The Wikiness

“Everybody’s moving, if they’re not already there. Everybody’s got to move somewhere.” –Bob Dylan

The leaves are leaving. The army of leaves that have fed the tree all summer now deserts, one by one, floating down in their dried uniforms to the ground. Soon whole regiments will be abandoning their posts, borne away by late October winds. The sky will again show white between skeleton branches. The leaves will have left, moving on into mulch, more food for the tree. 

In the morning, after a good night’s rest, my brain arises freshly bathed by deep sleep waves of spinal fluid. My energy awakens with first light strong and consistent. It powers me through the day’s obstacles and opportunities, until the sun starts to set, and my flame starts to dwindle. By the time light leaves the sky, all that remains is an impulse pushing me bedward. Energy has moved through my body like a tide, and then moved on, leaving me at rest like a shell on the beach. 

With any luck, my pillowed head will enjoy another energizing brain bath tonight, powering me to process tomorrow’s obstacles. I experience my life as a series of movements that so far have always moved on to tomorrow.

The flux is the point on the national level. It used to be that power games in the USA were kept out of my sight,  inaccessible in Senate backrooms and executive suites. In those days, I could be excused for believing the pleasing lie that human lives mattered in this society, and that Lincoln’s “better angels” would prevail. After all, adults were in charge. They played by the rules (more often than not), and no individual was allowed to take over the collective. Barack Obama was elected. Twice.  It seemed to me that “we the people” were in charge. 

Now, seared by the force majeure of COVID 19 trauma, I’m not so sure. Who’s in charge? I’ve seen society shut down, and demons of our underlying nature unleashed. I now watch AI advance exponentially like a slow-motion train wreck, beyond human recall, it seems, a new force majeure. Yet another is social media, which plays my brain like a maestro, abetted by an administration waging InfoWars, deliberately increasing the volume of its insults, misinformation, and defiance to what was called “the rule of law.” The message blitz portrays opposition as futile. The sclerotic constitution and its norms? Their checks on a tyrant’s takeover are now revealed to be negligible. Into a techno-authoritarian tomorrow, I see my old country moving on.

Finally, off a back lane behind the high street in the Scottish village of Dalmellington, East Ayrshire, memory itself has moved on. An abandoned churchyard holds the gravestones of hundreds of anonymous ancestors, their identifiers eroded into illegibility by the centuries. Who were they? What lives did they lead? Whom did they love? 

Both those who erected the memorials and those they would commemorate are forgotten today. No one is left to bear witness to the lives they stood for. They have all moved on. Only inarticulate stones remain.

Beyond movement, and above the tide of change, does anything remain? What doesn’t move on? 

Only awareness, the witnessing of what arises, what endures for a season, and what then moves on.