A Soft Landing on Marigold Circle

Dear readers,

For those who are still following along, you’ve probably noticed it’s been quiet on the blog this summer. I did a short update on my channel a few weeks ago letting folks know I found a cozy home, a 1970s two-bedroom brick rancher on about a quarter acre on the outskirts of Hot Springs, AR. It is a sturdy little house with a sunny yard and quiet neighbors, mostly retirees who are kind about looking out for you without intruding and generously extend weekly invitations (in season) to share enormous slabs of delicious ice cold water melon. It’s nothing fancy, but it after a month I can say it suits me perfectly and I am grateful for the blessings of having a safe place to embark on this next phase of life.

My snail mail address is 123 Marigold Circle Hot Springs, AR 71913. I’ve already received a few letters and care packages, which are much appreciated. I’m loving the slower pace of things in my chosen exile. Maybe I can have a go setting up some old school pen pal correspondences if you care to drop me a line. 

Marigold Circle is a loop at the end of Hobson Road that is tucked into the base of one of the ridges underlaid by that famous quartz crystal that comprise Hot Springs National Park, the oldest federally protected land in the country (1830s compliments of Andrew Jackson). This development of about thirty homes, locally known as “Little Chicago” is situated where West Mountain begins to transition into Music Mountain. For years Hot Springs was known as a mobsters’ hang out, some with Chicago ties. Oh, and the circle is a square (not a cul-de-sac), and I’m in the middle of the doughnut (aka the quantum vacuum, wink, wink).

I’m loving the breathing room provided by the small open lawn around my house that gives me space to take in the blue Arkansas skies, often punctuated by dramatic towering clouds. There is considerably less geoengineering here than in Philadelphia. It does happen, but much less. The forest that embraces our little development is a mix of pine and hardwoods, so I should have nice vistas at all times of the year. It’s not an off-the-grid, bug-out place; but it is quiet, there are good people here, and lots of places to hike and get out on the water. I bought an inflatable stand up paddle board that can convert into a basic kayak, which will be easier for me to transport. Now that I’ve got my life vest, I’m going to head out AFTER the Labor Day boating hoopla and soak up a bit of the calm of the shoreline of Lake Ouachita and the 1.8 million acres of national forest surrounding it. Water is the theme of the year.

My yard doesn’t have trees, but my neighbors do – a sweetgum and sycamore on the south, a maple to the north. It’s been a very hot month with daytime temps rarely getting out of the upper nineties and almost no rain. The poor gum tree, in particular, seems quite stressed. Having lived in a row house for the past thirty years, I didn’t own a rake, just a broom for the front walk, so I grabbed a solid wooden-handled Craftsman at Lowe’s this week. Even though I got a blower with my lawn mower purchase, I do hate the sound of them. For me Hot Springs is a great chance to slow down and get back to the basics. I slowly filled half a contractor bag with leaves yesterday and look forward to getting a better composting situation set up soon.

There’s a towering “axis mundi” oak across the street. It has been trimmed back by the power company, so it appears almost split in half, its  impressive fractal branching pattern is on full display, which is right in line with my recent musings on complexity and fractals. This particular specimen is over sixty-feet high. Given the severe weather you can get here, I recently took out a measuring tape to see how much distance there was between its base and my eaves. Hopefully, if it ever falls, only the top ten feet will hit my house, enough to mess things up, but not totally destroy the house. 

The one poor choice I’ve made so far (that I know of) is that I initially bought a terribly cheap, uncomfortable twin mattress. I don’t have sleep issues or chronic pain and don’t consider myself a mattress snob. Our old queen mattress that we had for over twenty years  held up like a champ. It was just a basic Serta or something, but of course they don’t make them like they used to. I ended up buying a replacement with natural materials that should be arriving next week. I’ll put the old one in a mattress bag in the basement for tornado season. It’s the perfect use for a sad excuse of a sleeping surface, perhaps one day padded protection from falling timbers. If that badly-pruned oak ends up taking a nosedive through my living room, it could end up being the hero of my story.

My house is on a slightly fall-away lot, which is why I have a basement. Happily, it is still level enough to garden once I get a  fence and raised beds set up to deter the many deer and bunnies. All the houses are modest one-stories, and so my little back sun porch has the feeling of a tree house. The neighbors feed the birds (and the deer). Most days I feel I’m simply a visitor in their avian kingdom. Marigold Circle is an ideal woodland edge habitat. There is a raucous group of jays, daredevil mocking birds and thrashers, lots of flickers, turtle doves, cardinals, house finches, and Carolina wrens. Some evenings or early mornings I get lucky to catch a glimpse of a hummingbird probing the magenta trumpets of the Four O’Clocks in my front dooryard. There are lots of dragonflies and butterflies and wasps, too. The wasps pollinate the big turkey fig out back that has been offering me a handful of sweet fruits every morning since I moved in. 

I mentioned in my video that I’m weighing the extent to which it makes sense for me to continue to share my research moving forward. I’ve pretty much unplugged. I’m not on social media outside of the interactions I have on my channel and blog. I don’t have a television or radio. I have a portable “suitcase” record player and am gradually collecting bluegrass and folk on vinyl. I don’t check the news online. What information filters in comes to me through my small circle of friends. I’m less interested in blogging as a contact / “gotcha” sport, as tempting as that is with all the things we’ve been talking about now rolling out including Crypto Bobby, Trump’s new sidekick. 

You might think that is irresponsible of me to check out, but I have come to the realization that I am not going to change the world through social activism or civic engagement. Trying to convince people to pay attention to the story I have attempted to surface doesn’t work. The learning curve is too steep and the feed does not operate in my favor. That said, maybe there is another way to tweak the seemingly chaotic but perhaps not entirely complex labyrinth of what we understand to be reality. Maybe it is my task for now to try and put my intuition and intellect into puzzling out some cheat codes and rather than throwing a wrench in the gears to stop the progress of so many problematic programs, learn to play living systems instrumentally with heart by adjusting initial conditions and tuning constraints. It may be a fool’s errand, but for now I turn inward – not giving up, but handing over control to the field of imaginative possibility as I try and train my eyes to see the clues and piece them together. Being quiet and reading and sewing for the time being is enough. I have put in my time trying to be loud. In the end it was unsatisfying, and even destructive to my wellbeing.

The idea of responding to breaking developments isn’t satisfying. Neither is critiquing personalities or asserting the superiority of my lens. Mostly, I want to continue to follow the intellectual meanderings that feed my soul. Neal Stephenson’s novel, “Anathem” revolves around a society of monastic thinkers who remove themselves from the world, so they can focus on weightier contemplations. I can see the logic in that. Stepping outside the noise has brought me a measure of peace and calm. Walking around barefoot, something I couldn’t do in Philadelphia, has felt great and is very grounding, too! 

The physics of digital information is different. I think it comes so fast and furious and disconnected from our actual lived experience that it overwhelms our sense-making instincts both individually and collectively and ends up leaving us anxious and adrift. I feel like I know enough for the moment about the basics of web3, the mechanics of social impact policy and digital governance, and the Internet of Bio-Nanothings. Now I want to better understand the realm that we are in. Not in an esoteric, occult way that appeals to many; more like a Claude Shannon, information theory way. I think energy flow and information is the key to traversing the choice architecture of inner space. The more I discover, the less certain I am about anything. I do think there is merit in putting my thoughts down in writing with a date and time attached, even though I’m less and less invested in the concept of linear time. That said, the postings here will probably continue to be sparse. 

The topics I currently find to be most compelling are quantum biology, proto-consciousness, complex non-linear dynamical systems, morphic fields, parallel processing, distributed collective intelligence, the observer effect, narrative structures, spatial computing, responsive environments, digital artifacts and deep learning. I am dipping into a lot of information flows along with friends and I’m not exactly sure what to say about my thought process yet. In addition to Karl Friston’s Free Energy Principle and Chris Fields’ Active Inference work, I am also very interested in the ideas of the late Jungian psychiatrist, dream analyst, and quantum consciousness theorist Gordon Globus. I am wrapping up his 2009 work “The Postmodern Mind” now.

I have a lot of ideas about non-traditional “computing” interfaces and humans-in-the-loop that have less to do with nanotechnology than with Qi, psi and plasma and etheric realms. As the head of standards for IEEE once said – it’s really all metaphysics! 

Minimizing surprise and making solid predictions is an evolutionary imperative, according to Karl Friston’s free energy principle. We hold a model of how the world works in our heads, so that we can use it to make good choices navigating uncertainty. Many of those choices are fluid and socially normed. Some people are more comfortable changing their model than others. Some people deal with surprise by looking away. Then there are the odd balls like me who keep hoovering up information and trying to find patterns in it so that we can conjecture about stories that could make the whole messy pile hold together for a time at least, because there are always more surprises awaiting us.

It seems in my case, I became too much of a surprise for my beloved family, and the perceived cost of changing their models to accommodate my admittedly fringe world view was too high. I can’t say they were wrong. I will simply say I didn’t realize with each small step, new nugget of information, and adjustment that I was being removed from their world model. I simply did not appreciate how profound the cost would ultimately be. 

I am still working to make sense of what happened to me in a way that is non-judgemental and centers compassion for all involved. I do believe understanding the power of the heart field is vital to navigating the turbulence of the world – not just in a sweet, saccharine sort of way but in a quantum processing sort of way that connects us straight to the divine nature of the cosmos. 

I have another blog post I plan to work on tomorrow in honor of the year anniversary of my father’s passing. I’ve been under the weather for about a week, but it seemed to be resolving so a few days ago I took a short out and back hike to Balanced Rock on the other side of downtown. On the return leg I encountered an unusual artifact, which felt like it had some symbolic significance. My next writing will be a reflection on that.

I’ll close with an entertaining and informative talk my friend Sean posted this week about artifacts inspired by a discussion I’d posted with Lynn on Open Education Resources. Sean’s talk features a read aloud from a Mrs. Frizzle and the Magic School Bus book sponsored by the Department of Energy. It’s a good format, be sure to check it out.

All the best,

Alison McDowell

123 Marigold Circle

Hot Springs, AR 71913

PS: I just learned that marigolds go by the Latin name Tagetes erecta, which comes from Tages the Etruscan deity of divination. West is the direction of the underworld in Greek mythology, though I continue to imagine these other realms as being more about signals and information, which means it’s interesting that the ridge above me is West Mountain and Music Mountain.