We had just turned onto the big hill behind the grocery store, done with shopping for the week, heading home. It was early evening, pitch dark. James hit the gas and suddenly I was shouting: "THIS IS TOO FAST IT IS NOT OKAY!" We were both shocked by my sudden vehemence and volume. James slowed and asked what was going on: he had accelerated quickly, but only to the speed limit in town, and being yelled at was not great! I began to reply, “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry; that was awful, I don’t know wha – DEER ON THE RIGHT!!”
Oh. We stopped. We marveled silently at the little fawn gingerly stepping along in the road.
“Thanks,” James said.
We call this spidey sense: that sudden certainty while driving that something protective needs to happen. You might know it, too? We have a family rule that anyone can call for the driver to change what they are doing if they get the spidey sense. That night after I yelled at him, James gently drove onward after we didn’t hit the deer, and I tried to apologize for shouting. James waved it off, saying, “Thank you. Whew. Gotta trust the spidey sense.”
What is time? How does it flow? Did I feel the deer I could not see? I wasn’t even looking up when I began to shout; I was looking something up on my phone. I could not have seen. Why did I suddenly shout?
Apparently on the quantum level, “there is no reason for time to run forward; the equations that describe it do not favor that direction" and recent research shows that on a quantum level it may flow forward and backward.
There was another day, a few weeks ago, where I was the driver. We were on the back road between us and town. It was still daylight. The top was down. I was flying along. Suddenly a buck came barreling out of the trees and down the embankment just ahead. We were on a collision course and both the buck and I reacted fast; I hit the brakes and for the first time in my year and a couple months long driving career explored under pressure how hard I could brake without a skid. The buck came to a full halt, bless and thank him, just before the pavement. James and I both experienced the split second of eye contact in which we whizzed past him, all off us wide-eyed, as a long expanse of communion – as if we had stopped, though we flew on past.
I did not feel the deer coming, but time was strange another way: we both experienced the car stopping beside the deer. For both of us the memory was of lingering and gazing at and with that buck, but the car never stopped moving. That one our current understanding can explain: adrenaline dilated our perception of time so that we had more space to move and react. What’s happening in the one we can’t yet explain? I love to wonder.
Two different people have described to me having an experience in which time fractured: a car was coming – toward someone’s child in one instance, toward the person when they were a child in the other – and each person experienced the impact, the car connecting with the child, the child flying through the air, but then the car was past and they were inexplicably safe on the other side. Both people hold this experience quiet and close. We don’t speak much of the things that don’t fit our understanding of reality. A dear friend who is a gifted healer once said to me, “One of the best things that ever happened to me was when I realized I could just not tell other people the things I see that they don’t. They get so upset.”
There is a team at UVA who has since the 1950’s studied children who seem to recall past lives. 2500 children. They have one level of classification where the children’s recall includes enough detail that researchers are able to identify the person whose life the child is recalling.
What is THAT?!
We know so much, but the limits of what we know are also vast. WHAT banged in the big bang? What was before? What is dark matter? Is the universe infinite? Why do we dream? Why do bicycles work? (our original theory on that was proven false in 2011!)
I like to keep my feet on the ground and my face pressed up against the window of mystery.
It is the job of both science and spirituality to wonder. Oh, how I love to wonder! Somehow, we tend to think we know everything and that everything we know is right, but most historical moments experience themselves as the peak of human knowledge until then and yet there is always more coming. What don’t we know? What do we think we know that we have misunderstood and we actually have quite wrong? I think of the roundness of Earth, of evolution, of the Earth moving around the sun, of the things everyone knew or did not know that were quite wrong, and I wonder where our errors and blind spots are. What are we missing? What will we know soon?
It is November, but at night before I crawl under the blankets, I turn off the heat and open the bedroom door to let the wind inside. The mystery is warm blankets and cold wind, both.
Ahhhh.
Love,
Dahlia
Resources
On Finding Work
Our current moment is tough in the realm of work: the AI bubble and our political and economic conditions are making work a higher-pressure event for a lot of folks, and looking for work is strange in this new moment of AI-everything. My friend Rachel mentioned that she was finding that using a networking approach inspired by Phyl Terry's book Never Search Alone was really working for her. "The book is very silicon valley ish, but if you can see through that is just about love, care, and a nice kind of bravery." There is a network of free Job Search Councils affiliated with the book that you can join, but my friend created her own, inspired by the methods suggested in the book.
Collaborative Gain Inc
We Are Not Alone
Tool use by wolves has been discovered by the Heiltsuk Nation in British Columbia, who kept finding damage to their crab traps. Video was captured of a female wolf swimming in the water, taking hold of a rope tied to a buoy with her teeth, dragging it all to shore, and then eating the bait out of the trap. You can see that video in the study. “This sequence appears to demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the multi-step connection between the floating buoy and the bait within the out-of-sight trap,” say researchers Kyle Artelle from the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry and Paul Paquet at Canada’s University of Victoria.
The Best Medicine
Thanks to Stella, who followed up on my recent mention of my love for c0median, writer, and actor Julio Torres with the suggestion to check out his show Fantasmas. It looks incredible.
The Choices Which Lie Before Us
Kate Crawford's entry in the 2021 Venice Biennale is entitled Calculating Empires. It's an astonishing data visualization, a map of the evolution of technological and social structures over 500 years. I loved her talk on AI for the Long Now Foundation last week; she is brilliant and her lens is fierce. This is a woman willing to speak truth about power. (My husband James is the Director of Communications and Design at Long Now, a non-profit which encourages consideration of human civilization on a 10,000 year timeline: the Long Now. We have adored the Long Now Talks for many years.)
Resistance
I hope you'll consider joining me and many in We Ain't Buying It from Nov 27 to Dec 1. "This action is taking direct aim at Target, for caving to this administration’s biased attacks on DEI; Home Depot, for allowing and colluding with ICE to kidnap our neighbors on their properties; and Amazon, for funding this administration to secure their own corporate tax cuts." The goal is to have the sales of these corporations take a big dip on that weekend: simply pause your engagement with these companies – and ideally all major corporations – for this holiday weekend. Spread the word! This is an easy one to join, and as we saw with Disney and Jimmy Kimmel, corporations respond to the loss of profit. How we spend is a power we can use for good.
If you use Gmail and don't explicitly opt out, Google will use your email and attachments to train AI. That sounds a lot like the "Facebook is going to own all your posts" urban myth, but unfortunately, it is true. You can opt out, though, and it's easy to do. Here are written instructions. Here are video ones on Instagram if that's your jam.
Supporting Me in Supporting You
This is human work – I do it by hand, with my own mind and heart; I do not use AI in the creation of what I offer you, friends. I invest half of a day every week in the creation of this newsletter. It's a labor of love – folks have been stepping up a bit lately as I've been clearer in my ask, and thank you – but I'm still earning less than I'd get paid by McDonald's for this time.
If you enjoy my work, you can give me a raise! You could make a one-time donation of thanks of any size. You could upgrade to a paid subscription for as little as $5/month.
If you're a reader of books and you buy them from the indie Bookshop.org by starting at my bookshop, I will receive a commission of 10%, even if those books aren't in my shop. This has picked up lately! Thank you, whoever is making this choice. It matters to me. (Bookshop tells me what the titles are; they don't tell me who bought them.)
Sharing my newsletter with others when it moves you brings my words to them and perhaps their support to me; hopefully everyone benefits there.
If you are a supporter, thank you; it means the world to me to know you value my work in the world, and it puts food on my table.
