~ A Joy Warrior's Journey
For days, I have been watching the lilac’s buds grow plump,
their pale purple trumpets lengthening, the tips of them
swelling until, one here, one there, they burst into white stars
that pour forth a scent brewed, you would swear, by angels.
Today it wafts through my open windows, perfuming the rooms,
and I, enveloped in the fragrance, breathe, and believe
that surely I am tasting the essence of heaven.
“What I don’t know I make up,” I used to tell people as a kind of joke. I left it up to them to figure out where fact gave way to fantasizing.
I was listening to some talk about ChatGPT this week. “What is ChatGPT?” you ask. (Here’s a good description.) Basically, It’s an online tool that’s sort of like a cross between an unimaginably vast library and a great personal assistant. A big bevy of those First Adopter types are praising its capabilities. It’s passed the bar exam, scored well on the SATs, and developed detailed business plans, for example. It’s fast and smart. You’ll be hearing about it more and more, I’m sure.
Well anyway, it turns out that when ChatGPT can’t find an exact answer for you, it, too, will make stuff up. And it’s very good at it, I hear. The Artificial Intelligence developers label the phenomenon “hallucinating.”
I thought that was an interesting word choice. When I make stuff up, I think of it as imagining. But what’s the difference when it comes down to it? Regardless of which term you give it, it’s a story our brains fabricate, both the living and the machine kind.
Personally, I thought it was a bit eerie that a language tool rooted in Artificial Intelligence would make things up. Why would it do that? It doesn’t have an ego to defend, after all, or emotions to sort out. It’s not trying to entertain. Maybe it’s a technique it uses for problem-solving. That’s one of the purposes our own story-making serves. Fortunately, ChatGPT doesn’t hallucinate anywhere near as much as we humans do. It’s more of a cut and dried here-are-the-facts kind of operation. We, on the other hand, are living in our dream worlds, our story worlds, more than we’re not.
To borrow the AI developers’ term, we’re usually living in a hallucination. There’s not necessarily something wrong with that. It’s the nature of the human mind (and maybe machine mind, too) at work. It’s a way of figuring things out, of looking for solutions.
What separates us from the machine, though, is that we can turn our attention away from our imaginary stories and focus on the here and now, with all its colors, and tastes, and sounds and smells. We can feel the air moving through us and around us. We can notice our bodies and adjust them at will. We can respond to the action around us. We can decide to play a different movie than the one that we were engulfed in minutes before. Or we can go back to it. But in the meantime, if only for a moment or two, we can be here, consciously alive in the midst of a living, mysterious world. And isn’t that amazing? And isn’t it amazing that we can be amazed?
Wishing you a week where you abandon the trance repeatedly to rediscover the mysterious reality right before you.
Warmly,
Susan
Image by ThankYouFantasyPictures from Pixabay
On this rainy morning, I wake
to a world of emerald green.
I laugh to see that the ferns,
whose emergence I awaited
all those early spring days,
have conquered the hillside.
I grin at their glad victory.
Overhead, raindrops play
the leaves of the trees
as if they were the keys
of a piano. And I watch
and listen to the song,
and it fills my heart with joy.
The moments become more precious now,
each one a treasure, even those swaddled
in clouds of gray. I stare at the creek intently,
as if I could hold onto these colors, as if
my staring could somehow paint them
indelibly in my mind, as if I could keep them,
or at least make this moment linger. But spring
flows swiftly on, blithely transforming the world
as she goes, dropping her love notes everywhere.
I hardly dare move lest I miss one luminous hue,
one scent, one note of her song. She laughs
in the tumbling waters. She dances in the breeze,
And oh, the fragrance of her green perfume!
They stand for nothing,
not for a price or a system,
not for any particular position,
or concept or creed. They obey
only the law of their being:
Flower freely. And so they show
their colors, and feed the ants and bees,
and decorate the roadsides, and dance
in the morning breeze, asking nothing,
simply being, and singing their songs.
And when the nighttime stars rise
above them, their hearts are filled
with contentment and joy.
It makes you feel more than lucky,
blessed maybe, honored, humble,
to happen on a little squad of baby geese,
no more, I’d say, than a couple days old,
intently studying this brand new world
with all its colors and scents and motion.
I try to imagine seeing it through their eyes,
their instinct telling them what to eat,
remembering where to find it.
Little do they know, these little ones,
the magnificent adventures that await,
that they will one day mount the sky
on great wings. and travel with these
grasses far behind them to new lands.
It is enough on this fine afternoon
to be here, in the warm sun, studying
this green birthplace, and remembering.
Just when I begin to think she’s settled down
she tosses another surprise before me.
Day after day, she just goes on and on.
Today, for instance, it was dainty bluettes,
sprinkled in puddles across the forest’s floor.
All you can feel when you look at their faces
is happiness. That’s why she brings them.
It’s who she is. It’s what she does.
May there be harmony.
May there be peace.
May we laugh sometimes.
May we accept what is,
welcoming everything
as our teacher.
May we know the serenity
of kindness.
May we forgive.
May our hearts be filled
with quiet, flowing joy.
May we walk in harmony.
May we walk in peace.
If you walk in this woods, amidst these pines,
these elders, with a request, sincerely made,
for clarity and peace, and nothing more,
if you walk softly, listening to the breathing
of all these living things—these leaves,
this bark, the silent,darting birds—
tasting the fragrance of the warm spring air,
observing the play of light and shadow,
a certain knowing will seep into your mind,
and your heart will be filled with deep peace.
When I saw the tiny maple leaves, just emerged from the tip of a branch, I thought about watching one of those time lapse movies. You know, the ones where you see a whole day sweep by from sunrise to dusk in a mere minute or two.
I imagined a little maple seed, the kind that twirls to the ground on helicopter wings, settling into the soil, sprouting, enduring a winter, coming back taller and stronger each spring until one day, it stood before me, a proud little sapling, unfolding its bright new leaves. Soon it will produce helicopter seeds of its own, and the story will go on and on.
The thought reminded me of an exercise I learned once where you traveled back through the history of something to appreciate all that contributed to its presence in your life. If you were eating an apple, for instance, you could trace it back to the store where you bought it and think about all the people who were involved in operating the store. Someone ordered it; someone sold it to the store; someone unpacked it from its crate and set it out for display.
Before that, it traveled on a truck that came from a distributor who bought it from an orchard. The truck had a driver, who worked for a company that bought produce and delivered it to stores. And the truck traveled over roads that were imagined and engineered and built and maintained.
The apple was one of many dozens that came from a tree that thrived in an orchard, soaking in a summer’s sun and rain. And before that it was a blossom, tended by bees, growing on the tree that produced the seed from which it grew. When it ripened, someone picked it and placed it in the crate that was loaded onto the truck.
And now it was in your hand, and you would bite it and taste what how delicious it was and how crisp and juicy and sweet its flesh. And it would nurture you. You were the whole reason it came to be. You and the workers in the orchard, and the builders of crates and trucks and roads and grocery stores.
It’s a worthwhile exercise. It broadens your sense of the connectedness of things and leads you to appreciate the wonder of life’s endless unfolding. And in the end, it leads you to the big questions: How did it all come to be? Where did it come from? Why am I, a tiny life form on a small speck of planet in the midst of a giant and dazzling universe, capable of wondering why? And how am I so lucky to be holding this apple right in my very own hand?
Wishing you a week of sweet wonders, my friends.
Warmly,
Susan