The Tyranny of Our Cult of Independence

I was raised marinating in the belief that my wellness is independent of the forces around me.  

This, one of the strategic lies of our society, has wound its way into the core of my thinking but today, on interdependence day – as are all our days – I am celebrating a small triumph. A small liberation from the tyranny of this Cult of Independence. 

This season, I have been worried about the pond in my backyard. I’ve tended it for more than twelve years and each year I learn something new about how to tend something whose purpose is to be wild. Of course, even the wildest of things need tending. But what I have learned this morning, or perhaps just remembered, is that I have been blinded to the tending that happens in the wild and have been sculpted by my culture only to see the tending that happens at my hands. I have an acculturated selective vision, that only my tending is the legitimate tending.  

I’m not going to go into the details of the pond dilemma that has been gnawing at me this season, more than to say that last Summer I swapped pumps, switching to a more energy efficient, quieter pump that pushes less volume of water into the little waterfall at the far end of the pond. Life is all about eros, about relationships, about possibility, about movement. And decreasing the movement in the pond by decreasing the water flow has, of course, radically changed the pond’s ecosystem and enabled certain kinds of algae to grow. Especially in this recent heat. Algae…I’m sure it serves a true function, like ticks and mosquitoes, but I have a hard time not putting all of them in the position of the Saxons to my Viking. 

We’ve had an unusually wet Spring and are continuing to have an unusually wet early Summer, and each time it rains I feel relief knowing that the rain seems to keep the algae growth at bay, mostly. But this feels unsustainable. And there is tremendous anxiety in me to figure out a more reliable solution. Reliability. Certainty. Surely these are the impulses that, grasping for them, humans began dancing with our own (and the Earth’s) demise. Everything must exist in a balance. Nevertheless, the anxiety is palpable. Sure, it rained this afternoon, and that saved me from this dilemma for today. But what about tomorrow…!? 

There isn’t going to be a fanfare denouement here. Just the simple realization that is now wrestling with me in such a very important way, that the rain is the solution. Each raindrop, a tiny determined agent of aeration, not only depositing fresh water into the pond but bringing oxygen with it. Thousands upon thousands of tiny aeration agents, parachuting into the pond every afternoon. Over the course of the morning and early afternoon the algae enjoys its ideal environment––hot and undisturbed. But Eros will prevail, and by afternoon the rains happen, the sun goes down, the temperatures drop, the algae is checked. And the cycle begins again in the morning. Or rather, the cycle simply continues, because cycles work that way.

What landed in me this morning was the ancientness of this balance, this interdependence, that is surely as much an improvisational dance as it is a consistent choreography borne of time. That despite what I was taught and told, this is how life must work…and it’s how it does work especially when supported to work this way rather than hobbled aka ‘improved’ a la Dupont or Dow or you-name-it. We suffocate creativity when we prioritize predictability. 4.5 billion years of improvisational dance woven with a certain, just-enough predictability – a wild dance of such vast diversity of expression that includes million-year lightening storms, ice ages, giant cold-blooded creatures and thousand-year-long comet-induced black-outs, has brought the Earth to this moment of such extraordinary diversity and complexity. Almost as if complexity and diversity go hand in hand. The more Eros, the more possibility – possibility we obscure while wearing the arrogant blinders of our cult of independence.

There is a balance that we are a part of, that we could also call indebtedness. We are beholden to each other and everything else for the continuation of this wild dance and our place within it. Perhaps the intelligence of this balance, whatever has so benevolently allowed Eros to stay matched with Chaos, has been so disrupted, so compromised we are now in the downward spiral into another slate-wiping ecological moment. But for this morning what I’m insisting on is that my own psyche integrate something I have known, logically, for awhile now – that perhaps I (and whatever efficient chemical I can purchase from the store) are not the solution to the pond’s  balance. Listening for the relationships, supporting the balance that comes from increasing the erotic interdependence happening in that small ecosystem is. And if that means I feel anxious every morning that the rain will not come to offer its restorative oxygenated droplets, I’ll thank my parents and grandparents for this unfortunate endowment – the belief that at the foundation of the good life are certainty and predictability. 

Instead I will lean in to the brilliance of the mad improvisational dance of 4.5 billion years that got me here. And I will learn how to court the rain.