms. So, take a kilogram, and divide it by ten 31 times in a row. This is an impossibly small number, never measurable by any physical means. And this is by design, since the electron itself is supposed to be a “building block” of matter, so what physical scale could measure this value? This value is an “ideal” value based on experiments, theory, and to make the equations work that predict the behavior of materials in experimental conditions. Oh, yes, and also, according to the theory, electrons never rest, so it is doubly an ideal number.

In fact, electrons are understood to be constantly in motion, and due to their impossible small size and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, by definition one can never know the exact position of an electron, ever. So, go back to that Bohr model of the atom and the electrons like little moons and please admit to yourself that this is a terribly, ridiculously flawed model. There are no moons, they are not orbiting, and even if they were, we can’t ever witness or locate a single one. More nuanced understandings of electrons imagine them as “probability distributions” of their most likely locations. These are often referred to as electron “clouds”. So, no more moons, but clouds. Things are getting much fuzzier, right? OK, but the cloud is really a real thing, isn’t it? There is something there, an imaginary particle that carries a miniscule bit of mass and charge… isn’t there? Or, are we going to be forced to admit that quantities like mass and charge, while measurable, do not entirely explain the mystery of electricity, and never will?

Moons, clouds, billiard balls, building blocks, packets of delivered energy . . .obviously these are analogies to things we experience in the physical, sense world. Is it really our goal to transfer these experiences naively to the always mysterious world of the unseeable, so that we can thereby demystify it, and pretend it’s just like our familiar world? Why are we so motivated to to do this, anyway? It certainly has to do with the desire to control. If we can make a model, no matter how obviously oversimplified, then perform experiments that demonstrate predictable results (a measure of control), then we say, we have “understood it.” But this notion of understanding is so impoverished from more time-tested notions of understanding, one has to ask, what are we gaining by pretending that electrons are like moons, balls, or clouds? And, what are we losing?

Here is one thing we are losing. So many of us are so far down the rabbit hole of electron worship, that it’s commonplace for people “who know something about science” to say that when you touch something, like a table, with your hand, it is really only the electrons in your hand repelling the electrons in the table. This is so ridiculous, to have inserted the abstraction of electrons between my own obvious sense of touch, I often wonder why we teach such gobbledygook. We are literally being asked to trust and believe in an imaginary particle over what we can really touch. No wonder so many people give up on science at a young age . . .

So, if we want to think of the electron as a “real thing,” we are really stretching our notions of what a “thing” is in the first place. And here we get to very basic notions of what’s really real. Even still today, to most people, what’s really real is what we can touch, what has heft, what you can press up against, what you can physically manipulate (this notion is falling apart for many people as we lose confidence in science and popular media, and has led many people to say just the opposite: that only the entirely spiritual is really real, via religious belief. But this is just the other side of the same coin, and most people that I experience imagining the spiritual world in this way are just imagining a more ‘heavenly version” of the regular physical world, maybe without all the warts and the “bad people”). From this basic intuition that what we can touch and lift is real, we derive the abstract scientific concept of mass: something with mass, we say, is a real thing. Electrons have mass. Ergo, electrons are real things.

But that mass is entirely theoretical and relativistic, so where did our intuition go, now? We must choose, either to accept an abstracted notion of mass (weight or heft), position (measured distance) and then apply it to the electron… or we admit that the electron is only an idea. And since it’s an idea, we, the ones that made up the idea, are always involved in its “realness.”

In certain limited conditions, the idea of the electron is a very serviceable idea, to be sure. We can build scanning tunneling electron microscopes, which can image the electrical topography of very small surfaces. Some have even claimed that these microscopes are allowing us to “see atoms.” But this stretches the intuitional notions of what it means to see. . .do you see??

I hope it doesn't feel like I’m splitting philosophical hairs (“splitting atoms”?). Where the rubber meets the road is if we teach each other and talk to each other as if electrons naively “exist”, independent of our thoughts, restrictions, equations, calculations and notions of them, then we have “thing-ified” the invisible world. In essence, we have made new gods (or demi-gods), and infused them with mythology. (And it’s not even a very compelling mythology.)

So, when I teach about electricity and magnetism, I spend all my time trying to show students what the conditions are that lead to the creation of a static electric charge, and what conditions can produce an electric current, and what the qualities of insulators and conductors are. I don’t talk about electrons moving through wires (they don’t. Really, they don’t. Watch this video if you have any doubts here). What I talk about is buildups of electric charge, and discharge. We can experience and feel when something is charged. It feels “fuzzy,” “tingly”, and may create an ozone smell. And when there’s a discharge, we may see hair that was standing up straight suddenly drop, or hear a snap or pop, or even see white or blue sparks. None of this requires the imaginary theoretical idea of electrons to explain.

When Ben Franklin first proposed that all the observed electrical effects of his time could be explained with just two kinds of charge, he was trying to simplify things. Many others had proposed that there were three, four, or more distinct types of charge. But Ben said only two could account for every observable electrical phenomenon, applying that famous logical tool Ockhams’ Razor, that the simplest explanation that accounts for the facts should be the one preferred. Now, as we have built up the Shrine to the Electron, ironically and unfortunately we have introduced a new kind of nearly impenetrable unnecessary complexity! It is a model that is just not needed for most applications, nor for a really good understanding of electricity, so why do we insist on it? (An electrician, for example, needs to understand exactly zero about electrons to do her job) The only good reason I can think of for this weirdness is: electrons are one among our modern panoply of demi-gods. And people get touchy if you mess with their gods.

As always, I welcome your responses, thoughts, challenges. Thank you!

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash

When you want more than you have
You think you need
And when you think more than you want
Your thoughts begin to bleed
I think I need to find a bigger place
'Cause when you have more than you think
You need more space

Society, you're a crazy breed
I hope you're not lonely without me
Society, crazy indeed
I hope you're not lonely without me

There's those thinking, more or less, less is more
But if less is more, how you keeping score?
Means for every point you make, your level drops
Kinda like you're starting from the top
You can't do that

-"Society" by Jerry Hannan, link to full song here popularized by Eddie Vedder on the soundtrack of the movie Into the Wild.

Well, Well, Well, A Warm Hello After a Long Hiatus my Substack Friends!

I’ve been swept away from writing for an entire season, and have had to just keep swimming in the hopes that I’d land again on solid ground from which to continue this and my many other threads. The cause for my absence: I decided to take a new teaching gig, at a local liberal arts college, and have found lots of challenge and stimulation there. I bit off a lot to chew, perhaps too much: I took two sections of one course and one section of another. . . none of which I had taught before. After years of teaching science and mathematics, I found myself strapped for hours to my chair creating humanities content from whole cloth, week after week for an entire semester. It never got too overwhelming, but boy howdy was it a lot! I found much to love about it, including exposure to a lot of new texts that I expect I will find myself bringing into my Substack work here. I also met three lovely cohorts of mostly freshmen, and have had a great time connecting to budding thinkers and writers, and helping them find their own voices. It’s been quite rewarding, and fairly consuming.

When I left off, I was well along on a path of exploring Compulsion and Compensation, and I’d like to wrap up that exploration with this post. Rereading the ground I’ve covered, I thought it might be good to, as plainly as I can, restate some of the (possibly contentious, potentially startling) conclusions I’ve come to. From that overlook, we can see how to conclude. Moving in order through the previous installments (you can click on the underlined links if you want to go back to read or remind yourself of what I’ve written):

First: A reason so many of us burn out in our work is: unrequited love. We are trying to love something unlovable, which is usually an institution, or our own ego-notions of ourselves, our significance as they are entangled with those institutions. We seek kudos, honors, recognition, perhaps even fame and are therefore strapped with a public persona we must maintain, wrapped up in our job titles.

Second: Unions are absolutely necessary to resist the most destructive tendencies of our extractive, rape-based economy. But they can only guarantee that our compensatory wages rise as extractive, destructive profits rise. They can’t mitigate or soften extraction, nor this persistent truth: Work, these days, pretty much sucks. By which I mean highly compensated work that buys our labor while insinuating itself into our lives, loves, emotions, desires and (completely natural) tendencies to want to give of ourselves to others.

Third: If we choose to keep working “within the system,” no matter how much energy, love, care, even reforming spirit, that we give and offer, “the system” will keep taking more. There are lots of good reasons why any particular person might choose to, or have to, keep working in the system. But it’s never going to stop on its own, working from the inside. For example, just in my short time at the college where I’m now doing some adjunct professoring, we all recently received an email from the president basically saying that, in order to stay afloat, we were going to have start accepting more students, retaining more students, and recruiting more students. In other words, the assembly line was going to have to speed up, just like Henry Ford’s did.

Fourth: We are all messed up about money. Or, to quote 1 Timothy chapter 6:: “The love of money is the root of all evil, which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” Said yet another way: the aforementioned shitty work that pays well drives us into addiction, and money is the most addictive substance known to humankind, precisely because of the qualities with which we’ve imbued it, to theoretically (but never in reality) satisfy our desires, many of which we aren’t even conscious of. Perhaps even more precisely, money is exactly what allows us to cut ourselves off from responsibility and relationship, in favor of compulsion and compensation. This is not equivocal and it has no exceptions. Money is unique, and it was created for just this purpose: as a proxy (an abstract substitute) for real “goods and services.” This phrase is already a stripped abstraction which should be understood to mean things people make for us to enjoy (not just stuff: we call them “goods” because they are supposed to be really and truly good for us!), and actions people do that take to care of us (not just “services”: really caring!)

And fifth and finally: If we can muster the luck, wits, strength, support, and ingenuity to break free from this burn-out inducing/exploiting/systemically-entrapping/money-hunger-driving juggernaut, we will be simultaneously: (1) free in a way that is quite liberating, and also probably anxiety producing…and (2) we will appear odd, or even threatening to most other people. We will be exactly like a former drunk that gets sober, and then makes no sense to his former drinking buddies. However, if things go well, we won’t allow that to drag us backwards, because we will realize that we were made to do good work, and good work is pleasurable. Here I’m just reiterating what Wendell Berry has said over and over, and I’ve tried to say in several different ways in other posts: Good, hard work can be very pleasurable, the most pleasurable in fact, when it connects us to nature, our own gifts, and other people; when it contributes, and heals, and is freely offered. It is a balm and gives shape and meaning to our days. It does not need to be compensated, because it is good work that makes real “goods”. It is a gift. It creates health.

It’s also really, really hard to make that break, and then to maintain it. Forces are constantly trying to suck you back in. That’s why, in my last post, I told you about Carl, and about how, as a recovering alcoholic, he had found within himself resources that could resist that “sucking” and work well in an otherwise unhealthy work environment without getting dragged down himself. In my time working very part-time at my new gig at the college, I’ve found much to enjoy, but I’m also aware of being surrounded by lots of folks who are still very much “plugged into the Matrix”: who have their lives, passions, livelihoods, legacy, pride, grades, etc all wrapped up in their positions. That’s why I’m so glad that the pay at this job really stinks. If I worked it out as an hourly wage, I’m probably being paid, like, $2 an hour. This makes me think I must be doing something right, because my motivations have nothing to do with the pay, that’s for sure. And, since I’m a lowly adjunct and nobody really cares what I’m doing as long as I’m teaching my classes, I have had pretty much complete freedom to connect with the students and the learning that can happen. It is a sweet gig to add to my several gigs that allow me to have a small necessary cash flow, while allowing me to maintain my “work sobriety”. I’m very blessed, and very wealthy.

What else is there to be said to wrap this up? I have had a couple directions on my mind that I’ll describe here briefly, but won’t go deeply into right now. I have been thinking for many months that the next place I might go, in fact, was… Jesus! Specifically how, if one tallies up the sayings, teaching, parables and actions of Jesus, so many of them (I’d conjecture the vast majority of them) have to do with this very subject of work, money, “belongings versus belonging”, storing up goods, pearls of great price, slavery, honest laboring…and on and on. I am so troubled when I consider how Jesus spent so much of his time on earth trying to teach us about work, money and God; and yet Christian and non-Christian alike today somehow have the impression that what Jesus really cared about was piety, sexual prudishness, and spiritual salvation. It is, truly, dumbfounding to me. The evidence for this mistaken yet dominant theological stance just isn’t there if you actually read the Gospels (OK, it is somewhat present in the Gospel of John. It is more present in the writings of Paul, but let’s leave Paul out of it for now). However, I’ve determined that this is a subject I’d better write about another time, and right now head to completion of this Compensation and Compulsion exploration.

Riffing off of the Jesus focus: One more avenue I felt drawn to explore, that I am also going to bookmark for another time, is how much of what I’ve written about reflects the financial life of a church. As I’ve shared, our primary income comes through my wife’s work for a great Presbyterian church. Church, arguably and at least ideally, is the one place where one is expected to give one’s money away freely. The Presbyterians have a well-earned reputation for being earnest people, and you can bet that any policy of the church has mountains of deliberation, faithful consideration, and biblical exegesis behind it. This is the case with compensation, and I got interested in what the PC(USA), of which we are a part, has to say on the subject. That document is titled, intriguingly, “Neither Poverty, Nor Riches”, which is a quotation from Proverbs 30:8, and the whole document is a very interesting read that touches on much of what I’ve been writing about here. Sometimes I think that a lot of idealistic endeavors out there today are really just ways to reinvent church. . . . perhaps I’ll write more about that, too, someday.

So, let’s end it here: I’ve said before that I’m not trying to solve any World Problem by exploring these topics (trying to solve a World Problem would suck me right back in to the addiction). I’m only trying to share my personal experiences as I continue to struggle with it myself, to try to become freer in my work, my relationships, and my thinking. And, honestly, it’s often lonely, trying to head in this direction. So many people I know and even feel close to are so entwined with either their work, or money, or both. So am I, quite often. But I am trying my damndest to eke out ever more sanity from an insane working world.

Here’s one obvious thing I’ve realized about this path: if you, too, try to head in this direction, you will likely received no awards. No institution will praise you, and few of your colleagues and neighbors will, either. It’s precisely the seeking of superficial rewards and awards that you are leaving behind, so this should not be surprising. The best you can hope for is bemusement when you say things like, “No, I don’t want more paid work, I have enough of that, and enough money. What I want is time to do my own work.” You might also get confusion, and possibly, judgement that you are such a slacker since you’re not maximizing saving up for “your retirement” (if I love my work now, what, exactly, am I going to retire from?). No 20-years-of-service commemorative mugs will come your way; in fact, many of your mugs will have broken handles because you don’t want to any longer perpetuate the myth that buying a new mug is an action that has no consequence. Somebody somewhere has to do potentially shitty work to make my mugs. A pastor friend of mine has been fond of saying, “You will know the truth, and the truth will…make you odd.”

And, oddly, this gives me a lot of hope. Because this means that there very well might be many, many more people like me, who on some level don’t believe the rhetoric anymore. If there were many such people, by design we wouldn’t hear about them…because they are being systematically sidelined and ignored, or are just keeping quiet. When my colleague Carl came into work every day happy and content, he made everyone nervous and uncomfortable. So, other than rolling their eyes at him sometimes, folks just didn’t talk about him much. He didn’t fit with their worldviews that were needed to keep their noses to the grindstone, while always griping and demanding ever higher wages, and investing much emotional energy into the belief that we must be long-suffering because “teachers are shaping the future leaders of the world.” What I’m trying to say is that we may be much closer to a revolution of work than we think, and we’d never know it. How exciting! Earlier I made reference to the Great Resignation that happened after COVID, and the puzzlement that resulted in the upper echelons about why so many people decided to say “take this job and shove it.” More recently, I could point to the fact that, on paper, we have a booming economy…but so many regular folks don’t experience this to be true at all. Yet their voices, by definition, are not going to be heard, or will be filtered. It may be that many have started to break their own personal chains, and who knows what they, and I, will do next? I’m interested to find out.

P.S. I want to express deep thanks to those that read, and support my Substack, in particular the fact that so many of you have continued to support me financially while I’m not producing new writing. It continues to feel like such a gift and is part of the inspiration for this entire Compensation and Compulsion series. Thank you.

A sobriety logo for Alcoholics Anonymous. Image found by Tony Rubino, found here

I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.

                                                    - Lloyd Dobler from the movie Say Anything.

Last time I tried to make the connection that money in its current form is inherently compulsory. It’s built to override or ignore relationship in favor of forcing material goods to flow, and services to be offered. As such, money is a receptacle and vehicle for so many of our unresolved ego-desires and shame-based aspirations. We use money to force others and the world to do for us what in reality is a longing for relationship, recognition or compassion. In this next installment of my exploration of money, work, compulsion and compensation, I’d like to tell you another story of myself, followed by a story about a teacher I met in my first year of paid professional work. I hope the two stories can resonate with each other and take our thinking further!

It was several years after my revelation in the mountains that much of my pain and anguish with respect to my work as a teacher stemmed from “unrequited love.” You might think that I “learned my lesson” after that time, and knew that I needed to make changes, and that’s kinda true. Lots of beautiful and wonderful stuff happened in the subsequent years, including that our daughter was born.  However soon enough,  I again found myself sitting in yet another Waldorf school with a Waldorf teacher mentor that was coming to observe and give feedback. I knew him pretty well from previous encounters and we could speak frankly with each other.  I was now in a position of leadership at this school and had been part of an exciting, creative, and exhausting project: We opened a new high school! However, the workload and the personalities of my fellow teachers and the internal politics between them were once again weighing me down in a terrible way, worse than ever before.  Looking at the mentor, Douglas, through bleary eyes, with excruciating back pain under the weight of a social situation that was anything but rewarding, I finally blurted out to him:

“You know, all these years as a Waldorf teacher, I’ve been so inspired by the work, but as you know the pay is terrible, and probably always will be. So, we don’t do it for that, clearly.  And the work is endless and largely unobserved and unappreciated, and my colleagues often act like petulant children and stab each other in the back. . . It honestly never occurred to me to ask this before, but I want to ask you now:  What, exactly, is in this for me?”

Douglas’s response was as quick as that of the Eurythmist in the mountains, and was just as pithy: “Health.”

I looked at him through the haze of my exhaustion, and I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”   However, within a few months of that conversation, I was able to admit to myself that I had escaped one boiling pot only to hop willingly into another, and I quit.  I knew then that I really, really, had to get clarity about this unholy nexus of my own propensities and personality, Waldorf teaching, and compensation.  If “health” was the goal of this work, then I was definitely going about it all wrong!

Now, a story about another teacher. Every since I realized that “health” should be the actual goal of my work as a teacher (really, of anybody’s work), my memory of Carl has become stronger as a real-life example of that health.  I met Carl in my first year of paid full time teaching work. I never knew him particularly well, and I was destined to leave that school after only one year.  I’ve previously written about that same year of teaching and the shock I received from observing my fellow science teachers as a new, fresh, idealistic teacher:  the ennui and disempowerment they felt, the hopeless outlook and sarcasm they imbibed every day, were palpable. . .but Carl, another fellow science teacher, was a huge exception to this.  Carl bounced into his classroom every day, right on time, but never early, full of exuberance and friendliness.  All these years later, I can remember his, “Hey Baby!” which he said to everyone, male and female, young and old.  Carl had his semester-long Physics classes figured out and so never really had to do much planning or prep work. He did practical but not particularly over-involved experiments and demonstrations.  He genuinely liked the students, and they liked him, and he liked to have fun. The other teachers sniffed their noses at the way Carl ran his classes, because it was judged that his class was an “Easy A”.  He gave short, simple, handwritten quizzes.  He had no overly complex ways of approaching teaching.  He just delivered the content, did the experiments, and went home, right at the dot of the end of the school day.

Carl was a recovering alcoholic, something he spoke about openly.  He joked often about missing beer.  In the year I taught with him, he had also given up sweets, and so, if you happened to be eating a chocolate in his presence, he would playfully come up really close to you, and ask you to describe the taste sensation for him in great detail, while he watched you eat it!  

Carl left school right away each day not simply because he wanted to: he had an entirely other gig: he ran a contracting company.  He left every day to supervise the work that his crews were doing, so couldn’t stick around, even if he’d wanted to (I’m sure he didn’t).  Carl often said to the students and the other teachers, “If I won the lottery tomorrow, I’d still come in to teach the next day.”  He was untouched by silly school administrative jargon and requirements, and unbothered by the ways that some other teachers thought he didn’t take his job seriously enough; Carl ignored any controversy or anything else going on that didn’t directly pertain to his work.  He was the only observably happy and healthy person I worked with that whole year.

I’ve since worked with a few (but only a few) other teachers like this: those who, for whatever reason, seem unaffected by the “compensation and compulsion” sickness that is otherwise so pervasive.  Most people I observe in the workplace show some kind of behavior like that described in Wendell Berry’s essay that I’ve referred to several times before, The Body, Feminism, and the Machine:

. . .most men are now entirely accustomed to obeying and currying the favor of their bosses. Because of this, of course, they hate their jobs—they mutter, “Thank God it’s Friday” and “Pretty good for Monday”— but they do as they are told. . . Their characters combine feudal submissiveness with modern helplessness. 

Carl was able to find a way to do work that he loved, and not get caught in the traps so prevalent in the compensated, compulsive work world.  I think there were several aspect to Carl’s character and situation worth pointing out here:

1. He was a “twelve step guy,” someone who had worked the program of Alcoholics Anonymous, recognized his powerlessness to resist his own destructive tendencies, and given his life over to a higher power to heal himself.  I find that folks who have suffered their demons and transcended them are less likely to succumb to shitty work situations.  They’ve developed a radar to suss out these kind of traps, because they’ve sensed them, and escaped them, in themselves.

2. Carl had other work to do besides this work, work that (importantly) was entirely his.  So, he was happy to contribute some of his extra available time to the school, but he knew that he didn’t have to give all of himself, nor put all of his sense of calling or accomplishment into the paid teaching work.  He was entirely content with the amount of work he put in, and the compensation he received for it.  It was enough.

3. Carl genuinely liked the kids, and other people, and everyone knew it. He could be playful at the drop of a hat, and did not overstretch himself in his classroom with ego-serving frivolity to prove to everyone that he was a “top notch teacher.”  His sense of self worth was outside his work as a teacher. He just really didn’t give a shit what other people thought of him . . . but he liked people and most people liked him.

I honestly paid little attention to Carl during that year.  I was busy trying to get my feet under me in my own teaching.  But my experiences since that time, all of my wonderful and painful experiences, have made my memory of Carl stand out in ever-sharper relief and illumination.  He was someone who had a healthy relationship to his work, who had cracked the code.  His way is worthy of study.

And here I come back to Douglas’ suggestion that what one gets from being a teacher is “health.”  If this is really true, and while I had massive incredulity when he told it to me, I now think it really is. . . then schools should be centerpieces of health in healthy neighborhoods! Yet we will know that this is less and less often the case. What are some hallmarks of health, in a person and in a community or school? Many come readily to my mind, such as: freedom of movement and individual volition, ability to breathe freely and evenly, healthy food eaten with relish and ritual, stimulating relationships with others of many ages and walks of life, good stories and music and laughter, vigorous physical and mental exercises and challenges, and deep rest. This would be a healthy person indeed, and a healthy school. However, thinking about this list of healthy hallmarks, one must realize at once what they all have in common. In order for any of us to have any of these, they cannot be accomplished or enjoyed alone. We all need each other to participate in creating and sharing all of these needful health-giving things. And, here’s the rub: none of these things, to be truly healthy, can be forced or compelled. Healthy living is living in relationship, real relationship. And money, truly, can’t buy that. In fact, money and the compensation of paid work in our current way of organizing ourselves has incredible power to poison one’s health for a lifetime.

The health that is the grace of creatures can only be held in common.
                                                                                         - Wendell Berry

I hope you are continuing to enjoy these posts.  As always, I love to read your reflections and comments. More to come on this line of inquiry, as I have time!

Click here to go to Part 6

Photo credit: Still from the 1999 film Office Space

The real work is never done, and has no clear beginning, and shows no result, no losing no winning.                                          
                                                                     -Great Lakes Swimmers, The Real Work 

Here I am continuing on in my exploration of Compulsion and Compensation, something I’ve been thinking and writing about for at least a year, and which I’m still puzzling over to get it out, to you! To go back to previous sections, click here. I hope you are enjoying reading, that your own thoughts are stimulated by my own, and that you will share with me if so! Let’s continue:

After long consideration, I see a big reason for my feelings of burnout and resentment were (and are!) centered around money; or more precisely money illiteracy, money emotional entanglement, and money addiction. 

Jenny and I were married, and immediately as we were setting up our life together, had (good) jobs, paychecks and bills to pay. After doing apartment living for a few years, we bought a house and got a mortgage. Actually, I’m chagrined to report, we got two mortgages! In what I now recognize as a fit of optimism and irresponsibility in those early days of making real money we bought a “second” summer house up north . . . before we bought a “first” house to live in back home!  It was a very cheap house in a part of the country to which I had romantic connections from cherished family vacations, and going to college there for a couple years. We enjoyed going there for a number of years, but then that “second home” became a burden that we had to work hard to rent out over a number of years, and then sell, for a loss. We had no money for a down payment on a “first” house; we each had college and grad school loans to pay off, and no equity; but for a while we had a double income and no kids, and the paycheck cash was flowing. 

(From the beginning, and sporadically over the years, I’ve spent some amount of time exploring co-housing and life-sharing situations to avoid some of the costs of the “single family household” lifestyle, but never found a good fit for our family. But maybe it’s worth noting here that I was uncomfortable with the middle-class-nuclear-family-home-ownership path and lifestyle from the very beginning.)

The conundrum of how to buy a (much more expensive) home to live in somewhere near our jobs in Chicago was resolved for us when Jenny’s church employer offered us a loan of the down payment that we lacked to make that purchase. Thus, within a couple years, we now had two houses, a mortgage on each of those houses, and a secondary loan tied up with one of those mortgages.

We did what so many college educated middle class folks do: entered adult life with debt. . . and then took on more debt (even though it was “good house debt”).  Jenny came into adulthood better educated than I was regarding personal finance, but I must say I think we were both pretty clueless.  We have learned the hard way like lots of people, through experience . . . and we have not made any really big mistakes. . . and I must say we’ve had generous support from friends and family through the years in the form of gifts, loans, and advice. This is some of that “privilege” that gets talked about that people coming from backgrounds like ours benefit from. It is very real, and I see it functioning in our lives through the years to keep us solvent. We’ve never loaded up a credit card, and we’ve never missed a payment on anything.  I think we’ve actually been quite “risk averse” and conservative compared to many others. But even so, by living in perpetual debt (like pretty much everyone else does, other than the uber-rich), a huge portion of our paychecks has gone to service our mortgages (and auto loans), enriched the banks, and driven up the GDP.  We’ve done our part to drive the economy, I say with plenty of sour cynicism.

Once again, one would think with our privileges and incomes that we should have been happy, and we were in many ways.  But, as I came to live in the felt experience of middle class living, I was increasingly bothered by the fact that we were “house poor,” meaning that we had sunk so much money and dedicated so much of our paychecks to the purchase of our house(s), that we could not afford to really do much of anything else other than live in it (them!).  Furthermore, Jenny’s church had (generously) lent us the down payment, and so we were now even more tied to her work than we had been before! We were doubly, nay triply in debt! 

We could have been much more disciplined than we were.  But, we were newlyweds, and were both working 60+ hour weeks in creative, idealistic, caring jobs that we were so, so dedicated to . . . the extra money we made went to pay for things we couldn’t, or didn’t, want to do for ourselves, because we were so busy.  Things like restaurants and prepared foods, and fancy meals when we could find the time to hang out together; and trips when we could find the time to get away from our busy jobs. And, we were paying off debt, always paying off debt.  In fact, that same generous church of Jenny’s helped her with paying off her college debt, too. I remember we finally paid our college debt off the same year that Barack Obama did, his first year of being President of the United States.

Jenny worked for a church in a very wealthy suburb of Chicago, while I worked for an urban private school in Chicago proper. Her job was so much better paying, with so much better benefits, better health care coverage, so much better everything; that’s not to mention that her employers had financed our house purchase and helped her pay off her debts. My job was far less consequential to our lifestyle and cash flow. As I became increasingly uncomfortable with our financial situation, I realized two things: First, that if we wanted to honor our debt obligations, we’d both better keep working, forever! In other words, we were suddenly “locked in,” we were compelled to keep working. Secondly, if we wanted to make a change (which, more and more, I did); if we wanted to have a less-leveraged, more “home-based life,” we would have to reduce or ameliorate the debt, and I was the one who was going to have to give up my work to free myself up for the tasks necessary to do that.  Although I was (overly) dedicated to my work, loved it and was enriched by it, I was being paid so poorly relative to my wife’s job, and pouring so much of my life into my work, that, in the middle-class landscape of my “debt-serviced” life, I was effectively losing money, and losing life, to keep working.  

Slowly, painfully, I came to realize that I was giving more of myself to my job (which I thought of as my calling and was incredibly important to me) than I was to my spouse and our home life (and, upon long reflection, I wanted to change that).  And there was another factor at play: because we did not have kids for the first ten years of our marriage, I was not receiving the major benefit that most Waldorf teachers receive: a free Waldorf education for their own kids, and more importantly, a community to which to belong.

This became a huge sticking point when I was working full-time in those years. I had some colleagues with up to four kids all enrolled in the school, all for free.  Adding up the potential tuition savings that this amounted to, these colleagues were getting a humongous benefit, more than doubling their actual salary.  This irked me, and eventually became a very poisonous lack of fairness that I couldn’t ignore. When teachers had their own kids in the school, they were part of the parent community as well as being teachers.  I had no children, so I was “just a teacher.”

Can you see in my story as I relate it that I was all mixed up in my motivations and my expectations? I can! No wonder I suffered from unrequited love! I was deeply devoted to my work as a teacher at a wonderful, idealistic school; and also, over time from my debt-strapped middle class perspective, I was laying expectations on that school to reciprocate by giving back to me gifts that I would feel were commensurate with my own giving. Yet, the school, by our compensation agreement, owed me none of that. All they owed me was the paycheck I’d been promised. I received much more than this, of course, as I’ve related in previous posts. But, year by year, it came to feel like not enough.

What was the real rub?  Was it the fact that although I think my colleagues respected me and liked me, they didn’t really have much interest in what I did, as long as I did it?  Or, was it the fact that I came home every day having worked at least as hard as my spouse and made less than half the money she did?  Or, was it the fact that some of my colleagues were compensated so much better than I was, simply by having more kids?  Or, was it something else, something deeper?  

After all, no one was forcing me to work for this school.  I could have gone back to public school teaching and received much better money and much better benefits any time.  Yet, I stayed.  I must have been receiving some benefit after all, at least for quite a while, something that kept me coming back, despite the fact that I was giving of myself in an unsustainable way, pushing myself habitually beyond my limits, and eventually causing myself harm. 

Reflecting on my experience, I now see that part of my confusion had to do with money. Money is a proxy, and a powerful, symbolic and homogenized proxy at that. I will once again mention Charles Eisenstein’s book Sacred Economics if you would like to go deeply into the origin and symbolic meaning of money. I won’t do that here. But allow me describe in the simplest terms I can manage one facet of money that seems crystal clear to me by now:  If I work a job and I come home with a paycheck, I may feel a sense of “accomplishing something”. I’ve “made some money” (a really interesting phrase if one starts to dwell on it). But the truth is that absolutely nothing has been accomplished other than the potentiality that I, and everyone else, ascribes to the dollars in that paycheck. All I've really accomplished is an increase to the numbers in my bank account, and that is nothing at all, in reality. But what those bank account numbers represent is quite powerful. They represent the (almost entirely) unmitigated power to acquire something (goods or services) that I want in the future. In other words money is a vehicle for each of us to compel each other to give me what I want, when I want it. With money, I can simply buy what I want, whenever I want it, if I have enough of it. Because the vast majority of us are entirely tied into the debt money system, and that system compels us to work jobs for money, we have an incredibly complex economic system that will provide us whatever we want, whenever we click “buy” on Amazon, or sign for a credit card transaction. With money, I can compel goods and services to come to me, without any relationship to the people I am compelling. So we see that money by its very nature breeds situations of compulsion. In fact, this is what money (as we currently conceive of it, and currently use it) is best at. This means that in some deep way, there is a near-complete disconnect between money and truly good work. Good work should always have some rich relationship to the world, to other people and to the benefit that work is creating. In fact, good work as I understand it is good relationship, period. Money, being a homogeneous “medium of exchange,” is relation-less compulsion, pure and simple. Witness how scary it becomes for people when money suddenly loses its value, for example during an economic downturn. What is so scary? It is precisely that we won’t be able to compel the world to give us what we think we need (or what we think we deserve) whenever we want it.

In the case of our lives, Jenny’s church was able to provide us with much more money; and so, because we lived in typical middle class debt and “needed” that money, we found ourselves more and more compelled to continue doing what we were doing, year after year, with little possibility of changing course without serious consequences. We both felt deeply called to our respective work, and loved it, and we were loathe to give it up. But forces we had fallen into quite innocently started conscripting our choices, and (for me) poisoning the really good work we had to do. Money became an intrusion and a goad that made my work into a doppelganger of what I wanted it to be.

I’ll end this section here and continue on in the next installment. Have you had experiences or reflections like (or contrasting with) mine? I’d love to know. Please be welcome to make comments as you feel moved! Click here to go to Part 5

I now think that there is a mismatch between the kind of work that teaching is (and many other caring activities), and the “world of compensation” that is the model for paid work today.

Charles Eisenstein points out that the very word “compensation” implies that by working at a job and being paid for it, the tacit assumption is that you wouldn’t want to work there if you weren’t being paid.  The very idea of compensation comes from the rise of industrial work as the norm for most of us.  For a really clear account of Henry Ford’s first factories, how they were received by people at the time, and how they acclimated us to receive “compensation” for shitty work, check out this amazing article, written in 2006, and then expanded into a full length book. Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford.  Here is an important excerpt:

In a temporary suspension of the Taylorist logic, Ford was forced to double the daily wage of his workers to keep the line staffed [because the craft workers at the time found the work to be insulting, boring drudgery]. As Braverman writes, this “opened up new possibilities for the intensification of labor within the plants, where workers were now anxious to keep their jobs.” These anxious workers were more productive. Indeed, Ford himself later recognized his wage increase as “one of the finest cost-cutting moves we ever made,” as he was able to double, and then triple, the rate at which cars were assembled by simply speeding up the conveyors. By doing so he destroyed his competitors, and thereby destroyed the possibility of an alternative way of working. (It also removed the wage pressure that comes from the existence of more enjoyable jobs.) At the Columbian World Expo held in Chicago in 1893, no fewer than seven large-scale carriage builders from Cincinnati alone presented their wares. Adopting Ford’s methods, the industry would soon be reduced to the Big Three. So workers eventually became habituated to the abstraction of the assembly line. Evidently, it inspires revulsion only if one is acquainted with more satisfying modes of work.

 Here the concept of wages as compensation achieves its fullest meaning, and its central place in the modern economy. 

So . . . compensation and compulsion go hand in hand.  One gets compensated precisely because it is understood that the work you are doing is work that you (and everyone) would otherwise not do, or that you would do, but not at the pace at which your employer compels you to do it.  The worker is compelled to do this unappealing work in exchange for wages that allow the worker to have more buying power (and presumably purchase what she needs to “compensate” for the damage she’s done to her soul by working a job she doesn’t want to do all those years).

Much was made a couple years back about the “Great Resignation,” in which many people during and post-COVID simply quit their jobs.  At such a grand scale, trying to draw simple conclusions about the reasons why is, I believe, rather suspect.  However, the name itself is interesting: “to resign” as the countermove to being no longer compelled, no matter what the compensation is.  Other than “from the job,” what does a person resign from, or resign themselves to when they make such a decision?  Having less money, I suppose. I don’t follow the labor market at all, but I understand that there are vacancies in all kinds of areas and shortages of workers that are causing companies (and school districts) to bend all kinds of rules and raise wages, just as Ford did back in the day, to simply get enough people in to do the work.

But, there is fundamentally something different about working on an assembly line versus teaching children . . . isn’t there?  In the former, one is following a prescribed process to build a product that one has no meaningful ownership of.  The car was designed by engineers, who gave it to other engineers, who came up with processes, who gave it to others to design the assembly line workflow. . .and then a worker shows up to work and does his small piece of the building process.  I don’t mean to imply that when one does this work, one can’t have pride in one’s contribution.  I mean simply that one is not really given any choice at all about the product.  The choice is only about the way in which you approach the work that is handed to you.

But, in the case of education, at least until recently, the way this work happened was very different.  Schools operate solidly in the realm of culture and so the work is cultural work, meaning artistic work.  Or is it?  More and more, schools are really just trying to find bodies to fill the gaps.  More and more, they are providing teachers with prescribed curriculum, tests, designations and policies that ensure that teachers “produce a quality product”.  I have one public school teacher friend of mine who told me that she is literally handed scripts that she must read, verbatim, when she teaches her class.  She no longer even has freedom to speak her own words.

We’ve turned schools into mimics of factories, and the students are treated like industrial products, and so it makes sense that we treat the employees like factory workers.  Soon enough, many teachers will likely be “replaced” (supplanted, really) by AI programs that can follow the script much more smoothly, and remove the human element completely. This is a possible future that I simultaneously fear and find ridiculous: we are edging toward trusting computer proxies to teach our children more than we trust our fellow human beings. We seem to be asking ourselves: “Industrial production produces slick fancy cars and electronics for us to buy with our bloated wages; why shouldn’t it produce a higher quality “product” with our children?”

I taught in the antithesis of this culture when I taught in Waldorf schools. Waldorf schools, for the most part, are so countercultural precisely because they double down on the human element in teaching, rather than trying to squeeze it out. So, I should have been blissfully happy in my little Waldorf school teaching awesome, quirky kids in whatever way I saw fit from my individual human perspective, without any particularly meaningful oversight and a ton of freedom . . .right?  And I was!  But, also, I wasn’t.  I was sick with unrequited love. So, I ask myself again, why was that? I’ll take that up in the next installment.

Click here to go to Part 4

Photo by Remy Gieling on Unsplash

I offer Brian Does Whatever He Feels Like Doing, Gosh! to you as a gift, with no paywall. You give back to me through your reading and kind attention, your likes and comments, and if you choose, either a free or paid subscription. Paid subscriptions support me financially to be able to do more of this writing. You can go to this post, and this one to read more about why I do it this way.

Since I’ve worked as a teacher for most of my adult life, what I’m sharing comes from my experience of that world. However, I am quite sure that there is much that translates to many other types of work, perhaps nearly all of them.

Before launching Part 2, I also wanted to say a couple things here about sharing my own biography. First, I have to say that I have had amazing experiences being a teacher in general, and being a Waldorf teacher especially. I have loved my work, even as it has sometimes overwhelmed me. So, while I’m sharing some of the negative elements of my work with you all, in no way should it be understood that this is “sour grapes.” I have lived a charmed existence in my working life; a privileged one, in fact. I have had the privilege of loving my work. I’ve worked really, really hard too. And I regret none of it. We all work out our karma in and through our lives and our work. Of that much, I am sure.

Secondly, I’m also very aware these days of how being an Enneagram Type Four has shaped how my particular path has worked out. I’d encourage anyone who feels intrigued, puzzled, or bothered by certain patterns in their work or relationships to study the Enneagram. It can really help give insight into the way in which each of us is actively narrating and choosing our experience, and why we narrate and choose the way we do.

OK, let’s keep going, shall we?

Our salaries at the Waldorf school were typically low for being teachers at a small private school, probably even a little lower than most.  As I’ve related, we also were asked to do more (or at least think of ourselves as being responsible for more) than most teachers are called upon to do.  The ethos of the school where I worked was that the task of being a Waldorf teacher was a spiritual calling of sorts, even a calling of the highest kind!  Monetary compensation was nowhere near where it “should have been” in terms of our education levels, skill, hours and days of extra time, care and attention to students and lessons, and great creativity that we poured in.  But this fact just didn’t come up much.  We believed (or were led to believe) that we were doing a great cultural deed and service, and that was reward enough.  In a more nuanced way, perhaps it was felt that the school was a (sacred) community and so the rewards for working there went well beyond money and benefits.  And I know that for me, for a long time, there was much truth to this.

Before Waldorf, I got my start in public education, and worked in three public schools in four years across two states.  I posted an early memory of that time soon after I started this Substack here.  They were “good” schools (meaning the property tax base was high and so they had many more resources than other schools not so fortunate), and the teachers I worked with at those schools were similarly dedicated, creative, often quirky, and self-giving.  They also had a similar sense of performing an important cultural task, although there was much less concern for the administrative tasks of the school, as that was clearly in other people’s hands (the principal, etc).  Although many of my fellow teachers were quite nice, there was even less collegiality than in the Waldorf school.  Folks came in and did their jobs, and most did them well.  Then they went home.  Their private lives were their own affair and their “performance” as teachers was all that mattered.  As an exception to this rule, I remember one 8th grade history teacher at the school where I worked in the swanky suburbs outside New York City. He was Jewish and took it upon himself to create and sustain a program in which 8th graders could learn about the Holocaust and then had the opportunity to speak to actual Holocaust survivors that lived nearby.  Many of my public school colleagues looked askance at this kind of above-and-beyond dedication, because it made them look bad, and he was perhaps too personally involved, and too determined to put real history onto the plates of his students.  There was a focus in the public schools where I worked on just doing one’s job, and doing it well, but no more.  

Those public schools, of course, had strong teachers’ unions.  I was exposed to paying union dues for the first time when I worked in public schools, and nothing in my experience had prepared me for it.  My parents had not belonged to unions, and, to my memory, nearly nothing had been said in my childhood about them, either good or bad.  It’s so strange to me now as I reflect that I lived in Dearborn, just outside Detroit, the site of Ford Motor company headquarters, and some of the most historic union organizing and union-busting of all time, and no one taught me about it in my whole time going through my (unionized) public schools!

Anyway, I saw the dues deducted on my paycheck as a brand new teacher and mostly shrugged.  I didn’t understand anything about what it was for, and I was making so much money compared to anything I’d made before, that I didn’t fuss about it.

A short few years later, when I’d left public school teaching, had moved to Chicago for grad school and took some classes from an influential professor, I started to learn some of that union history. My interest grew so great that I spent one summer in an internship with the United Food and Commercial Workers going to meat processing plants around Chicago and seeing the conditions of food factory workers.  That same summer, I also had the task of attempting to organize church congregations in Joliet, IL to protest the new Walmart store that was moving in at that time (Walmart is an infamously union-busting corporation, although these days they look like peaceful lambs compared to Amazon).  What an awakening this was for me!  I’ve since then taken more classes, read some Saul Alinsky, Upton Sinclair and other writers and thinkers in union lore, and, given that I took it up later in life, I feel at least somewhat better educated about unions and union history than I was as a younger person. That experiential education that I received in my late twenties has led me to be a supporter of labor unions in general, as the one major social movement that has power to curtail some of the worst effects of unbridled capitalism. Until we invent an economic system that doesn’t exploit-by-design, we need strong unions, I’m convinced.

However, here is my observation: My friends that have stayed in public education (and are much better paid than I ever have been, vested in their pensions and protected by their unions) have not fared better than I in terms of burnout; in fact in some cases it seems much worse.  I have several close teacher friends that went to work in the public sector at the same time I did, and stayed working at those same jobs all the way through.  This leads to what to me seems like an incredible outcome:  several of them at my age (right around 50) are near to reaching full retirement and full pension.  They can retire!  On the surface that sounds wonderful, except I see in some of them that “the school/system” has taken a heavy, heavy toll.  The burnout that my friends in public schools have experienced is the same as mine, or worse.  Cynicism about the students, the administration, and the parents abounds.  In fact, they resemble those older teachers that I recall meeting when I was a fresh young teacher in my first year. Despite the fact that my friends have been vastly much better compensated than me, if anything they seem even more helpless and powerless to escape their ennui about the whole enterprise.  I know several retired public school teachers who just plain won’t talk about their previous careers of teaching, at all, period.   This tells me something interesting: that what is broken about school doesn’t really have to do with the money.  At least not completely.

Thanks for reading, and as always I welcome your comments and insight. Your interactions help me shape my thoughts as I see how what I write reflects back to me through you! Click here to go on and read Part 3.

Photo by Manny Becerra on Unsplash

When I was in about my tenth year of full-time work at a Waldorf school, perhaps my 15th year of full-time post college work, I was on retreat with a small group of Waldorf teachers.  Some came from my school, some came from others.  We were in a log cabin in the mountains north of Saratoga Springs, a beautiful and peaceful setting.  By that time, I had come to be really bothered by a question which had become urgent for me.  I had loved and still loved teaching and working with the kids.  I had found great inspiration, especially through my teacher training and fellow cohort of teachers, through the readings, experiences, discussions, and other teachers I rubbed shoulders with.  I was doing excellent creative work, and finding so much to be interested in and stimulated by.  Yet, I was completely and totally burned out and depleted.  I was walking to school each morning during the school year, often breaking out in tears due to pent up emotion that I didn’t know how to otherwise expel.  Now, in the summer, I was in the mountains with this group of teachers, and for the first time I voiced this question to others:  Why?  Why, with all the wonderful work I had to do, was I feeling so totally sapped, and put-upon and resentful?

There was a young(er than me) man there, who was at the time training to be a eurythmy teacher.  (Eurythmy is a movement, speech and musical art form that is practiced and taught in many Waldorf schools) That alone caught my attention since the vast majority of eurythmy teachers in Waldorf schools are women.  He was a fascinating person, clearly wise in some ways beyond his years.  He was also an arborist and did some tree work for our host to pay for his attendance at this conference.  He had a faraway gaze and kind of nature-man vibe that was magnetic. Immediately after hearing my question, while I was still thinking I’d voiced a conundrum that no one could possibly have an answer to, he answered it in two words: “Unrequited love.”

Boom. This response hit me like a bombshell.  Of course!  I was, in my teaching, trying to love something or someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t love me back.  Of course. I was more than stunned, I was thunderstruck.

I’ve told this story to many teachers that I’ve mentored, because it strikes me as getting deeply to the heart of a malady in schools everywhere (and pretty much all other workplaces).  I’ve already written plenty about ways that schools could turn their energies to become more vital cultural institutions that serve neighborhoods and people rather than false ideals of preparedness, curriculum standards and achievement.  Now I want to turn my attention to why this change often doesn’t happen.  I think the question I asked, and the answer I was given, are windows into some of the answers.

To explain a little bit more my own burnout:  I was teaching a full time load of science and mathematics classes at the school.  I was also a part of a number of teacher committees, including leadership.  In Waldorf schools, there is a commitment to the teachers significantly contributing to the leadership of the school. So there are “leadership teams” of teachers rather than principals.  I was also on a Student Care committee, helping to craft interventions for struggling students;  I was a class sponsor to a high school class, which involved many social and communication duties, plus a yearly 10-day trip that I conceived, planned and ran.  I helped with recruiting, interviewing, hiring and mentoring new teachers.   I helped oversee discipline and revise handbooks and rewrite curriculum and support accreditation.  I helped host workshops and teacher conferences, I supported school performances and festivals.  In any given day, I brought any number of oddments to school depending on what bake sale I was contributing to, what science experiments I was planning to do, what school promotion I was supporting, and what grading I needed to bring back to return to students. 

In addition to all of this, I was feeling increasingly limited in the classes I was teaching.  I wanted to go deeper into phenomenology and environmentalism, so I started a Green Team club, with an accompanying course.  I created a 9th grade course in Agriculture, with added field trips and overnight stays.   I started an after school club to work on green projects like converting a diesel car to run on vegetable oil and keeping honeybees.  I sponsored a rocket club because I had a precocious and smart kid who wanted to do it, and he needed a sponsor. I oversaw the high school’s Service Learning volunteering program, and set up sites for them to do their service. I became increasingly involved in an effort to save a community garden that the school had been using, and then, when the garden was doomed to be displaced, I helped lead the effort to locate and inaugurate a new garden.

By the time I sat in those mountains, I had given just about everything of myself to my teaching and to all of these extra projects that seemed to me to be so needed and so vital.  Many, many teachers do this, so I know it’s not a novel story.  Yet, I came to realize I was making myself very sick doing it.

What I eventually couldn’t ignore was the simple observation that, no matter how much I did, no matter how much goodwill and blood sweat and tears I gave . . . “the school” would always take more (that phrase, “the school,” needs some unpacking, but I’ll just use it for now).  Everything I did contributed to a vibrant school community, and nothing I did was “enough”. Many or even most of my fellow teachers were doing something similar, giving of themselves from their minds and their creativity and their hearts. 

My work did not by any means go unrecognized: I received many kudos and much appreciation from certain people for my efforts.  My colleagues also generally appreciated what I did, although I’d argue that we teachers were mostly so laser-focused on our own work that we very seldom took the time to really see what our colleagues did with any thoroughness.  When we would sit down together for meetings after pouring so much of ourselves into our individual work with the students, our conversations were typically about (1) what was coming up next, and what preparation was needed, (2) administrative and communication tasks that someone felt we should be doing, or should be doing better, or (3) issues and problems with the students that needed addressing . . . and what more we should do about it.  Notice that all three of those topics involved us doing more.  On top of all this, there were also sincere attempts, which I always deeply valued, to study together, as collective study is a strong value of many Waldorf schools (usually of anthroposophically-inspired writings related to human development or education in some way.  This, I note with some alarm, seems to be waning in many Waldorf schools.)

However, here is one thing we almost never did as teachers in all those years:  we made no serious or sustained attempts to go into each others’ classrooms and see and appreciate what was being done. We almost never shared the fruits of the student’s and teacher’s labors with each other.  The strong exception to this was the fine arts, where artwork was often on display, and almost everyone attended school plays and concerts.  I came to see the fact that my math and science students seldom got to “display” or “perform” their work, except within the classroom, as a detriment and inequity. (Yes, the studies of science and math, properly approached, are liberal art forms, just like the others, worthy of performance and display). This led me to, you guessed it, start a math club, and hold science fairs.

So, I knew I was appreciated on a surface level, but I also knew that nearly no one (other than the students) knew what I was teaching or doing in my classes, and in a certain very real way, I knew that almost no one cared.  My job, as I came to be more cynical about it, was to “fill the slots” of math and science classes, that everyone, parents and teachers and “the school,” agreed needed to be taught, and to “give students credit” for completing coursework in these subjects.  The students needed credit because they were (with a number of exceptions) on a “college prep” track, and credit is the currency of that path.  The extra-curricular stuff I created and ran was all very nice, but didn’t matter, unless it completed a transcript or padded a portfolio. I tried mightily to infuse my student evaluations with insight, care, detail, nuance and careful observation.  However, in the end, what I made was: letter grades.

So, I was burned out. I was more than burned out: I was burned all the way down. I was trying to love something unlovable.  What was that thing?  It was not my colleagues, who I appreciated and often felt very close to and inspired by in many ways.  It was not the students, who were always a joy and a challenge to work with, and with whom I had great relationships the vast majority of the time.  What I was trying to love was: “the school”.  And the school was an institution that could not love me back.  Why is this?  This is what I want to explore next, and through exploring, hopefully find some insight for myself, and others who have walked a similar path.

Thanks for reading. As always, I love your reactions, comments, etc! Here is Part 2 if you’d like to keep reading. I’ll try to get these out weekly-ish, until they are all out there and my brain-palate will then be cleansed and clear for whatever’s next!

Photo by ennif pendahl on Unsplash

By contrast, nature does not use pumps.  Trees that raise water hundreds of feet in the air have no pumps.  No animal uses anything really like a pump in its movement or its body morphology.  The closest you might find are certain squids that can expand and contract to “jet” themselves quickly away in case of danger.  But by-and-large, nature seems to have taken a completely different approach to using air and water.  You might imagine that the human or mammalian heart is like a pump, but this is a gross oversimplification.  The heart regulates flow, it doesn’t force it.  How could it?  The human circulatory system has 60,000 miles of blood vessel pathways, that branch out and out, covering every part of the body..  Did you know that when an embryo in utero is developing its nascent heart, it’s the initial fluid flow that makes the heart around it, not the other way around? Yes, you read that right, the fluid starts to flow in certain shapes and the heart builds around the flow.  Much more about this can be found here if you’re interested.

And I think this is a more reverential perspective to complement the profane: that of flow.  Flow and vortexes.  Nature seems to prefer the smooth movement of eddies, whirlpools, funnels and waves rather than fluids forced through compression in pipes.  

Every time I teach this subject, I come to some new and different understanding through my work with the students.  And this is the insight that I have this time around that seems, if not new, even a little more well-defined: that the nature of air and water is to constantly flow, that it’s the flow that sustains life, and that nature’s forms in all living things is to work with this flow tendency, rather than to force pressurized mechanical motion.

Last year as I was reflecting on teaching this same course, I wrote this post, in which I pointed out that breathing is happening at every level in the whole cosmos, not just in living beings. So flow is not only confined to air and water. Rather, air and water, each in their own way, are the epitome of flow on Earth. If we are comfortable letting go of our materialistic notions that air and water are only conglomerations of particles, then we could entertain the imaginative notion that they each came out of cosmic flows that were non-material in nature long ago. Thinking that something like flow preceded the existence of substances that could flow is a great example of the anti-materialistic thinking that I like to encourage us all to do!

I’ve also previously written about how honeybee flight doesn’t obey Bernoulli’s laws at all, because honeybees move their wings in leminscates to create lift using vortices.   This year I also found that scientists are just getting around to studying how the humble dandelion seed can fly, and it’s quite beautiful.  Just like the bee, the dandelion seed uses vortex-creation to achieve flight.  In other words, flow!

Nature prefers open or semi-open systems that maintain flow and communication with the surroundings.  This is surely a hallmark of our next generation of design and science, that we let go of our obsession with pumps (which is really our obsession with total control) and start to work with the natural tendency of air and water to flow, given just the slightest inducement.  What if we studied flight that mimicked the bee or dandelion?  The catch would have to be this: we couldn’t schedule that flight on a runway to get to our next business appointment on time.  The need for control and manipulation is part and parcel of the materialistic outlook.  If we could embrace our own porous flowing boundaries, I truly believe that many new technologies-of-connection are just waiting for us to open up to them.   We certainly do have a crisis, as I told the students: it will be impossible for the whole world to live like so many of us currently do, owning one or two (or more) cars per household, and hurtling around burning fossil fuels with our pump-mobiles.  The new technologies will be ones that make us more active partners with nature, rather than passive bystanders and controllers.  They will make us more flowing in our intentions and our movements.  We will find that we don’t need to maintain the kind of rigid structures that nail everything down in the built human world today.  This is because we won’t be enforcing our will alone any longer. Rather we will be adding our will to the stream of the much larger Will of Life, to keep the flow going.

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash

One kid found a fact that there are about 1.5 sextillion molecules of water in one drop.  Another found a “fact” that when you feel wind blowing against your skin what you are “really” feeling is the air molecules hitting your skin. Yet another student brought the idea that H₂O is the chemical formula for water because each water molecule is “made of” two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom.  I’ve intentionally placed a few things in quotations to indicate my skepticism and disagreement and I’d like to try to explain the bias inherent in these three statements.   They can serve as good-enough examples of how materialism glosses over our understandings to set itself up as the ultimate-objective-knowledge-of-what-is-true.

These three molecule-esque factoids about water demonstrate something about the confusion in our materialistically-infused scientific literature.  I find nothing particularly wrong with the first fact, since it is nothing more than a restatement of the idea of a molecule as an idea.  That idea says, essentially: water (or any substance) is an aggregate of little “pieces of water,” and the smallest possible piece of water is something we will call the molecule.  Fine and well enough.  However, this does not mean that there is any real, physical way to isolate one lone molecule of water.  The molecule is, I repeat, an idea.  That idea says, “keep cutting it smaller until you reach the One Single Water Particle.”  This hypothetical One Single Water Particle is imagined to contain everything within itself that is “Watery-ness.”  This is the idea behind the word “molecule” when we use it.

Of course, we could take this even further: Science textbooks now describe that if you split that One Single Water Particle, then you’ve split the molecule into its constituent parts, its “atoms”. And we could keep going even into the realm of so called “subatomic particles,”but the pattern is already clear, isn’t it?  When one enters the world of molecules, one is entering a world of splitting, of dissection.  This approach to working with matter has in some respects been very powerful, in other respects quite limiting, and in many serious ways very destructive.

So, I have no particular problem with the first statement, that one water drop “contains” so many molecules, except that it amounts to a tautology.  If we choose to treat water as “splittable’ into pieces, then the molecule is the obvious ideal end to that splitting.  It’s self-referential and self-fulfilling, to set out to split up substances into parts, and then to find and count those parts. Can you see that?  It is truly a case of finding exactly what we look for.  I won’t go into the history too much here, but perhaps it would surprise you to know that, far from working in an unbiased fashion as science often purports to be in its rock-solid method, people like Robert Boyle and Issaac Newton assumed that matter could be split into constituent parts . . . and then went about investigating how it could be done!  (They called them corpuscles back then, and they took the idea from ancient Greek philosophers. This fact is often cited as a reason why molecules and atoms are “really real,” since the idea goes back so far. However, this is a misunderstanding of the Greek mind. They considered all kinds of things, including that the world was flat or round and that the universe geocentric and heliocentric. The Greeks had no problem entertaining conflicting and paradoxical “truths” like we do today.)

I must place a line in the sand at the second “fact,” that what you are “really feeling” when you feel wind, is molecules of air hitting your skin.  This “fact” is, in fact, a boldfaced lie.  This is someone trying to get you to see the emperor’s new clothes that aren’t there.  You absolutely do not “feel” molecules hitting your skin.  What you feel is pressure.  Pressure is the primary sensation that we actually feel (and was one of the phenomena that scientists sought to explain through imagining molecules).  This is why materialism running rampant can cause so much damage, because it tries to convince us that the ideas or models can actually be experienced or felt.  But they can’t! Because they are ideas!  The human being can sense pressure, and so pressure is one of the fundamental experiences that one must work with to understand the behavior of air and water.

Now, what about H₂O being “made of” hydrogen and oxygen?  This, too, takes the abstraction of atoms and molecules and obscures the ideas under layers of apparent simplicity.  I’ve previously mentioned that it’s a relatively easy experiment to add some salt to water (because pure water is a poor conductor of electricity), then apply an electric current (for example using a 9 volt battery with a couple of wires) to the water.  You will find that bubbles form at each of the wire ends and rise in the water.  If you capture those bubbles separately in two test tubes, you will find that, if you apply a burning stick to the gas in one test tube, it will *pop* as it quickly combusts (that’s hydrogen).  If you put the same burning stick into the gas in the other test tube, the flame will flare up brighter (that’s oxygen).  If you allow the reaction to continue and continue, you will have less and less water. OK, so we’ve proven that water is “made of hydrogen and oxygen,” right?  Wrong.  This is that sneaking materialistic assumption coming in again, the one that says “if you keeping splitting, you will find the essence.”  What we’ve proven through this experiment is that if we apply an electric current in the way described, water disappears and two gasses appear.  It is a total transformation, and by the way requires salt and electricity to make it happen (the salt is also transformed chemically).  So why don’t we say that water, electricity and salt “can be transformed into” hydrogen, oxygen, salt, and a depleted battery?  Wouldn’t this make just as much sense?  But because of our assumption that matter is the container for all the qualities that make things what they are, we say water is “made of” hydrogen and oxygen, period. 

It’s a subtle point; can you see it?  It’s a conflation of our common notions of “what things are made of” with “what their essence is”.  We are too loose and imprecise in our words and their meaning, and this is also a side-effect of materialism.  We are uncomfortable with speaking about transformational processes as just as much a “part of” what a substance “is” as what we think of as matter.

What if “what water is” in its essence was inseparable from ”what water does”?  What if the moment you took water out of the air, stream, lake or river where it lived, removed all life forms living in it (as there inevitably would be), removed all the dissolved minerals (as there inevitably would be), bottled it in a test tube and then performed experiments on it, you were already ignoring the entire context in which water exists?  This is the holistic critique of the materialistic approach to all substances.  You can’t, in fact, make a universal theory of everything when your “everything” is only abstract particles because you’ve cut everything else out of the picture.

I want to be clear:  I’m not arguing against the usefulness of the ideas of atoms and molecules in certain contexts.   Yet they are and always will remain, ideas or models, limited in their application by the imagination of their proponents and the context of their creation. Molecular ideas come in handy when you are mixing chemical substances and want to be able to predict the mass of the reactants and that of the products (although even then lots of other factors come into play). Molecular ideas provide some context for some of the behavior of water (such as the idea that water molecules are imagined to be “polar,” i.e. that water is affected by nearby electrically charged things).  But molecular ideas do not “explain or describe water’s essence”

Because we are molecule-obsessed, we are trying to convince ourselves that “everything that water is and does” can be explained by the formula: H₂O.  This is patently ridiculous although I observe that most people swallow this understanding uncritically.  Water, that most essential of life-giving substances, must be understood as it lives, moves and has its being in the ocean, lakes, aquifers, polar ice caps and clouds, and in all living things, including us.  Water is inseparable from its context and its behavior in nature.  The same can be said for air, and for everything else that we study.  This does not mean that we can’t take water out of those places and do experiments on it.  But those experiments and their findings should not be overblown in their importance, nor swapped out for and elevated over our actual lived reality in a tricky slight-of-hand.

We could inject a healthy dose of humility and care into our language, especially our language about science, and stop speaking about atoms and molecules as what the author Owen Barfield calls “psuedo-phenomenal entities”.  We can realize that atoms and molecules are only models, only one kind of lens, one kind of imagination that we can apply. And molecule-thinking has no priority over other kinds of imaginations for water, other than the fact that it is currently the way of thinking so much in fashion that it amounts to dogma. Let’s try to think for ourselves, shall we?

Photo credit: Akira Hojo on Unsplash

For a number of years now, on the first day of teaching water and air physics, after some of the preliminaries of introducing myself and getting to know the students’ names and a little bit about them, I tell them the joke about two young fish swimming in the water who meet an older fish. The older fish says, “Hello youngsters, how’s your water today?” . . . then he swims on. The two young fish look at each other puzzled, and one says to the other: “What the heck is water?”

I took this joke from a famous speech given by David Foster Wallace at a graduation ceremony, and that speech has actually come up more than once in my writing on this Substack in interesting ways. The joke hopefully wakes the kids up a little to the fact that they may have taken the wonder of air and water for granted so far in their young lives.

We then begin with a big “brainstorming” session (nice pun there for air and water physics!) in which we try to think about all the places in the world where water and air are found. The students can always come up with lots of prior knowledge, and this brings to mind that water and air are really everywhere in our world, that they are nearly always found mixed together, and that they are constantly in motion. Water is in our oceans which cover 70% of the planet. The entire planet is covered by a blanket of air that we think of a concentric “spheres” (atmosphere, troposphere, stratosphere, etc etc). Water is found under the ground everywhere in the world. Water is in our air (and air is in our water). Both air and water are in every living thing, including humans and so many human organs have as their activity the movement of air and water smoothly and continuously through the body. We realize through our brainstorming that you don’t just need water; you need to keep water moving through your body to keep healthy . . . and so does every other living thing.

After this brainstorm, the first experiment I do is very simple but profound and instructive. I have a big tub of water (like a big rubbermaid tote. You could do this in your utility sink or bathtub at home), and one or two containers. First, I alway have a narrow-necked plastic water bottle, maybe a half-liter or more in size. The tub of water needs to be deep enough to submerge the bottle completely. Then, it’s nice to also have a wide-mouthed container like a Mason jar. In the school labs where I work, I have access to big graduated cylinders, which are especially satisfying to work with because they have perfectly straight sides and no constriction at the neck. I might also pick a third interesting-shaped container like a narrow neck flask or something like that. I tell the kids that this is a lot like things they might have done playing in the bathtub when they were younger. Then I do the following:

I ask a volunteer to come up and submerge the plastic water bottle without putting the opening underwater. Then I ask them to report on the sensation. The bottle is pushing up, resisting being put into the water. If the student suddenly lets go (which is fun and makes only a minimal water mess, so totally worth it), the bottle “pops” out of the water (and some water pops out too!) with quite a lot of oomph!

Now I ask the volunteer to push the bottle down so the mouth is under the water surface. This creates an air and water exchange that I’ve come to call the “blub-blub”. It’s a very particular sound that’s hard to translate into writing. It’s like (rising in pitch and tempo) . . blub-blu-bl-b-b-b-b-boop! That’s the best I can do, you’ll have to try it yourself to see what I mean, or perhaps you remember the sound from your own playtime in the bathtub!

Now, lift the bottle, full of water, out of the water. It’s heavy now, being filled with water. It is being pulled down whereas, before when it was full of air, it was being pushed up. Now tip the bottle and let it pour out. It’s a similar, but different kind of sound that I call the “glug-glug” sound, and it also changes in pitch and tempo as you continue to pour. Also worth trying and watching and listen to yourself!

We observe that any air-filled container can experience an upward buoyant force if it is pressed down into the water. And any water-filled container held in the air pulls down with the force of its own weight.

When the air-filled bottle is underwater (and actively blub-blubbing), air is escaping due to air’s buoyancy in water, and water is rushing in to fill its place due to water’s weight. When the water-filled bottle is being poured out from above, it’s the reverse. Water is leaving the bottle due to its weight, and air is rushing in to fill the bottle. The students usually notice that the flexible sides of the bottle are alternately caving in and puffing out in rhythm with the blub-blub or glug-glug.

Over the next couple days and with the help of discussion and a few other experiments, we can realize that the blub-blub and glug-glug are demonstrating something fundamental about air and water. The narrow neck allows us to see that pressure differences are causing the air and water to “take turns” coming in and going out. A little bit of air exits the bottle and now the bottle has lowered its pressure inside. Now some water can come in to equalize the pressure. And back and forth and back and forth, like a “pressure pendulum” swinging.

If you do the same thing with a wide-mouth mason jar or a graduated cylinder, you don’t get any blub-blub or glug-glug. Instead you get a “swoosh” as air and water smoothly exchange places with each other. If you turn the container over quickly with the mouth pointing straight down (or cover the mouth with your hand until it’s perfectly vertical, then remove your hand quickly), and you watch quickly and closely, you will see that air will rush up through the center, and water will smoothly fall around the edges, like a waterfall. And, if you invert your water-filled plastic bottle with the narrow neck and give it a little starting spin, you can create a very beautiful vortex that also smoothly flows out, and avoids the glug-glug completely!

I find these experiences to be very rich and that they draw students into curiosity about water and air. . . Since, as you know, I'm not going to prioritize the teaching of materialistic dogma like atoms and molecules, I must work from demonstrations and experiments that invite students into to trying to observe and think for themselves. This means that I need to try to “let the experience speak” rather than telling students what ”the right answer is”.

This simple set of experiences becomes a rich jumping off point into deeper understandings of air and water.  I encourage you to play in the sink or bathtub for yourself!  I'll try to keep sharing with you all along this path of studying air and water as I am able

Phot credit: Me! Glug, glug

 My disagreement with materialism is a quiet one, but one which I’m determined to keep repeating, to make sure that anyone else who has reservations about an entirely materialistic approach understands that they’re not alone! While I do think there are more and more cracks in what Charles Eisenstein calls the Story of the Separate Self, the materialistic juggernaut is still largely dominant, intact, and steamrolling over us all and our God-given senses when it can.

A little story to illustrate what I mean: I recently substituted in a science classroom at a very nice school here in my town.  The classes of mostly 6th graders that I worked with that day were lovely, typical kids. They had, I think, a pretty usual spread of propensities, abilities and attention.  Our assignment for the day was to complete a reading packet with follow-up questions introducing convection, conduction, and radiation, the so-called “three modes of heat transfer” in nature.  Since this was a subject I’ve spent a lot of time teaching and pondering, I couldn’t help doing some teaching while we read the packet together.  However, I had my work cut out for me, because the language of the packet was, to my anti-materialist sensibilities, truly a horrible mishmash.  

The sentence describing conduction, for example, was something like this: “Conduction is when higher temperature vibrating solid atoms or molecules transfer heat energy through their vibrations to adjacent atoms and molecules.”  I got lots of (very honest) confusion about these sentences, so I asked the class: did they know what was meant by atoms or molecules?  A few of the more forthright students said they’d heard the words, but they had no idea what they meant.  Right. But how can you blame them for being lost?!

 Read that sentence about conduction again and ask yourself, how many of those words (even if you understood something about their meaning) are referring only to abstract models and not to anything connected to one’s real experience?  

I understand very well the atomic theory and kinetic theory of heat transfer to which the above sentence is referring. However, just to have some fun, let’s play with it like a 6th grader might in their mind.  “Conduction” is a word that is also used when referring to trains and music and means something like “to lead and to follow” (a couple students did ask me if it had anything to do with trains).  And what the heck does “vibrating” have to do with anything warming up or cooling down? This seems like another musical analogy. There is nothing visibly vibrating when something warm is put into contact with something cooler.  Following the meaning that the word “conduction” evokes, we might as well think of heat as bunch of trains that leave the “hot place” station and follows the “train tracks of conductive heat transfer”; or alternatively, we could think of heating as the ringing of a bell in a certain location, that then causes a ripple effect in a field of bells that are rung in succession in an ever-expanding ring. 

 And, “heat energy” is a completely mysterious thing that even Richard Feynmann, the eminent physicist, admitted that we can do calculations about, but which no one really understands. This is something that I wrote about here.  . so how in the name of all that is sensible can any sixth grader make heads or tails out of this??

(I want to interject here that the teacher whose class I was filling in for is a friend of mine and, I'm quite certain, a good science teacher.  None of this is meant as a criticism of her, or of science teachers everywhere. Those are the people I’d most like to reach with posts like this!)

Given what I said about trains and bells, and continuing to be playful in order to make my point, the above  sentence could just as well (but not more clearly) be written as: “Heat energy conduction is like the ringing of a bell that resounds and causes nearby bells to ring, and they in turn ring bells further out, until the ringing has spread as far as it can, and all are ringing evenly.”  Or, alternatively, we could say "The trains of heat energy leave the station from the hottest place and travel out in all available directions all at the same time, all at the speed that the paths in each direction allow.”

Both of these alternative descriptions seem like pretty awkward analogies, and I'm not recommending them, but here is my point: they are just as bad as the original one.  Let me repeat: “atoms and molecules” are no better than “trains and bells”, and possibly worse, since most kids at least have experience with trains and bells! 

We have got to stop teaching atoms and molecules to kids, especially when they are just starting to gather scientific experience and understanding.   I know this flies in the face of every single thing currently written about good science education today.  This is what I was saying about the juggernaut.  Whoever wrote that worksheet was bound and determined to describe conduction using atoms and molecules right from the start, because they believed that atoms and molecules are the objective reality and must be taught immediately so as to make sure that the kids have the “most correct” scientific understanding.  The deep irony of this situation is that most kids don’t learn anything except how to regurgitate meaningless words, and they don’t gather any experience with the physical world, either.

Seeing what they had to work with, I told the kids, “Place your hand on the tabletop and hold it there for 20 seconds.  The table initially feels cool, but then less so as you leave your hand there.  Now, remove your hand and feel the spot on the table where your hand just was.  It's warmer than the rest of the tabletop.  Feel your hand that was on the table: it feels cooler. That's conduction.”

My general sense was that plenty of kids “got” that simple exercise.  However, they still had to answer the questions on the worksheet, which were all about, you guessed it, atoms and molecules. So what I had showed them in 20 seconds and made sense, had no connection to what they had to do to complete the assignment.

If science teaching isn't just going to be an indoctrination into meaningless words that simply refer to trains, bells, atoms and molecules, we need to start with human experience and use words that stem from that experience.

Here's my alternative description of conduction. See what you think: Conduction is when something warm comes in contact with something cooler.  The warmer thing cools and the cooler thing warms until they have evened each other out (are at the same temperature).

This description of conduction can get you very far in understanding thermal physics. No atoms or molecules needed.  I repeat, no atoms or molecules are needed to understand thermal physics at an introductory level, and even at a very high level.

You might ask, “Then when are you going to introduce them to atoms and molecules?” My answer is: “When their own work and thinking about science requires them to take it further into abstraction; or when they hear about it and get curious and ask me about them.” 

In the air and water physics course that I'm teaching now, I plan to address the fact that water is often called “H2O”.  Aha! you might say, now you have to talk about atoms and molecules.  Nope, I don’t.  I have set up a nifty hydrolysis device with a plastic cup, two tacks, a couple test tubes, and a battery.  It’s quite easy to apply an electric current to water and generate hydrogen and oxygen gas, and then show the kids that you get twice as much hydrogen as oxygen by this method.  Thus, “H2 - O”.  

Then you might also ask: Ok, when will a science student reach the point that they must learn about atoms and molecules?  My answer: “I have no idea because everybody is different. And many people may never get to that point; and if they never learn about atoms and molecules, but have a grounding in physical experience and practice with explanation that is grounded in their actual senses, they will be fine.  And more than fine, they may even be much better off than their counterparts who had “atoms and molecules” drilled into them from a young age, and are simply regurgitating words.

And, again, you might ask me:  What will you tell them when they've advanced enough to recognize abstract thinking when they see it, and want to know what atoms and molecules are? I will say, “The ideas of atoms and molecules are just that, ideas;  they are abstract models that allow us to explain certain aspects of the behavior of the physical world in certain situations; but they are not objectively true outside of the context in which those ideas were developed. They are limited models (as all models are) that apply only in those situations in which the models were worked out in the first place, which is essentially the laboratory, the fission reactor and the cyclotron.  At an even deeper level, my recent posting about Projective Geometry, in particular this post should hint to you that even the mathematical basis for the equations of physics that underlie atomic theory carry their own point-centered bias!

The great hubris of science today compels science teachers and science students alike to bow at the altar of atoms and molecules.  I have no problem with atomic and molecular theory, put in its proper place.  But, it’s hard to keep from getting a little testy when I have worksheets like this to contend with.  I know that we can do better.   And doing better is exactly what I am trying to do through my own teaching of water and air science. I hope to share some more of what I’m doing and how I’m doing it with you soon!

Photo by Shaouraav Shreshtha on Unsplash

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

We have arrived at the last installment of my walk through Wendell Berry’s poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.  I’ve found a lot of new meaning in trying to describe some of the contours and facets that I can see in this poem to y’all.  I hope you have, too.

We left off last time with human lovers “in the field” surrounding, protecting and nurturing, as best they can, a sacred space where human and non-human life can thrive and renew itself, a place where satisfaction holds sway. After this completing imagery of the previous section of the poem, the final section seems like something of an epilogue, and also a recapitulation of where we began, alongside one final image.   

Yet if you’ve been following from the beginning of this poem, you may remember that it began with a very different feeling, and with some dire warnings about what can happen to sour one’s satisfaction permanently: namely, to “want more of everything ready made,” and to “be afraid to know your neighbors, and to die.”

We will always be subject to the usual strife and struggles of daily living and losing, joy and sorrow; but we can live essentially whole and intact, in community and with joy and meaning in daily and yearly rhythms . . . if those forces that would like to disturb and derail us for their own profit can be evaded.  There are today, in fact, many forces arrayed against humans living in simple satisfaction and contentedness. 

I have to confess that as I worked on this post the last few days, I was shaken in a way that I haven’t been in a long time by the recent announcement that our President ordered unilateral bombing strikes on targets in Yemen.  In the big picture, there is really nothing special about this.  Every American president I’ve ever lived under has done something similar, without exception. There is always some imagined enemy to bomb or destabilize.  But some part of my heart that I usually keep more guarded and in check is really feeling this; and not only this, but the entire damn pattern, since it’s only the latest in an obvious pathology stretching back at least as far as World War I and the rise of modern industrial warfare.  Indeed, the “generals and politicos” are at their same old transparent bullshit again, using our tax dollars and our implicit proxy to use a truly terrible arsenal of war for whatever they deem necessary.  I am so saddened and angry by this.  Angry doesn’t cut it: I’m furious, actually. I feel a kind of deep anguished rage about this: that for my entire life, and long before I was born, the generals and politicos are still doing the same shit, still causing the same rampant destruction . . . and still trying to convince us that there is some good reason for it.  And, so far, we are still falling for it.  My country continues to invade, kill, destroy, extract  . . . in short, to rape the world, for “quick profit,”, for “more of everything, ready made.”  The flimsy and insulting rationale for this particular attack has to do with dirt-poor Yemeni Houthis “disrupting trade routes.”  Our oil and consumer goods that are shipped on freighters and tankers are being delayed, and so the Commander-in-Chief has ordered the bombing of yet another sovereign country.  This, at least, is honest.  At least this time they didn’t bother to come up with some whitewashed name like Operation Enduring Freedom.  The richest country in the world is bombing one of the poorest . . . so we can have our crap delivered on time.  

This latest action is only the familiar emblem of what we all know: there are powerful generals and politicos who would like our attention to be trained on them, and who would like to be supplying us with a never-ending stream of geopolitical arguments for war and scary images of destruction dealt from above on a grainy black and white video.  They’d like us to believe that those holding the reins of power ought to be revered, honored and deferred to; that they must be respected. We are to assume that they must know what they are doing and that they know better than we do.

I am bone-tired of the lie that economic stability and safety depends on electing the “right” candidate, or on killing “evildoers, rebels, terrorists and extremists,”.  Whether one opposes or supports the current administration (or supported or opposed the last one), it matters not, as long as they have our attention.  Whether we are striving to “tear the system down,” to “make America great again,” or to “bring hope and change,” we are still entirely compromised . . .and our thoughts are entirely predictable.   All of these slogans boil down to yet another version of imposing our will on a world we don’t regard as neighbor.

And here, Mr. Berry is clearly expressing:  whatever you are trying to attain by “wanting,” even if what you “want” is for world peace to be achieved through superior firepower and militarily protected shipping lines . . .this is a lie and a trap.  It is a trap that you should try to evade and, if you find yourself caught, to escape.  Your heart can tell you, even if your mind cannot, that no amount of attention given or power ceded to generals and politicos will lead to contentment.  It will not lead to more life; it will only destroy. It will destroy satisfaction in those places where we are killing “rogue nations'' for our own national interests, comfort and convenience. And it will destroy our satisfaction, too.  How can I ever be satisfied if my country is bombing other countries so that cheap disposable goods from China can flow freely?  How can I ever be satisfied if I know that American companies are manufacturing munitions for all sides to use to kill each other in never-ending conflict, and that this military production is stimulating the economy and driving growth in gross domestic product?  Who can ever be really satisfied by this?  No one. Some of us can delude ourselves, and maybe even for a lifetime. We are being hoodwinked and manipulated and used.  The heart knows this.  

To be a truly human creature in the created world, we must try to leave all of this wanting behind. Not only that, but we have to be wily in how we stage our getaway!  Otherwise, we will just get drawn in again.  We will get drawn in to who is president and who might be president next; and which country is at war with another, and what the latest entertainment fad is, and what new villain is garnering our indignance, and which pandemic or catastrophe or other scary monster is currently looming, and what new influencer movement is currently printing sunflower flags or colored ribbons or images of watermelons for people to wave . . . all of this will draw you in and keep you in, forever, if you let it.  We are being pursued just as much as the Houthis and the Gazans and the Israelis . . . because the generals and politicos need our attention as cover for them to keep doing what they do.  They need our tacit approval so they can continue to define the terms of engagement.

We play into the hands of the powerful forces of government, advertisers, pharmaceutical companies, agribusiness, political parties etc when we willingly swallow their “party lines,” and think like they’d like us to think.  But we also play into their hands when we try to impose our own oppositional thinking into the maelstrom of cacophonous voices and stake out our little claim on the world stage.  Witness how many of us feel like we need to take some kind of “stance” on the current war in Israel, in which about 30,000 souls, mostly women and children, have been killed so far, and many, many more are suffering.  Why do we feel that we need to have a reasoned opinion about this? There is no “stance,” on this, there is no justification. There are no good guys, there are only humans on both sides, killing.  Let’s not equivocate. There are only (mostly) men killing and wantonly destroying, goaded by our elected and military leaders. 

Whenever I get like this, I'm reminded of this other powerful Wendell Berry poem, which expresses the depth of my feeling:

Before we kill another child
for righteousness' sake, to serve
some blissful killer's sacred cause,
some bloody patriot's anthem
and his flag, let us leave forever
our ancestral lands, our holy books,
our god thoughtified to the mean
of our smallest selves. Let us go
to the graveyard and lie down
forever among the speechless stones.

What is to be done, then?  How can we escape from this trap of wanting? When I get like this and feel the goad of my complicity, it makes me feel like a wild animal that cannot free his paw from the teeth of the hunter's trap, no matter how hard I writhe. Sometimes waves of fury wash over me as I realize how I’ve been used and misled most of my life by these forces. I feel ashamed, too, for my complicity.  I want to stop being a proxy killer.  I want to escape.  But this is more wanting!  The trap tightens.

We must be crafty to escape.  We need to become like the fox.  Let’s think for a moment what a fox is like:  The fox is elusive, slippery, poised. She is opportunistic, willing to wait and do what she needs to do to survive, to nurture her kits, and to stay wild and free. She will do startling things to get free, including leaving false scent trails for the killers to confuse themselves with, while she steals away.

Inspired by this line, I’ve been trying to become more foxlike for years! It is difficult for me, given the many years I was trained to be compliant, civil, “patriotic” and “reasonable.” But there is nothing reasonable about how most of us live today. Now more than ever I want to keep my mind and heart intact.  But if I had to choose between the two, I'd keep the heart and ditch the mind.  The mind can help us to discern the traps of modern life, to see them clearly for what they are as illusions.  And yet, the mind can only get us so far and no farther. It will not be able to free us: it will just keep making more excuses for more tweaks, more justifications for how we can stay comfortable and tolerate genocide in our name.  The mind will pretend that because one country is considered an “ally,” certain killing is different than other killing. The mind without the heart can be eternally fooled by just war theories or strategies that “ensure” our safety at the expense of others’ lives, ad infinitum. The mind can also be stimulated to imaginary fears that make us accept compromises and keep destructive forces working on our behalf.   Last MLK day I wrote a post about this very thing.

It’s only a grounded logic of the heart that will give us the scent of a trail to break free from this.  The heart logic of loving the world, loving one’s neighbor, and loving God can be enough to break us free, and no power can control it, if we renew it every day in the real world, and in one’s real neighbors, and in one’s real experience of God working in and through us. 

Breaking free from the generals and politicos and trusting one's heart leads to a practice. It is a practice of facing one’s self and the world and one’s neighbor each day renewed, exactly as we each are, and seeing anew the beauty and grace which is gifted to each of us, and which we are also a part of.  It is a practice of remembering that every human being is a brother or sister, and every non-human being is a part of our extended family.  It is also a practice of grieving the destruction, the lives lost and still being wiped out, the hatred that drives it and the corrupt logic that sustains it all. And yet we will never be able to stop this destruction by becoming destroyers ourselves. We can grieve and we can rage . . . but no amount of angry retribution will ever lead to satisfaction.  On this day when we remember the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr I think we’ve arrived at exactly the place he did when he became convicted that non-violence and love for neighbor was the only way forward.

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

In this light the last two words of this poem, which I’ve been displaying since I started working with it, ring out.  “Practice resurrection.”  With these last two words, we have permission to be creatures who make lots of tracks in many directions, who are in fact supposed to be renewing our imperfect minds and hearts and bodies, every day.  These last two words help me to feel my pulsing blood and quickening heart, and know the deeper truth that lies in them that transcends my mind’s arguments.  My heart tells me truths that my mind will never admit, like: We are not ever secure, and seeking security is itself a trap.  We cannot oppose our “enemies” by becoming like them, not even by utterly destroying them . . . and in fact, there is no enemy other than my own wanting.  The heart knows that we are only constantly alive and responsive, only continuously pulsing and practicing, and dodging and weaving, to stay free.  The heart knows we have a world-full of neighbors to help us track our own living . . . and no need for illusions of more than this.

In the face of continuous destruction and political meaninglessness, this manifesto that is not a manifesto gives me a key to escape into the woods and into my own life and into my neighborhood. I hope it does for you, too.  I can imagine wondrous consequences if enough of us stole off away from the generals and politicians, ceased to give them our attention, and went back to living our grace-filled lives, seeking deep satisfaction without constant unhinged wanting.  Our hearts are not that different from the fox’s; they know what to do. That is something at last that we can trust, and practice resurrection every day of our mortal lives. 

I’ll end here with a beautiful song that comes to me when I think and feel along these well worn lines.  It’s called The General by the band Dispatch. That link is the song and this is the lyrics. The subtitle to this post comes from the refrain of that song, check it out. I had some great kids when I taught in the Waldorf school who introduced me to this song.  Without getting lost in my wanting . . .I want this message to even reach the generals out there who are directing the killing as we speak.  I want their hearts to be whole, as I want mine to be.  We all need to get there together.

Image found here.

So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

We’ve come a long way in my slow gestation of Wendell Berry’s poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. I’ve enjoyed teasing out meaning from this very meaningful poem.  By way of review, some of the images that have arisen as I’ve explored the poem with you are (moving through Parts 1-5 in order): a new kind of logic of the human heart (Love. . .And); pathways across an inner landscape that lead toward loving the world and all of our neighbors, non-human and human; the idea of usufruct, that we are stewards and never owners of the given world; the rich tapestry of a sequoia and the forest floor beneath it that simultaneously retains memory of all the generations before and serves as the repository of preparedness for multitudinous possible futures; and listening and looking at death and dying with new ears and eyes for the renewal that is within in every dying process, and the dying that is part of every living process.

I have one more section of poem to go after this one (unless I slow down again and parse it out even more!).  This section where we now find ourselves was actually a big part of the inspiration for me to take on this project of working through the entire Manifesto in the first place.  The words have lived strongly in my mind for several years now. I find that I have so much to think and say about it that I wrote several pages . . . and then I set them aside, because I realized I was getting majorly off track. So . . . I’ve scrapped most of what I’ve written so far, and am starting again, trying to cleave to the poem, and stay in the flow of imagery that we are in.  I will (mostly) leave all of my other inquiries and questionings aside for now.

The last lines of the poem just before these new lines, you may remember, are about laughter:  “Laugh./  Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful/ though you have considered all the facts.”  From this laughter and joy (which is itself preceded by a view of death and dying in a new light), the imagery of this next section of the poem is potent, and, I think, a culmination of a series of images that lead up to this one.  That culminating image is, of course, a woman about to give birth to a baby.  I think Mr. Berry in his choice of sequence of imagery quite intentionally moved from a sequoia forest floor, to death and dying as continuous renewal, through laughter and joy, and then finally to a woman preparing to birth a new life.

 There is a kind of cycle there, a beautiful revolution, from forest, to carrion and humus, to the very end of the world, to human laughter and human joy, to a baby on the way.  This succession of images is what good poetry is all about, and the feelings and thoughts they give us as we move through them with our hearts and minds.

But the image is not only that of a woman near to giving birth.  The way Mr. Berry wrote these lines implies at least a couple other levels: “Ask yourself: Will this satisfy/ a woman satisfied to bear a child?/ Will this disturb the sleep/ of a woman near to giving birth?”

Firstly, while the image is that of a woman giving birth, Mr. Berry is speaking to us, and what is clear is that we, the readers of this poem, are not, in this instance, the woman.  We are those humans that surround that woman, asking ourselves how we can work together to create the necessary sacred spaces around those who are bearers of new human life into the world.

Secondly, the idea of satisfaction lives strongly.  Mr. Berry repeats it, I'm quite sure, with purpose.  The feeling of satisfaction, of rightness and completeness and fullness and peaceableness are all invoked here. This is a woman near to giving birth who feels, as risky and overshadowingly demanding of a threshold experience as childbirth is, that she is satisfied. She is as ready as she can be, and surrounded by the support and care that makes birthing the sacred initiation that it is. I wish to insert here that I don’t mean to imply any “virtue signaling” around natural or home childbirth vs. birth in a hospital setting, C-section, etc.  I have the utmost respect for each individual person’s choices, and griefs, around their childbirth experiences. Child-birthing is another one of those threshold experiences that I wrote about last time, akin to being born ourselves, and to dying.  Each person encounters these thresholds uniquely.  And yet, invoking this feeling of satisfaction as a goal and ideal that we can each work toward for every woman undertaking this sacred task, seems to me to be inspiring without judging other people’s life paths.  I have had the privilege to be present at several birthing experiences where this satisfaction and nurturing care around the birthing mother were present and tangible, and I know it to be a worthy goal! 

Now . . . this is where I was going to write a bunch of other things, which I came to realize would actually only distract from giving this poem my full attention, and that really is what I want to do.  I will only succumb a little bit to the temptation to tell you what I was going to tell you!  I was going to write a lot about women and men, and the biological/spiritual/biographical dimensions of womanhood and manhood that may seem so archaic or even patriarchal today, but which I think we need to re-enliven and re-work (without in any way marginalizing those special individuals who feel that their gender identity is non-binary or fluid) if we are going to find good work for people to do that doesn’t leave their minds “punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer”.

I was going to spend (and I have spent) a lot of time mulling over the obvious crisis of men in our world; rich, powerful men who “go cheap for power,” men who are at the helm of corporations and governments and armies and are overseeing the destruction of the beautiful world for quick profit or “national security”; and men in our history and still today who are demagogues that spur other people (most of them men) to acts of deplorable violence; and men who are lower middle class and poor who are so obviously struggling to find meaningful work to do for their families and communities, work that would allow them to help create and protect the kinds of sacred spaces around birthing mothers that this poem invokes.   I was going to write about Mr. Berry’s idea, which he writes about in many other places, of husbandry, which I think is what he is invoking here.  But . . . I’m going to leave all of that for another time, because it takes us much too far afield. . .

And, there is a field that Mr. Berry is inviting us to go to in our imaginations.  It is a field that surrounds a place (I picture a farmhouse, do you?) where a woman can sleep peacefully as she gets ready to give birth.  I think Mr Berry means for us to go to that field in our imaginations, fall in love with it and the sacred house it surrounds.  We should protect a space like that, because that space will nourish the woman and her baby, and will equally nourish other women and men and non-binary persons, and children, and the fields, and the forests.  The image is symbolic, of course; the specifics of how we nurture that space in our own lives has to be left up to us.  Not all of us can live on farms with fields surrounding, and I’m sure not all of us want to.  And yet, the idea of protecting sacred space by asking ourselves: “Will it disturb the sleep of. . .?”  is a potent one. That question can be asked anywhere. 

What kinds of “fields'' will we live in?  What will we swear allegiance to?  To a flag, or a republic, or quick profit, or amusement, or hoarding, or visions of doom and gloom that spawn despair and are always only half the picture? Or will we swear allegiance to sacred spaces that nurture life, grieve death when it comes, and celebrate renewal?  What is nighest to your thoughts?  What is nighest to mine?  Will our collective thoughts create realities where women are satisfied to bear children and live in those “fields,” and where new lovers want to run off and lie down together?  I hope for that, I really do.

As always, I welcome your responses and thoughts. Thank you, friends.

Another photo of original artwork from my house. Purchased from Teresa McGeeney on Etsy

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.

Hello Dear Friends,

After a couple weeks of being otherwise occupied with travel and work and holidays, I’m returning to the task I set for myself, of working through the poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front by Wendell Berry.  (Here are Parts 1, 2, 3 and 4) if you want to go back)As has happened already several times before, I’m really struck by the serendipity of the timing.  Here we are at the dying of the year (and yet also the time when the Sun has already begun to regain its strength, little by little, after the Solstice), and this particular passage of the poem is all about: renewing one’s relationship to death and dying!  This part of the poem is beautifully reflected in this time of year, when the glitzy Saturnalian holidays are over and we are left to regard the stark bright stars on cold dark nights, with the trees bare and nearly all the natural world in recession and hibernation, nearly everything apparently dead. This time of year (in particular the twelve holy nights between Christmas and Epiphany) is thought of in anthroposophical circles as the time when spiritual realities come closest in to humans, and when deeper spiritual messages can often be heard resonating in our own lives.

I’ve written previously about the very obvious fact that a hallmark of our collective sickness in our consumerist society is not only fear of death, but willful ignorance of death and all of dying’s ways.  We have a strong preference not to pay too close attention to the actual dying process, nor to the inescapable fact that all living things, including ourselves, must die.  (There are beautiful initiatives, such as hospice care that help people to die at home with their family, that are attempting to correct this blindness.  Another good example is natural burial options that skip the embalming and entombing processes that accompany so many funerals these days.) We don’t want to admit to ourselves what is so clearly obvious when one looks at nature: that Life in all of its variegated growth, abundance and diversity absolutely depends on a constant complementary death and dying process in order to renew itself.

This is a place where, as different as they are, Wendell Berry and Rudolf Steiner come very close to each other.  I find it amusing to think about these two writers and thinkers, both of whom I admire deeply, meeting each other.  Or, since that’s impossible in time because Steiner died a few years before Berry was born, perhaps I imagine Wendell Berry picking up some of Steiner’s lectures or books.  I think Mr. Berry would find Steiner’s methods and approach pretty inaccessible and probably mostly gobbledygook.  The best I can imagine is a kind of bemused charity of each toward the other.  Berry writes from an American, romantic, agrarian and heart-centered methodology.  Steiner was Austrian, highly intellectual, and immersed in (mostly urban) occult conversations in Europe at the time.  And yet, when it comes to insights around right relationship to death and dying, I see the two men as absolutely working from the same material, with some differences in language and scope.  

Rudolf Steiner came to recognize this bias against death and dying in science and culture (and really, against life itself) early on in his work and spent a lot of time trying to point it out to people.  His inspiration came through his doctoral work retranslating the scientific writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. One of Goethe’s focuses was on deeply immersive botanical studies of various plant life. When one studies life in all of its forms, from the smallest organisms to the most complex, one sees everywhere cycles of death and rebirth.  And, in the more complex longer-lived organisms, we see a kind of echo of dying, a dying that does not involve actual physical death: we call that: sleep!  Steiner through his lifetime built an entire worldview of the human being around these ideas.  The human being is one that cycles through the day and night, and through the seasons and years, and even through multiple lives, constantly swinging between periods of greater awakeness, growth and blooming, and back to rest, dissolving, retreating and dissolution.  It just made sense to Steiner that, since everywhere we look, we see life using dying and rebirth cycles (and waking and sleeping cycles) to constantly renew itself, this pattern must continue “all the way down” into the depths of the human being, and also “all the way up” into the cosmos. After shedding a lot of my materialistic baggage, it makes a lot of sense to me, too.  (Considerations such as these led Steiner to speak in favor of ideas of human reincarnation and karma, although one needn’t embrace these philosophical ideas in order to simply accept the compelling evidence for cyclical living and dying.)

As different as they are in background and method, Berry and Steiner offer the same insight.  And, I must say, Mr. Berry is much better at putting it succinctly, poetically and practically, to my American ears.  “Listen to carrion–put your ear close and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come.”  It’s all there in this potent sentence.

This theme comes up over and over again for Berry.  I could rattle off a dozen poems of his that I know and love well, that explore and return to this: that in order to love life deeply and truly, in order to feel connected and loved by a world that is constantly dying and renewing itself, one must embrace one’s own death, and (hard as this is to do), the death and loss of all of our loved ones and everything we love in this created world.  To do so is to embrace a larger and truer version of life, and prevents the grievous error of wanting to hoard more time or more money; or to freeze life into some neo-Platonic conception of, for instance, unchangeable homogeneous atomic nuclei, or a glorious heaven of good humans living in the clouds who are all in their mid-30’s, at the perpetual prime of their life possessed of perfect bodies.

For a long time I, like many people, held very closely to a deep fear of death.  And, I don’t think anyone is being honest nor particularly imaginative when they say that they aren’t afraid of dying.  Dying is most certainly a threshold in one’s life, a humongous one.  It’s not about being unafraid, but it is about a certain kind of trust. I was helped greatly in my own feelings about death and dying by something I learned while studying Steiner.  One day in a class I was participating in, the subject of death and dying came up, and a person who was well-read in Steiner’s writings pointed out this simple yet profound conceptual shift.  “Death is not the opposite of life.  Death is the opposite of birth.”  They are both thresholds, but life, in fact, if one honestly observes it, goes on and on, through birthing, growing and dying cycles.

As an exercise (taken from Goethe) to try to get at the “life bias” so many of us carry, try this: Think about a flower, perhaps a daisy. . . Now, what are you thinking of?  I bet it’s a fully-flowering, height-of-summer daisy in bloom.  But that’s not the complete daisy, is it?  That is only one stage in a continuum of “daisy-ness”.  When the daisy is still contained completely inside a daisy seed . . . it’s still completely a daisy, is it not?  When it starts to put out its first root and shoot and cotyledon leaves, it’s still completely a daisy.  When it grows tall and green and leafs out but has no flowers yet, or flowers only in bud, it’s still a daisy.  Then flowering happens and this is what we habitually think of as the daisy, but that’s just one moment, one preferential snapshot we have for the daisy at its climax of being fully awake, fully outwardly alive.  But, now, continue in your imagination of the daisy in time: the flowers are now pollinated, are done with their work and the petals wither. The seeds mature and drop off onto the ground, or birds come and eat them.  The plant’s living forces withdraw completely down underground and the leaves and stem brown, wither away and decompose.  Various and sundry microorganisms, and some macroorganisms, feed on the dying plant material.  The dying daisy is just as much daisy as the living, growing one. Every part of that imaginative picture is a complete daisy. Or, alternatively, all of those pictures of the daisy are facets of complete “daisy-ness”. Nature, in other words, does not differentiate between cycles of living and cycles of dying.  It is a complete cyclical totality.

This is what I also see Berry describing in this passage of the poem: That we must see the humus building under the trees (the “dying cycle” of the forest) as absolutely essential to life.  We must in fact see the death of all living things as the kernel of nature's deepest renewing wisdom.  Without constant dying, there is no constant renewal.  And so, we humans can become more integrated, more alive in fact, and can become true partners with nature when we realize that our own death will also contribute to the enrichment of the world.  This is true not only in the physical sense if we leave our bodies to naturally decay, but in the spiritual and poetical sense of our karma, the resonance of our deeds as we live as well as we can while we are awake.

And, if we can embrace this, a new kind of freedom and joy can result.  This, I think, is why this part of the poem quite necessarily finishes in joy and laughter.  The end of the world becomes nothing particularly alarming if one realizes that in the seed of every dying is a new birthing on-the-way.  I picture the laughter Berry is speaking of as a deep joyful belly-laughter because it knows the truth: That constant dying-and-renewal is, in fact, at the core of nature’s way, and we can trust our own renewal through the thresholds of being born and dying just as we trust and anticipate that we will wake up after a good sleep, or that the daisies will bloom again.  This kind of laughter is a potent inoculant to those who use doom and gloom to scare us into thinking that death is some kind of absolute ending, or that the otherwise dead universe only made life in one unimportant corner by accident. Ha! How ridiculous! In truth, we are surrounded and are completely part of a continuous cycle of growing and blooming, and receding and dying; of joy-making and grief-making.   We are infused with them both, all the way to our in-breathing and out-breathing. Our completeness, just like the daisy's, must be seen as a daily kaleidoscope of little births and deaths, and every waking moment is complemented by the time we spend communing with spiritual worlds while we sleep. We could very well laugh out loud about this, it is such a relief to know it to our core!

I’m really enjoying working through this poem with you.  As always, your comments and musings are really welcomed!

Another photo of original artwork from my house. Purchased from Teresa McGeeney on Etsy.