When we see that word “Family” most of us think of a relatively small number of people. Maybe when you saw it, you thought of your family of origin. Maybe you thought of your family of generation. Maybe you thought of the people who live in your home which may include some of each. When I was a kid, we had “Family Reunions” which included the extended family of my maternal grandmother. It did not extend to my maternal grandfather’s family nor to my dad’s relatives. Typically, there were 30-40 people who showed up. I know of “Family Reunions” which are much larger, involving hundreds of people. Years ago, when I wrote in this blog of “Family Matters” I mentioned a subset of people who attended my “Family Reunions.”
Occasionally, people think of humanity as their family. I have been lucky enough to visit a respectable number of countries (28) and I’ve met people from over a hundred and in every single instance, it’s very easy to see that they are basically like me both physically and mentally.
Like many people, I was brought up in a religious tradition that reinforced the idea that all of us are in this together. Beyond my personal experience, it is just plain fact that human beings share most of their history (4 billion years) before we began diverging slightly a hundred thousand years ago. Beyond that, we are all sharing the planet. While, borders may keep some people out (or more commonly, keeping them in), in the long run, the water, air, and pollution is shared world wide across all “boundaries” of religion, philosophy, or nation.
It may be difficult for some to accept that all humans are part of their extended family.
The truth is that our actual family is far broader and wider than the 8 billion people on the planet today. We share more than half of our “family history” with every single creature and plant on earth today. When you think about vertebrates, for instance, we have similar bodily systems. We mate. We eat food. We eliminate wastes. Even those who live in the water actually breathe air that’s dissolved in the water. We learn. We flee. We are curious. We are aggressive. We solve problems.
The earth is basically covered with living organisms. That is our family. It can be a source of inspiration and comfort if you let it be. And, you can love that family.
Sunshine was one of my reasons for moving to San Diego. It wasn’t the most important, but it was important and I appreciate the Sunshine. For the past week, however, Sunshine took a long-awaited vacation. Apparently, Sunshine was running some sort of scam on the weather forecasters, calling up and saying, “Hi! It’s Sunshine! I’m feeling so much better today! I’ll be at work as usual tomorrow. You can count on it.
And then, when daybreak arrives the next day, it doesn’t. That is to say, when it should arrive, it doesn’t because Sunshine has overslept. Again. I suspect it might be because of all-night partying last night on the other side of the world.
You would think that the weather forecasters would catch on. You might even think that they would have seen the famous “Charlie Brown” cartoon meme in which Charlie Brown’s frienemy Lucy, promises him, year after year, that she will dutifully hold the football and not pull it away—not this time. And, dutifully, year after year, Charlie Brown decides that this will, or at least might be, the year that Lucy finally does the right thing.
But of course, she doesn’t do the right thing. And, Charlie falls flat on his back every time. Lucy smiles.
So apparently, this week, did the Sunshine. Taking vacation elsewhere and not showing more than a stray ray or two in San Diego allowed for the deluge. Other places farther north had it much worse, in terms of rainfall and damage. Worldwide, what we now call extreme weather may, in many places, become more “normal” and extreme weather will become deadlier.
In any case, I am have been just as foolish as the weather forecasters and Charlie Brown. Every day, my phone app has said the rain would be over in a day or two. And, then, two days later…same forecast is dutifully presented. But not the promised reality.
Sadie, meanwhile has been very patient about the fact that our walks have been typically much shorter all week. She has also been patient about not being allowed to dig in the dirt. More accurately, she wasn’t allowed to dig in the mud. There was no “dirt” around. It’s not idle digging. She hears and smells gophers and goes after them. Unsuccessfully. Every time. She’s dug for gophers more than the San Diego weather forecasters trusted Sunshine’s repeated false assurances that tomorrow the rain would end; indeed, even more often than Charlie Brown has over-trusted Lucy.
She persists. She enjoys the process. Maybe the weather forecasters enjoy knowing that they made everyone feel hopeful that could play tennis in a few days (or have a picnic or mow the lawn or harvest their fruit in sunshine). Maybe Charlie Brown enjoys being the kind of person who would give another one more chance to be good, even if they never take that chance than to be more cynical and realistic.
I can’t say what the motivations are for Charlie Brown and the weather forecasters, but I am sure Sadie enjoys the digging. She certainly has little care for how dirty her paws get or whether she spews mud on my shoes. My philosophy may be a mixture of Charlie Brown and the San Diego Cabal of Sun Predictors. I believe Sadie should spend some time “just being a dog.” In other words, she should be in at least partial charge of what she does and be allowed to follow her “instincts” unless it poses a true danger and not just because, say, she tracks mud into the house.
As I was watching Sadie dig, and I was sliding sideways to prevent becoming inundated with wet dirt, it occurred to me that I too, had some years of “just being a dog.” My parents, I think, thought of it as time for my “just being a kid.” In some cases, I heard adults say, “Oh, it’s just boys being boys” when we played in the dirt, fought with sticks, or had “rock wars” wherein we literally threw rocks at each other.
Not all adults were on this plan 100%. My own parents would let me play in the dirt often times, but they did not want me to participate in rock fights or stick duels. Evading those restrictions was trivial. We weren’t trying to be bad. But we knew our friends would not to try to blind us with sticks or stones. We believed implicitly that since we weren’t intentionally trying to blind each other, it wouldn’t happen.
Though there were local variations in the strictness of restrictions, we were always able to do some version of “just being a kid” which truthfully, was not all that different from “just being a dog.”
I had just as little care about muddying my shoes or fingernails as Sadie does about muddying her paws. I’d say my “dog years” were mainly between six and thirteen. Before six, my parents or other caregivers wouldn’t leave me alone long enough to get in real trouble. I mean, I managed all the usual little things like peeing into electrical outlets, throwing stuff down the “registers” (heating vents) to see what would happen, and writing in books and on walls, but there was no opportunity to have rock fights or get muddy from head to foot.
From ages six to thirteen, however, I spent a lot of time outdoors unsupervised. Plenty of time to be a dog. A few years later, however, it dawned on me that girls might find me more attractive if I were less muddy. My mother might have planted that suggestion.
There’s no doubt that many of the “instincts” I had were not very effective guides. They weren’t as effective as the knowledge that science and society had developed over centuries. On balance, I still believe having some dog years is a risk worth taking.
Life on planet earth is over 4 billion years old. There are also no known “skips” in life. In other words, each generation of life, N comes from the previous generation N-1 and generates the next generation N+1. Every living thing on earth today, so far as we know, has the same unbroken line of ancestry dating back 4 billion years. We all share ancestors.
Vertebrates appeared about 500 million years ago. This means that we humans share 7/8 of our heritage with every living fish, bird, reptile, amphibian, and mammal. Indeed, fish have a heart, a brain; they mate; they eat; they have blood; they move; they learn. They flee danger. If someplace is a good source of food, they hang out there.
Early humans must have intuited that they were very like (as well as somewhat unlike) other animals. Otherwise, they would not have learned how to track them and hunt them, let alone train them. In the last few hundred years, however, we have learned much more about how similar we are to other animals anatomically, physiologically, and behaviorally.
I happen to think this branch of science is fascinating.
But it’s more than that. To me, it’s also heart-warming. It’s comforting in many ways.
First of all, I am in awe of our extended family. Life has survived for over four billion years! It hasn’t just survived; it has evolved in a million different directions. Our family includes trees that live thousands of years and grow hundreds of feet tall. Our family includes animals and plants too small to be seen by the naked eye; birds that migrate thousands of miles; whales that weigh 300,000 pounds.
Second, it is comforting to me to know that the Tree of Life is secure against the short-sighted greed of a small number of humans. Ecological disaster, atomic war, pandemics are certainly damaging human life and comfort as well as destroying whole species. But the Tree of Life is vast and more importantly, incredibly diverse. The self-destruction of humanity is possible and would be incredibly sad. But the Tree of Life? We won’t destroy that.
Third, it is comforting to see, hear, and interact with the biome. The way that life interacts with other life is beautiful to observe. I view it as a drama, a symphony, a tapestry, all rolled into one. When I go for a walk, I walk through life; I walk through my family; I walk through a work of art and become reminded that I am one with it.
Birth and death become the same: turning a page in a marvelous and endless story. That’s not to trivialize or belittle it. Turing the page of a story is actually a big deal! Pages make chapters. And chapters make books.
Weather in San Diego is typically nice almost every day. Today is no exception, but that doesn’t mean that the weather is boring. There is a lot of natural variation. There is variation in the humidity, in the wind, in the position of the sun, in the heat, in the (fairly rare) precipitation.
Reflecting on this reminded me of another kind of natural variation: the variation in organisms of the same species. Without that variation, evolution would be far less effective.
It also reminds me of several of the characteristics of natural beauty and good design that Christopher Alexander writes about.
Things that have zero variation are mechanical, predictable, repetitive, and generally not very pleasing aesthetically. Mindless, endless repetition is aligned with death. Variation is aligned with life, freedom, creativity, growth, and joy.
Among things that are non-living artifacts, there is still a variation in how variable they are. Walls made of stone, are by their nature, “rougher” and more variable (and more beautiful) than walls made of bricks. Walls made of bricks are more irregular and beautiful than one made of solid steel. Similarly, at least to me, fences made of wood are more variable and beautiful than fences made of metal.
Building elements that make up a wooden deck show grain and irregularities in the surface of the deck. In addition, however, they even have interesting variability below the deck as shown here.
You can also see in this photo below a variety of materials. The stucco, by its very nature, more interesting and variable than steel or plaster.
In these photos, you can see variation within leaves, among the leaves of a particular plant, and also among the plants themselves. Each plant and each part of the plant grows in accordance to its genetic blueprint. Except a “blueprint” is itself too fixed and unbending to be an appropriate metaphor. The growth will depend on the context–water sources, light sources, nutrients in the soil, other nearby plants and rocks will all play a part in how, precisely, a particular plant grows.
It would be absurd for one plant to say to itself: “Every plant should be just like me! I have a plan based on what works for me and everyone should do exactly what I do!”
[Author’s Note: I’ve been spending time in my garden filled with varieties of texture, forms, and colors. Yet, it all seems harmonious to me. Today, I took a trip to the drug store. My senses were assaulted with garish and egotistical displays, each trying to outdo the other for my attention. I ignored it all, but I can’t help thinking there are better things for human brains to be doing that having creative people try to force me to buy a bunch of chemicals in a bright package and better things for my brain to be doing than shutting off input. Rather than assault your brain with photos from the drugstore, I have instead included pictures of bright colors from the garden. To me, these are not garish.
OK, I guess the first thing to admit is that I’m totally in love with our dog, Sadie. So, my perceptions are incredibly biased. But in the account that follows, I will try to separate observation from interpretation in at least once instance.
From Sadie’s first puppy days with us, Sadie and I have played a lot of ball, most often with a tennis ball. (Sadie completely disdains Pickle balls, by the way). We have evolved many different games and variations. Perhaps at some future time, I might trace out the ontological tree of indoor and outdoor tennis games, played, at least for the most part, without a racquet by either of us.
For a time, we got in the habit of throwing a ball off the back deck early in the morning. Initially, the game was for Sadie to catch the ball while it was still in motion. She would begin dashing down the stairs of the deck in order to hit stride on the grass, make a sharp right turn into the driveway and catch the ball, if possible, in the air. Eventually, the garden had a baker’s dozen of balls in various places along the edge of the driveway. This led Sadie to invent a new game. (Yes, Sadie. It felt to both Wendy and me that this was her initiative.)
Rather than dashing down the stairs so swiftly that she could see whatever ball was most recently thrown because it was still moving, she now would wait until the ball was either barely rolling or had already come to a rest. Then, she would dash to the far end of the driveway and determine by smell which ball had just been thrown. Having watched the ball, the human observer on the deck could see which was the most recently thrown ball. Sadie would trot up to a group of balls in roughly the same spot and sniff till she found the correct one and then come racing back with it.
A few weeks ago, our Doggie School teacher brought out a “squeaky ball” — a tennis ball, but one that squeaks. It isn’t as bouncy as a “real” tennis ball, but it has the same shape, weight, texture as a “real” tennis ball—and because neither one of them is manufactured by General Motors, they are both the same shade of the green that everyone else inexplicably calls “yellow.” (I strongly suspect that the vast majority of people are anomalous trichromats without knowing it. This would explain why my judgement is so often at odds with that of others).
Sadie has taken a couple of the “squeaky balls” outside. In the last week, she’s started a new behavior. She digs a hole in the dirt with her squeaky ball beside her; then she rolls the squeaky ball around in the dirt; don’t rinse; repeat; again; again. I found myself thinking she was making it harder to see and grosser. But of course, that’s only from my perspective. What she’s actually doing is making the ball easier to distinguish visually from the others, especially at a distance. More importantly, she’s making the ball more findable by smell alone and she’s making the ball more interesting and more personalized.
A person can train a dog (or other animal) to do amazing things. It takes patience and discipline. I’m not very good at either. But I’m also interested to see what emerges from a cross-species interaction where there is no pre-conceived “right way” or “end goal” that is envisioned and then imposed on the other. Don’t get me wrong. I’m perfectly okay with insisting she do her business outside and that she not eat the cats. But to me, it’s much more interesting to play ball with Sadie and see what emerges rather than “teach” her to play ball “my way.”
When I was a kid, we played “baseball” but it was rare we played on a regulation field and almost unheard of that we played with nine on a side. Typically, there were only somewhere between two and fourteen total. We invented all sorts of work-arounds. Sometimes, a team would have one of their own do the pitching and/or catching for the batting team. Sometimes, we would have to use “imaginary runners.” I get a base hit. The next batter walks. The next batter walks. Now, the bases are loaded! Yay!
The only problem: there are only three people on our team. Solution: The player on second would go to third to take my place and I would go bat. Now, if I got another hit and the real player who started on first made it all the way home, for instance, we could infer that the “imaginary runner” who started on second had made it as well.
We tend to think of the phrase “Play Ball!” As a unitary phrase. But it does have two components. Sometimes, I think it possible that we’ve become so competitive that when the umpire yells: “Play Ball!” We immediately think: Win! Go Team! I’ve got five bucks on this game!” And, in the context of professional baseball where it’s a multi-billion dollar business, that makes some sense. But in the context of kids (regardless of age) with dogs, or kids with kids, maybe we should hear:
petersironwood 