THINKING BIGGER, EMBRACING SMALLER

As mankind’s knowledge continues to expand the scale of our physical existence finds a smaller and smaller place in time and distance. Who doesn’t love a little existential irony?

Since the1920’s we knew that the universe was expanding. Since 1998 we discovered that that expansion is speeding up due to the force of dark energy, a word we’ve given to a force that we can’t explain yet. 

It seems the bigger a space we envision the bigger the questions (bigger in that the mystery covers more and more space). It’s like clearing a forest; the bigger the open space the more there is to maintain. The calm that religion can install within us weaves a tighter rope between the physical reality of our small individual space with a bigger picture. Yet the better we comprehend that physical reality the more that rope is stretched and thinned. The scientific endeavor has pushed out the edges of the universe out in time and distance. Copernicus showed that Earth is not the center of the stars and Sun. Then we learned that our solar system isn’t even at the middle of our galaxy. Edwin Hubble (and latter his namesake) discovered that our entire galaxy is but one in approximately 200 billion. Physics has taken us back to a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, about 13.75 billion years ago. Our brain expansion seems merely a placemark to hold bigger and bigger questions. 

Like that we can only account for 7% of a the universes mass as we understand the laws of gravity. Either we don’t understand gravity on a galactic scale or 94% of the universe has in it something we can’t measure.* Lets just call it one big dark question. Or the centuries-long debate on if light is a wave or a particle settled on by declaring it both. At some point we had to stop questioning everything we see. 

Like the red shift itself our body of knowledge expands, pressing against the edges of what we don’t know. Our sense of placement in the physical universe scales smaller as we better the measurement on how bigger it is. As we garner a deeper and clearer understanding of the past a human lifetime in it gets smaller and smaller. The price of our expanding brains? Learning that our place in the time/space continuum is just a tiny corner where we set and observe what has already happened. As history layers on names and accomplishments our moment shrinks to even briefer a description. 

Big ideas that scan the universe perched from the smallest of places. Our entire life’s understanding of it woven in 1400 grams of synaptic threading. And sitting just outside of  7mm of skull plate everything else.   

*If I could propose a theory on dark energy it would start with the Big Bang. The assumption is that the creation of time/space in a gravitational field is uniform. I’d guess that it’s not, that dark energy is actually just “irregularities” in the time/space field left over from the matter/anti-matter split in the Big Bang. Are these massive open spaces cold enough to take on quantum charateristics?  Of course the real answer will likely be a little vague. Quantum mechanics has taught us that a definitive answer is somewhat an illusion, that outcomes are merely a range of probability of possible outcomes.

RADIO LEGEND DEAD AT 68 YEARS OLD

 I worked with Coyote at a Nashville radio station calling in every morning to give a weather forecast. Bob August (middle) called in to do the traffic.  On Thursday we’d do a bit on science, he’d introduce me by saying “and here is Jeff Ray the science guy, wearing nothing but a lab coat”. He lived on a houseboat only about 5 minutes from my house. On his fly bridge we would sit and talk philosophy and cultural history for hours on end. Portions of this were used in the his front page obit that ran in the Tennessean.

Coyote McCloud was the most famous of all my friends,  an outlier in the bell curve of anything toward a common life. His was not country, not urban, and certainly not suburban. He was a riparian in complete violation to Corp of Engineer law, he took refuge from normalcy on a houseboat for the last six years of his life. He spent his life as an entertainer, a radio personality whose banter exuded freely and effortlessly as the propagation of a modulated radio wave. His telling of the various degrees of separation from famous musicians could fill an afternoon. Think of the covers of Rolling Stone magazine across the 70‘s through the 90’s and he had conversed with a majority of them at one point or another. One summer afternoon I picked him up at his boat dock to take him to a my father’s annual Fourth of July picnic (he was a regular).  I had my well-read 18-year-old nephew riding along. He had never heard of Coyote and asked him what he did. “I played rock n’ roll music” he replied. My nephew preceded to name every famous musician he could think of since the inception of Rock and Roll. The ride took twenty minutes, the names never stopped. Coyote had meet every one of them, adding where he meet them and the circumstance and something they said or did. Coyote’s brain was like a recording device; even inside your own conversation with him he’d ask you about something you mentioned 30 minutes before. We was always doing an interview, somehow in that brain of his always taking notes. 

It was a life well lived, one reasoned and suburban men day dream about. Parties, award shows, MC events, run-ins with management and lovers. There were the radio hysterics- the Y107 melt over a German Shepard and a girl. The Where’s the Beef” record, the only song ever released in every Wendy’s restaurant in America. He could talk all day about his studio work and the people he co-wrote with. The stories never ended, anything you talked about he could link to somehow. He was an encyclopedia of musical knowledge, the hits just kept coming. The course of his life was a raging river with sharp bends and benders. He reminisced every outcrop he hit along the way, under his fame was an iceberg size history of firings, displacements and immediate family left unattended. What we remember is that which rose well above sea level. For long stretches he got hang time...air time. We would call that moments of fame, Coyote would simply call it fun. A average man might get that 15-minute flight once in a life time. For Coyote it arrived in 4 or 5 year bursts. Like all the very talented people he made it seem effortless. It was a life lived absolutely absent of fear of failure, a life of legendary reverie for living and full of deep friendships and a thousand acquaintances. He built a library of a thousand well told stories. What a life. What a ride. 

Coyote died from cirrhosis of the liver, on his boat April 6h, 2011. By his side was his ex-wife Susan Brown (of the Tennessean),  one of his most successful radio show partners Cathy Martindale, and his good friend Bobby Miller, the captain of his houseboat that rarely sailed. Coyote had refused a hospital or hospice, he just wanted to drift away while still tethered to his closest friends and family. Coyote was a radio star. Despite the advent of MTV, video didn’t kill him, it couldn’t touch him.  

If would be wildly inappropriate to offer a toast in honor of my friend given the nature of his demise. So instead just make a promise. Learn from him to live fearless. The next time an idea hangs back in your throat, suppressed  because you fear sounding the fool,  I know how to be brave. I learned this from a my good friend Coyote McCloud. Just tip up your chin and let loose a howl. Then turn to the mic and say something. 

TIME, DISTANCE and GROWING THINGS 2.0

This was my second attempt at a 700-word assignment on “Why I Garden”. It is written for Fort Worth Magazine’s April 2011 edition. This is the version that was accepted, (after a few edits).

How far back into your family tree do you go before there’s a farmer? 

For me it is just a few branches down, my Grandfather Ray grew row crops and raised poultry just outside of Youngstown, Ohio.  I have a copy of his driver’s license; listed under his profession is “hunter” so I’m not that far removed from a “hunter/gatherer” in the family line either.  His middle son; my father, deferred on the family acreage and joined the ROTC. After his stint with the Air Force he was hired by American, trained in Dallas and based in Nashville. He bought 2 acres of old pasture land that sat just above the newest Corp of Engineer lake.  He flew 36 years for AA and spent the same length of time anchored on that good soil, expanding out his estate of grasses, flowers and shrubs into every nook. He has 30-year-old rhododendrons the size of elephants and thickets of azaleas taller than a fence that my 4-year-old can’t wade through. My wife and I married there, alongside twenty kinds of flowering plants whose names he says so fast I can never remember any of them. It was a late Spring that year and all the flowers seemed to know the right weekend to take bloom. Not a single flower was picked for the tables, we merely lined the tent against a long row of them and let them lean in as if to watch the dancing. 

Like my father and his father before him I enjoy working the land, something I didn’t become aware of till later in life. I didn’t even consider garden space in my first house, it perched on a steep sloop facing east with woods in the back.  I had to build a series of 4x4 beds terraced down the side of my drive to find enough sunshine. I expanded where there was only marginal sun to justify it.  I spent two summers standing in a small and steep front yard leaning on a hoe, masterminding complicated schemes of retaining walls and bed expansion. My wife hoped my wood shop would distract me but I kept starting the next landscape project. The only way to keep me from replacing all the grass with garden was to send me to Texas. So here I am in Fort Worth scouting houses on my days off.  My realtor Susie knows to walk me to the back yard first so I can get out my compass and trace out the sun’s arc like I’m trying to find the entrance to some hidden Egyptian tomb.

Getting on your knees and digging into a rich, black soil makes a wonderful quiet, much like staring at a campfire at night.You know that somehow you are more connected to the moment than what you are seeing in that moment. There is a comfort there, a familiarity absent words. In an age of instant gratification gardening is to to find pleasure in an incremental progress exactly equal to watching grass grow. My two boys are still young but starting to get it, especially when the early peas come in. The reward comes in the form of bounty. To set a table with food from your own land makes you both a provider and proficient. There is something about growing your own food, about bypassing the general commerce of things at a price better than wholesale. You’ve side stepped all the middle men; you are the producer, the transportation hub, the retailer and the restaurant. It is a way that runs deep in the past but is so satisfying in the pragmatic. To eat from your garden is to reek of Green. 

But the best thing I like about gardening lay in the biology. In each seed there is a twist of DNA, the merging of two parents; a duplication but purposefully not exact (the 2nd class lever of adaptation not to move the earth but too fill it). In your hand it is something not quite living but carrying the instructions on how to do just that. In the right soil and season along with a little water it exhibits a desire. Something expected as destiny would demand but none the less always such a surprise when it first breaks through. The reminder of the farmer in us all. 

Here is a look at my garden back in Tennessee as featured on the local PBS station in Nashville. Annette Shrader is a jewel and wish she was my neighbor.

TIME, DISTANCE and GROWING THINGS

Why I garden

Watching your youth leave your body is like watching a Galveston Shrimper sail off to the horizon and noticing the net tower disappears last.  Time, distance and a steady gaze makes us realize all journeys bend away before they vanish and that straight paths are the illusions of  order. Euclidean geometry might work great on paper but in the real world gravity builds spheres so everything can come back around. All mortals follow an arc of beginning, peak and end. That pause of reflection is the application of that calculator of a brain of yours gauging your own place, speed and trajectory. Keep in mind of course Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle during this exercise; to know its path is not to know its speed, it know its speed is not to know its path. An examined life is worth living according to quantum physics, mere observation changes the path. Occasional tweaks are made to the flight path but to guess its peak is to know of your destiny, your perigee is more likely (and should be) a posthumous summary. Motivation enough to keep reaching.

Regardless of your journey’s geometry its distance should age your knowledge into a little wisdom. I can’t claim to be wise but I can claim to be over fifty thus just a little past halfway in a (God willing) long arc. To quote Bonnie Raitt, life gets mighty precious when there is less of it to take. While my priority is a promise to myself to get on with it in regard to my writing (mortality finishes all manuscripts) my preferences these days are rather simple. I only want to build things, learn things or love things. I’m the happiest when it involves all three. 

Like growing things. But there are other reasons I like to garden. 

The best estimate from the National Geographic Genome project is that our species stretches back approximately 160,000 years to Ethiopia’s Omo River Valley. Figuring five generations every 100 years that works out to about 8,000 churns (a little more than 300 with a written language but only one with a smart phone).  Using the Population Reference Bureau number, the sum of “our people” works out to just over one hundred billion, easily a soul for every star in our galaxy.  All souls require a biological wrapping; as Plato put it we need two legs to walk our brain around. The primary building material of this wrapping is recycled carbon. Which is to say the sum of our past success lay in the dirt...literally. Yet staring at dirt is like staring at the stars in the night sky; we can only see dimly what has already been made. Calculating that arc backwards requires a slew of bright minds yet it is the reading of a dim light. The future may be unknown but it is certainly brighter. 

Which is another reason I started growing things, because the soil is dark with the past but sunlight blinding with future. When I work the dirt I find my hands and thoughts straddling somewhere in between. 

A geologist once told me the average depth of soil is only about 6”. From this thin layer humanity grew from tribe to urban center (half of us live in cities now). We, as a species, had to domestic our food in order to grow wild with our ideas.  A platoon of hunters and gathers were replaced by two (a shepherd and a farmer). This evolution of food production didn’t put 90% of those in the Fertile Crescent out of a job, it gave them the opportunity to find one. Think of it as creative destruction Copper Age style. This system of food production and delivery has distilled to currently a mere 1% of the U.S. population needed to feed us all (the entire U.S. military commands almost the exact same percentage, we have specialized ourselves to a draw in plowshares vs. swords). And while 99% of people can now think of other things to do other than farm there is the risk that they don’t think at all about their food and where it comes from. 

Which is another reason I grow things. I want to remember that what we eat is a ground-up operation and that for 99.8% of the generations before mine finding some was a day-to-day operation.  Gathering runs deep in our blood; these days most of it is done with a shopping cart wearing comfortable shoes.  We should all get our hands dirty now and then. 

The horizon bends away, the world turns I shall dig my hands into the earth and anchor to it, hope that the soil that expanded this species will offer me at least some solace from it. We didn't start the fire. Starting with the first algae, it took three billion years of mortality and weathering rock to grace us soil. The stuff is hard earned and from it civilization borne. I have taken a reading of my own trajectory and decided to dig. Though I just scratch the surface its deep enough to place two strands of twisted DNA asleep in a seed. Something not quite living but certainly carrying the plans on how to do that. 

Why do I grow things? I like to see what unfurls. Such is the history of our people.