Tech

Consider humanity’s greatest inventions: language, the written word, fire, germ theory, the scientific method, music, art, the wheel, agriculture, and rounding out the top ten, of course, the bicycle.

You’d have to get down to around number fifty or so, in the realm of innovations like the waterbed or kimchi before the cellular phone showed up—and way farther down the list until you’d arrive at software applications for said phone.

(In fact, phone-based social media applications would probably show up in the top ten of humanity’s worst inventions, right around there with the internal combustion engine and nuclear bombs.)

Nevertheless, there is a time and place for everything (except, of course, the aforementioned nuclear bombs), and so I’m not going to complain (any more than I have already) about a piece of software that potentially keeps a person from being ditched by the group before the dangerous egress to one of Seattle’s most dangerous egresses (albeit one affording an absolutely stellar view of our own nearest star’s setting to the west on a lovely and clear late spring evening, albeit one scored a mere 4 out 10 by the New Hampshire judge).

If my little round face, crossing the front of another person’s little plastic rectangle means that I’m better able to catch up to the favored group of itinerant miscreants, then so be it; I’ll accept that.

But let us not come to depend on such technological mediations at the cost of our innate abilities to connect using only what nature has given us: eyes, ears, loud mouths, olfactory clues, (especially for those riding behind a person puffing away at a cannabis cigarette), and even those extra-sensory perceptions that somehow allow a person to show up later in the evening just by following their intuitions—(and well, sometimes by making a phone call or checking the so-called twitters.)

Technology or not, as long as we keep pedaling, we’ll meet up where we’re going, wherever that is.

Nature

Tom was holding forth about some podcast or something where they talked about how birds can regulate the incubation of their eggs to time their hatching to correspond with the instant when some caterpillars emerge; that’s pretty cool, for sure.

But it’s not really the birds doing it, is it?  

It’s really nature, in all its multitudes, doing its natural thing so that everything keeps wiggling, as Alan Watts put it.  

“Nature is wiggly.” He wrote.  “Everything wiggles: the outlines of the hills, the shapes of the trees, the way the wind brushes the grass, the clouds, tracts of streams. It all wiggles.” 

Good old Dr. Bronner put it right there on the side of his soap bottles: “All is one.”  

And even though Bertrand Russell, in his famous essay, pointed out that that the logic of mysticism which underlies this claim about the unity of all things is faulty, it’s hard (and maybe impossible, which is why, for the most part, the logic is faulty) to deny that everything is everything, (right down to the obvious scientific point that all the atoms in the entire Universe—from those making up stellar nebulae to those comprising peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or little Covid-safe mini-joints, “P.D. bidis” as they will be called if and when I get to follow in the steps of Snoop Dog or Cheech Marin and have my own Professor Dave-endorsed cannabis line) is to overlook what is probably the most essential truth of all, right?

So, yes, each of us individually pedals their own pedals and climbs to the top of another new parking garage, this one offering a view of some others one might hope to scale some other day, but at the same time, and more essentially, it’s the Universe pedaling all of us as one.

We’re just the wiggles wiggling all together as the Universe wiggles itself; it’s all the same thing hatching itself at the only always perfect time.