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| Black Mountain from White House Pool, Pt. Reyes |
If you've ever felt the ecstasy of being one with nature, one with the universe, you may also have felt the agony of being unique, separate and alone.
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| Drifting Thoughts |
Two sides of the same coin, as the saying goes. We each carry these polarities, if only as potentials that graze our conscious selves like tangents on a circle.
Would we trade the bliss of ignorance for the torture of clarity? Or, better yet, marry them together?
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| Horseshoe Bend, Drake's Beach |
I like to think we're drawn to frontiers, to edges where the land meets the sea, because they tune these polarities within us, bring us into harmony.
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| Textured Wave, Drake's Beach |
We're all one, all born of elements formed in exploding stars, born of a virgin that science calls a singularity. From that unique mother of the universe comes a family of forces and elements, of life and consciousness.
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| Iris Bluffs, Pt. Reyes |
Spring is a great reminder of the mystery of life.
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| Spring Greenery, Kehoe Beach |
And I don't just mean mystery in a religious, poetic, or mystical sense, but an actual mystery that has scientists completely flummoxed.
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| Sun Breakthrough, Pt Reyes Ranchlands |
All the insights we've made into physics and biology remain fragmentary knowledge, as yet unsynthesized into a coherent story of the mystery of life.
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| Silhouettes in Morning Mist |
This all came together for me as I was reading an interview in Quanta Magazine with the physicist Nigel Goldenfeld and was struck by the following passage:
“It’s in that sense
that I think our view of evolution as a process needs to be expanded — by
thinking about dynamical systems, and how it is possible that systems capable
of evolving and reproducing can exist at all. If you think about the physical
world, it is not at all obvious why you don’t just make more dead stuff. Why
does a planet have the capability to sustain life? Why does life even occur?
The dynamics of evolution should be able to address that question. Remarkably,
we don’t have an idea even in principle of how to address that question —
which, given that life started as something physical and not biological, is
fundamentally a physics question.”
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| Cliff Dweller, Pt. Reyes |
I like to believe that humanity will someday be able to address that question, to tell that story. And maybe in doing so, become able to address the ability of a virus that's just following the laws of nature to jam up our life systems, not just individually but extending to the entire tribe of human beings throughout the world.
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