No-one who has gone to the beach

On a sweltering summer day

Who has followed the receding waters of the ebb tide

To dig clams and chase crabs

Can dispute Nature’s humanity-organising powers

*

How ‘ignoble’, then, for man to insist

That such movements derive from his own internal choice

That his individual and collective actions

Are the product of his locally originating agency

Under the direction of his ‘internal purpose’ and ‘choice’

*

Before Yule was largely ‘traded out’ for Christmas

T’was the winter solstice that brought us together

In celebration of our inclusion in Nature’s dynamic ground

From an earlier era where we saw ourselves as whorls in the flow

Or, as ripples in an all pervasive energy-field dynamic

*

Drawn together to celebrate inclusion in space-as-plenum

Drawn together to celebrate common inclusion in space-as-plenum

*

But then came God-the-Creator of virgin births

To give these offspring ‘local being’ in their own right

Notionally equipped with their own local agency

Whose movements and organisation, it was claimed

Were sourced entirely from within themselves, … where else?

*

Opening the hatch on the central control unit of man

Also known as ‘the brain’

Scientists pointed to the presence of ‘knowledge’ and ‘intelligence’

Substances that, they claimed, would CAUSE

Men to assemble on the beach on a hot day

*

Thus it grew out of fashion to regard space-as-plenum

The mother of man and the organiser of his behaviours

Space-as-plenum instead became ‘space-as-void’

Populated by local objects with local agency

That ‘reproduced themselves’ or so it was claimed

*

The people on the beach are in many cases no longer

Like those drawn to the Solstice or to Neptune

When asked how they come to have gathered there

They smile and speak of their education

Their knowledge of thermodynamics

*

How else is the world to be envisioned

When a God-Creator populates it with local objects

Notionally equipped with local agency

Acting and interacting in a space that is otherwise empty

Where organisation is driven by internal purpose and choice

*

And why not build a language to match this design

Creating local objects called words

Equipping them with local meaning-giving agency

To populate a space of understanding that is otherwise void

So that they too might go forth to conjugate, multiply and have dominion

*

Inverting space from the plenum to the void

Removes the flow of meaning to dynamic figure from dynamic ground

And starts instead ‘from scratch’ by way of ‘common belief’

Local objects. like imaginary-line-bounded sovereign states

Then owe nothing to the plenum and everything to internal belief

*

This inverting from space-as-plenum to space-as-void

Removes the flow of meaning to the word from the dynamic ground of understanding

Starting instead from scratch by way of common belief

Local words, like local sovereign states

Unilaterally declaring their independence and their fully internally-driven meaning

*

Meanwhile, no more heed of virgin births for this pagan

And no more heed of knowing smiles of summer beachgoers

Who believe they are a self-organising thermodynamics study group

No more heed of word structures claiming supremacy

Over the plenum of understanding that parented them in the first place

*

As Emerson says, Nature is a plenum

That not only organises us, but creates us

And as Teilhard de Chardin says, the plenum of Cosmogenesis

Is our true parent, the age of nations is past.

After all, two thousand years is ample for a space-as-void tryout

*

In Nature, the dynamic figure is the child of dynamic ground

The hurricane is the child of turbulence in the flow

NOT the causal parent of turbulence

The confluence of beach-going dynamic figures

Is the product of the dynamic ground

*

Christ has many self-appointed interpreters

That relay a diversity of alleged messages

Not the least of which are early Christian mystics

For whom space-as-plenum IS God, a divine cosmogenesis

Within which we are whorls and ripples

*

The people of Stonehenge gather in celebration

Of space-as-plenum that includes us all

We tend to look back on them with ‘knowing smiles’

Based on nothing other than our ‘common belief’ in space-as-void

Affirmed by a sufficient number of heads-nodding-accord

*

Common-belief based organisation

Is the parent of many internally-driven dynamic figures

Such as the 195 sovereign states, the many thousands of corporations

All believing in their own local, independent being

And the corollary belief that space is otherwise void

*

Common belief operates on our internal direction

Is this the correct date, place and time to gather and act? … we ask

A sufficiency of heads-nodding-accord then set us in motion

Creating organisation from individual self-centres outwards

Ignoring the outside-inward orchestrations of space-as-plenum

*

Is THIS what Christ intended,

That man should have dominion over nature?

The opinion of some priest, captured in Genesis 1:28

Or were Christian mystics and Teilhard de Chardin more on target

With their notion of space-as-plenum, the all-including parental Godhead

*

I suppose I should thank orthodox monotheist theology and classical science

For trying to bestow on me independent being and my own local agency

However, without intending any disrespect

It is an offer that I can and must decline

The over-large helping of ego bundled into it having unsettled my palate

*

This all being openly said and thus off my chest

I can respond to the natural call to celebrate the winter solstice

Without waiting for a heads-nodding accord

To authorize and anoint the time and place to gather, and have me stand by

With party hat and horn in hand, awaiting the official intellectual signal

*

Saint Francis’ Canticle ‘In Praise of the Creatures’

With its references to Brother Sun and Sister Moon

Casts one more vote for space-as-plenum

THROUGH which our deity, or deities, or

Common ‘mother’ nature may be respectfully celebrated.

*

Sure we can follow the intellectual signals

That have us gather at the beach,

In the Church hall or at the annual company picnic

And we can smile the savoir faire smile of someone

Who knows all the whens, wheres and hows of social gathering

*

But after the rich experiences of being gathered

To celebrate a solstice or meteor shower or full moon where one is deeply touched

By the bringing-together of self-and-other as inclusions in a common space

Mere intellectual signals as the positivist basis for organising

Become far less satisfying.

*

By the way, it’s about that time again, is it not?

The appointed time to celebrate

Which may recall Mike Myers SNL German show-host skit

‘Komm!, now ist venn vee dahnce’

It is time to reach  inside to crank up the internal drive and manufacture some jolly organisation

*

Of course, we don’t have to perform

Like wind-up elves in a Christmas decoration

We can ‘get pagan’ and let our movements be animated

NOT PRIMARILY by kick-in-the-butt intellectual signals telling us ‘the time to celebrate is now’

But by re-awakening our awareness of inclusion, together, in space-as-plenum

* * *