An Implicate World, Unfolding…by David McCloskey

A 2017 philosophical-poetic meditation by David McCloskey, creator of the Cascadia map. To learn more about David McCloskey and his work, visit the Cascadia Institute site.

David McCloskey
© April 22, 2017
Cascadia Institute

AN IMPLICATE WORLD, UNFOLDING….

    We live in an Implicate World, woven in depth,

                    unfolding thru time….

How the garden opens!—hidden and dormant thru the long wet cold winter–when we got thrashed repeatedly by ice and snow storms–(everybody it seemed was thrashed this year)… & how now it rises in the long slow “green footed tide of Spring”….

 

In these parts the dark dank gloom in Winter-Spring is first pierced by tiny white cascades of Indian Plum unfurling its blossoms, then translucent golden-green leaves, the brilliant yellow unfurling sheathes or spathes of Skunk Cabbage attracting flies with its fetid scent along with the chorus of Pacific Tree Frogs, those green natives of vernal pools and swamps, filling evening’s air with such ratcheting racket as to drown out the moon, then the first flag of Spring those delicate dangling racemes of Flowering RedCurrant, trillium of several persuasions rising broad smiled in their iconic tripartite white petals surrounding golden anthers radiating like a crown or sun splayed back into the world, birds everywhere flitting and feeding and calling and strutting, Canada Geese V-honking quick-winging by overhead, and oh! Those sky-blue camas fields carpeting the valleys and welcoming us home, deer with fawns and fawn lillies delicate lovely magenta pink bonnet nodding over forest duff on the soft velvet edge of the new green-tipped leafy woods…. One by one they appear, rise, luminous waves rolling from dark into light….

 

All this unfolding into the Festival of Light… as each day the light grows more lovely, long and deep, sweet as the enveloping air, rising slow and falling later…. I’d almost forgotten what it means to live outside in the bristling air, this vibrating ground, a field of sounds enwrapping, calling us, and now I remember what it means to be welcomed back into LIGHT as a constant companion…. I’d forgotten, but the world remembers…!

 

All this appears of its own accord one by one in their own chosen order, layered like blankets, melting one into another…. Rising into the light from within the ground, from within the woods, from within the town, within the marsh, from within the sky itself…. each rising from a hidden ground one by one to stand forth into the light… then falling back into the wide arms of the welcoming world….

 

And so it goes until this vast and intricate efflorescence literally explodes–we call it “Easter” when everything rises from the dark blooming all at once!–into the Festival of Light called April & May–when the “green-footed tide of Spring sweeps us all away….” until it all fuses into the golden riot of summer, when all you can do is ride the long wave home….

 

All we creatures dwell within this world, an Implicate World, a woven world enfolded and unfolding in depth on many levels thru time…. We do not exist, as we were taught in school, in a categorical order organized in self-contained categories of space and time as the order of coexistents and succession, of space as an inert container of static objects, of matter and substance, of essences and form, of self-contained things, abstract entities, objects, subjected to the gaze of a sovereign subject who bestows meaning upon it all thru the logos…. For it has meaning before the logos. The promise of Greek metalogics which we still unwittingly embrace was that if you could grasp things’ essences and universal categories, you could control the world…. When modern science learned to quantify everything, that became the magic formula–categories & quanta= equals control…. an illusion if there ever was one…. As if you learned the right formulas you could impose them on an unknowing world…. As if we had all the answers, without even knowing what the right questions might be…!

 

Instead of a world organized in terms of categories which we turn into separate administrative agencies, splitting the world into self-contained static entities–as we do with watersheds or ecosystems or economies or technologies or health or education or transportation or infrastructure or law and business, ad infinitum ad nauseam…. we need to witness that the inherent order of the world is otherwise than we what we think….

 

We could take a walk outside in the Spring, we could rejoin the local community, we could learn to pay attention to how our own bodies work and how we get sick and heal… or we could learn the surprising lessons of the vibrating field of the small and large in quantum mechanics and cosmology, etc. Indeed, every where we turn the world is self-evidently working its merry way along very different lines than we think….

 

I make maps now of my home ground, and have had to unlearn so much inherited nonsense–Geography as a spatial science, and all that…. which blocks understanding of how places work and how life flows thru here…. I start now not from categories, but immersion in the flow of life thru a place…. Soon you find energy flows pouring thru from every direction–in the winds and storms above and the seething magmas below and the water and waves pounding thru in the ocean in the rivers cascading down, in the riotous efflorescence of green creatures binding soil and earth to sky and all the critters flying swimming crawling prowling thru…. I sense the world now as Energies surging and pulsing from above and below and from within, and the flows together create a field, and the field concentrates and animates forms, the forms we encounter. Gazing out on the south Sound at Nisqually when asked “What do you see,” you may first reply, “water & islands & sky…” Now, when I look on the same landscape, I see a field of energy articulated from above and below, and this world we see is the marriage of this earth and that sky turning together….

 

Because our world is danced into being, it is woven of many threads and partners turning toward and away from one another in an intricate rhythm. What we call “Climate,” for instance, is the synoptic regional regime of these converging seasonal and longer rhythms from many weather cells intertwining “just so.” Endless chatter about “Climate as statistical normals of long-term averages of temperature and precipitation” etc. mistake cause and effect and miss this regime as a regionally woven rhythmic dance—for how could we believe that statistics somehow cause weather! But such categories as “Climate” are inert and cause nothing. Pay attention not to the quanta of categories but rather to the woven dance unfolding….! Ask: “where do the energies come from here? How do they flow and form? How do they intertwine? How are they changing?” Etc.

 

We need to leave off unwittingly substituting our cultural default of the “Categorical Order” for this very real world, the Implicate World in which we dwell. It is implicate insofar as its enfolded one level within another thru energy flows which then unfold generating a field of forms, which then enfold the flowshapes into a different form…. Just as Spring unfolds like a fern frond unfurling giving rise to a panoply of flowers and forms rising and falling in waves,

 

What we seek here is to learn to listen to the song of the world as it is being sung, in comprehending these layering dynamisms thru their flowshapes and waveforms flowing and ebbing like waves on the shore…. For in this intricate implicate world things are woven and layered on many levels simultaneously…. and relationships of patterned sequences (how lame our language!) are as real as things….

 

For Nature is that hidden continuous source from which all things rise & return.…

 

Our world is implicate not only because it’s intricately woven and layered in time, but in depth, for Nature embodies the dimension of depth. By implicate depth we mean it exudes power in ten thousand ways, mean that is woven on many levels of significance and spirit, that it resonates on many levels of meaning thru time…. and also rises as the source and carrier, not merely the recipient, of meaning … and these implications unfold on many dimensions thru a day, a life, an eon….

 

This world—the world itself— is our first teacher…. As this resonant world calls out to us the first wisdom is to learn how to listen… hear not merely listen… see not merely look!

 

What we may hope to grasp at any one time then is a luminous glance at several significant patterns unfolding thru us…. like an N-dimensional animation…. and so invites Imagination to unfurl the energies and rhythms singing thru, so we might sing the song of the world back….

 

                                                                          Earth Day, 2017
Eugene, McKenzie-Willametteland
Cascadia