Can You Believe It?

I am sitting on my back porch as I write this.

It is night. The deer are moving through the yard again, the way they do, unburdened, as if the dark were simply the yin to daylight’s yang. Above them the moon is out, casting the kind of light that makes the familiar look slightly uncertain, not unlike most things these days.

I find myself staring at it, thinking: the moon doesn’t shine.

Never has. It reflects. What we think of as moonlight is sunlight bouncing back at us from the moon’s surface. We’ve looked up at it our entire lives, named it, written poems about it, navigated oceans by it, yet most of us have never once questioned what we were actually observing. It looks distant, separate from us here on earth, yet we inter-be with it in ways our very existence depends upon.

I find that both humbling and “illuminating”.

Now that I think about it, the sun does not set either. The earth rises. We are the ones moving, spinning at breakneck speed through space. What we experience as a peaceful sunset is actually us sort of falling backwards at a thousand plus miles an hour, as earth rotates in relation to the sun’s fixed light. We feel still. We are anything but.

The sky is not blue. It scatters blue light while absorbing everything else. Color is not a property of the world. It is simply something that happens inside your brain.

The stars you see tonight may no longer exist. The light left some of them thousands of years ago. You are looking at the past and calling it the present.

You are not solid. The atoms that make up your body are 99.9 percent empty space. The feeling of a chair beneath you is not contact. It is electromagnetic repulsion between electrons. Nothing is actually touching anything.

I am not telling you this to unsettle you or to try to sound smart. I am telling you this because we navigate all of it with complete confidence, every single day, and in almost entirely ways that are  constructs of the mind. Useful ones. Necessary ones. But a construction, nonetheless.

Which brings me to the news.

The World That Wants Our Attention

If the reality our five (known) senses convey is already a simplified, or more accurately, a distorted version of what is actually happening, consider what it means to filter our already compromised interpretation of reality through an endless loop of competing narratives. Maybe real―maybe not images, algorithmic outrage, cable news supplied red meat, political propaganda, and advertising designed by some of the sharpest minds on earth to make you feel insufficient until we buy something, which often turns out to be not as advertised.

The deception is not only external, in a warped way, it has become our shared belief system; fake news, deepfakes, spin, propaganda. Yet despite all the static and wonkiness, our brains are actually functioning as designed, as in to be deceived. To fill gaps with assumptions. Our brains tend to confirm what it is already believed and filter out what feels foreign. It reaches for the simple story when the complex one is too uncomfortable to hold.

Bad actors of all stripes know this. They have always known, and leveraged, this. What is new is the scale and the speed.

The result is a kind of unescapable exhaustion. A state in which so much is contested, so much is manipulated, so much arrives with the volume turned to maximum, that the mind does what exhausted minds have always done. It stops questioning. It goes into default mode. To habit, to tribe, to the inherited assumptions that feel like certainty because they are familiar. The moon shines. The sun sets. They said so on television.

And in that cerebral default setting, division deepens. Bigotry finds its footing. Fear masquerades as common sense. A Whisper gets buried under the noise, causing us to forget it was ever there.

What the Deer Know

The deer are still in my yard.

They have not checked their phones. They have no news feed, no algorithm curating their fears, no political leader deceptively telling them who to distrust. They move through the dark guided by something older and quieter than information. Something that does not need to be verified because it was never in question.

Dr. Neil Theise, a physician and complexity theorist, said something that I have carried with me since I first encountered it. "There is not an atom in your body that you did not eat, drink, or breathe from the planet. We're not really individuals. We're just the planet that self-organized into little creatures. We are all earth, just an animate version."

Think about that for a moment.

We are not a separate observer standing apart from the world, trying to figure out what is real. We are the world, temporarily organized into a shape that can ask the question. The deer are not separate from what they move through. Neither are we. The boundary between us and the ground underfoot, between us and every living thing that has ever exhaled the oxygen we are breathing right now, is far more porous than our senses suggest.

Which means the stable ground, the truth, we are looking for is not somewhere out there beyond the noise. It is not in the next news cycle or the next political leader or the next product that promises to fill the void.

It is inside us. Beneath our mental constructs. Beneath our default modes and the tribal reflexes.

In my recently released book, The Whisper Before the Wave, a dying man sits by a fire and finally becomes still enough to hear what has been there all along. Something quieter and more trustworthy than answers, or what we like to think of as certainty. The Whisper I refer to in the novel is not a voice from outside. It is nature-knowing that resides within each of us and all living things. It is the same intelligence that moves the deer through the dark without confusion, that turns the earth toward and away from the light in a rhythm that has never once been late.

It seems to me that we are (made of) that intelligence. By default.

And to sense it, our wisdom, as in nature’s knowing, we just have to get quiet enough to stop calling the reflection a source. And see the light.

Let's Do Human Better.