Pop 89: The Universe is Enough
By Madonna Hamel
Yesterday, I tried to re-post this column on social media for friends to read. But, FB is no longer posting from “news sites.” In fact, it's rebranding itself as a portal to the so-called “metaverse” and renaming itself Meta.
Oh boy, here we go again. Technology posing as a means of rescue from all the harm it has, to a great part, created. We see it with VR, AI, and a host of escapist bread-and-circus toys meant to divert our attention from the steadily increasing levels of hubris and wealth messianic technocrats have neither capacity nor desire to limit.
The metaverse is a computer industry term for "a single, shared, immersive, persistent, 3D virtual space where humans experience life in ways they could not in the physical world."
According to the "meta verse" industry, "the physical world" - ie: Nature, Creation, ie: your flesh and blood and the storm clouds on the horizon and the sun breaking through and the grass in your yard and bison and antelope and coyote on the plain and your dog and your grandma and the food you eat and the sprinkler you run through to cool down in the summer heat and the water in which you wash your dishes and the cold drink you gulp to slake your thirst and the song you play badly on your guitar and the carrots you planted and the onions you chop and the book you read and the fresh towel you pull from the dryer and the hand of the man you hold as he struggles in the hospital bed and the flowers outside your window and the dust on your dashboard and the birds making a nest in your poplar and the tick of the clock on the wall and the laugh of your kid sister and the bike you rode to get to the store before it closed to buy ice cream and all the rest of this magnificent uni-verse we live in, including the rainbow of milky stars arcing over our heads and the moon rising huge over the ridge - all this, is just not enough.
I will say for myself, I haven't even begun to enter into the millions of experiences "the physical world" is offering me. Just as I write this, thunder rumbles outside, and I jump up to watch the brash and bold bull thunderclouds as they shove their way across the sky. I want to learn more about where these clouds are headed and how they were born and what exactly is happening up in there?
On my bookshelf is a chunk of rock bearing a bright foot-long cluster of desert fire-dot lichen. A lichen is a living organism comprised of two partners: an algae and a fungus. The algae provides food through sunlight to the organism, and the fungus provides a home. It takes a year for one millimetre of this particular lichen to grow. What lichen teaches me about space and time and partnership, no computer-generated artificial world can replace. As my friend Caitlin likes to say: "I've taken a likin' to lichen."
Living on the edge of Grasslands National Park keeps me grounded in reality. Living immersed in nature helps me take a greater likin' to this world. But that does not mean I haven't wanted to escape it at times, especially in my teen years. Still, part of moving through adolescence is to face the struggles and challenges life presents. Not to find ways to split off, decompartmentalize, run away, remain angry and suspicious and unhinged.
Virtual Reality. Artificial intelligence. Metaverse. These ersatz, close-to-real-but-not-really-real enthrallments are just the latest inventions of people who have decided they would rather not be fully engaged with the life in front of them, would rather not enter, as the poet David Whyte describes it, "the conversational nature of reality."
Escapism has always had its venues. When I was a kid, it was in the books of child detectives like Nancy Drew and the Bobbsey Twins. But I knew it was escape. It wasn't an alternate to the world of school and chores and siblings and trips to Grandma at Christmas and to the lake in the summer.
Some of life was fun, some of it was hard, some of it I hated, but I learned how to move through it. The stuff I loved opened my heart. The stuff that was hard opened my mind. The stuff I hated strengthened my spirit, if indirectly, by presenting me with "teaching moments" wherein I had to find ways of nurturing strength of spirit, principles to stand by, and character to stand up to bullies.
I understand how tempting it is to run from the world and its insane and cruel behaviours. But this same cruel world is also our home. As indigenous spirituality reminds us - all our relations - all beasts and plants, live with us. As St. Francis' prayers assert - the sun and moon are our siblings.
I once asked my physicist friend Mike if he believed in God. "I don't know about God," he replied. "But I believe in the universe. The uni-verse. The single story. It's all one story."
To ignore the wondrous, the mysterious, the sublime elements of the physical world in which we live, move, and breath is to be blind, is to shirk responsibility - that is, to be unable to respond - toward the truth and beauty of the world we live in, the home under our feet. Our single shared story.
One lifetime is not enough time to explore all this universe contains; it is huge and contains multitudes. Might I suggest the next time technocrats exhort you to plop on a headset, you grab a magnifying glass instead. That blade of grass two feet from your door, with the ant crawling up and down, will be all you need to return to your senses, to come home.