Aquarian Age: Water, Water Everywhere

It turns out this is one of those blog posts that ended up being more working notes for myself than a coherent narrative for others. So be it. I needed to write down these random, but somewhat related musings and observations for future reference. At some point maybe I’ll be able to synthesize all the loose bits flying around, but today is not that day. If you care to look over my shoulder and get a glimpse into my explorations in and around Little Rock and Hot Springs, in the context of collective intelligence, fungi, and fluid dynamics, you’re more than welcome to do that!

I came across the quote below from Itzhak Bentov’s “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” this morning, and it very much resonated. While part of me wonders if the connections I’m making across disparate pools of information are valid, there’s another part – my intuitive gut sense – that tells me to keep going. In prior posts I’ve laid out how the environment seems to “speak” to me in objects and experiences. There are lessons I’m supposed to learn, but the takeaways are not always immediately obvious. 

“As consciousness evolves and information starts pouring in, the information is couched in a language best understandable to the person involved. For instance, a poet will be shown the nature of Creation in poetic images, an artist in visual symbols, and a mathematician in abstract equations; a nuts-and-bolts fellow like myself will have it shown to him as structure.”

So, if I take that to heart, I suppose it’s not surprising that messages would come to me through the cultural landscape – art, buildings, nature. Sometimes clues are slippery, or I don’t yet have enough context to understand their significance. My pin board is getting pretty full, but I keep shoving stuff in. At the end of a walk I made through the Vogel Schwartz Sculpture Garden along the Arkansas River last Saturday, I saw this lovely woman dancing on a circle. 

As I navigate the deluge of information around me, I aspire to lean-into her grace and poise balancing on the circuit. Hopefully I can learn to traverse the Mobius strip of Bentov’s cycles of continuously inverted realities in the spirit of joyful exhilaration shown by these children parading across a log. Like the little girl at the front, I step off into my next adventure, not all of them as immense as buying a house. Sometimes the adventure is just trying out a new recipe, cumin-cinnamon farmer’s market okra, sauteed with onions in a borrowed kitchen.

In the past two weeks, I’ve had two unsuccessful attempts to purchase a new home. Both situations had to do with water, which is interesting. For the past several years Stephers and I have been turning over this “water problem” and how it relates to graphene, carbon nanotubes, flow state, microfluidics, and dissonant forms of oscillation that seem to have resulted in countless broken relationships. It is this systematic, perhaps bioengineered, tearing of the global social fabric (social physics) that has created an abundance of disconnected “free agents” available for game play in this surreal, yet long anticipated. human potential movement optimization landscape.

Then our friend Sean brought in more wrinkles around Alphabet’s wastewater scans and Jepson’s precision AI health advisories that meshed with my research into social impact bonds around sanitation and Stanford’s “smart” toilets. Not to mention Ivan Illich’s strange sewage talk given to the Dallas Humanities Institute at the invitation of Gail Thomas, who along with Jungian soul alchemist James Hillman was aiming to “heal” her city from the long held trauma of the Kennedy Assasination. You can almost imagine her teaming up with Nicole Shanahan to get Texans logged on to their digital blockchain freeDOM wallets and have Metroplex-based Verily optimize their microbiomes as free-market agents in some strange, possibly interdimensional, economic transaction we haven’t yet grocked.

 Along the sculpture walk there was a small memorial plaque to an Arkansas electronica dance pioneer, Jeffrey “Bushy” (yes, another plant reference) Hudnall, founder of Cybertribe and pioneer of the music scene in Little Rock. Bushy was beloved for nurturing community. “Luv” was a theme in his memorials. So, I’ve never encountered a public memorial to an electronica figure, and since Jamie Wheal speaks of the medium as a way to access ecstatic flow states, it seems important. Oh, and the wall in the park was about a fifteen-minute walk from the Albert Pike Memorial Temple.

So I ended up reaching out to Emily Moyer, since she is the person I know who is most expert in this area. I mentioned to her our recent investigations into tardigrade biology, including the water bears’ intrinsically disordered proteins, as a possible system of networked data storage that could link water programming and group mind. After I rang off I realized the bench where I’d been sitting, which had a view of the Arkansas River that runs from the Colorado Rockies through the plains and on to the Mississippi Delta, was framed by an oval sculpture that was pretty much a picture window composed of hexagons that evoked, for me at least, graphene membranes for water “cleansing” and perhaps programming. As Emily said, Hesse’s Glass Bead Game is always on. 

The first failed home purchase involved a one-acre property with lovely frog filled marsh along the road, which I was super excited about. Unfortunately, the fact that it extended into an antiquated septic field made the deal a no-go. My second attempt was a cute house near the racetrack, a Cuban-themed coffee shop, and the bike trail downtown. The inspection was going great until the guy tried to get into the crawl space to take at the guts of the house and much of the ground was covered by an inch of water on top of an ill-fitting vapor barrier. Add to that a lot of soggy, ripped up duct insulation, and that was not going to work either. The water table around there is really high and I could end up spending a ton of money trying to mitigate the situation and still end up with mother nature laughing at my feeble attempts to contain her.

I’d been making arrangements for movers and insurance and utilities, and that all was brought to an abrupt halt. Back to square one. I was frustrated and decided to take a hike to clear my head. We’ve had lots of electrical storms and torrential downpours in Central Arkansas this May. On the positive side, my things in storage have stayed dry so far, everything is a lush deep green, and the fungi are blissed out in all their diverse mycelial glory. I’ll share the photos of the amazing mushrooms that gave me quite a show along my walk in another post (here).

Years ago I remember reading Barbara Kingsolver’s memoir “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” about her family’s move across the country from arid Arizona to the mountains of Virginia where her husband’s family had land, and there was water. She felt like life in Arizona was no longer sustainable due to drought conditions. Water was, in part, what brought me to Arkansas. I loved the idea of clear mountain lakes fed by creeks burbling over quartz crystal spread across hundreds of thousands of acres of National Forest. I was excited by the idea of mineral springs with public taps downtown where anyone can fill a jug for free. It was great to imagine living in a place where it rains enough that you don’t have to water your garden every day. 

I guess I just hadn’t thought through what all that moisture would mean for the spore-like creatures with whom we share our planet and who perhaps would also like to be my toxic below-the-floorboards or behind-the-drywall “roommates.” It’s a tricky course to navigate as a home buyer in a land of humidity and standing water. I’m looking at a property now that has a partial basement and a sloped yard that’s graded away from the house. I guess you know you’re all grown up when dry basements and French drains are something to be excited about. 

The efficiency apartment where I’m staying looks out over a brick walled garden with a large fountain. Under a broad basin are four draped female figures, which I presume are meant to represent the four seasons, the water pouring over the basin squirts out from a large jug ornamented with four horned Satyr heads. I presume this signifies Pan, son of Hermes and a close friend of Dionysus. Pan was god of flocks, shepherds, and bees who oversaw the wild lands and springs of Arcadia. He was worshiped not in fancy temples, but in caves and grottoes, which seems appropriate for Arkansas. He played pipes and danced, but could also cause dread and PANic among travelers through the forest. 

In trying to find out more about Pan, I came across a reference to a book about conversations Scottmsan Robert Ogilvie Crombie had with Pan and other forest elementals in the 1970s. Crombie was close friends with Peter and Eileen Caddy who created the Findhorn Foundation in the 1960s, one of the first intentional eco-communities. I bought a book written by a man he mentored and Ogilvie sounds rather charming. I’m a bit envious of his life chatting up gnomes in the garden. He did mention that if you want to partner with the elementals you should leave a corner of your plot wild and untended and go there as little as possible. I shall keep that in mind as I draw up my garden plans.

Last Saturday I explored Mount Holly Cemetery, where the who’s who of Arkansas are buried including many statesmen and civic leaders. It’s situated halfway between where I’m staying in Quapaw Quarter and downtown Little Rock. Along the way I took pictures of some fabulous cottage gardens, giving me ideas of things I can try when I get my own patch of soil. Be sure to notice the hunk of crystal in the birdbath and the piece in a chipped off patch of concrete sidewalk. There seems to be an added sparkly resonance to all aspects of life here in the Natural State.

I do love historic cemeteries, and I spent several hours walking Mount Holly’s old carriage lanes dotted with quartz under shady oaks and magnolias playing eye-spy with myself looking for Masonic double-headed eagles, Odd Fellow triple chains, and Woodsmen of the World stumps, along with more rare occasional pentagram and crescent moon. The grounds are well-tended by the local Master Gardener group and there’s a restored Victorian Iron Fountain near the back that adds a soothing, splashing sound to mask the hum of cars on the nearby expressway that lies beyond the quaint Sexton’s cottage.

One of the headstones, made for a man named Reasoner, was inscribed with Psalms 65 Verse 9. “The River of God Is Full of Water,” a complement to Revelations 22 Verse 1 “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.” Water, sacred water, yes but preferably water in the right place. 

There was also an inscription on a memorial obelisk to William Gilchrist, the first Grand Master Mason of the Grand Lodge of Arkansas, which was established in 1838. “What is our life, it is even a vapour that apeareth for a time and then vanesheth away.” Vapour, another phase of water that feels apt for this Aquarian age where the air sign (ether / Ethereum) bears the shared cup (or well) of knowledge to bestow upon the collective, shared information ruled by Uranus (innovation and unconventional thinking)  and Saturn (logic and structure). 

To me this brings to mind Alicia Juarerro’s enabling constraints in an emergent complex system, perhaps one where we’re tagged, according to our assigned  archetype, and given a ticket to enter the World Sensorium dance hall of qualitative information transmission, an experience especially designed for the cosmic free agent cadre. I’ve read that Aquarius has a glyph of two parallel waveforms, ripples that speak to this dual nature, communication above and below, Earthly and divine. Ripple, like Matthew Mellon’s XRP, a current/currency to draw us into a cybernetic flow state for unconscious collective problem solving perhaps?

And the Woodmen of the World? That pricked up my ears after having put together a three-hour compilation of clips that hopefully draw connections between token engineering and collective intelligence based on information exchanges enacted between fungi and root systems. Sep Kavar, of MIT Social Computing, IoT pre-k slippers and beautiful digital money for refugees, often speaks of the intelligence of the forest.

It turns out the Woodmen of the World (WoW), whose members often featured the fraternal order’s insignia and arboreal designs on their “tree-stump tombstones,” was founded in 1890 in Omaha, Nebraska – later home to Warren Buffett and the Berkshire Hathaway juggernaut – by Joseph Cullen Root (root, right?), a 33-degree mason who was involved in various business enterprises throughout the midwest. 

The privately-held life insurance firm currently manages $17 billion in assets and has over 1,000 employees. The 2002 Jack Nicholson comedy “About Schmidt” centers on his character’s retirement as an actuarial executive from Woodmen of the world. The organization makes $18 million in philanthropic donations annually. Members participated in parades dressed in military-style uniforms bearing aluminum axes. Up until the Depression, the fraternal order trained drill teams, called Foresters, at huge summer encampments. Members were sought out to be made officers during WWI due to this training. 

In doing a search on the WoW aluminum axes, I came across mention of an Aesop fable, “Mercury and the Woodsman.” In the story a poor woodsman loses his ax in a stream. Loudly bemoaning his fate, the winged god comes down to help, but when retrieving the ax Mercury tempts the man first with a gold ax and later with a silver ax, both of which the man refuses. For his honesty, Mercury gives the woodman all three axes to keep. I find the confluence of woodsman, aluminum, and mercury rather interesting given my research into ALCOA and the Mellons and soul alchemy. I guess I’ll just have to put a pin in that.

A timeline on the Woodmen of the World website notes the role that one of their members, Morris Sheppard, played in setting up Federal Credit Unions. When I was first researching blockchain identity in 2018, I was surprised to see early efforts were being led by credit unions, though now within the context of a networked collective (as with cooperatives) this makes sense. 

 

Sheppard was a lawyer turned Texas Legislator and later US Senator who was a eugenicist who was allied with the Kellogg’s Race Betterment and temperance advocate. Despite authoring the federation legislation that established  Prohibition he managed to run a productive still operation from his Texas ranch.  He promoted women’s suffrage and the provision of federal funds for pregnant women to reduce infant mortality; however, in 1914 he was on the Central Committee planning the First National Conference on Race Betterment held at the Battle Creek Michigan Sanitarium.

It turns out the man who reinvigorated the Ku Klux Klan was also a Woodman of the World member. In the 1920s in Texas practically all elected officials, lawyers, and judges in the state of Texas were, too. Which meant that in order to try a legal dispute around a Woodmen of the World property in El Paso, the state had to create an all-female judiciary at the state supreme court level, because all the men had to recuse themselves from the case. Those are things that make you go, um, when considering the role of eugenics, digital health records, guided evolution, blockchain, and public-private partnerships being set up in the Lone Star State.

I see a compelling overlap with the outsize role fungi-heavy Pacific Northwest institutions and companies have played over the past thirty years in bioengineering, gaming, ingenious data storage systems, etc. to get the next layer of the Maya AR spectacle prepared. Early in my education activism days, I flagged Booth Gardener, former Governor of Washington, as an important player. His stepfather was former board chair of Weyerhaeuser. Booth was also on the company’s board. Former Arkansas native Bill Clinton tapped him to serve as US Trade Representative and Gardener was later pulled into the sphere of Marc Tucker and NCEE who were intent on reimagining schools with backing from the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Governors (read Kubernetes) Association. See the LittleSis Screen shots below for a glimpse into the range of social welfare policies Gardner (interesting name there) implemented, including assisted suicide, which I can see playing into the future of sustainable human composting being let by Washington State with pilots at Bells Mountain, a research focus of my friend Sean. In case you were wondering, there are lots of videos showing Tardigrades in compost.

Check out this post for a two-part, four-hour conversation Sean and I had on microbial intelligence, fungi, permaculture, indigenous wisdom, and the future of computing.

PS: I am working on a post with an updated working hypothesis about the nature of “the system” we’re in. I took lots of notes today and hope to have that one up early next week. Stay tuned! 

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