Yesterday morning we woke up at Joe Creek Waterfalls RV Resort and began the day admiring its namesake. The night’s cold breath lingered as beautiful frost on the moss and needles next to the falls. Then we took off along Redwood Highway from south-central Oregon to the coast of northern California. Wow, hadn’t seen the ocean in too long.
We’re off to reorganize ourselves and clarify our mission for San Francisco. I’ve been reading a book on how to organize since I’m finally admitting to myself it’s something I’ve been pretty reluctant to do my entire life. It’s funny, I read it and it makes so much sense, yet it still always feels so forced. Anyway I’m excited to be working this out in the sincerity of nature; distractions just sublime and melt into the wind.
A bit into the drive we decided to pop the top of the back van and stand looking out as we drove. It was a little risky but we had a relay system in case anything looked too sketchy- and it was so worth it. The laughs and waves from the cars behind us (hope one of you posts a pic!) against a backdrop of raw wilderness released an emphatic ‘DAAAAA’ from my lungs. Germans got that guttural affirmation so right.
Out on these mountains there’s no organizing entity. No manager looking over each tree’s shoulder and telling it to grow taller, no accountant adding up the yearly total of dead-leaf nutrient revenue gained by the soil, no customer paying for the view. There’s no mission everything agrees to, or if there is, the mission is a basic principle of life: evolution. Yet every part of the forest is extremely efficient and the result is an incredibly complex, balanced and patterned structure How?
In nature everything just does itself. Each piece naturally allows the relationship between itself and its neighbors to exist. A rabbit doesn’t try to convince its friends she has the best escape technique; she uses it and lives, and others follow the example.
That’s not to say the rabbit doesn’t care for her friends, I’d say she probably does very much. But she doesn’t care about what her friends think of her actions, so she’s not changing who she is or what she does for others’ sake. That way, she’s reliable; she’ll always be a rabbit, never something else in disguise. I think this is one key rule that allows natural habitats to form such a beautiful harmony.
Perhaps organization’s not the concept we’re really trying to accomplish Maybe it’s harmony. Organization implies intent I suppose, so that you can structure yourselves around it. But our intent is perhaps to get rid of any external intent so that we can find inspiration. We want to find a way to each use our inspiration to together create a harmony.