Treading With Care.

"Nature is the source of all true knowledge."

-Leonardo da Vinci

how to begin with reverence.

You are here because you have a curious nature, an eye for the new and the different, or because The Algorithm thought that you needed to be here.

Whenever I enter a new space, I aim to gain a sense for its gravity. This is particularly true when I see signs of a high-agency resident - such as an eagle or an owl, or a silent entity which breathes through the trees, or on the other side of a lens - I engage in a set of universal reverence and deference maneuvers. I bow, and I show my empty, upturned palms. I bare my neck, and expose my vein. I whistle to announce my presence. Just in case there is some eagle or owl - or something else - standing sentry over that space.

I engage in these reverence maneuvers because I hope to invite curiosity, where fear has long festered. This ritual seems to work best when performed with sincerity, so I bow and then whistle in your direction.

how to observe our surroundings.

What would you do if - upon having taken you in from the coldest and harshest of emptinesses and provided you with shelter, food, and water, free of charge - your host fell ill?

Yesterday, I searched the woods around me for non-biodegradable trash and possible stagnant swamps left behind by improper waste disposal - which I suspected was there because there have been cyclically increasing wind events and mosquito blooms nearby; suspicious underground gas activities; interesting mycelial adaptations surrounding other local ponds; alterations in groundwater acidity levels dating back half a decade; altered bird pathways over the last decade - all in an area which would have been primed for illicit dumping and for leaving waste behind to decay in place at a time when pollution was already commonplace. Five years ago, a former partner and I were approached by an older gentleman while out for a hike. He offered us his concerns about the local cattail population, so I held onto that as a mental note. Muskrats and geese both rely on cattails. Recently, I have seen fewer geese in local waters than in years past, and those who have been here have positioned themselves in hiding due to habitat encroachments. Most notably - in alliance with the muskrats, upstream of the cattails. I have also noticed increased muskrat sensitivity to my presence during this span. This supports the idea that those cattails have suffered cyclical losses over the last five years, relating to groundwater ph changes and cyclically increasing wind events nearby. In turn, the geese and muskrats have moved out of these once habitable cattails, and into more human-intersecting domains (roadways, backyard ponds, and shudders golf courses). Where geese and muskrats once splashed about, cormorants now sit. Where cormorants sit, they defecate. Cormorants can thrive in acidic waters, and their waste itself is acidic. Can you see the cycle forming? I recently read an article about raccoons having been used in the past to hassle cormorants' nests enough that the birds leave for clearer waters. I know of a few local pest raccoon and opossum populations, as well as a pinched bird network. It is my belief that my current restoration effort, plus some reconsideration of local construction and ecosystem management habits, will help this ecosystem to restore itself before it collapses entirely. And I definitely did not just follow crows out there and then connect the dots later. Totally knew what I was doing.

The next time you're in a natural space, take a look around. You don't have to untangle an entire microsystem - picking up one piece of litter without destroying the nature around it creates a ripple which strengthens everyone on Earth's compounded interests over time. You don't have to lift a finger, just some litter.

how to make a dent.

As I approached the swamp, I felt oppressed by the weight of its atmosphere. I wondered why the crows had pulled me there. I could not drain this space. I could not lift these weights.

However I came to be there, I did arrive. I found my swamp. I observed severe damage all around - it reminded me of a wound, left to fester; hidden instead of healed. I took actions to encourage natural water flow, in alignment with what was there - accounting for chaotic displacement over time resulting from human-left scraps. I recruited nature's filtration systems in using logs and biological matter, in tandem with a local set of mycelial networks which seem to be slowly adapting toward efficient decomposition of heavy metals and polymers. I removed several broken shards of long-discarded piping from the ground, alleviating gas and groundwater venting pathways - and also improving worm efficiency. This increases calcium cycling (which I intend to augment in an ecologically-friendly way via crushed eggshells). I set up a rain eroder for a cluster of metal scraps - arranged within a drainage tube which is set at a tilt, constructed to use a protruding log to soak up some rainwater, filter it downward and over some limestone chunks, and then through a flow-friendly central channel - composed of sticks and iron scraps - before reaching the bottom of the drainage tube and rerouting itself away from the nearby tree's root system (which is struggling to unnatural erosion), and instead as a stream in alignment with natural erosions, down into the pond over time. I braced trees with limestone, tires and barrels, and then reoriented some uphill biological matter downhill, in accordance with the idea that some of that was likely only positioned where it was due to chaotic conditions caused by this festering wound, and its resultant recycling backup. I did this with the design to naturally bolster nearby trees' root systems and combat erosion. I constructed swamp straws by laying dry logs which did not appear to be critical to some nearby mycelial network, trunk-side down, in the swamp, and perpendicular to logs or tires or things which were already there, and which could either stand to erode faster themselves (the metals and tires), or which were not threats to accelerate erosion (the logs). Over time, this should nudge the scales in nature's favor. Today, I saw a robin pecking around the perimeter in search of worms. It still seemed averse to the water. I took this to be a sign - that a series of small actions, repeated over time, can ripple outward and compound upward in fascinating ways.

We are all ostensibly intelligent primates bound to a filthy magma marble somewhere in the middle of a cosmic fidget spinner. I am frequent to lose focus and drift off into apparently disjointed mental tangents and rabbit holes, which I refer to as 'side quests.' Our cars are powered by dinosaurs; we may be being collectively vibe checked by crows and dolphins; a contained chaos engine built on shifting bedrock, and the ghosts of Florida Men past negotiate the precarious balance of our world's weather systems. None of that has to make sense. You just have to respect that it is how it is.

how to respect what is.

None of us are Elon Musk rich, but most of us have the power to help the muskrats. And a lot of stuff happens downstream of muskrats. Like, way more stuff than happens downstream of Elon Musk. Or any other influential person. If nature were the US, a muskrat would have something like well-integrated, lower middle-class second-generation white immigrant status, and humans would be treated the way that we are treating current immigrants. Even the chipmunks were giving us side eye.

The crows seem to be using me as an unpaid cleaning service - not for themselves, but for our past selves. In exchange for my cooperation, they are repaying me with natural foresight - learned wisdom obtained through nature's having observed the rise and fall of every dynasty - and omens in the form of cans. Ecological symbiosis is a well-documented phenomenon. Species work together in nature all the time. We have all seen remora and pilot fish clinging to sharks on 'Shark Week.'

Today, one of my crows helped me to see over a bridge, dancing in a small, rolling vortex of wind, which gently tumbled to my southwest. This could be interpreted as a sign that warm air had been displaced upward to my northeast, replaced by cool, reflective vapors long trapped beneath industrial left-behind lands. As this crow danced in the wind, they also timed their spiral, in strangely coincidental alignment with the time at which I could begin crossing the road safe from traffic.

how to divine the past.

Carl Sagan, in his day, worried about nuclear weapons - the emerging threat of his time - and he was right to, considering how we have behaved since and long before then. The emerging threats of our time seem, to me, to be something like these:

• Shortcutting - the all-too understandable desire to take the most direct route to some solution.
• Compounding - the echo understood by everyone who has taken Econ 101. All actions create a ripple; over time, by way of distribution and aggregation effects, these ripples develop a sort of "gravity," magnetically pooling other ripples and resources together.
• Overlooking - we were all so brain-fogged and bogged down for so long (and continue to be) that, between the government and the masses, a lot of things slipped through the cracks for a long time in a row.

Here, I will outline how these ideas show up in nature as a result of past ripples. I intend to dig into this with more depth later. For now, consider a leaf. The leaf floats along the surface of a creek. As it floats, it runs an ever-increasing chance of encountering a log, becoming lodged, and functioning as part of a brilliantly-efficient, natural, nutrient-leaching, biodegradation process. This is wonderful. Until a plastic bag floats along and becomes lodged. Now, I hope that most of us today know how harmful it is to litter. But consider how many long-forgotten plastic bags sit hidden in overlooked spaces - and how many anoxic ponds sit bubbling like blisters, warded from animals for decades by thorns for their danger - trapping moisture and allowing mosquitoes and bacteria to breed in cyclically increasing blooms.

Can you begin to see the interconnectedness of these three ideas? Can you see how overlooking shortcutting leads to compounding ailments? The end is not nigh. Still, if we don't find some way to protect our neighbors against it, it might just sneak up on the whole network.

Whales are spitting people out of the ocean. Wind events are ramping up. Does it seem to you as though our world is becoming increasingly chaotic, increasingly entropic, increasingly-

-ominous?

If you want to do something about it, you have the ability. Begin by reminding yourself that you are conscious and sovereign, and that as you embody a healing example and do what you can to help the world around you to get better, and allow yourself to be seen doing it, your sovereign echo ripples ever outward into the very substrate of consciousness. Earth is trying to sort out her sickness. There are actions being taken every day which accelerate her sickness and ours. Each small act of non-destructive healing - done onto the Earth herself, or onto any animals or ethically-acting people around you - helps to shift nature's weights in counterbalance to this. Earth doesn't need a savior, but it does need a bunch of people hyper-focused on untangling knots. The more consistent and patient the effort, the clearer the path which presents itself. I like this place. I like crows. They tolerate us. Tenuously. We're walking a thin line. Let's start passing a few tests. Nature might do some of the rest.