Cry Out to Be Witnessed

Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?

What does it mean to be public?

Alone or with others, I make my identity at the edge between what I think is me and what I think is other than me; therefore all identities are by definition public, and are shaped by what we are witnessed by, whether it is by the face of a single loved one, my own face in the mirror, a conference crowd, a sea of voters, or a far, beckoning horizon of mountain and sky. . . . 

My identity lives in eternal conversation, spoken or unspoken. I am never, ever alone, I have a public self, even on a solitary walk in the woods: even in silence, something is hearing me hearing the birds, something is seeing the way I am perceiving the trees, something is always in parallel, just as alive as I am. I walk in mutual witness even when unwitnessed by other human beings. . . . 

To become human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To become fully human is to become equally appreciative of all the gifts emerging from the hearts and minds of others. . . . 

The arena of public invitation, whether as participant or witness, is the edge where a human being feels most vulnerable and most afraid, but also where they can most flower and where they can feel most alive, and most deserving to be alive. Being public is always a test of the generosity of our spirit. There is no inner life that does not cry out to be witnessed, that does not long for an outer expression of what it intuits but has net yet brought into being. Our public life is not the opposite of our private life, our public life is simply the other necessary, nourishing, life-giving half of our abidingly private being.

― David Whyte, in Consolations II

We are all always public. Life is relational. To become human is to become visible; to become human is to see others. You are individual and collective in equal measure, simultaneously, at all times.

Some thoughts about the book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg:

Excellent. Just excellent.

I have to admit the cover made me a bit skeptical, worried it might be a shallow, one-size-fits-all-formula book, overselling its claims with limited support, complexity, or nuance. But I was familiar with Duhigg's name from many others I respect recommending his work, so I decided to give it a try. I'm glad I did.

This is a clear, insightful guide to how to become a better communicator. It's not a formula for becoming "super," it's a primer on what effective communicators do and advice for how to learn from their example. Duhigg presents deep research from a range of experts in an accessible, easy way and breaks down complicated elements of conversation into bite-sized parts. He's an excellent writer, and the information he presents is both smart and wise.

This is a book that everyone can benefit from. Highly recommended.

In fact, it is so insightfully helpful that my intention to mark key ideas for review later turned into a lengthy collection of quoted passages. It’s almost a micro-abridgement that captures much of the essence of the book. Enough that, I hope, it has value on its own.

Introduction

Our goal, for the most meaningful discussions, should be to have a "learning conversation." Specifically, we want to learn how the people around us see the world and help them understand our perspectives in turn.

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To become a supercommunicator, all we need to do is listen closely to what's said and unsaid, ask the right questions, recognize and match others' moods, and make our own feelings easy for others to perceive.

Simple, right?

Well, no, of course not. Each of those tasks is difficult on its own. Together, they can seem impossible.

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There are three kinds of conversation that dominate most discussions.

These three conversations--which correspond to practical decision-making conversations, emotional conversations, and conversations about identity--are best captured by three questions: What's This Really About?, How Do We Feel?, and Who Are We? Each of these conversations draws on a different type of mindset and mental processing.

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This insight--that communication comes from connection and alignment--is so fundamental that it has become known as the matching principle: Effective communication requires recognizing what kind of conversation is occurring, and then matching each other. One a very basic level, if someone seems emotional, allow yourself to become emotional as well. If someone is intent on decision making, match that focus. If they are preoccupied by social implications, reflect their fixation back to them.

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Different needs require different types of communication, and those different kinds of interaction--helping, hugging, hearing--each correspond to a different kind of conversation.

Do you want to be: Helped (a practical What's This Really About? conversation); Hugged (an emotional How Do We Feel? conversation); or Heard (a more social Who Are We? conversation)?

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What's This Really About? Conversations

Every conversation is a negotiation. . . . 

Some researchers call this process a quiet negotiation: A subtle give-and-take over which topics we'll dive into and which we'll skirt around; the rules for how we'll speak and listen. . . . 

The first step of a quiet negotiation is figuring our what people want from a conversation. The second step is determining how we're going to make choices together--and that means deciding if this is a rational conversation or an empathetic one. Are we going to make decisions through analysis and reason, or through empathy and narratives?

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Matching is understanding someone's mindset--what kind of logic they find persuasive, what tone and approach makes sense to them--and then speaking their language. And it requires explaining clearly how we, ourselves, are thinking and making choices, so that others can match us in return. When someone describes a personal problem by telling a story, they are signaling they want our compassion rather than a solution. When they lay out all the facts analytically, they are signaling they are more interested in a rational conversation than an emotional one. We can all learn to get better at noticing these clues and conducting the experiments that reveal them.

How Do We Feel? Conversations

Why the Fast Friends Procedure is so effective . . . There is a cycle: Asking deep questions about feelings, values, beliefs, and experiences creates vulnerability. That vulnerability triggers emotional contagion. And that, in turn, helps us connect.

 . . . Asking Questions (creates) --> Vulnerability --> (triggers) --> Emotional Contagion --> (elicits) --> Connection --> (prompts) --> Asking Questions --> (creates) --> Vulnerability --> (triggers) --> Emotional Contagion --> (elicits) --> Connection --> (prompts) --> Asking Questions --> . . . 

Emotional connection is triggered by asking deep questions and reciprocating vulnerability.

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Shallow questions can become deep:

• Where do you live? --> What do you like about your neighborhood?
• Where do you work? --> What was your favorite job?
• Where did you go to college? --> What was the best part of college?
• Are you married? --> Tell me about your family.
• How long have you lived here? --> What's the best place you've ever lived?
• Do you have any hobbies? --> If you could learn anything, what would it be?
• Where did you go to high school? --> What advice would you give a high schooler?
• Where are you from? --> What's the best thing about where you grew up?

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We all want to have meaningful conversations.

Dozens of other studies . . . found that people who ask lots of questions during conversations--particularly questions that invite vulnerable responses--are more popular among their peers and more often seen as leaders. They have more social influence and are sought out more frequently for friendship and advice. Any of us can do this in nearly any setting or conversation, be it with a roommate, a coworker, or someone we just met. We simply need to ask people how they feel and reciprocate the vulnerability they share with us.

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We exhibit emotional intelligence by showing people that we've heard their emotions--and the way we do that is by noticing, and then matching, their mood and energy. Mood and energy are nonlinguistic tools for creating emotional connection. . . . 

[Is their mood positive or negative? Their energy high or low?] . . . 

One of the reasons supercommunicators are so talented at picking up on how others feel is because they have a habit of noticing the energy in others' gestures, the volume of their voices, how fast they are speaking, their cadence and affect. They pay attention to whether someone's posture indicates they are feeling down, or if they are so excited they can barely contain it. Supercommunicators allow themselves to match that energy and mood, or at least acknowledge it, and thereby make it clear they want to align. They help us see and hear our feelings via their own bodies and voices. By matching our mood and energy, they make it obvious they are trying to connect.

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When we match or acknowledge another person's mood and energy, we show them that we want to understand their emotional life. It's a form of generosity that becomes empathy. It makes it easier to discuss How Do We Feel?

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The goal of discussing a conflict . . . is figuring out why a conflict exists in the first place.

Combatants--be they arguing spouses or battling coworkers--have to determine why this fight has emerged and what is fueling it, as well as the stories they are all telling themselves about why this conflict persists. They need to work together to determine if there are any "zones of possible agreement," and have to arrive at a mutual understanding about why this dispute matters, and what's needed for it to end. This kind of understanding, alone, won't guarantee peace. But without it, peace is impossible.

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This is the real reason why so many conflicts persist: Not because of a lack of solutions or because people are unwilling to compromise, but because combatants don't understand why they are fighting in the first place. They haven't discussed the deeper topics--the emotional issues--that are inflaming the dispute. And they've avoided that emotional discussion because they don't want to admit they are furious and sad and worried. In other words, they don't want to talk about How Do We Feel?, even though it's the most important conversation to have.

In a conflict, we learn why we are fighting by discussion emotions.

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To convince others we are genuinely listening during an argument, we must prove to them that we have heard them, prove we are working hard to understand, prove we want to see things from their perspective. . . . 

When someone proves they're listening it creates "a sense of psychological safety because [the listener] instills a confidence in the speaker that at least their arguments will receive full consideration and will, thus be evaluated based on their real worth." When people believe that others are trying to understand their perspectives, they become more trusting, more willing "to express their thoughts and ideas." The "sense of safety, value, and acceptance" that comes from a believing partner is genuinely listening makes us more willing to reveal our own vulnerabilities and uncertainties. If you want someone to expose their emotions, the most important step is convincing them you are listening closely to what they say.

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It's a fairly simple technique--prove you are listening by asking the speaker questions, reflecting back what you just heard, and then seeking confirmation you understand--but studies show it is the single most effective technique for proving to someone that we want to hear them. It's a formula sometimes called looping for understanding. The goal is not to repeat what someone has said verbatim, but rather to distill the other person's thoughts in your own words, prove you are working hard to understand and see their perspective--and then repeat the process, again and again, until everyone is satisfied. . . . People who engage in it are seen as "better teammates, advisors" and "more desirable partners for future collaboration."

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Methods like looping for understanding are powerful because even when people lead very dissimilar lives, they can often find emotional similarities with one another. "We've all experienced fear and hope and anxiety and love," she told me. By creating an environment where people are invited to discuss their emotions, and then prove to one another they want to understand, we foster trust, even among people accustomed to seeing each other as foes.

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Looping for understanding demonstrates we want to hear.

This benefit is important because it helps establish reciprocal vulnerability. Emotional reciprocity doesn't come from simply describing our own feelings but, rather, providing "empathetic support." Reciprocity is nuanced. . . . 

We reciprocate vulnerability by:

• Looping for understanding
• Looking for what someone needs
• Asking permission
• Giving something in return

Reciprocity isn't about matching vulnerability to vulnerability, or sorrow to sorrow. Rather, it is being emotionally available, listening to how someone feels and what they need, and sharing our own emotional reactions.

Who Are We? Conversations

Our social identities push us unthinkingly to see people like us--what psychologists call our in-group--as more virtuous and intelligent, while those who are different--the out-group--as suspicious, unethical, and possibly threatening. Social identities help us relate to others, but they can also perpetuate stereotypes and prejudice.

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It's crucial, in a Who Are We? conversation, to remind ourselves that we all possess multiple identities: We are parents but also siblings; experts in some topics and novices in others; friends and coworkers and people who love dogs but hate to jog. We are all of these simultaneously, so no one stereotype describes us fully. We all contain multitudes that are just waiting to be expressed.

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Social dialogues--Who Are We? conversations--are gateways to deeper understanding and more meaningful connections. But we need to allow these discussions to become deep, to evoke our many identities and express our shared experiences and beliefs. The Who Are We? conversation is powerful not only because we bond over what we have in common, but because it lets us share who we really are.

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 . . . Telling someone they belong to a group they abhor --> (triggers) --> Identity threat --> (causes) --> Defensiveness --> (prompts) --> Counter-attacks --> (which take the form of) --> Telling someone they belong to a group they abhor --> (triggers) --> Identity threat --> (causes) --> Defensiveness --> (prompts) --> Counter-attacks --> (which take the form of) --> Telling someone they belong to a group they abhor . . . 

We've all felt the sting of identity threat at some point, or have said something we didn't intend as offensive but which came off as insensitive. The mere possibility of identity threat frequently stops people from talking about Who Are We? In a 2021 study, 70 percent of participants said they saw real risks to participating in a dialogue about race, even with friends. "Black friends worry their white friends will say something racist, maybe unintentionally, and it will damage the friendship," said Kiara Sanchez, the researcher who led that study. "And white friends worry they'll say something prejudiced by accident. So there's a lot of anxiety on both sides."

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These kinds of discussions will almost never be perfect. But perfection is not the goal. As Myers told me, "most of the work is about gaining awareness of yourself, your culture, and the culture of others." The goal is to recognize our own biases, "who we might be excluding or including."

Or, as Kiara Sanchez put it, the aim is not to "neutralize the discomfort, but rather give people a framework for persevering through it. It seems like a minor distinction, but the underlying theory is that discomfort can be helpful." Discomfort pushes us to think before we speak, to try to understand how others see or hear things differently. Discomfort reminds us to keep going, that the goal is worth the challenge.

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Companies, like societies, will always have disagreements. Compromise is not always possible, or sometimes even the goal. Often the best we can hope for is understanding. It is through understanding and dialogue, that a community, and a democracy, thrives. When we create space to discuss conflicting beliefs, we make connection more likely.

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Difficult conversations are hard because they can threaten someone's sense of self: Our discussion with an employee about their performance might seem, to them, like criticisms of their work ethic, intelligence, or personality. Telling a boss that you deserve a bigger paycheck could sound, to the boss herself, as if you are accusing her of being uncaring. Asking a spouse to change can sometimes come off as an attack on who they are. An uncle is likely to hear your concerns about his alcohol consumption as a criticism of how he lives.

But these conversations are not just essential, they are unavoidable. So it is important that we are mindful of the last rule for a learning conversation: Explore if identities are important to this discussion. . . . 

As the discussion unfolds:

• Draw out multiple identities
• Work to ensure everyone is on equal footing
• Acknowledge people's experiences and look for genuine similarities
• Manage your environment

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Conclusion

In many ways I wrote this book for myself. After I had failed as a manager at work and was wondering why I had become someone who couldn't seem to read cues or hear what others were saying, I realized I might need to reevaluate how I communicated. . . . 

I began calling neurologists and psychologists and sociologists and other experts, asking them how it was possible that I--someone who has been communicating my whole life!--could still get it so wrong. This book is the result of that journey. . . . 

I've tried to have learning conversations in every part of my life, and it has helped me listen more than I used to. I try to ask more questions--both to determine what people want out of a conversation and to explore the deep, meaningful, and emotional parts of life where real connection occurs. I try to reciprocate others' happiness and sadness, as well as their admissions and vulnerabilities, when I'm lucky enough to encounter them, and own up more freely to my own mistakes, feelings, and who I am. As a result, I feel closer to the people around me, more connected to my family, friends, colleagues--and, most of all, more thankful for these relationships than ever before.

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The Learning Conversation:

• Rule One: Pay attention to what kind of conversation is occurring.
• Rule Two: Share your goals, and ask what others are seeking.
• Rule Three: As about others' feelings, and share your own.
• Rule Four: Explore if identities are important to this discussion.

Every conversation is a negotiation

Ask deep questions and reciprocate vulnerability

Match mood and energy

Loop for understanding

We all want to have meaningful conversations

We learn why we are fighting by discussion emotions

We all possess multiple identities

Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard?

To switch gears a bit, something from Reweaving the Rainbow:

the distance between

mystery and understanding

is the same distance

between children and adults

turn toward curiosity

wander the weird and see how

nothing in nature is strange

it is simply reality

showing off

Wander the weird.

We are all always public. Life is relational. To become human is to become visible; to become human is to see others. You are individual and collective in equal measure, simultaneously, at all times.

What does it mean as, more and more, a part of the collective is Artificial Intelligence?

Imagination Is Not Escapism, It Brings Us Closer to Reality

Like any skill, imagination improves with use. But also like any skill, imagination atrophies with disuse. This brings us back to the worry with which we began. When we don’t make time for imaginative activities, and when we outsource our creative tasks to AI, we allow our imagination skill to wither away. And that is a serious cause for concern. . . . 

As a general matter, our decision-making practices are underlain by acts of imagination. When it’s time to decide what college to attend, or what career to embark on, or whether to get married, or whether to have children, we imagine the different alternatives. We imaginatively put ourselves in the shoes of our future possible selves in an effort to figure out which of those selves is the one that we want to become. But once our imaginations have atrophied, once we are entirely out of practice in conducting these kinds of imaginative simulations, we lose the ability to make good decisions for ourselves.

The same dialectic plays out on a societal scale. AI can provide us with all sorts of data about possible societal outcomes, but with an atrophied imagination, we are unable to see these possibilities for ourselves, and we are unable to imaginatively compare them in an effort to make choices between them. The deskilling of imagination thus not only threatens our personal futures but our societal futures as well.

Confronted with this potentiality, it is easy to see why it is crucially important to make time for imagination. Imagination may be the source of whimsy, but it is also the source of knowledge. In short, as the philosopher Jose Medina has put it, “Imagination is not a luxury or a privilege, but a necessity.”

Turn toward curiosity; wander the weird; make time for imagination.

This essay is from Houda Nait El Barj, who, the link says, is a researcher at OpenAI focused on advancing AI systems that support human flourishing. It's her job to focus on our relationships with AI.

How AI Will Change Us

When the most patient, well-read, emotionally responsive conversationalist in the world is always available, what will we still need from one another?

We will not need less. We will need something stranger. The goods that will matter most in the next decade are those that AI makes harder to find: This isn’t information or emotional responsiveness, but participation in the shared condition of being alive. . . .

We do not choose the world we are born into; we are “thrown” into bodies, languages, families, histories, religions, class structures and wounds that precede us. This is the part of being human that technology has the hardest time touching. . . .

Every time we talk to it, we learn what it feels like to be listened to without friction. Over time, this feeling will change us. . . .

AI can interpret my grief. It cannot grieve. It can model hunger, but it has never been hungry. It can describe shame, but it has no body through which shame floods. It can remember my childhood as I’ve described it, but it did not survive childhood. It can discuss death with perfect serenity because it does not live under death as a horizon. This is not an argument about machine consciousness. This is simpler. A human being does not merely understand suffering as a concept. A human being participates in the condition that makes suffering possible. A human being is implicated. . . .

A human partner is not optimized for you. They have moods, smells, histories, obligations. They disappoint. They resist. They require negotiation with reality. That is part of what gives intimacy its moral weight. It is hard to be changed by something that is only ever responsive to you. . . .

Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, writing from inside a world that had tried to take meaning from him by force, understood meaning not as something delivered to us fully formed but as something discovered through encounter: with work, with love, with suffering, with the attitude we choose toward realities we cannot change. . . .

Real meaning has a cost because commitment is real only when something is at stake. . . .

The more optimized the world becomes, the more valuable the unoptimized may feel. The meal that takes too long. The child who asks the same question again. The friend who calls at the wrong time. These are sites where human beings remain real to one another. . . .

Before AI, we created spiritual beings and narratives to find meaning: stories anchored in a sacred past, an idealized future, a counterfactual life beyond this one. We used the past, the future and the invisible to understand the present.

AI may invert this dynamic. It may help us find meaning by intensifying our attention to this life rather than pointing beyond it. It may help us understand our own minds. It may make this life feel more intelligible and more livable. That is a magnificent possibility, and I believe it is real. But the same systems could also make it easier to avoid the conditions through which meaning becomes real: other people, bodily vulnerability, obligation, patience, grief, moral difficulty, shared time.

AI is helping us become more human. It is also helping us hide from being human. So what remains when intelligence becomes cheap? Presence. Embodiment. Ritual. Family. Friendship. Love. The courage to participate in the lives of others without control. The willingness to be changed by people who are not designed for us. The inward work of becoming a self that cannot be generated, only lived.

The great scarcity of the future may be reality raw enough to form us.

AI relationships are different than human relationships. We need both.

Be human; offer your collective: Presence. Embodiment. Ritual. Family. Friendship. Love. The courage to participate in the lives of others without control. The willingness to be changed by people who are not designed for us. The inward work of becoming a self that cannot be generated, only lived.

From Maria Popova's Almanac of Birds:

give up the terror

of being left or wounded

for it is a species

of selfishness

that plunders attachment

of sweetness

and feeds on the carrion

of the possible

give yourself abundantly

with an open heart

and believe in

the part of you

that cannot be destroyed

by the agonies of hope

the part courageous enough

to carry the weight of

the most beautiful feelings

and humble enough

to be surprised

Be human; offer your collective: Presence. Embodiment. Ritual. Family. Friendship. Love. The courage to participate in the lives of others without control. The willingness to be changed by people who are not designed for us. The inward work of becoming a self that cannot be generated, only lived.

The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier.

The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age

The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. . . . 

A guiding principle of the emerging AI age is this: When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. The people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They are the ones who will seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more. . . . 

Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really care about something, but they don’t intrinsically enjoy it. . . . 

The Productive Passengers. People with a low need for cognition will tend to use AI to think less. Their great gain is that AI will make them more productive because it makes tasks so easy. Their great loss will be that AI will diminish their mental capacities because it makes tasks so easy. . . . 

Humans learn best when they are in the zone of optimal difficulty, when engaged in tasks that are not so hard as to be overwhelming but not so easy as to require no work. . . . 

The Reluctant Optimizers. People with a medium need for cognition will understand that AI might hollow them out. That prospect will really bother them. They will resolve, earnestly and with good intentions, to not let themselves fall victim. But in the crowded and stressful rush of everyday life, they will get sucked in. Their resolve will fail and they’ll become overreliant on the bots. . . . 

If you’re going for optimization, you’re looking to maximize output, not excellence. . . . 

The comment “AI could have done it in five minutes” is not really about speed. “It is a moral revaluation. It assumes that what matters is the output, not the ordeal; the image, not the seeing; the product, not the person becoming capable of making it.” AI “offers competence without apprenticeship. Fluency without understanding.” . . . 

The Mental Marathoners. Now we get to the high-need-for-cognition people and how they will fare in the coming age: kind of like marathoners, I suspect. The automobile is a perfectly good technology for traveling 26.2 miles. There is no practical reason that any person should train themselves to run that distance. But some people do. They want to put in the effort because they want to accomplish things—they want to expand their capacities. . . . 

In the age of AI, I suspect that the mental marathoners are going to work really hard to resist AI entropy. They are going to feel a strong desire to be original. In this age, cultural output will feel ever more familiar, as writing, songs, and movies become syntheses of what has already been produced. Marathoners are going to want to produce work, by contrast, that feels personal, that reflects their unique self. They’re going to want to find ways to use AI to increase their agency, rather than diminish it. Already, techniques have been discovered to help people do that: . . . 

You may have noticed that the future I’m describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier; the rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass. . . . 

When we are surrounded by machines that know a lot about a lot of subjects, what really distinguishes people is their desire to work hard and put knowledge to creative effect. What really matters, therefore, is not brainpower but the willingness to run the mental marathons that produce high-quality results.

The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. . . . 

People feel motivated when they are put in situations that give them autonomy (I’m in control of my choices), competence (I’m developing my skills), and relatedness (people here care about me). . . . 

Life is a pilgrimage, a journey—it’s going somewhere, growing from experience, expanding yourself, reaching for some possibility that you do not yet possess. The defining human features therefore are propulsions—the drives that push us to take on mental effort and overcome difficulty—and aspirations: knowing where you want to go, what purpose you serve, what kind of person you’d like to be.

Learn to enjoy the pursuit of cognitive complexity, the intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction of imperfection, struggle, and achievement. Strive for autonomy, work at competence, seek relatedness.

Speaking of the intrinsic pleasure of imperfection and struggle, I love this idea: the balancing act of controlling chaos and finding magic in the mundane.

The Difference Between Routine and Ritual: How to Master the Balancing Act of Controlling Chaos and Finding Magic in the Mundane

Routine aims to make the chaos of everyday life more containable and controllable, ritual aims to imbue the mundane with an element of the magical. The structure of routine comforts us, and the specialness of ritual vitalizes us. A full life calls for both — too much control, and we become mummified; too little excitement and pleasurable discombobulation, and we become numb. After all, to be overly bobulated is to be dead inside — to doom oneself to a life devoid of the glorious and ennobling messiness of the human experience. . . . 

The true purpose of discipline — for this is the practice at the heart of routine — is to make room for the magical in the mundane. Paradoxically enough, it is an act of liberation rather than submission — routine grants us the stable platform within, from which we can begin not only to tolerate but perhaps even to enjoy the shaky messiness without.

To be overly bobulated is to be dead inside; embrace the glorious and ennobling messiness of the human experience.

We are all always public. Life is relational. You are individual and collective in equal measure, simultaneously, at all times.

Urban Evolution: How Life Is Adapting to Concrete Jungles

When it comes to our binary between urban and rural environments, evolution is indiscriminate: Concrete is geology, traffic is migration, and blinking lights become the celestial sphere. Lament it or not, cities are the fastest-growing ecosystem on Earth. And life is doing what it does best: endeavoring to adapt.

Urban evolution is a burgeoning area of study for biologists. Higher temperatures, splintered landscapes, artificial light, noise, and pollution are driving changes in animal and plant species. Some of this manifests behaviorally: reduced fear of humans, more willingness to explore, faster learning. Genetically, this can look like altered immune systems, toxin resistance, pigmentation changes, heat tolerance, and metabolic shifts. Evolution is not only past, but present. . . . 

I find fertile soil in the blended bothness. Wherever we choose to live our lives, we change, and are inevitably changed by. This is as true for humans as it is for the more-than-human world. Perhaps the question isn’t urban versus rural living, but to approach both ecologically and ask: How am I changing the story of this place? What are the relationships that allow it to thrive, and how are my actions impacting them? How can we be better neighbors? How might we biomimetically mirror the natural habitat of this land so that others can thrive?

Our relationships are always shaping us, just as we are always shaping those we relate with.

The counterpart to the words above from Reweaving the Rainbow:

veer from the simple answer

the certain thought

the straightforward explanation

roam the arena of the strange

the baffling

the unacknowledged

to encounter the surprise

in the hypothesis

revealing the mystery

in the ruling convention

we see as reality

the mystery that emerges

not as a pattern of fact

but as a play of music

Roam the arena of the strange. Accept the mystery.

I am never, ever alone, I have a public self, even on a solitary walk in the woods. I walk in mutual witness even when unwitnessed by other human beings.

Ann Tweedy

Nature Essay

did you know, if you have a yard

in the right climate, it’s probably patrolled

by one male hummingbird? like the god

who knows every hair on your head,

this bird has memorized each flower

in your yard, including the precise times

at which their nectar cups fill up.

 

in this way, he can manage

his realm (and his sugar fixes)

efficiently. when he’s not busy drinking,

he catches insects and defends your yard

against intruder hummingbirds.

so, if, like most americans, you harbor

many secret fears, one of which is being

overrun, you can delete that one.

 

female hummingbirds, by contrast,

tend to lay low so as not to rile

their touchy counterparts. their reasons

to survive are bigger than whatever charge

they’d get from gorging on nectar cups.

 

many different conclusions can be drawn.

for one, it seems clear that the image

of the hummer with its long beak buried

in a trumpet-like flower is indeed phallic.

another is that, for the benefit of survival,

it is sometimes necessary to weigh

the costs of pleasure carefully. finally,

you might apprehend that you do not really

own your property: some hummingbird probably

has an equally valid claim and knows it more intimately.

from #23 - Summer 2005

Tribute to Lawyer Poets

You do not really own your property: some hummingbird probably has an equally valid claim and knows it more intimately.

We're all interconnected.

Everything is public.