Beauty and Silence
When I was young, there was a small sign that hung next to the bay window that overlooked the backyard. It read, “How beautiful the silence of growing things.” Now, nearly three decades and three thousand miles from that place, I see the verdant green of new shoots on plants I put into the ground last year. I see the slow and enduring cycle of the natural world open to the light of summer. I see…a rainbow unicorn jump all over this keyboard as the laptop screen is forcefully closed by the small hands of a clumsy yet determined toddler.
These days are a reminder that silence, while essential in its own right, is not required for or characteristic of growing things. What we might take for silence is actually the fundamental - the lowest and most prominent pitch upon which the harmony of nature unfolds. Our task continues to be finding signal amidst a cacophonic information landscape. Perhaps if we open our ears and eyes to the peace of wild things we can come to rest in something not quite silent, but beautiful.
The Vital Principle
“Life possesses an intelligence which pervades the universe and is expressed with accordance to the environment and the quality of the material in which it manifests itself.”
— D.D. Palmer
At the beginning of the last century, the founder of chiropractic, D.D. Palmer, outlined the foundation of chiropractic philosophy. To this day, chiropractic maintains a vitalistic perspective on health and healing. Vitalism recognizes that life is characterized by an organizing energy or principle. We can use a reductionist approach to break the whole into its parts, which can facilitate understanding. However, just as flipping through the pages of an anatomy book will not reveal the complexity of a moving, feeling, breathing animal, life and health is something more than the sum of parts. When D.D. writes of “an intelligence which pervades the universe” he is acknowledging the presence of an essential organizing energy. He deliberately describes this as intelligence, not simply energy or force. The historic and critical contribution he made to the development of healing arts was precisely this - the animating principle that pervades the universe is also what organizes function in people. Health and dis-ease represent a spectrum on which this energy is able to clearly express in a physical body. And the spine is the interface where this life principle can flow or be obstructed.
His insight includes the direct impact of the environment and the limitations of matter on the expression of life. Far from a materialist or reductionist perspective, his vision and his writing prefigure what we accept as common understanding today. Of course environmental factors influence health and disease. If there are toxic chemicals introduced into the water of the earth or the water of the body, if the air is unfit to breathe, if the quality of food is weakened by devastated soils, if we are constantly immersed in a narrative of fear, then of course this will affect the expression of health.
Finally, let us also acknowledge the idea that “life…manifests itself.” One of the most important distinctions that vitalistic chiropractic makes is that health flows from the inside-out. Adjustments are offered to help clear the spine of interference that reduces communication to and from the brain. The free and robust expression of information along the nervous system is the necessary condition for our ability to coordinate adaptive function (i.e. health) in ourselves. As D.D.’s son B.J. would later go on to say, “Nature needs no help, just no interference.”
Control + Shift : Connect
I am not a tech person. I prefer to read words on paper instead of a screen. The word “code” prompts me to think of an occult message or a set of ethical principles instead of computational language. As evolutionary as cyberspace is and is becoming, I still prefer the dirty, salty, temperate, and acoustic experience of the physical world. All of that being said, shortcuts when applied adeptly can be a useful way to cut through terrain. There is little doubt that we have entered the Dark Wood and are still finding our way through. Through is, after all, the only way out.
One of the meta-themes emerging from the Age of Crisis we see, feel, and hear around us is a paradigm shift from models of compliance to models of collaboration. The compliance model of governance from authority is a blunt instrument. Blunt instruments are seldom an effective or appropriate tool for challenges that require precision, coordination, and nuance. Consensus cannot be commanded, cohesion cannot be achieved by separating citizens into classes, communication cannot be clarified with censorship. A collaborative model encourages transparency and discourse, recognizes more than one solution, and can effectively coordinate across domains. Control is at the center of the compliance model, whereas connection is at the center of collaboration.
Whether or not it was Einstein who remarked “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them,” there is a distinct ring of truth to the sentiment. This idea is an invitation to use a different set of keys. The shortcut Control + Shift allows us to change the keyboard in use when more than one is available. If we change the keys, perhaps we change the language. When we change the language, we open to a new perspective. The shift from control to connect might be the beam of light that breaks through the trees to lead us through.