The images shown below were made a few days ago in and around a creek that I like to visit whenever I need the peace, depth, and solace that most social circumstances seem to deny. The sun had made a surprise appearance during this merciful recession of Winter, which was all I needed to drag my bike out of the basement, throw a few essentials into my knapsack (water, tripod, and a camera with my favorite fixed-focus lens), and fly out of the house.
I am cautiously hoping that the the pandemic emergency we are experiencing turns out to be the alarm that wakes a critical number of us to the far larger crisis affecting the species as a whole.
All our forms of organization, both secular and religious, are failing because the root problem confronting the species is, fundamentally, not one of social structure but of consciousness. The tribalism and self-centeredness each one of us embodies have created, in our time, a general state of mind mirrored by a society that can not possibly cope, now or ever, with the multiple interconnected problems of their own creation.
Before we get to the pictures, please allow me the few more paragraphs necessary to place them in the proper context.
Competing and often bitterly opposed nations, institutions, groups, and individuals have been developing and modifying themselves for millennia, but they have remained constitutionally incapable of transcending themselves and integrating the species. Being so intensely dedicated to protecting and prolonging themselves, exclusive cultural and psychological forms are incapable of eliminating the chronic injustice, conflict, and sorrow for which they are responsible. Even if we are aware of how dire the current situation of humanity is, we carefully avoid going to the root of it because it is so deeply and firmly planted in ourselves, and we loathe being so intimately disturbed. So, we go on and on devising and applying insufficient, local, and external fixes to our many ailments, which is what we have always done, and precisely what has brought us to the present, virulent manifestation of the same old chronic disease of mental separation.
Our tribal and personal isolation creates the splintered and conflicted world we suffer and that suffers us. We are the persistence of greed that appears intent on devastating the biosphere. We are the ever-present danger posed by thermonuclear and other horrific weapon systems that we insanely trust with protecting us and our level of consumption at whatever cost to others and the miracle of life itself. We are the secular and religious ideologies and traditions from which we derive so much of our sense of existence, not caring much that identity is what keeps humanity divided and in the state of permanent insecurity and conflict that still passes for normal. We are the demographic, epidemiological, and climatic variables we cannot control. We are both vectors and victims of the afflictions created by our classist, sexist, racist, sectarian, and partisan convictions.
In a nutshell, we are not as unique, autonomous, and innocent as we like to think we are. What is more, unless we find a way to stop acting in the divisive manner predetermined by our always limited experience and integrate ourselves into the stream of life, nothing significant will change, and the species will simply continue in its present suicidal trajectory.
Outside of human society, there is nothing that exists in separation or that, like us, pretends to do so. The atomized sense we have of life comes from looking at it exclusively through the prejudiced and otherwise aberrant optics of thought. Knowledge and its intelligent projection are, of course, essential to human life, but not when they become the ground of an absurdly separate claim to existence that cruelly distances us from most others and jointly alienates us from the wholeness of existence.
This brings us back to the pictures I want to share with you.
I go out into the wild because there I hardly exist. Nothing in or around the solitary creek cares about who I am, or how high or low, distinct or indistinct my social and economic position may be. The raucously flowing water or the solemn stone bed and flanks of the stream are no audience to the silly claim of a tribal pedigree, stale accumulated knowledge, or the importance granted to an idealized future self enjoying much-improved mental and social circumstances.
Deep immersion into the undivided, and therefore unthinkable current of life and death―both manifest and non-manifest―rubs the image of a separate personal/tribal self right off the mind. In front of unknowing, innocent, and therefore keenly attentive eyes, the creek bares all. There is no inside and outside, no me and you and it. There is no particular sense of time either; gone is the time that flows from the remembered past through a predefined and instrumentalized present and onto the future that fear and desire dread and crave in similar measure. There is only this instant (click!) that is dying so the next may be, so mysteriously new that thought, which is always old, does not even attempt to reduce it to itself.
May seeing these images (poor representations of what is beyond representation) prompt you to find a similar undoing of your own sense of isolation.
