Other Than Our Intentions
Physics, not philosophy
The present moment is constantly emerging. It is that millisecond now that evades us, that keeps us gasping for air, that we ride beautifully and terribly upon. It is simplicity merging simultaneously into the vaporous complex ocean of our lives unfolding. This complexity that is the haze of uncertainty and frustration, a constraint of vapors, has no name. We have no direct way to refer to it, yet there it is all around us.
We operate under the assumption that the vocabulary we work with represents the potential we have for expression. It does not. It is silly to think we do. No, no more than DNA actively contains an expression for every condition life could face at any time. What we have is derived from what we were given, not from what is possibly real, and it seems more and more that what we were given is not enough, or was always only ever meant to be added to, modified, and celebrated in its potential for becoming what will be - not for what it was. The celebration of awareness of the needed, however, can only unfold in the now. This is why leaving ourselves open to ecologies, why knowing what ecologies are doing, what they are made of, how they do it, and what their actual potential for growth into all better tomorrows can be must match what is.
The histories of our ecologies are important, no doubt. But only in the sense that they inform about our tomorrows. Those tomorrows are never the yesterdays they were, from small-scale changes in a gram of soil in one second, to ocean currents and solar system tides across millennia. And it all only unfolds, it all only exists, in the emerging now. What a heavy burden the light and fanciful now contains, the complexity of all existence in the beautiful simplicity of a vanishingly small, barely noticed, mundane moment that we just keep ignoring. We are lost in a haze for which we have no name - yet a name we desperately need. And how can we name that of which we are unaware? And that is the trouble with ecology - it is only ever other than our intentions.