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| Great Blue Heron Pausing During Low Tide Feast |
Complexity needs space, room to breathe. It does not like simple, tidy “answers” that box it in. Complexity also requires that we approach it with a multiplicity of understandings, disciplines, and practices. The moment we begin to break Complexity down into its parts, forgetting the music those parts create when they are strung together, Complexity flinches. She moves away.
Complexity is far-ranging, like a
nomad – present in the moment of that place but always on the move.
Complexity shows herself in every
aspect of our lives, and perhaps is
Life itself:
A pair of
eagles high in the neighbor’s tree yesterday who one moment seemed so
still and
rooted, but the next minute had vanished.
Monthly
bills that are paid for now, but always swimming in the muck of economic
unsustainability.
That deep,
perfect connection with an acquaintance over a steaming cup of coffee
which cools so
soon into inconvenient boredom.
The
grieving friend whose ever-shifting emotions take her on journeys into
confusion; other
ungrieved losses; a search for the walking stick that can support
her climb up
the winding,
slippery, partly-obscured trail.
The old,
sick, loved one whose future is in the hands of others who find no simple
solutions
or desirable choices when keeping him safe might mean extinguishing his
spirit.
The
wrenching, painful edge between compassion for a dear one suffering with
mental illness
and the excruciating emotional fallout of the disease’s impact on close
relationships.
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| Pair of Bald Eagles Next Door |
Oh, sure; we can say a person,
place, situation or thing is some way or another. Our human need and tendency
is to make things comprehensible, which is to say “knowable” and “safe.” It is
much simpler if things remain as we understand them right now. Tidy.
Uncomplicated. Definable. Static. Perhaps this is why the ever-changing nature
of Nature (and thus, Life) throws us into dis-ease, chaos, confusion,
imbalance…But can we really know anything very deeply if we have to cage it
like a panda behind bars in the zoo, depriving him of his very wild nature to
roam through “bear time” and vast “bambooey spaces”? The best we can do, the
most intimate we can become with Complexity - a gene in the organism we call
Life – is to greet it widely and freely as it is in any single moment.
Can we get big enough (broad perspectives
and an open, supple heart) to hold Complexity’s wildness? Better yet, can we live with the discomfort
of roaming the wilderness that is Complexity’s rightful homeland? Can we, in
turn, embrace our own tentative relationship to Complexity, which is to say,
our own relationship with our human nature: flaws, beauty, fears, inconsistencies
and all?
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| Low Tide Glory and Mt Rainier |
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
