contradictory, gathers around any
important issue that it is like white noise. Too much half-heartedly confirmed
information equals no information at all.
When I left the farm in 1965 and
gained access to a university library and people with new kinds of thoughts I
found that many of my assumptions about life and my place in it were suspect or
outright wrong. In those days my white noise consisted of rural Kentuckian
beliefs echoing among verses from the Tao Te Ching, TV scenes from Vietnam
while learning flower anatomy, Blacks being beaten in Selma as I read Mahatma
Gandhi's autobiography, all the while dealing with my own soup of teenage
hormones, and ignorance. I almost didn't make it through that blizzard of
irreconcilable images.
However, I did find a way through
my time of disorientation, and now I want to describe that path in case someday
someone else wants to try it.
The path consisted of identifying
certain basic paradigms of Nature, and trying to live in harmony with them.
By "paradigm of Nature" I
mean any motif -- any theme or dominant pattern -- in Nature that repeats again
and again in different contexts. As a hypotheses confirmed by experiments
matures into a theory, a pattern exhibiting itself very frequently in many
situations grows into a paradigm.
For me, a natural paradigm's
importance lies in this thought: That if the Universal Creative Force displays
a certain way of getting things done again and again in many disparate contexts
-- frequently enough for a paradigm to be recognized -- then there's a good
chance that that paradigm displays a pattern worth considering for my own
problems.
Here are three of Nature's most
obvious paradigms, which I try to live by:
- Natural resources are to be used sparingly, shared with other
living things, and recycled
- Our living patterns should be sustainable in the long run
- Diversity is sacred
Other paradigms are sometimes
glimpsed, and certainly other people are programmed to glimpse other paradigms
besides these, but in my case just trying to honor the above three has been
enough to structure the life I am living. Striving to live in harmony with them
has bestowed on me a peacefulness and sense of meaning adequate for a whole
lifetime.
With natural paradigms there is no white
noise, for they become visible spontaneously and fully formed to anyone who
seeks them. One gives himself or herself time to think in a peaceful setting
where Nature expresses Herself, and the insights blossom clear and distinct. No
white noise at all...