Does Everything Exist That Could?

Different time, same questions

A moose, airlifted and relocated by helicopter.

Recently, I’ve taken a blanket to the lawn around 6am and read for the first few hours as the sun rises. The birds and I watch the neighborhood wake up. I’ve been big on my Annie Dillard kick, which is in turn turning me toward biology. At night, I’ve been watching Ken Burns & Stephen Ives’ documentary series The West. My attention, which has so often and so pointedly focused on human relationships, is dialing in on philosophy, history, and science. 

I’m still on this kick of “does everything exist in this world that could?” The question is not so much conundrum as it is koan. Still, I feel disgruntled by it. To learn anything about reproduction and death, about root systems and water cycles, about evolution and technology, is to experience my mind completely splayed out. “I don’t understand” territory is a great land to be in, insofar as it short circuits me straight to reality. “I don’t know” seems to be a vantage point that lets me see everything more clearly and with more love. 

Take, for instance, the time period of 1750 to 1880 west of the Missouri River. A simple blip of time in a particular pocket of space. The sheer amount of “muchness” leaves one splayed, but also connecting the dots. Buffalo, beavers. Treaty after treaty with with Indigenous Americans broken. Child after child slaughtered. Chinese in baskets with sticks of dynamite, building the railroad. Swedes fresh from small villages now in middle of Kansas, not another family in sight. People of all classes and creeds, foot stomping to their particular perception of survival. 2024 in America: no less astounding, fearsome. We’re running off the fossil fuels of rapid collision. Awareness winks, worlds build and crumble.  

None of these facts are “new info” (I was lucky to learn a lot in school and I watched The West 5 years ago), but I’m starting to learn something about growing up. My perception at 30 is, in fact, wildly different and more vast than at 25. This trajectory offers some enthusiasm for the gift of aging, which is no more or less a miracle than the literal thousands of cottonwood seeds I see leisurely traveling through the air in this lawn I’m sitting in. How many pass through this acre a day? How many will root? How many will make it to the fine old age of a grandmother tree? What the fuck, pardon my language, are the metrics of wisdom?

In retrospect, a whole heck of a lot of behavior went on west of the Missouri from 1750 to 1880 that could be classified, from one vantage point, as incredibly shortsighted, greedy, and devastatingly unwise. Could it have been another way? Yes and no. Is it any different now? Does everything exist in the world that could? In 2006, Utah and Colorado struck an agreement in which they airlifted moose by helicopter to Colorado to boost the population. In my old neighborhood I spent 3 years watching the same 3 legged deer survive and eat the neighbor’s plants. The other day, buying hair clips in a Colorado Walgreens, I encountered a squishmallow stuffed bear audaciously promoting Pringles. 

By virtue of being a therapist in Boulder, my world and my social media feed are filled with a lot of relational and emotional content: polarity practices, authentic relating, shadow work. In my life, I’ve done a tremendous amount of weeping with others. In my own sober psyche I’ve encountered a monster covered in goo, watched it turn into a bear, watched it turn into a baby bear, and followed it to a cave of treasures where it offered me precise and exacting intel about the formation of my ego structure. This stuff is the joy of my life. But right now, in comparison to learning about birds and buffalo, it’s all feeling dastardly tiresome. How is it that I’ve gone through so many of my hours not actively splayed in wonder with the understanding that what’s “out there” and “in the past” isn’t me? 

Somehow, it is my professional task to aid people in finding some modicum of peace with this all, so at minimum they don’t snap and hurt others and at best they enjoy the ride and proliferate health and truth. Navigation of how to do the later is my own daily practice. I’ve taken to the cushion, drank the medicine, and climbed the mountain. I keep at it. I sit in the sun in the morning and continually reconcile myself to the practice of emptying out as the way to let the creator move me from within.

A memory comes to me: childhood, leaning against the window in the backseat of our family’s electric blue VW van, listening to the poetry of Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter:

“Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world

The heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own”

I am still young, I suppose, and shifting everyday. But from this current developmental vantage point, it seems hard to imagine a world in which I have any sense of understanding of what’s really going on in this interplay of being the eyes of the world and the singularity of the heart. When I let my mind scan all the knowledge and teachings I can consciously summon up and intuitively feel into, I’m left splayed again and again. I become wide, my contours thin. I expand into space, and space, and space, in which there is nothing to reconcile. 

At times I become tired with myself, feeling like all my writing recently is a recapitulation of the same idea. I wonder why I feel the need to post it at all. But I intend to keep tending to it, because it keeps knocking on my door to tell me it’ll help me recognize home.