Magical Realism Among The Raindrops

I woke up with piles of boxes filling one end of my living room. They’d been there since last weekend when I hauled them up from the basement and down from the third floor. Given our recent investigations into fascia, the psyche, and computation, perhaps the physicality of my cardboard wrangling was a subconscious tactic to help me process the loss. Contained within an assemblage of Playmobil, YA fantasy novels, vintage ephemera, and yellowed diplomas were the remaining belongings of two-thirds of my tiny nuclear family. At 8:30am movers were scheduled to arrive to whisk everything to storage, so I made sure to be up and out of the house early. Everything was organized and labelled with notes for my husband on what was to go, and which items were to be relocated in the house. It’s what moms do, right?

The night before I tucked away “Piggy,” my child’s beloved stuff animal companion, threadbare again after one flesh-colored terry cloth “chest” transplant. I gave him one last big hug and placed him gently next to “Brown Wolf,” both of them atop a quilt of wild 70s prints made by my grandmother in the summer camp trunk covered with Dolly’s Dairy Bar stickers, a Brevard, NC staple. It is the end of an era. I wept softly and alone in the chill of the sewing room.

After I had a few years of parenting under my belt, I would proffer parents of infants this insight – no matter how terrible or how wonderful life is at any given moment, the one constant is change. Cherish the sweet moments and know that the miserable ones will pass eventually. It may seem like forever, but it isn’t. I still think it’s solid advice, though bittersweet all the same. I’ve come to accept the situation and scrabble for scraps of grace to get through another day until the house sells and I can start to start over. We are still human, right? Feeling all of the big feelings is part of the job description, and yes, I’m here for it.

While packing up some lovely textiles woven by my husband’s late mother, I came across a few concert t-shirts from back in the day when he wore army jackets and his hair longish and was a DJ for late night hardcore shows that aired on college radio stations. Me? I was pretty square, naive, knew very little of the world. We met during a study abroad semester in Venice. On foggy fall nights we would walk holding hands to the tip of Dorsoduro, past the Salute plague church, to “the point,” Punta Della Dogana – young love. There we would sit watching the lights edging St. Mark’s Square where the Canale Grande met La Giudecca, the deep channel.

Back then I had no conception of water memory, Neptune,  psi, or waves of consciousness. Unseen from street level, Atlas and Fortuna kept watch over the point, the latter holding a rudder aloft showing the direction of the wind, and our fate. I can look back and see my course was set when I was just a callow child off on a big adventure that would eventually sweep me to the City of Brotherly Love nestled between the Delaware and the Schuylkill, and then on, apparently, to the very different burbling 4,000-year-old waters of the Ozarks.

A few years back, my friend Dru shared with me the Chinese parable of the man who lost his horse. The gist was that when something happens in our lives that is apparently good or apparently bad, it is best to keep a neutral outlook, because the good might lead to the bad, or the bad to the good. Life cycles up and down. That our lives together started out under the globe of the heavens held by two atlas figures topped by a seventeenth century statue of Fortune charting human weather, commerce, navigation, bureaucratic systems…it’s quite a perfect summation of the tapestry I’ve been weaving without quite being aware of it until now.

Good? Bad? I guess I shall stay the course and see what comes next and try to hold onto my sense of wonder and playfulness as the trickster energy bubbles up around me.

I texted my soon-to-be-ex-husband a picture of “Misfits: Legacy of Brutality,” saying it seems the tables have turned. Now he’s an institutional administrator while I’ve gradually slid over into the outlier spot. Earlier in the process of letting go I spent a few days sifting through drawers of old cards and letters and report cards and crayon drawings, the fleeting realms of moms. Back then I was still a beloved wife and mother and daughter. The cards said so, at least. Now, I am an out-of-tune, dissonant dissident in a world rushing obliviously forward. Only a handful of people seem to be able to see and comprehend the layers of logic protocols and invisible sensors bathing us in invisible harmonic frequencies and smart cybernetic governance to tap into our soulful connection to the divine.

This is the world my child will navigate. Capably, I have no doubt.

And me? I will watch the phase shift coalesce from the sidelines. If I’m lucky I will view the etheric confluence barefoot peeking over a bed of glorious rainbow zinnias with a tomato sandwich in hand, juice running down my forearm, and when the sandwich is done, I will put a kayak on my aging Subaru and point it towards the crystal clear waters of Lake Ouachita.

I have a memory of being in a circle of families. Our children were part of a semester school in the Pisgah Forest south of Asheville. We were about to entrust our precious ones to four months of expeditionary learning, which in retrospect wasn’t my best parenting choice but you do the best with the information you have at the time. One of the teachers read Khalil Gibran’s poem “On Children.”

 

And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.

And he said:

Your children are not your children.

They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

They come through you but not from you,

And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,

For they have their own thoughts.

You may house their bodies but not their souls,

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them but seek not to make them like you.

For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with

His might that His arrows may go swift and far.

Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness.

For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

 

I remember being nonplussed and unsettled. I wasn’t ready, but we never are. I understand more about information fields and the divine creation and energy than I did then. My child did come through me, and settled so far, so far away, launched from breast milk, home cooked dinners from our CSA farm box, hand sewn Halloween costumes, art classes, bedtime stories, family trips, walks to the library, and kisses on the brow, even after adopting the habit of pushing me away in annoyance.

With everything in order, I headed out to get a leisurely breakfast at a restaurant that was about a twenty-minute walk from home just off the Ben Franklin Parkway, Mr. Electric himself. There was a steady rain washing away last week’s snow leaving craggy miniature mountains of ice chips languishing on the soggy drifts of leaves that didn’t manage to get bagged up during the fall – crystalline phase shift. It was a mild, drizzly rain, the kind that has a hint of the spring that is to come. There wasn’t much wind, and the misty droplets coated all the edges, plants and buildings with sparkly beads of water – billions of miniscule lenses abstracting and expanding the limits of the ordinary material world. It was magical.

 

Ironically the umbrella I’d grabbed wasn’t my regular rainbow one, or even the boring black one, but another that was emblazoned with the UPenn Arts and Sciences logo on it. The past week or so I’ve spent some time learning about Mark Johnson, a philosopher from the University of Oregon who spent his career talking about the ways we use our body to make meaning in the world. You see, our intelligence isn’t just in our brains and the nervous system that keeps it jumping, it’s also in our body and the liquid crystal fascia is an amazing part of that system. Art, culture, creativity, sports, dance are all gifts we toss back and forth with the quantum field of our collective consciousness.

These goofballs really want to meld all of that with natural philosophy, STEM we call it now, to create a unified computational system. This goal of melding social and natural sciences extends back at least to Leibniz who sought to create a universal computer where the grace of the human soul might be leveraged to shine a light on the secrets of the cosmos. I don’t think it’s likely to work, at least not how they think, but I chuckled all the same that the umbrella I’d unthinkingly grabbed on the way out the door had a special message for me. I was walking away from the life represented by that UPenn logo and soon heading south into the unknown, and the water was there as my witness.

In his “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” Itzhak Bentov wrote of our lives as embodied information organizers, pattern seekers, and meaning makers. Bentov felt that as we make sense of the material world through our experiences, our epiphanies, heartbreaks, and joy, there are invisible tapestries woven on the warp and weft of psyche and biology. These complex works of art, infinitely varied, are gradually gifted to the universal mind upon the passing of our bodies. That vision really resonates with me, particularly in combination with Johnson’s theories about non-linguistic communication and the importance of art and culture and the movement of the body in carrying out that important work on both and individual and social level.

Stephers shared with me a fascinating paper about social systems and how we use artefacts to leave traces of ourselves on our environments and those traces then influence the behaviors of others. Our use of cultural artefacts to imprint our consciousness on the energetic fields of the universe that vibrates around us is similar to the concept of pheromones that coordinate the collective efforts of eusocial creatures like ants or termites. My sense is that Web3 hopes to make cultural artefacts calculable at scale, converting them into universal coordinating signals to coax digital harmonies from the remaining wild corners that are slowly being overtaken by silicon. I mapped out some notes on this in my Dallas Mythos map below. 

What follows are images from my walk to breakfast and back, with a slight extension of the route to the former GlaxoSmithKline US headquarters that has since been turned into a String Theory charter school. This embodied meaning making exhorts us to go out into the world, the real world and see what’s out there to be seen! For me, since everything turned upside down, I’ve felt inclined to stay close to home and disconnect. Maybe it’s not a healthy way to be, but for right now cocooning feels right. Still, when I go out with intention and my eyes open, the universe tells me stories and leaves me clues. No, not like I’m “hearing” things or “getting downloads,” more like I’m just aligned with the symbolic language of the universe and open to exploring in a wondering, wandering way.

First, I encountered  a large puddle at an intersection. I paused for a few minutes watch the ripples of the raindrops and all of the rings that danced across the surface of the water. Bentov’s book spoke of information being stored in interference patterns. He described a three-pebble experiment where the ripples where flash frozen into a holographic information storage system in the water. In my case there weren’t pebbles, but dancing drops that captivated me.

And then just a half block down I had to stop again and take a picture of this surprising gift – a fish ornamented with spirals swimming through a colorful mosaic sea, as if to remind me that we don’t get to choose our river. We can, however, pay attention and find the best way to work with the flow.

And after I finished my mushroom toast, all the better to get in touch with the mycelial elements, I came out of the restaurant and saw that in the chainlink fence surrounding the empty lot across the street someone had created an impromptu party cup installation, mashing the plastic into the gaps to spell out the word “HOPE” in crude, but very legible letters. I smiled.

At this point I decided to go a bit further afield rather than head straight back to the house. I passed the Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which stands about a block and a half from the Catholic Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.

And between the two on a sidewalk above the I-676 crosstown highway was a pretty lame art installation of Ben Franklin with his lightening bolts and keys, all electrical potential and trusted cryptography and Metaverse portals. It’s all right there if you have the eyes to see it. In the background is the former GlaxoSmithKline building.

I knew I wanted to take a photo of the Zenos Frudakis 2000 bronze sculpture “Freedom.” Zenos is the name of an Old Testament prophet featured in the Book of Mormon, which is interesting since you can see the temple from the piece. The composition was inspired by Rodin’s “Gates of Hell,” in turn inspired by Dante, which can be found a few blocks further along the Parkway.

I’d seen the piece a few times before in passing, but I’d never stopped to look at it very closely. I was kind of shocked.

The image conveys a person escaping the confines of the background block. For me, however, knowing the multiverse phase shift that is underway this “freedom,” especially one sponsored by a company working with Google Alphabet’s Verily on electroceutical development, feels a bit off.

Could it be the animal skull at the base?

Or the smirking cat staring out?

Or an incongruous jester, which is totally out of keeping wit the rest of the piece?

The texture of the figures spoke to me of fascia – movement, communication through embodiment, fractal tissues, today glistening with water.

Bodies at different scales embedded in their environment, a miniature twin tucked in one corner.

I felt drawn to reach out and put my hand on the outstretched hand. It reminded me of my dad, whose hands were so big and the way his fingers would curl down over mine and give them a firm squeeze. I miss that.

As I headed west to go home there was a colorfully odd sticker on a metal plate. A ghost with rainbow balloons – the souls are with us in all of their photonic playfulness.

Tucked up next to the retaining was of the highway was a clutch of pine trees with an abundance of small cones scattered on the pavers below, which I took as a sign that I should fill my pockets and proceed to Sister Cities Park.

It’s an uptight pocket park, managed within an inch of its life in that Disneyesque, public-private partnership, “don’t walk on the grass”, “we have the rights to all pictures taken of you here,” and “yes, you need a permit authorization to do anything fun,” neutered nature tamed and contained vibe.

 

Oh, and this is the first time I noticed a wayside elucidating the fact that the site was formerly a pauper’s burial ground and execution site. Not sure how our Sister Cities, Tel Aviv among them, would feel if they knew. St. Peter in his alcove with his keys overlooks the crystal fountain (based in Toronto). At the corner where the park met the sidewalk was Robert Indiana’s Latin take on his iconic Love statue. “Amor” commissioned in 2015 for the papal visit and World Meeting of Families.

Of course I wanted to leave a heart on the LED light fountain. Today’s kids don’t get swimming pools, just interactive splash pads. Who knows how that’s going to fit into stigmergic social computational artefacts once we’re all hydrosapiens. As I was laying down the pine cones the security guard hustled over. Now, it’s January and raining and no one but me is in the park, so she must have been inside watching me on some closed circuit cameras. She asked what I was doing and I replied what does it look like I’m doing? She said are those acorns? I said they were pine cones and just kept doing what I was doing. She turned and left saying I had to “clean it up.” I encircled the heart with needles from a few pine branches than had dropped in the storm and set an intention. Then I crossed over to the Cathedral. As soon as I stepped away she swooped in with a broom and dustpan to rid the park of my dissonant heart. But she didn’t pick up the actual litter under the bench even after I pointed it out. Then she and the other guard went and hid inside the closed cafe.

 

So I decided to make another heart. This one at the base of the Shakepeare statue outside the library – all the world’s a stage. I used rock salt left over on the sidewalks for the outline and filled it in with small magnolia pods and a few springs of yarrow that were unbelievably still a very cheery yarrow. I guess I should cut the security guard some slack. It is a spectacle after all, and she was simply playing her assigned archetypal role.

I went inside the library thinking that I would take a photo of the computer terminals in the children’s department that annoyed me so much when we made visits when my child was so little. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the beeping, jarring computer game terminals for toddlers were gone. Yay. I did see a display in the lobby that the public transit division wanted your daydreams, which is pretty creepy. I also had a long and rewarding conversation with the social worker who was manning the services desk in the lobby. I explained to her about social impact bonds and pay for success and blockchaining unhoused people (MyPass in Austin) and offered my theory that it was about biohybrid computing. She looked up Michael Levin on her phone and seemed genuinely interested, which gave some meaning to a morning that would otherwise have been rather bleak.

Three is such a nice number, so I decided to make a final heart on the fountain outside the Barnes Foundation – talk about the power of curated artifacts! I remember back to the lockdown days when a few of us did an esoteric tour of the Parkway and left some lovely crystals in the water. The water was turned off for the season, but there was a bit in one corner from the rain. This one was simple – not too much material around – twigs, sycamore ball fluff, an auburn oak leaf, and a smidge of pine.

The rest of the way home was pretty uneventful. I stopped to dip my hand in the water of the PeCO electrical manhole cover – liquid portal. 

I saw an acupuncture storefront with the sign for Still Waters.

And a window with artwork that looked like a black and white concept game – the Niantic Pokemon Go version of digital “Playful Cities” in abstracted, quantifiable reality.

And as I got to my house I saw my tree, that I will miss very much. In the city you only have room for at most one tree in the front. Ours was a thornless honey locust and we put it in when we bought our house in 1998. The past year or so the bark started peeling back and I noticed some larvae under it and I was worried for it. We had an injection put into the roots to stop the sucking bugs. A big hunk of bark fell off last year and I was very upset. But now six months later it’s healing up with new bark. You can still see the scarred place, but I want to believe it will bounce back, even in spite of all the incessant geoengineering. 

I am a Sagitarrius and we are rather mercurial, but as spring arrives I will try to remember the parable of the man who lost his horse. Good-bad, bad-good – we just need to practice swimming in the flow in which we’ve found ourselves. I hope you’ve enjoyed coming with me on this damp stroll through the city that I loved and that I’m leaving. I’m sure I will find new stories in new places to share.