The Unplugged Scientist

The Unplugged Scientist drinks his tea on a Saturday morning in the green glow of a rising sun filtered through the flush of summer on his Blue Moon Farm.  How, after so many years of taking things apart, checking their oil (so to speak) and writing tales of how the world works, do I find myself now in the midst of a world view collapse.  Yes, the 'scientist' is supposed to put Humpty Dumpty back to together again after the myriad dissections, but for some reason that doesn't seem to be happening at political levels. 

Let's get serious here.  First, I have no idea what I'm talking about.  Second, I have no idea what I mean by that first paragraph.  Well maybe I do.  I mean, since coming to this farmstead and digging in four years ago, my inner scientist has found himself in a vortex like reversed world view.  I find myself consolidating.  I see things in lumps rather than pieces.  I find myself gathering rather than taking apart.  I don't see "cattails" in a marsh now.  I see a marsh woven with cattails, sedges, Reed canary grass, ....  Our chickens are not, "Ribbons and Curly, or Sophie and Hobbes, but a flock of free ranging omnivores constantly in search of their well being and a south facing building foundation to dust against.  When I go to move the cows to a new paddock I'm walking in a sun-soaked tame grassland supporting cow pies, flies, frogs, hoppers, thistle, fences, cattle, salt skidders, marsh, surrounded by forest, sky, warmth, wind and me; yes me!  Pushing myself through this maize of connectedness and like the wind causing a ripple, albeit, a slight one, in time.

I put on my rubber knee-high boots the other day.  Took to the marsh to check my aquatic insect traps and found that the dragon flies larvae had once again evaded my trapline.  Hummmm.  There I was again, trying to take the system I depend upon apart.  The empty trap was like a sign (about time I get a "sign" around here) signaling; "STOP.  You can't see anything by taking this apart".  Years and years of study and conditioning standing at attention in the marsh with this sign slapping me "smack" in the forehead.  Off in the distance a combine is spewing dust above the neighbor's wheat field as the harvest is underway in every direction except east (Ha! The forest gets in the way of harvest to the east.  Three Cheers for that luck!).  They are taking apart the wheat field, counting their "beans" and putting them in a basket.  Dismantling.  Great word with "man" locked inside it.  We are a beast that takes things apart.  Then, we engineer until we attempt anxiously to reassemble our restless behavior.  We try to make it better with our sliderules (oops those are artifacts now, so I mean our computers) and our ingenuity and what I'll see of that wheat field in a while is a baler going hell bent for election to role up the straw leaving a stubble as frisky as a hog haired brush each bristle pointing to the sun.  How ironic.  Most of the farmers here will fallow those fields for winter hoping to get back in them in spring as soon as the drains move the spring melt to the sandbags protecting Fargo from the annual 100-year flood of the Red River of the North.

We have learned to take it apart, whatever it is.  We believe we are putting it back together again.  (Sorry, Humpty).  Yet each year I find myself in a sulk of inter sadness.  We all feel it.  We all mostly ignore it.  Even politicians feel it, but I have to believe they interpret their feelings as symptoms of the stress of their work and so take analgesics to counter the pain.  Our intuitive emotional fabric is working, but we are trying to fix it with a mis-ID and a pill.  Each year that we take it apart it comes back together a bit shabbier than the last.  But, those incremental bits of difference are almost undetectable and thus the lawmakers and the policy makers fail to fix anything as well.  A scientist worth her salt will take the pieces, thrice examined, shine them against her hypotheses and draw some conclusions.  Not definitive conclusions since by nature science is incremental in its truth telling.  Those conclusions are turned to recommendations and sent up the line for lawmakers, policy makers, and decision makers to deal with.  The result is they take another pill and pass the buck to the future overwhelmed with the complexity of the mouse trap we find ourselves walking into.  Even with their constituents dropping like flies in the human pies we have spread in our wake, the leaders of our communities, our counties, our states, our nation, the world do little more than sidestep the 'pies' for fear of it sticking to their loafers.

I'm going out now.  I'm going to walk outside this post into the fresh air and make a small wrinkle in time again.  On my way, you come too, I'm going to unplug my scientist and lean into the day like a cog in the wheel.

Ah, the greenside is up on Blue Moon Farm.  And it is richly overwhelming....