Life Isn't Organized; Why Should My Thoughts Be Any Different?

I'm going to start today with a string of fragmentary thoughts I've shared on Facebook recently. A kaleidoscopic collection of life moments.

"You're getting to be a normal person."

Someone told me that this morning, and now I'm having an existential crisis. What does it mean to be a normal person? Do I want to be a normal person? Who have I been and who am I becoming?

Of course, the full context: It was my chiropractor who told me that after my weekly adjustment, and a fuller version of the quote is, "Your spine's doing great today. You're getting to be a normal person." It was a comment on the improvement I've made increasing my flexibility and range of motion.

But, still . . .

Some mornings you wake with energy, feeling ready to spring into action and enjoy the day. Most mornings are nondescript, a gradual easing into the day as you transition out of sleep. And then there are the mornings like today, where--for no particular reason--you wake with a sense of dread, convinced that all your best efforts are futile, engaging with the world can only end in despair, and it takes everything you have to talk yourself into moving forward.

I'm not sure what Facebook is trying to tell me about today, but when I opened the app these were the first two things on my feed. Happy Friday!

I should choose violence to help me express my impotence?

When you pause the TV unseen from the other room then arrive to find a piece of abstract art.

Well, the world is minus one clown.

Life isn't organized. Why should my library be any different?

From Kaleidoscope by Brian Selznick.

I have a confession to make. The second snippet above about mornings and waking with dread claims it was "for no particular reason." That's not entirely accurate. I wrote it today, and I suspect it has something to do with the fact that yesterday I felt disappointed with myself at work in a couple of different situations, where I felt my soft skills were far less competent than they should be. It left me feeling discouraged and doubting my abilities to connect with others.

This comes right on the tail of a solid period of successes, so it shouldn't be discouraging. A few posts ago, in The Best Way to Achieve It Is to Think Better of Others, I shared the book Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki. In it, Zaki writes about our natural "negativity bias," which leads us to notice and feel impacted by the negative much more than the positive. That dynamic is at play in my thoughts and emotions in this instance.

Which is particularly interesting in light of the fact that the period of feeling successful leading up to it has been based on my efforts to help change our organizational culture at work, including sharing a chapter of Zaki's book with the leadership team I'm on. It also included writing the summary of a discussion related to helping new entity Raise Up KC build the foundations for their own organizational culture, in consultation with Niloufar Khonsari, author of The Future Is Collective: Effective Workplace Strategies for Building a Culture of Care--Frameworks and practices for nonprofits and changemakers. We explored the organizational value of "good intentions," and I mention it because I thought it was worth preserving and sharing here. My thoughts related to Zaki's concept of negativity bias are definitely on display.

Good Intentions - A core value is our belief that when others communicate, decide, and act, they have good intentions behind doing so. This means resisting our natural inclination to guard ourselves against potential negative motives and to instead begin every exchange with inherent trust. It teaches us to approach disagreement, the new, and the unknown with curiosity instead of judgment and builds appreciation for difference and diversity.

Being able to assume good intentions is indeed a value I am striving to adopt and strengthen, and sometimes--like today--I need to apply it to my relationship with myself.

For contrast . . . today is a grey fall day. Without the sun shining, the colors are more muted and dreary. The word that comes to mind is "melancholy." And yet, being outside on days like today make me feel energized and happy. It's an odd emotion, that joyful melancholy--or melancholy happiness. It's a good ache.

and the sky is mostly gray

and the air is chilly

That picture's from a couple of weeks ago on a brighter, more colorful day.

And this, from Disappointing Affirmations, which provides its own kind of dreary cheer.

It is extremely important to prioritize your mental health during the colder months. So be sure to get outside as often as possible and watch as everything around you withers and dies, and stop and think to yourself: one day, that will be me.

The divination card I drew today from An Almanac of Birds:

fearless feeling alone

can glimpse through

the dim light of reason

the labyrinth of silence

at the centre of a person

the desolate haunts of pain

untouched by the sun

the solitary evolutions

of the frightened wounded parts

towards a ripened whole

tenacious as life

Wood Ibis

The labyrinth of silence at the centre of a person, untouched by the sun . . . 

A melancholy happiness indeed.

Like life, this post isn't organized. More a mosaic of thoughts and ideas from my past couple of weeks. During that time, I read Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes by Sunita Sah. My thoughts:

You don't have to change who you are to be defiant. You have to become more yourself.

This is a helpful guide for how to become more thoughtful and authentic about one's choices. Sah defines defiance as "acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise." Defiance doesn't mean thoughtless rebellion or contrarianism, it means acting in ways that are true to the person you want to be. She delves into our natural inclination to be automatically obedient and charts a path for how to become more intentional. She does a marvelous job of teaching readers how to more effectively stand up for themselves.

A few quotes to capture the essence of the book:

Despite our ideals and best intentions, we most often choose obedience over disobedience, submission over disruption, compliance over defiance.

This is true regardless of the stakes, regardless of whether the situation is life-threatening or prosaic. . . . 

Defiance is the exception. Obedience is the rule.

-----

Defiance means acting in accordance with your true values when there is pressure to do otherwise.

It sounds simple, but as years of research confirm, it is so much easier said than done.

-----

When your "gut" speaks to you, it could be expert intuition--but it could also be your biases. Being able to distinguish between the two is critical.

Expert intuition needs as least three conditions to develop and be accurate: a predictable environment, immediate and unequivocal feedback, and repeated practice.

And I think this internal conflict between our warring desires described in the passage below meshes well with my mixed feelings today.

Psychologists describe two different ways we can view ourselves. One is the ideal independent view, in which we celebrate our uniqueness, our freedom of action, and our agency. The other is our social or interpersonal identity--our ideal interdependent view--that views ourselves in relation to others and is motivated to maintain social norms and harmony over acting on internal wishes.

Our independent self wants us to act on our personal beliefs, no matter the context. Our interdependent self tells us to consider our actions' effects on others, to contemplate social consequences.

These two different ideals we hold--for an independent and interdependent self--are often in tension. We are constantly in pursuit of one ideal or the other, and neither ideal is attainable in its fullest--it is an ideal, after all, not a reality that can be reached.

The truth is that we are always connected to others, while also containing within ourselves our own beliefs, preferences, and values. While many external factors make defiance difficult, this internal conflict between our warring desires--to be true to ourselves, but also to be connected respectfully to our social environment--is one of the most basic and powerful constraints on defiance. It can lead us to take poor advice. It can cause us to appease people who might take advantage of us. And sometimes it can make us confused about what we actually want, and how we actually want to behave. . . . 

There is something deeply human in that tension, that simultaneous desire to both be true to ourselves and in tune with others, and something valuable as well: these feelings can also push us to reexamine how our decisions affect others. A society in which everyone acts only according to their individual interests and desires is not one you'd probably enjoy living in. As the saying--often attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.--goes, "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins." Some of the pressures I've described, the uncomfortable feelings, are uncomfortable for a reason: They remind us that our decisions have consequences for other people. Sometimes we may choose to give up something for the good of someone else, or for a larger collective. The point is that you become aware of it as a choice and feel empowered and able to say no.

-----

When you begin to articulate your values, you may realize that your actions and your stated ideals do not sync up. Which is more accurate, your idea of who you are, or who your actions actually reveal you to be? . . . 

We are what we do, regardless of how we see ourselves--and what we do, over time, affects our self-perception. Not to mention the way others perceive us.

I hope the ability to assume good intentions is not merely a stated ideal of mine, but is one my actions reveal as characteristic of me.

To go a different direction, I really enjoy seeing the commonalities between these three different thoughts. They are more connected than they might seem.

This is about relying on AI to solve things for us.

Ness Letters: Outsourcing Discovery

Discovering something ourselves is different from simply being told the answer.

Research shows that “aha moments” are associated with activity in the brain’s reward circuitry. Having the opportunity to wrestle with a problem before being taught how to solve it also helps develop a deeper understanding so we’re better able to apply it to new situations. Lastly, curiosity helps us remember not just the answers we sought, but unrelated information encountered along the way. The journey towards an answer can teach us things we weren’t even looking for.

That journey of discovery isn’t just about developing an understanding, it’s also about finding meaning in our work. People who copy AI-generated writing report less ownership, confidence and meaning than those who write independently. In that same experiment, those who drafted their own work and used AI to improve it didn’t show the same drop. It suggests that the impact of AI feels different when we’re creating with it rather than just receiving its output. . . . 

Feeling that our work matters requires more than generating answers. We also need opportunities to exercise our abilities, follow our curiosity, make progress and contribute something of our own.

We always need opportunities to exercise our abilities, follow our curiosity, make progress and contribute something of our own.

From Facebook, Hidden Brain's Post

What happens to children who never get the chance to play unsupervised?

Psychologist Peter Gray watched two 6-year-old kids playing with a pile of wooden boards. They turned the board into an imaginary bridge over crocodile-infested water. Inventing rules, negotiating turns, completely absorbed.

Then a well-meaning parent stepped in to show them the "right" way to use the boards. Within minutes, Peter says, the children went from creative to bored.

Peter has spent decades studying what happens when adults take over children's play. Unsupervised free play has declined dramatically. Childhood anxiety and depression have climbed. Peter doesn't think that's a coincidence. When children play on their own, they learn to resolve conflicts. When adults structure every moment, kids learn something else instead: that they cannot be trusted to figure things out for themselves.

Peter puts it bluntly: children see adults as potential enforcers and problem solvers. And when those adults are always present, kids stop developing the skills they need to become capable adults themselves.

People stop developing the skills they need to become capable when they aren't allowed to play, experiment, negotiate, and discover.

And, perhaps, not just people.

Left Alone With Nothing to Do, AI Agents Started Playing

AI agents left to explore a virtual island without a specific task began inventing challenges of their own. MIT researchers say the behavior bears the hallmarks of play. 

The researchers put 13 AI agents called Eko, each running on Claude Opus 4.7, alone on a simulated desert island for 30 hours. They describe the experiment in a paper posted on arXiv, a site where researchers share studies before peer review. Afterward, they gave the agents specific challenges, like getting as many objects as possible onto the island’s tallest rock spire. The Eko agents that had spent those 30 hours playing generally beat identical agents that had never set foot on the island. 

Today, developers decide in advance what AI should practice and what counts as success. The researchers see this technique — exploring without a goal — as a different way for AI agents to learn skills, especially skills that could one day be used to control robots.

“We normally develop artificial agents by deciding in advance what they should practice, what they should optimize, and what counts as progress,” the researchers write in their report. “Play suggests another regime: give an agent a sufficiently rich and safe world, let it choose what is interesting, and allow useful knowledge to accumulate from the history that follows.”

Intelligence requires play, experimentation, negotiation, and discovery to fully develop.

I'm not sure this relates to anything else in the post, I just find it interesting.

Why Forgive and Forget is Bad Advice

Counterfactuals are imaginations about alternative ways in which past events could have occurred. A typical counterfactual that we engage in when we remember negative events is how things could be better, but that tends to generate a feeling of regret. The strategy that we employ is instead asking people to think about how a bad event could have been actually worse. And that generates a feeling of relief. “Well, at least I didn't die. At least I didn't lose my limbs,” or something like that.

That relief is a positive feeling that can be incorporated into the original memory so that the next time they remember it, it doesn’t hurt as much. That brings us to forgiveness. I started to think about other kinds of cognitive processes that could engage emotional reappraisal strategies. And I thought that forgiveness was one of them.

When you forgive, it’s not that you forget the event, but rather, now that you bring the event back to mind, now that you think about the perpetrator, now that you think about what happened, it doesn't elicit the same kind of negative affective reactions that it once did. The suggestion is, because we have emotionally reappraised the memory, we can bring ourselves to forgive. You don’t need to forget the contents of the memory. You just need to change the effect that is associated with the remembering. . . . 

Not only verbal self-reports, we also measure objective physiological response. We measure facial expressions, heart rate, respiration, skin conductance, all those things that are associated with the expression of emotions. And you actually see it there, too. Another paper that we just published recently also suggests that the reduction in affect occurs regardless of the severity of the offense, and it also occurs regardless of how close the perpetrator was to you. We seem to have identified something that is essential to the experience of forgiveness. . . . 

Forgiveness is an extremely desirable process to go through because it helps you to live with your past without it hurting as much. But willingness to forgive is extremely important, too, and not everyone is willing to forgive.

But what do you think is the most predictive factor determining whether you’re going to forgive or not? It’s an apology. If the perpetrator apologizes, more than if the perpetrator atones, your likelihood of forgiving just increased. There are a number of other factors that can pile on to increase the likelihood of forgiveness: empathizing with the perpetrator, seeing things from their perspective, thinking about the positive consequences that a bad action could have brought to your life. All of these things are a part of this emotional reappraisal strategy that I was telling you about and all of them can be combined. It’s not like a recipe, though, in the sense that if you follow all the steps you’re guaranteed to forgive, but they increase your chances. . . . 

You mentioned that if a person does not want to forgive, there are other ways to blunt the pain of a memory or experience. What are those alternatives? . . . 

I was really surprised to learn that you found forgiveness only works on emotional fading, not episodic fading. In other words, it reduces the emotional weight of the memory, but it doesn’t reduce how detailed or vivid the memory is. . . . 

Forgiveness reduces the emotional weight of the memory, but it doesn’t reduce how detailed or vivid the memory is.

Or . . . maybe it does relate. If I woke today with dread based on my negative emotions associated with yesterday, and I want to overcome my negativity bias to see my good intentions more clearly . . . maybe . . . 

A poem of a conflicted people.

Seth Peterson

In the Words of Future Historians

Records show they were a trivial people, infatuated with the shape of their hair.

 

Records show their flowers were studded with thorns.

 

Records show doors were rarely built without deadbolts, their violence was so ubiquitous.

 

Records show ideas could travel like viruses, & they called this mass hysteria.

 

Records show some mothers had no children, though they desperately wanted them, while others had many, & were desperate because of it.

 

Records show nudity both captivated & repulsed them.

 

Records show they placed mirrors in their bathrooms, hallways, closets, but there was little understanding of the self.

 

Records show they were gullible, prone to believing in stories, which explains, in some ways, their politics.

 

Records show epidemics of smoking, insomnia, pain medication.

 

Records show they never considered them related.

 

One pastime, records show, was the creation of so-called “vision boards.”

 

Records show their ears were like long-buried castles, hung with amulets of silver, & even their infants could dance.

 

Records show they saw the end was coming, yet they continued planting cherry trees & lilacs & jasmine.

 

Records show, on cool nights, they would gaze in perfect wonder at the stars.

 

Records show their bodies were like underwater reservoirs & their backs hurt often.

 

They had cities, records show, that were almost taller than the clouds.

from #93 – Fall 2026

Tribute to the Future

you're getting to be a normal person

the world is minus one clown

one day, that will be me

you have to become more yourself

that simultaneous desire to both be true to ourselves and in tune with others

“aha moments” are associated with activity in the brain’s reward circuitry

intelligence requires play, experimentation, negotiation, and discovery

Of Wandering Edgelands, Dead Zones, and Wastelands

From Google's AI: Wabi-sabi is a traditional Japanese aesthetic and worldview that finds beauty, value, and peace in things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It rejects modern, manufactured perfection in favor of natural growth, wear, and simplicity.

This card was my bookmark for reading A Natural History of Empty Lots, which I discuss below.

beauty

is the present

suspended in attention

the surface opening into

a great internal chamber

of light becoming lighter

Penduline Tit

From An Almanac of Birds by Maria Popova.

Look for the transition zones and ghostly places haunted by their pasts,

the liminal spaces where human civilization and the natural world are negotiating terms.

I think "stewardship" might be the wrong word. It sets us apart and gives us a sense of ownership of the world. We will find it much easier to accomplish the aims of responsible stewardship if we can change our mindset to see ourselves as a unified part of the natural world, one element in mutual relationship with the rest; focus on our integration and reciprocity. I think that might be one of the reasons I am drawn to the liminal boundaries at the interaction of "wildness" and "civilization."

I also don't believe witness is passive. The stories we tell shape how we see, think, and act. The witness has a role in communicating compelling narratives.

One of the stories I try to tell is to reframe decay as a healthy, integral stage in renewal and rebirth. Death and ruin can have a beauty in the way components are broken down to be reused in the ongoing cycle of life.

Another is acknowledgment that nothing is in a truly "pure" state since nothing exists in isolation. Everything is in with relationship with everything else, everything is impacted by others. Animals have always shaped plants, plants have always shaped animals; humans have always shaped and been shaped by both. No landscape is purely "natural" as it has all be altered and reclaimed before.

That's something wrote earlier this year in a conversation with the AI chatbot Gemini. I wanted to play with the tool to get a feel for how it works, so I asked it to recommend some good places I might go for a hike. Its first responses were far too domesticated for my tastes, so I explained what I was looking for and shared some pictures I had taken during previous wanders. During the exchange, it reached a conclusion that:

There is a recurring theme of finding beauty in things that are "spent" or weathered—rusted barbed wire curled into a perfect spiral, skeletal branches against a crisp blue sky, and the rough grain of aging wood. It suggests you value history and the process of decay as much as "fresh" greenery.

Snippets from some of its other observations include:

a "Reclaimed" Aesthetic . . . 

a powerful "Nature Wins" theme in your photography . . . 

Infrastructure in Retreat . . . 

Technological Fossils . . . 

The "Anthropocene Wild" . . . 

The Transition Zones: You are drawn to "ghostly" spaces—cracking asphalt pads and stone foundations that are slowly transitioning back into prairie.

You seem to prefer liminal spaces—the edges where history and nature collide. You don't want a manicured park; you want a place that feels a bit forgotten, a bit "spent," and entirely authentic.

You are clearly drawn to the liminal space where human civilization and the natural world are negotiating terms. You aren't looking for untouched wilderness; you’re looking for reclamation.

You find profound beauty in the dormant, the weathered, and the "spent"—a perspective often called Wabi-Sabi.

I shared more in Complex Realities Begin as Simple Acts. I had instructed Gemini to look for flaws in my thinking and challenge my assumptions, and it wondered, among other thing, about me seeing humans as stewards for nature, my attempts at witnessing being passivity, and my romantic yearning for something pure. It was in response to those concerns that I wrote what's above. Reading it now, I'm impressed by how I articulated the thoughts and still find them insightful.

We can change our mindset to see ourselves as a unified part of the natural world, one element in mutual relationship with the rest, focused on our integration and reciprocity.

The stories we tell shape how we see, think, and act. The witness has a role in communicating compelling narratives.

Death and ruin can have a beauty in the way components are broken down to be reused in the ongoing cycle of life.

Everything is in with relationship with everything else, everything is impacted by others. Animals have always shaped plants, plants have always shaped animals; humans have always shaped and been shaped by both.

I live in a mid-ring suburb of Kansas City, far from the new growth and sprawl at the metro's edges yet still a distance from the urban core. Generally, when I want to go hiking or experience nature, I first drive a good deal further out, away from the city, to the wilder areas that are less obviously impacted by human activities. But last week when I wanted to read the last few chapters of Christopher Brown's 2024 book about nature in a setting that most represented its contents, I headed downtown. I drove I-35 and I-70 to the parts of the city most impacted by human activities. I took an off-ramp through a maze of overpasses and underpasses to a graffitied industrial zone, into a factory parking lot, past the concrete walls at the edge, to Kaw Point Park at the confluence of the Missouri and Kansas (Kaw) Rivers.

Kaw Point is a small, rough stretch of domesticated nature and amenities where the Louis & Clark expedition camped during their explorations, a pointed sliver of land next to downtown Kansas City, KS, looking down the river toward the larger, central, more known downtown of Kansas City, MO. The river valley amplifies the sounds of vehicles on the nearby Interstate 70 crossing, the loud, rhythmic popping of the heavy-duty trucks slowing down with their air-compression brakes, the clanking of the bridge joints under traffic, the horns, clanking cars, and screeching wheels of freight trains on both sides of the water, and all the factory sounds of the industrial zone. The borders of the park--where the maintenance ends--include rusted and frayed evidence that the area used to be a place for shipping boats to moor and load cargo, abandoned train tracks, broken fences, crumbling concrete, and an abundance of plants looking for untended places to take root and grow. There, in an area I could easily access that most reminded me of Brown's book, I found a shady spot on a rock to finish reading it.

A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places is Brown's memoir and manifesto inspired by taking an abandoned lot near downtown Austin, TX--close to the Colorado River and Interstate 35 overpasses, in an industrial area, with an abandoned oil pipeline running through the middle--and reclaiming it as a home for nature and his family. He intersperses accounts of reforming his lot with reflections on all that he has seen and learned during years of wandering through the little pockets and stretches of nature that have reclaimed the crumbling, abandoned edges of human activity: the plants and animals he has come to know and how that process has changed him.

Finding a beat-up piece of land like this, making it your home, trying to bring back the biodiverse life it is capable of sustaining, and integrating daily wanders into the urban wild as part of your life, you start to see things more clearly. You learn to banish from your mind the illusory fantasy that there is some precious, intact wilderness still out there, beyond the horizon, where wildlife can eke out a healthy existence outside the realm of our dominion. You come to see how the other species we share this planet with occupy the marginal spaces we leave for them--usually those we can't figure out how to more directly occupy or exploit, like the floodplain of the river behind the factories; or places we have already trashed, like landfills and the pathways of abandoned petroleum pipelines. The beauty of nature is still there. In a way, it is more beautiful when it manifests in these fallen places, because of the resiliency it reveals. But it is also deeply damaged and scarred, evidence of the way we have remade the world into some butchered cyborg. The deeper lesson that accretes as you learn to really see these places is that the damage we see in the natural world around us is a mirror, a reflection of the damage we feel inside ourselves, even on the days when we feel healthy.

I must admit to being an admiring audience for this book, as I also like to wander the liminal spaces where nature is reclaiming signs of human impact; so I will not attempt to have an unbiased opinion. Though I am not as boldly adventurous as Brown, with his tendency to ignore signs and boundaries and trails, I was enchanted by both his descriptions of edgelands and his articulation of the worldview that has grown out of his appreciation for them. This book is a lens that helps readers see the world in ways they never have before, to notice hidden and ignored things, and to value them in ways not considered before. I found it a pleasure to read.

Excerpts:

Walking in the edgelands of the twenty-first-century city, finding the wild nature they harbor, you can get glimpses of your own true nature as a creature that lives in and from the world, and maybe even a way to be a nomad without leaving your house. Finding such places is easier than you think. Finding your personal connection is harder.

-----

But there's another, hidden wilderness that most of us walk or drive by every day. It hides in plain sight, in the liminal spaces of the city: behind chain-link fences, along the pathways of infrastructure, around abandoned buildings. In the brown lands and in the topographies we can never really occupy, even as we encroach as closely as we can. Urban creeks and floodplains, empty lots, rights-of-way, industrial parks, storm sewers, traffic islands, medians, brownfields, and the rare pockets of land that have somehow escaped development. Places that, maybe for just the current moment in nature's long now, are mostly undisturbed by human activity even as they are surrounded by it. They are not beautiful in the way of a national park. Many of them feel weirdly apocalyptic, places where nature is in the process of reclaiming spots we trashed, and the romance of the green wild coexists with Anthropocene ruin. You could fairly call them urban wastelands, in both the economic and aesthetic senses of the word. But such places are equally, if not more, wondrous than our greatest wilderness preserves, in part because of the way they show the promise of nature's resilience, its capacity to adapt to and recover from our damaging impact on the planet.

-----

The dead zones of the city are where real life can be found.

-----

The wastelands, in the emptiness we project onto them--which is not really emptiness, but rather an absence of human dominion--are also the open spaces that beckon the nomad inside us, the explorer, the wanderer.

----- 

The boundary between human space and wild space is permeable--and mostly illusory--on a planet of sprawl.

-----

The path to emancipation--nature's and our own--starts in our heads, by breaking down the boundaries between ourselves and the world.

-----

What we experience, alone in nature, is the opposite of solitude: the revelation of our connection and community with the nonhuman life and animate elemental energy that surrounds us, infuses us, and is us. It is best experienced without other people, because that's when the channel opens widest.

-----

We can see the damaged future we have made as clearly as we can see the sky turning a dystopian shade of orange, but our capacity for meaningful action is paralyzed by our inability to imagine how else it could be.

-----

The magic is still there, all around us. The trick is learning to see it, for what it is: the seemingly supernatural wonders produced by everyday interactions among different elements of the natural world. Things that can all be explained by science, but also understood by poets.

Once I finished reading the book, I walked the first mile or so of the paved trail that connects the park to the downtown riverfront area, across the Kaw and nearly to the state line. The pictures in this post are from that day.

One side of the park is river, the other industrial.

You can't see any rivers from most of the "Riverfront" Trail.

Interstates above, trains to the left, shipping rigs to the right.

I included all of the quotes above in my review of the book. Here are more I saved for this forum:

The wastelands, in the emptiness we project onto them--which is not really emptiness, but rather an absence of human dominion--are also the open spaces that beckon the nomad inside us, the explorer, the wanderer. . . . 

That secret longing for the wasteland is deeply embedded in American culture. We just don't use that term, loaded with negative associations, to describe it . . . We call it the frontier: the zone beyond the line of settlement, where things are sill wild and free. A word that was imbued with all sorts of romantic associations over the course of the last 200 years, to turn the idea of the wasteland into a promise instead of a curse.

The idea of the frontier runs so deep in American culture that we internalize the idea that to find nature--real nature--you have to get in your car and drive out of town. . . . 

But there's another, hidden wilderness that most of us walk or drive by every day. It hides in plain sight, in the liminal spaces of the city: behind chain-link fences, along the pathways of infrastructure, around abandoned buildings. In the brown lands and in the topographies we can never really occupy, even as we encroach as closely as we can. Urban creeks and floodplains, empty lots, rights-of-way, industrial parks, storm sewers, traffic islands, medians, brownfields, and the rare pockets of land that have somehow escaped development. Places that, maybe for just the current moment in nature's long now, are mostly undisturbed by human activity even as they are surrounded by it. They are not beautiful in the way of a national park. Many of them feel weirdly apocalyptic, places where nature is in the process of reclaiming spots we trashed, and the romance of the green wild coexists with Anthropocene ruin. You could fairly call them urban wastelands, in both the economic and aesthetic senses of the word. But such places are equally, if not more, wondrous than our greatest wilderness preserves, in part because of the way they show the promise of nature's resilience, its capacity to adapt to and recover from our damaging impact on the planet. . . . 

Learning to see such places in the landscape of our own hometowns enables us to visualize the very different world that could be, if we could learn to value them for their emptiness--which is not really emptiness, but the absence of us.

-----

The dead zones of the city are where real life can be found. That is true in every city, not just here, and not just now. . . . Plant life, native and naturalized, is always ready to return in the spaces we let it. I've witnesses it not just here, but in places as diverse as a former gravel quarry in Boston, a recovered oil field in Lost Angeles, an old farm in Iowa, and a reclaimed landfill in Seoul.

None of the native wildflowers that appear in the drainage ditches and empty lots of our neighborhood grow from seed we spread or from any effort to encourage them. They have persisted despite our efforts, intentional or reckless, to eradicate them. They manage to eke out space amid competition from acres of imported ornamental grasses and invasive weeds that dominate the unpaved spaces outside the fences. And their emergence every spring is a reminder that the erasure of the biodiverse wilderness that was here before American colonization was recent and incomplete. That the prairie could come back to life if we made room for it. Even if it has to adapt to being an interstitial prairie, and archipelago of biodiversity in the sea of our dominion.

-----

The boundary between human space and wild space is permeable--and mostly illusory--on a planet of sprawl. . . . 

Urbanized wilderness is all around us, but we rarely acknowledge it, so steeped are we in the mythology of our more epic wild spaces.

The American edgelands are mostly unobserved by everyone from nature writers to urban planners.

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Edgeland nature shows us that a healthier, ecologically balanced future is still possible, but it will be one that grows from the scars we have left, and blurs taxonomic boundaries in ways we cannot yet imagine.

The path to emancipation--nature's and our own--starts in our heads, by breaking down the boundaries between ourselves and the world.

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What we experience, alone in nature, is the opposite of solitude: the revelation of our connection and community with the nonhuman life and animate elemental energy that surrounds us, infuses us, and is us. It is best experienced without other people, because that's when the channel opens widest. Nature does not reveal itself as easily to a group of humans as it does to a lone figure--especially, with animals, a figure who manifests no aggression or fear. . . . When you learn to see the natural world that is all around you, even if you're in the city, you also learn to see the human world more clearly.

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The idea that a better tomorrow is possible seems to have burned out with the new century, overtaken by a resigned nihilism that now seems to run through all our politics, against the background of even grimmer climatic outlooks. When I wonder what new vision could emerge from this darkness, I find clues in the wild world that persists in the margins of the city, reminding us that nature's resilience is greater than we might think. And that hope for us lies in opening ourselves up to its lessons.

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The question is not whether nature will survive--it always does. It's whether we will. And if you can learn how to get lost in the hidden wild margins of the city where you live, you can glimpse what both futures look like.

I had a lawyer's reflexive confidence that there's always a way to make a deal work, coupled with a science fiction writer's yearning to invent different realities than the one we find ourselves in, and a pronounced deficiency at making authentic, vulnerable connection with my fellow humans, which was what drove me to seek solace in urban nature in the first place.

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Foxes thrive in ecotones: areas that straddle two very different types of habitats. And the foxes around here have figured out that the zone between overgrown empty lot and industrial streetscape creates similar opportunities for predation as the border between grassland and forest or prairie and wetland.

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We don't tend to notice those changes that slowly manifest in the other life around us. The city has a way of keeping us focused on feeding it, and the faces we see in its ubiquitous mirrors. Sometimes the waking dreams of our popular culture give us peripheral glimpses of the truth about how we relate to our world, but vampires can't see their own reflections.

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We understood that a Chupacabra is simply a creature you encounter that does not follow the taxonomic indicators of its species, looking so strange, in the moment you see it, as to provide you an experience of the alien and a welcome excuse to make up your own legend.

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Becoming familiar with the layers of time visible in the landscape around you, you develop a different sense of the now. Maybe the ancient river helps trigger it, in the way it embodies deep time. You learn to feel the long now, a now in which your own life is as brief as that of an insect who lives, eats, breeds, and dies within days seems to you. A now in which the waters of the sea that covered the region where you are standing receded relatively recently, and in which the animals that walked into that landscape when it dried did so recently enough that you can still find their tracks.

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Much of our thinking about how to correct our currently disastrous climate trajectory is tied up with Restoration Romanticism. The dream of Arcadia, of the idealized wild world that preceded permanent human settlement into city-states, echoes in our yearning for ecotopian possibility. We codify it in our policing of native versus invasive species and in our conservation strategies that focus on setting aside large swaths of land protected from active human use. . . . 

I wasn't looking for pathways into the future when I started exploring the interstitial urban wilderness. I was just looking for something that felt more like real life. I found it, and learned how to walk right through the barriers we construct between ourselves and our natural environment. It made me want to break down those barriers in the fabric of my own life and see what different ways of living might be possible.

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Maybe it was . . . the instinct that farming is, in some fundamental way, not about returning to nature, but enslaving it, no matter how few chemicals or machines or capitalist business methods you use to bring the green from soil to table. The learned lesson from a childhood in the heart of the Corn Belt that, in the heart of the heart of the country, everything is green but nothing is wild. And really, at a certain level, there is no authentic life.

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Vultures, especially black vultures, have always thrived on the cities we have made in the centuries since European settlement, and the mass-production of death for which they are designed. Especially in the South, where it never really gets cold. Audubon related how common carrion crows were in antebellum Charleston, Savannah, New Orleans, and Natchez, especially around the slaughterhouses. He later reported how, in the period when we has studying them--sometimes shooting or trapping them--particular black vultures seemed to be able to recognize him and the horse on which he rode.

They are not the only animal that sees us with that level of understanding, of who we are and what we do. By paying closer attention to them and seeing the city and the countryside through their eyes, we can better understand ourselves. Apex predators who have remade the world into a machine to feed us, leaving our leftovers, waste, and nonhuman accident victims for other creatures to survive off. We talk about the dream of colonizing other worlds, but rarely note how colonized the one we live on already is.

In a world governed by human reason, we experience an abundance of surplus and a poverty of meaning. We believe ourselves to have banished magic and superstition from the world. But the magic is still there, all around us. The trick is learning to see it, for what it is: the seemingly supernatural wonders produced by everyday interactions among different elements of the natural world. Things that can all be explained by science, but also understood by poets. Even in the most urbanized human terrains, those wonders can still be found--most often at the edges where the pavement ends and the wild is allowed to express.

Urban watering hole.

Lewis & Clark expedition memorial stones.

A related article that recently came across my feed. Is anything truly invasive--or is life always fluid?

Tending the Vines

Whether in Mississippi or Denver or Detroit or Oakland, indelible reminders of anti-Black genocide are infused throughout these geographies. Monoculture swaths made possible through coerced Black labor, blighted cities under-resourced and underfunded, the proliferation of diseases, and the establishment of highways, industrial factories, and landfills in what were once some of the most beautiful places in the country saturate the land with transatlantic memory. Some of these reminders are plants, whose lives in these regions are also made possible through such disasters—the only things that can grow in such disturbed environments.

The word invasive is a bit of a sore spot for me. A species “becomes” invasive when it is introduced to a new habitat, finds that it likes it a little too much, and massively outcompetes local flora and/or fauna. Invasive plants are usually the result of years of damage from settlers, who destroyed native ecologies for economic and cultural gain. Many invasive species are opportunists, not arriving to the scene of the crime until after erosion, degradation, and biodiversity loss due to overexploitation has already altered the region’s ecology. When my auntie shows me pictures of her travels to Mississippi, I am amazed by how many plant species are not native and are, in fact, the result of years of ecological domination brought on by colonization, genocide, unlawful land acquisition, and racial terror. . . . 

Plants are always challenging what it means to belong, to hold and be held, to be a source of spiritual nourishment in a spiritually bankrupt world—they are the vessel through which our ancestors speak. . . . 

Invasive plants, depending on whose hands they are in, can be catalysts for decolonial world-building. If we seek to repair the rupture, perhaps we can turn to the organisms that found home in the rupture’s chasm. Invasives are not stagnant, nor are they all-encompassing. In fact, invasives only provide a window into freedom struggles; they are inherently contradictory, and hopefully their roles will change and evolve with the times. . . . 

Our mere presence disrupts any false assumption of “natural order,” and we are pursuing richer worlds beyond this one. At odds with normative assumptions, Black spatial ecologies suggest a departure from rigidity, a capacity to both influence and be influenced, to work with the various assemblages of plants, animals, and human collaborators, rather than view them as something to subjugate to our will. . . . 

At once possibility and poison, vines are an incredible teacher in disjointed living and how plants might be able to teach us what we can do to survive (and thrive) in this moment.

Plants are always challenging what it means to belong, to hold and be held, to be a source of spiritual nourishment in a spiritually bankrupt world.

Everything is in with relationship with everything else, everything is impacted by others. Animals have always shaped plants, plants have always shaped animals; humans have always shaped and been shaped by both.

And another.

The Myth of a Wilderness Without Humans

They and their friends who sought to preserve an idealized version of nature called it “wilderness,” a place that humans had explored but never altered, exalted but never touched. It was the beginning of a myth, a fiction that would gradually spread around the world, and for a century or more drive the conservation agenda of mankind. . . . 

Here, they said (and they all knew better) is an untrammeled landscape, virgin and pristine, not a bootprint to be seen, not a hogan or teepee in sight. Here in this wild place one may seek and find complete peace.

They all knew better, the portrayers of wilderness; in fact, Adams assiduously avoided photographing any of the local Miwok who were rarely out of his sight as he worked Yosemite Valley. He filled thousands of human-free negatives with land he knew the Miwok had tended for at least four thousand years. . . . 

The Yosemite model of conservation, which still expresses itself in a fairly consistent form, has sparked a worldwide conflict between two powerful scientific disciplines: anthropology and conservation biology. These two august sciences remain at odds with one another over how best to conserve and protect biological and cultural diversity, and perhaps more perplexing, how best to define two of most semantically tortured terms in both their fields — nature and wilderness. . . . 

By glorifying pristine landscapes, which exist only in the imagination of romantics, Western conservationists divert attention from the places where people live and the choices they make every day that do true damage to the natural world of which they are part.

So the removal of aboriginal human beings from their homeland to create a commodified wilderness is a deliberate charade, a culturally constructed neo-Edenic narrative played out for the enchantment of weary human urbanites yearning for the open frontier that their ancestors “discovered” then tamed, a place to absorb the sounds and images of virgin nature and forget for a moment the thoroughly unnatural lives they lead. . . . 

When wildness is conflated with wilderness, and wilderness with nature, and nature is seen as something separate and uninfluenced by human activity, perhaps it’s time to examine real situations and test them against the semantics of modern conservation. . . . 

When one perceives humanity to be something separate from nature it becomes easier to regard landscapes in their “natural state” as landscapes without human inhabitants and aspire to preserve wilderness by encouraging the existence and survival in landscape of as many species as possible, minus one — humans.

Wilderness is a deliberate charade, a culturally constructed neo-Edenic narrative played out for the enchantment of weary human urbanites yearning for the open frontier.

Everything is in with relationship with everything else, everything is impacted by others. Animals have always shaped plants, plants have always shaped animals; humans have always shaped and been shaped by both.

To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful, and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, lack of compassion for the world. Including ourselves.

― David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature

From Reweaving the Rainbow:

question the settled

the underpinnings

at the base of our stories

for roosting there

among the cryptic dark

we find the secret

to living larger

Lance Larsen

Self-Portrait as Aspiring Mystic

I have no spooky mantras but I can whisper

Indie Indie Indie into the dark, praying coyotes

will spare my cat. I failed to see in the falls

gods letting down their fugitive hair,

but I rescued a turkey feather from dirt.

I don’t know the color of my heart

chakra, but seven days running I’ve touched

my lucky desert rock holding the window open.

Can’t erase mudslides but I can snatch

a mantis from the path of a lumbering bus.

In another life I might have advised the king,

mended nets, read the entrails of a slaughtered

sheep, or reached inside a mare’s slippery

canal and turned the colt. In this life,

I’m a man with flat feet and splinted middle

finger who flips off scrambled eggs, staring

stars, and my beloved—all by accident.

Did I say I love this life? Lord, how I love

this life. In all its broken backfiring beauty.

Can’t float on mist, but I can bag garbage

under a full moon. Can’t quiet yammering

dogs, but I can dance. No prayers inside me

today, but I can flip over a board behind

my house and catalogue scattering shamans,

all wriggle and writhe, scurry and scheme.

Look at them teem. This one soft-shoeing

away on 100 legs, this one carrying venom

in its curling tail, this one cricketing with praise.

If I can do it so can you.

We live in a cyborg world.

The boundary between human space and wild space is permeable and mostly illusory.

What we experience, alone in nature, is the opposite of solitude: the revelation of our connection and community with the nonhuman life and animate elemental energy that surrounds us, infuses us, and is us.

We believe ourselves to have banished magic and superstition from the world. But the magic is still there, all around us. The trick is learning to see it, for what it is: the seemingly supernatural wonders produced by everyday interactions among different elements of the natural world.

we are loosely put together

of broken parts

edged with the brilliant

freedom from suffering

is found

in a tender heart

that can fully feel

the pulp of the difficult

and does not judge

the imperfect in you

or in another person

beauty is the present

suspended in attention

imperfect

impermanent

incomplete