Why Everything is Everything

A few nights ago, I stood on a remote beach on the Carribean coast of Colombia -- each movement of my feet inspiring a fireworks display of plankton in the sand. The glowing plant-animal life of the ocean climbed effortlessly up into the sky, a majestic dome of constellations whose names I don’t know but to whose powers I am subject. Together, the earth and sea and stars seemed to create a perfect circle that wrapped around me like the songs of M.F. Doom I had absorbed earlier that day in the equatorial sun.

I think that to discover truth, you have to mix pure science with intuitive knowledge – or rather, maybe the purest science encompasses intuitive knowledge. Growing up a freakish child of nature whose vacations were spent climbing the small peaks of Oregon and Washington rather than Magic Mountain of Disneyland, I learned early how to wear fleece and how to unshackle myself from worldly concerns – at least for a period of time. Days and weeks spent living closer to the earth than the suburbs would allow grounded me somehow. I knew that milk came from cows – not from a carton – and that you should never pee where you drink. Perhaps this organic relationship I developed with the natural world made it an unappealing subject of analysis. It’s sort of like when you have chemistry with someone, you just know that you like him or her – and you don’t always need to identify why or by what equations of temperment or background or career path.

These trails blazed in childhood led me to an alternative college, where I managed to get away with taking only one science class in four years – Evolution of the Earth, with the late John Reid. He took us on field trips all over the Northeast – a scant rival to my beloved Pacific Northwest – where we dug into the core of the earth and took sand and soil samples. . . measured,weighed and predicted. It took me awhile to understand my conflict, why I had trouble getting into this approach to knowledge of something that already felt very familiar. I do remember, though, that theories of plate tectonics impressed me deeply. I always thought that ‘Subduction Zone’ would be a great name for a band but our own folk-pop stylings seemed better suited to a name that evoked quiet contemplation rather than natural disaster.

‘Where is this going and what does it have to do with you ditching New York every winter-spring for Latin America?’ You might ask. I will tell you: The theory that the earth is composed of various masses of land that either converge, diverge or transform resonated deeply for me because I saw within this idea powerful metaphors for how we relate to one another – drifting apart (forming ocean basins), crashing together in firey subduction zones (volcanos), or rubbing up against one another (earthquakes). Who knew science could be so sexy?

I guess my point is that yes, we find what we’re looking for – so if we’re looking for metaphors for relating, I suppose we could find them as easily at the mall or a neighborhood bar as in the Tayrona National Park in Colombia. But I found them in Tayrona – where I spent a week scaling jungled hillsides, bathing in pure water, eating delicious healthy meals, napping in hammocks, practicing yoga and psychic development to a soundtrack of Kid CuDi and the crashing waves of the ocean, and understanding all variety of plate boundaries with my fellow yoga geeks.

Slingshot to Bogota and back to a world of currency, computers, traffic, air pollution and cell phones, I was reminded that you shouldn’t form judgments based on reputation – you have to know a place for yourself. Bogota was a lamb in wolf’s clothing. . . granted, I stayed in the nicest part of town and only saw its entire terracotta-colored sprawl from the top of the mountains that form the eastern border of the city. I visited modern arty restaurants with local friends and talked about plants of knowledge while dining on Colombian sushi (a roll made of plantain, pork, avocado and cilantro wasabi). Also among my activities was a visit to the Botero Museum, which houses a huge collection of art donated by the famous Colombian painter who is known for his corpulent subjects. The museum also has over 100 of Botero’s own drawings, paintings and sculptures. Being immersed in this very particular worldview left me wondering what could have motivated it. Botero’s answer: ‘An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it.’

And so, I drift.