The clay side by the Kalapuya
The ineffable voices,
the living and nonliving,
the animate or inanimate,
the essentially spiritual,
the utterly mysterious,
the
fractally fascinating sounds that linger in the shade
here at the energetic end of summer at a time when
carbon dioxide and methane levels have started to
resemble those of fifty-five million years ago after
comparable quantities of greenhouse gases entered
the atmosphere and caused a worldwide heat-wave
that lasted over 200,000 years,
of the power of the
world’s continuous beginning,
of the ungraspable
holiest phantom calling to us from the rapids and
causing us to reflect on the life of the universe in
these secret thoughts that run over things sacred,
profane,
clean,
obscene,
light,
or grave,
and each
without all shame or blame;
the ineffable voices
of the living river,
of the ceaselessly flowing entropy reduction that
generally and joyfully characterizes all forms of
life,
of the primal attraction to watery edges we
inherit from our origins 150,000 brief years ago
back in Africa’s Rift Valley where our ancestors
foraged along the shore for fish,
mollusks,
birds,
crustaceans,
and mammals,
of this coming from
melted snow and ice and this flashing past dark
boulders or shadowy trout as the stream acts out
what has happened to it and what it will do in its
randomly sensitive dependence on so many initial
conditions,
of the perpetual peace inspiriting this
ancient tumult of pristine flux;
of the living river
declaim so purely,
stand so phenomenally beyond,
behind,
and within
the passing of immediate things,
infuse us now so
unconsciously with inspiring bagatelles of transient
experience,
suggest so melodiously the immanence
that is real yet forever to be realized,
is the remotest
possibility and the most immediate fact,
that gives
meaning to everything transitory but still defies our
comprehension,
the mystical transcendence whose
conceptual expression remains our hopeless quest,
expound so profoundly on the soul’s poise,
on its
insouciance,
its sureness,
its sweetness,
its cunning
as the black river pours over the split rocks making
savage rainbows of spray,
remind us so reverently
of Hildegard of Bingen and of the divine sparkling
of waters,
so magnanimously,
so independently,
so
simply of the process of optimal harmonization with
the Ki of the universe and with the kami of the high
Cascades,
O yes!,
extemporize so urgently of life as
it becomes in the intricate invasions of as,
in things
unseen,
from fecund Nil created;
declaim so purely
through ouranic forest,
through maples and ash and nitrogen-fixing alders,
through firs and hemlocks and cedars,
through the
miraculously improbable distribution of molecules
that connects these heliotropic woods to the entire
terrestrial biosphere or to the Sun and the River of
Stars by day or by night,
this analogy between the
biochemical and the astrophysical that proves to be
mathematically feasible after all,
through all these
spirelike dendrozoic structures based on the carbon
made in stars and spread in dust and gas throughout
the interstellar medium or the whorling arms of our
own and countless other galaxies,
the same carbon
that provides our planetary life-forms the means to
encode and transmit our genetic instructions to our
own cells and to our varied offspring whether we be
eukaryotes,
bacteria,
or archaea by domain,
through
these thriving descendants of ancestors who started
three eons ago to practice photosynthesis,
utilizing
solar energy to take carbon from atmospheric CO2
and synthesize storage sugars,
and who began 400
million years back to cooperate symbiotically on
dry land with underground mycorrhizal fungi for
nitrogen and for precious water during droughts,
through this holy and enchanted landscape where
hydrogen from the original cosmogenic explosion
rushes molecularly bonded to its derivative oxygen,
evoking Presence in Absence,
Essence in the Void,
the subtlest ecstasis and the memorably fugace,
the
common and inseparable life of the earthly and the
heavenly,
or more precisely yet vaguely something
more basic than biota,
something beyond life and
death,
a universal harmony heard beside a river in
the mountains through trees;
through ouranic forest
and chthonic chasm,
the cleft in the Earth whose verticality now aims us
down the tilth toward the subterranean embodiment
and enactment of the vastly greater portion of the
biosphere here at this place a couple hundred yards
northwest of the junction of Oxbow Road and Three
Kings Road off of Highway 139 just past Pioneer
Bridge,
this local landscape set into motion in the
invisible past when a massive clay slide slipped off
Tumtum Ridge down to where the Kalapuya River
still sluices through the volcanic mountains,
this
spectacular pair of vertiginous cliffs whose steep
potential points our mindfulness down toward the
googolplexes of creatures underneath this elegant
A-frame cabin and the expansive deck upon which
Hope and I luxuriate,
the endless miles of coiled-up
gossamer threads of fungal hyphae or root-hugging
mycorrhizal arbuscula,
and all the nematodes,
the
springtails,
the water bears,
the mites,
the countless
other arthropods,
the bacteria,
the methanogens,
the
protozoa,
the tough,
robust,
so adaptable microbes
generally,
the libidinous earthworms whose cosmic
inching works and reshapes this clay soil that slid so
far so fast so very long ago,
clay being the aperiodic
crystal that is able to mutate and self-replicate like
double-helix DNA,
that is chemically reactive with
adenosine triphosphate molecules for storing vital
energy in living organisms,
that was formed within
the mantle at high temperature and pressure and
brought to the surface by the same churning plate
tectonics pushing the continental crusts,
that during
the meteor bombardment,
the volcanic degassing,
the cataclysmic rainstorms and intense ultraviolet
irradiation of our globe’s raw first eon utilized the
potent thermal energy from the radioactive magma
of the deep subsurface to provide the basic stardust
components of our planet the means to re-organize
themselves against the threat of the thermodynamic
disorder and evolve into a complex design of living
systems,
that served as a crystalline template for the
sequencing of simple proteins and genes,
arranging
pairs of amino acids or nucleotides into the proper
orientation for the biosynthesis of macromolecules,
that can incorporate nucleic and amino acids into its
own structure to initiate the replication or synthesis
functions of those earliest living microbial obligate
anaerobes from which we all descend,
that provided
capacious electrostatically charged surfaces to serve
as primitive enzymes,
that likely became embedded
by RNA-like single-stranded nucleotide chains,
was
eventually taken over by them and finally replaced
altogether for biocatalytic purposes,
that formed the
scaffolding with which the bridge of life was built,
and that swarms with miracles ultra vires scientiae
in its electrochemical interiors;
and chthonic chasm
whatever Gaia feels,
metaphorically speaking of course,
using an ancient
anthropomorphic eidolon for our little locus of the
Illimitable that novelist William Golding suggested
to his neighbor the chemist James Lovelock in the
early 1970’s in their quiet Wiltshire village where
the country folk found it obvious that the biosphere
was a self-regulating system keeping all conditions
favorable for life over improbable periods of time,
the scientist and the literatus thereby collaborating
to resurrect an ancient goddess also known as GA,
an irresistible divinity personifying the biosphere
with its strange property of keeping itself always a
fit and comfortable place for living things to affect
and inhabit,
with its stable recycling of energy and
materials among its components at rates controlled
by feedback systems,
with its Gestalt greater than
the sum that we question while it works,
with its
elemental composition similar to the universe as a
whole in which hydrogen,
nitrogen,
oxygen,
and
carbon are by far the primary ingredients,
with its
eight levels of intricate self-organization from the
organelles to biotic entirety,
with its abundant flow
of energy characterized by a tendency to form itself
as it consumes,
with its extremely exotic subsurface
ecosystems of vast microbial metabolisms powered
by the Earth’s inner heat independently of the aging
sun,
with its visceral biological forces in an intimate
union with the many fluxes and pools of the global
exchange of water,
energy,
and nutrients between
the sunlit surface and the depths,
with its Paleozoic
stromatolite fossils over three billion years old that
were left by the archaic photosynthesizers,
with its
fossilized arbuscular mycorrhizae from 400 million
years ago that resemble miniature etched trees,
with
its green chloroplast organelles that originated in a
primordial symbiosis between the cyanobacteria
and the eukaryotic organisms,
with its microbial
majority of life that would and will survive if and
when all of us large creatures became or become
extinct but not vice-versa sadly,
and with its truly
awe-inducing effect on this couple of us vociferous
advocates and voracious consumers who have been
inspired to love and respect the Earth because we
are part of it and cannot survive without a healthy
planet as our home,
who have dedicated ourselves
to replacing that destructive reductionist thinking
with this holistic compassion,
to integrating our
socio-economic well-being with environmental
protection,
to changing specifically to accredited
green power options for household electricity,
to
installing solar panels on the roof and a solar hot
water system,
to using energy-efficient appliances
and light bulbs,
a triple-A showerhead,
and a tiny
fuel-efficient car,
to walking,
bicycling,
or taking
public transportation,
to calculating our own carbon
footprint,
to conducting a workplace sustainability
audit,
and to writing to our politicians about climate
change and the right response,
we two who lounge
on this raft-like deck temporally afloat and marvel
at the hummingbird-sized sphinx moth flitting from
blossom to bloom while chipmunks snatch roasted
unsalted peanuts from Hope’s lap and vine maples
so imperceptibly continue to turn red at this twist in
the scenery that civilized people admire where birds
and small animals withdraw and return to observe
us,
perhaps knowing in their bones that eternity is
beautifully pointless and that the brute facts are
more than truth enough;
whatever Gaia feels.
the living and nonliving,
the animate or inanimate,
the essentially spiritual,
the utterly mysterious,
the
fractally fascinating sounds that linger in the shade
here at the energetic end of summer at a time when
carbon dioxide and methane levels have started to
resemble those of fifty-five million years ago after
comparable quantities of greenhouse gases entered
the atmosphere and caused a worldwide heat-wave
that lasted over 200,000 years,
of the power of the
world’s continuous beginning,
of the ungraspable
holiest phantom calling to us from the rapids and
causing us to reflect on the life of the universe in
these secret thoughts that run over things sacred,
profane,
clean,
obscene,
light,
or grave,
and each
without all shame or blame;
the ineffable voices
of the living river,
of the ceaselessly flowing entropy reduction that
generally and joyfully characterizes all forms of
life,
of the primal attraction to watery edges we
inherit from our origins 150,000 brief years ago
back in Africa’s Rift Valley where our ancestors
foraged along the shore for fish,
mollusks,
birds,
crustaceans,
and mammals,
of this coming from
melted snow and ice and this flashing past dark
boulders or shadowy trout as the stream acts out
what has happened to it and what it will do in its
randomly sensitive dependence on so many initial
conditions,
of the perpetual peace inspiriting this
ancient tumult of pristine flux;
of the living river
declaim so purely,
stand so phenomenally beyond,
behind,
and within
the passing of immediate things,
infuse us now so
unconsciously with inspiring bagatelles of transient
experience,
suggest so melodiously the immanence
that is real yet forever to be realized,
is the remotest
possibility and the most immediate fact,
that gives
meaning to everything transitory but still defies our
comprehension,
the mystical transcendence whose
conceptual expression remains our hopeless quest,
expound so profoundly on the soul’s poise,
on its
insouciance,
its sureness,
its sweetness,
its cunning
as the black river pours over the split rocks making
savage rainbows of spray,
remind us so reverently
of Hildegard of Bingen and of the divine sparkling
of waters,
so magnanimously,
so independently,
so
simply of the process of optimal harmonization with
the Ki of the universe and with the kami of the high
Cascades,
O yes!,
extemporize so urgently of life as
it becomes in the intricate invasions of as,
in things
unseen,
from fecund Nil created;
declaim so purely
through ouranic forest,
through maples and ash and nitrogen-fixing alders,
through firs and hemlocks and cedars,
through the
miraculously improbable distribution of molecules
that connects these heliotropic woods to the entire
terrestrial biosphere or to the Sun and the River of
Stars by day or by night,
this analogy between the
biochemical and the astrophysical that proves to be
mathematically feasible after all,
through all these
spirelike dendrozoic structures based on the carbon
made in stars and spread in dust and gas throughout
the interstellar medium or the whorling arms of our
own and countless other galaxies,
the same carbon
that provides our planetary life-forms the means to
encode and transmit our genetic instructions to our
own cells and to our varied offspring whether we be
eukaryotes,
bacteria,
or archaea by domain,
through
these thriving descendants of ancestors who started
three eons ago to practice photosynthesis,
utilizing
solar energy to take carbon from atmospheric CO2
and synthesize storage sugars,
and who began 400
million years back to cooperate symbiotically on
dry land with underground mycorrhizal fungi for
nitrogen and for precious water during droughts,
through this holy and enchanted landscape where
hydrogen from the original cosmogenic explosion
rushes molecularly bonded to its derivative oxygen,
evoking Presence in Absence,
Essence in the Void,
the subtlest ecstasis and the memorably fugace,
the
common and inseparable life of the earthly and the
heavenly,
or more precisely yet vaguely something
more basic than biota,
something beyond life and
death,
a universal harmony heard beside a river in
the mountains through trees;
through ouranic forest
and chthonic chasm,
the cleft in the Earth whose verticality now aims us
down the tilth toward the subterranean embodiment
and enactment of the vastly greater portion of the
biosphere here at this place a couple hundred yards
northwest of the junction of Oxbow Road and Three
Kings Road off of Highway 139 just past Pioneer
Bridge,
this local landscape set into motion in the
invisible past when a massive clay slide slipped off
Tumtum Ridge down to where the Kalapuya River
still sluices through the volcanic mountains,
this
spectacular pair of vertiginous cliffs whose steep
potential points our mindfulness down toward the
googolplexes of creatures underneath this elegant
A-frame cabin and the expansive deck upon which
Hope and I luxuriate,
the endless miles of coiled-up
gossamer threads of fungal hyphae or root-hugging
mycorrhizal arbuscula,
and all the nematodes,
the
springtails,
the water bears,
the mites,
the countless
other arthropods,
the bacteria,
the methanogens,
the
protozoa,
the tough,
robust,
so adaptable microbes
generally,
the libidinous earthworms whose cosmic
inching works and reshapes this clay soil that slid so
far so fast so very long ago,
clay being the aperiodic
crystal that is able to mutate and self-replicate like
double-helix DNA,
that is chemically reactive with
adenosine triphosphate molecules for storing vital
energy in living organisms,
that was formed within
the mantle at high temperature and pressure and
brought to the surface by the same churning plate
tectonics pushing the continental crusts,
that during
the meteor bombardment,
the volcanic degassing,
the cataclysmic rainstorms and intense ultraviolet
irradiation of our globe’s raw first eon utilized the
potent thermal energy from the radioactive magma
of the deep subsurface to provide the basic stardust
components of our planet the means to re-organize
themselves against the threat of the thermodynamic
disorder and evolve into a complex design of living
systems,
that served as a crystalline template for the
sequencing of simple proteins and genes,
arranging
pairs of amino acids or nucleotides into the proper
orientation for the biosynthesis of macromolecules,
that can incorporate nucleic and amino acids into its
own structure to initiate the replication or synthesis
functions of those earliest living microbial obligate
anaerobes from which we all descend,
that provided
capacious electrostatically charged surfaces to serve
as primitive enzymes,
that likely became embedded
by RNA-like single-stranded nucleotide chains,
was
eventually taken over by them and finally replaced
altogether for biocatalytic purposes,
that formed the
scaffolding with which the bridge of life was built,
and that swarms with miracles ultra vires scientiae
in its electrochemical interiors;
and chthonic chasm
whatever Gaia feels,
metaphorically speaking of course,
using an ancient
anthropomorphic eidolon for our little locus of the
Illimitable that novelist William Golding suggested
to his neighbor the chemist James Lovelock in the
early 1970’s in their quiet Wiltshire village where
the country folk found it obvious that the biosphere
was a self-regulating system keeping all conditions
favorable for life over improbable periods of time,
the scientist and the literatus thereby collaborating
to resurrect an ancient goddess also known as GA,
an irresistible divinity personifying the biosphere
with its strange property of keeping itself always a
fit and comfortable place for living things to affect
and inhabit,
with its stable recycling of energy and
materials among its components at rates controlled
by feedback systems,
with its Gestalt greater than
the sum that we question while it works,
with its
elemental composition similar to the universe as a
whole in which hydrogen,
nitrogen,
oxygen,
and
carbon are by far the primary ingredients,
with its
eight levels of intricate self-organization from the
organelles to biotic entirety,
with its abundant flow
of energy characterized by a tendency to form itself
as it consumes,
with its extremely exotic subsurface
ecosystems of vast microbial metabolisms powered
by the Earth’s inner heat independently of the aging
sun,
with its visceral biological forces in an intimate
union with the many fluxes and pools of the global
exchange of water,
energy,
and nutrients between
the sunlit surface and the depths,
with its Paleozoic
stromatolite fossils over three billion years old that
were left by the archaic photosynthesizers,
with its
fossilized arbuscular mycorrhizae from 400 million
years ago that resemble miniature etched trees,
with
its green chloroplast organelles that originated in a
primordial symbiosis between the cyanobacteria
and the eukaryotic organisms,
with its microbial
majority of life that would and will survive if and
when all of us large creatures became or become
extinct but not vice-versa sadly,
and with its truly
awe-inducing effect on this couple of us vociferous
advocates and voracious consumers who have been
inspired to love and respect the Earth because we
are part of it and cannot survive without a healthy
planet as our home,
who have dedicated ourselves
to replacing that destructive reductionist thinking
with this holistic compassion,
to integrating our
socio-economic well-being with environmental
protection,
to changing specifically to accredited
green power options for household electricity,
to
installing solar panels on the roof and a solar hot
water system,
to using energy-efficient appliances
and light bulbs,
a triple-A showerhead,
and a tiny
fuel-efficient car,
to walking,
bicycling,
or taking
public transportation,
to calculating our own carbon
footprint,
to conducting a workplace sustainability
audit,
and to writing to our politicians about climate
change and the right response,
we two who lounge
on this raft-like deck temporally afloat and marvel
at the hummingbird-sized sphinx moth flitting from
blossom to bloom while chipmunks snatch roasted
unsalted peanuts from Hope’s lap and vine maples
so imperceptibly continue to turn red at this twist in
the scenery that civilized people admire where birds
and small animals withdraw and return to observe
us,
perhaps knowing in their bones that eternity is
beautifully pointless and that the brute facts are
more than truth enough;
whatever Gaia feels.
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