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| Spring Puddle, Steve Brown 2024 |
Pregnant spring clouds move behind the juniper ridge out the front window as the sky turns from gray to blue with the coming of the night. Soon the reflected interior of the house will mingle with the outside for a brief magical time until the interior eventually takes over and the windows are reduced to mirrors.
The natural world blotted out by artificial light. Perhaps that is a metaphor for our times. The observable universe has expanded greatly both telescopically and microscopically due to advances in technology, but the amount of time the average person encounters the natural world observable to the human eye has plummeted because the projected reality on the glass devices before us has replaced our direct interaction with nature. We have access to almost everything, and yet we ignore our personal connection to life.
This is also somewhat true for me. I live on ninety acres of land with two creeks and the forest a very short walk away, and for much of the year, deer within a stone's throw from either my front or back door. Yet, a hundred years ago, it is very likely I would have had more connection to the earth living in the center of town, even a fairly big town, because much of my food would have been grown in my garden, no matter how small, and sweltering summer nights would have been spent on the porch swing listening to the crickets sing instead of watching TV or clicking on an endless supply of videos on my phone. I would most likely walk or ride a horse more than I commute by rail. Travel would be slow and methodical--time for reflection on something big and grand, like God, or next to nothing, like that one tree on that otherwise bald hill before me, both equally important to knowing one's place in the universe the only way it counts--personal, unnamed, in the fabric of your soul.
Now, even the machines have intelligence, but man never really understands anything because most of his interactions with the world are done remotely with a screen between him and reality. Spiritually, we are not meant to know the world this way. It's damaging. To understand how a tumbleweed takes seed, sprouts and grows and tumbles its posterity across a turned field through a time-lapse video is not to know a tumble weed. It is facsimile reality. To know a tumbleweed is to watch it slowly turn from green to dark red to dark brown to beige as one passes it each day as late summer slides slowly into fall and the last crop of alfalfa is cut, or you get the tumbleweed's nasty barbs in your skin, even with gloves, as you pull masses of them from the wire fence around the chicken run.
It is only through direct, tangible connections to the world around us that we gain a sense of place, and a sense of who we are in relation to that place. And yet we now spend hours daily in front of screens. No wonder we are no longer sure about who we are. Whatever meaning life has, it is impossible to think it is not somehow directly connected to life. I know that seems obvious, like saying whatever an apple is, it is somehow connected to being an apple. But we live as if we weren't people with an origin--rooted to the earth and sky. What does a person made of flesh and bone have to do with a glass screen? What in our cells would have any connection whatsoever to the pixels of light on our computer, let alone the plastics around it? What unnamed dialog could possibly take place between the two at a cellular-memory level, where things really matter?
But a cricket--that is quite a different thing. How many generations have our ancestors heard their songs and passed some memory of that music onto us through our genetic memory?
We are setting ourselves up for spiritual isolation on a mindboggling scale because all human origin narratives go back in time to a place where God moved upon the face of the deep. That tangible unknown is glimpsed in flashes by staring up at the seemingly countless stars, or comprehended in the very cells of our skin as the smoothness of the inside of a conch shell glides along one's fingertip and speaks of universal unity stored deep down inside forever but not named in your mind until that mind-boggling ah-ha moment: I and this conche shell are of one great design. As good as Cosmos or any other show might be--it cannot get you there. Only looking directly at those stars and personally feeling that shell can place you in that moment of direct instruction: This is what it is to be human, here, now.
We are creating a world of constant stimulation and almost zero direct connection, and frankly, that's more frightening to me than even artificial intelligence. The Metaverse can only lead to an ever-increasing sense of purposelessness because our purpose, like the purpose of all living things, is simply to exist between the dirt beneath our feet and below the sun and clouds in the sky and grow in that space the best we can amongst all other living things. There is no man without the garden because the garden is the origin, that magic moment and place where God granted us life, and we were raised from the dust to be. That type of knowing can't be comprehended before a screen. A genuine sense of purpose cannot be learned, only experienced. God is in the details because God is the details in a very real sense. He is directly tangible everywhere through direct engagement of the senses, but He is tangible nowhere without some connection to what actually is. We are creating a reality where we only experience the universe through projections of life, simulations of being replacing actually being.
Nothing could make Satan happier. A spiritually displaced people can be led in any direction.
Getting to know this moment well enough to see it, taste it, and hear it breathe--that may well be the antivenom to serpent's final attempt to slither into the sinews of our being and sever us once and for all from the garden and any memory of who we are: Sons and Daughters of God.
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