personal writings

Pit

    I was born with a pit in my stomach. 
    A pit is often mistaken for a hole,
    gaping, infinitely empty, inside out, slow consuming.

    The truth is, the pit is the whole essence, endlessness confined in
    the seed.
    I once thought it was devouring me but
    I now know that I am the one with teeth.

    One may spend their whole life chewing on the material,
    reveling through hedonic madness and
    gnawing at the own self
    until it is finished.
    There is too little time.

    I do not want to be happy, I would rather
    STARVE myself of indulging in the delicious sweetness so my pit may give way 
    to the creation of an infinite expanse; so
    the thick, sticky substance of space I may trudge carefully
    and it through me.

    I do not want to be happy. I want to be unlimited.
    I want to be inextricably entwined in the fabric of space.
    Being no stranger to pain, I have seen candles in the dark.
    My pain is pennies in the fountain and it is as easy to
    die as it is to be happy.

    But I am not happy, I am whole.
    Truth is a rediscovery of the space between the lines.
    Frameworks are not true but they are at an angle. 
    Truth is the hypervolume of experiences from all possible angles 
    at once
    and the relationship of the subject at each angle to all other possible angles,
    and the potential for each angle to change over time,
    thus changing the relationship of the subject to the angle and all others,
    all at once and forever in a moment.
    I am a hypervolume: Infinity tandem with infinity.
    The truth is, a pit is a whole.

On Existence

    We here have learned enough of the stars to know how unlikely it is that life should exist at all. The Earth tilts at the perfect angle to the sun, it glows with a perfect atmosphere with chemicals arranged to shield us from harm and entrench us in the perfect amount of warmth, and it drips with the cosmically scarce essence of life: water.
    We are a product of perfection; made in the image of the stars themselves. Elements came together over millions of years in such a way that it formed the conscious sensory experience we consider life. Life, as it is experienced uniquely to each individual, is called the umwelt.
    A dog has poor eyesight and thus engages with the world through smells. their acute snouts immerse them in a sensory bubble that informs their consciousness. The umwelt, the perception, informs the consciousness on the inside. Plants and trees communicate with one another through soil as a mouth., fungi form nebulas of consciousness, experiencing the world without a body across a hivemind of hyphae. worms have taste buds all over their body begging one to imagine, in the words of poet Danusha Lemeris: “a pleasure so sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,” to the euphoric pleasure that occurs when it's submerged in a dropped fruit. 
    It’s easy to anthropomorphize other species when we seek to understand them, but all umwelts must be understood as unknowable and powerful as our very own. This is where we can extract value. The human’s sense of value lies in our experiences that shape our thoughts and culminate in purpose. Other species that live must be experiencing realities of sensation that amount to some sense of purpose, of fitting as part of a whole as well. After all, something must motivate them to live and reproduce. You could chalk it all up to chemical reactions inducing feelings but we humans know better than anyone that our own lives are valuable in relation to one another in our massive ecology of experiences, and if I have learned anything about science, it’s that it does not provide answers, but approximations. The truth lies somewhere between water and warmth and it escapes us indefinitely.
    There are deeper ways to comprehend nature. It is not entirely through the self nor others nor our impenetrable academic toolkits we are trained to use like masters of the trade: it is by immersing yourself in the thick sludge of everything. We must submit ourselves entirely to the absurdity of nature with such shining optimism that the rules of the world reveal themselves to us through the senses and beyond them in the mind. It’s like catching a firefly in a jar: you take pleasure in the chase of it, you trap it in your hands and place it in your container, you look at it from all angles and admire it for no reason other than that it's alive and beautiful and you are happy to see it. It seems you are simultaneously as small as it and it, as large as you. We must call this love. It is the same love of God, the love of creation itself. It's the kind of love that whether the force you worship grants you mercy or not, it always remains.
     As humans, we are naturally in awe of all that is created and in flux. We easily tire of static things. We wish to build and craft and combine and alter the world around us. Humans have the force of nature deep inside them as we are its children and are made with its own genetic material. No other creature we know has this incredible infiniteness within them that gives way to divine creation, that is, creating for the sake of creation, such as in the case of art. Art may be what separates so drastically from the rest of life. Our taste for aesthetic beauty motivates us to create and to alter our environments. Beauty is our madness; the same madness that put men on the moon. The kind that reveals infiniteness in all things.
    As scientists, we must take great caution with this power. The world as we know it is coming to end by our hand at an unstoppable rate. Western traditional cultures' disregard of nature and its potential to decimate if not treated carefully may be our demise. The pendulum has swung so far to the side of creation and development for so long that we are now watching it swing back to the opposite side; that of destruction. We will still battle ultimate death though. It is in our nature to do so. We spend our entire lives fending off mortality.
    In the world of ecology, a field of science on the very frontlines of climate change, there have been calls for a radical change in the way that we carry out science in a practical context through the implementation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, the skills, beliefs, values, and knowledge of indigenous peoples regarding nature and its shape. In the lens of traditional ecological knowledge, humans are inside of nature. We are participants in the web of life, equal to all others. It acknowledges the immense power of mankind, the power to destroy as a form of creation, and urges us to maintain balance so as to not let the pendulum swing too far in either direction. This requires reciprocity. We must care for the world that made us from nothing. We must approach the hypervolume of experiences occurring in nature with a deep, emotional connection, a gratefulness, and a responsibility if we are to shift the balance. 
    Science alone does not suffice. The lived experiences of all creatures on Earth are too significant to disregard the emotional weight that comes with it. All life, in all its forms, shares sensation. We must exercise radical empathy for all that lives, feels, and dies, as though they are part of ourselves: because they are.