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.