Writing about life and arts
The world is still colossal, a gaping map of mystery our brains fill in with imagination.
It’s delusional to think we know it.
Thankfully, any time we traverse the planet we’re awakened by our own trained incapacity, an ignorance blind to nature’s surprises.
The ever sprawling internet promises to teach us a few things, but it’s just an appetizer.
If we want to know the world, we have to drive around it. Exploration is the only way to coalesce the wonders out of the world.
Whether we establish a route or keep it open-ended, we can discover things along the way.
Constraints produce their own magic. They make us innovate based on what we have to play with. But so too do indefinite destinations.
Out of curiosity blooms everything.
We permit our heuristic temptations to guide the discovery process. The rush to fill ignorance with self-knowledge makes us feel alive.
The world is more like a playground than a camp. We should feel free to try and steal the sun, at least act like it.
The frictionless internet begs us to take more information than we need.
But in borrowing its widgets, we have to reciprocate to ensure what we put out or reinvent comes back to enrich nature itself.
Life as we know it can survive without sunlight and oxygen: witness the creatures that populate the sulfurous vicinity of submarine hydrothermal vents. Life as we know it cannot live without water, and where there is water, there is almost always life.“I discovered living creatures in rain, which had stood but a few days in a new tub,” Antonie van Leeuwenhoek observed in 1675 after peering through his invention, a new and better microscope. A grown man like Pablo Valencia can last three weeks without food; without water, at most several days.
Read Watermarks: Diving into the fathoms to find life’s fluency
In 1968, Doctor Paul Ehrlich warned the world of its excessive population with his book entitled The Population Bomb (Amazon).
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he wrote, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
His trip to an overcrowded Delhi in 1966 seemed to convince him that there wasn’t enough food to go around to support humanity.
Thankfully, Dr. Ehrlich’s warnings never panned out. Instead, his book sparked a debate about “the potential consequences of overpopulation: famine, pollution, social and ecological collapse.” Out came some viable solutions.
While population has more than doubled since The Population Bomb came out, agricultural innovation has been able to sustain the boom. Today, one in ten people are starving as opposed to one in four.
However, Ehrlich and other researchers predict that the environmental damage from overproduction remains to be seen. Undermining the ecosystem could still wipe us all out. Other researchers are more optimistic, believing that human ingenuity will come to the rescue.
We shape the Earth, and it shapes us.
For all the pieces interact, transforming into a cohesive thought.
The trees grow in cities, the oceans meet at the cape.
All the pieces interact, enveloped by the space inside.
The weather is fickle, cyclical, everything too much for a remix, itching for evolution.
To get closer to the texture of stimuli, gentle in our convictions, cushioned from other things.
In nature’s ludicrous rhythm, we trust.