PART I

by Hugh M. Lewis

Man conforms to the earth;

The earth conforms to the sky;

The sky conforms to the way;

The Way conforms to its own nature.

(Lao Tzu--Tao Te Ching)

The curvature of time and space creates centers and margins of being and nonbeing. The roundnesses of the universe creates receding horizons of beginning and ending. The turning of great circles through the heavens creates endless changes in the ways of things in the universe. The repetitions of the many seasons and cycles are but the patterned rhythm of nature's changing flow--like so many rain drops that soon swell the streams and rivers.

We are captured within these rhythms, and its changing flows through us. Linear time and Euclidean space have an origin in space and time but lack an immediate presence of a constant center. We naturally experience space and time as curved and hyperbolic, but we have unlearned how to envision the roundness of our world by the conventions of linearity and angularity that we have been instructed and conditioned to use from the earliest age. A child's first patterned recognition is of a round shape. A child's first toy is a square block. We have come to project our collective conventions of superficial flatness, perfect straightness and a distorting evenness upon our round realities. Such pre-perception makes it difficult for us to notice that nothing in the world really moves in a straight line, or that nothing ever happens exactly as we would have predicted it.

It is strange that we are perhaps the roundest of Nature's creatures and yet we are the only one's to want to straighten our world out. Preconceptions of flatness and straightness made it difficult for early European explorers and their map makers to conceptualize the world as a self-centered, complete globe, or to understand the illusion of an ever receding horizon without eventually reaching the edge as a consequence of the roundness of our world. Even recent maps are still made containing a distorting degree of flatness and evenness of our world.

Such illusions of linearity led to a search for absolute centers, original beginnings and final ends, and the further the distance from our immediate locations, the more difficult it was not to experience the center as a sense of projected self in time and space--the Civilization of the Sun as the center of diffusion of World Civilization, the Earth as the Center of the Solar System and the Astrologer's Cosmos. God is still portrayed as a bearded white European, Western Europe still lies at the center of many world maps, and World History still begins with the prehistoric origins of the Indo-Europeans, and traces the rise of civilization to the spread of a Euro-centric Civilization.

With such preconceptions in the background of our shared knowledge, we cannot bear the paradoxes of infinity and eternity, of multiple simultaneous centers or multiple parallel universes, of curve space-time or universal relativity, or of simultaneous being and nonbeing in both centers and margins, or of balanced multiple points of dynamic equilibrium. Even physicists today, dealing with all the space-time distortions of the Universe, still find the concepts of infinity and eternity of the Universe difficult to deal with in their cosmologies--even though we still have not yet found the apparent center or real margin of the known universe.

Our conception and experience of the natural curvature and roundness of reality depend upon our ability to perceive and recognize the qualities and quantities of change in our world. Recurring or reversible changes allow us to understand the cycles and circles that reality turns in. We find it in the seasons of the weather, of the moon, of birth, growth, maturity, aging and death of all life forms, or in the movement of water around the earth or of the earth's crust itself in continuous motion and erosion. In the larger moire of cycles and circles within greater cycles and circles, and of the continuous changing along different scales of being, we recognize the interrelationships and the context of our world in which everything is related to everything else. Even the hypothesized Big Bang or the many Black Holes of the physical universe must be part of a grand cyclical event with multiple centers of movement and beginning, with contraction following expansion following contraction.

The whole of reality is without a permanent stability or an overall linearity. Each cycle, each circle, each season is slowly evolving and continuously changing along multiple scales of space and time.

This changing confronts us with the illusion of a one-way, singular linear causality, though we are in fact observing the distorted consequences of distant and remotely curving causality and the multitude of overlapping and intersections of different cycles of circles. We see in straightness and apparent order an anagraphic distortion of the real twisting of the space-time fabric of real events.

We must unlearn how to experience again our many pathways through the recurring seasons as the natural curvature of our intuitive perception and feeling and the innate hyperbolic roundness of our peripheral vision. We must learn to see the patterns and processes of natural chaos, to find sense in the nonsense of entropy and to understand the paradoxes of infinity and eternity and total contextuality. If this is irrational at one human level of order, it is an aesthetic delight in diversity and natural disorder at a more basic and natural level of experience. If we look closely, what we believe to be conceptually well ordered turns out to lead to perceptual chaos and abandonment, while what apparently begins as perceptual chaos eventual leads to a grand pattern and order.

We need to rethink our science and rationality in order to be able to account for and better deal with the apparent chaos of the curvature and roundness of the world. We need broader, more flexible definitions of what is genuinely rational and real and fitting to our real experience of the natural order, and theories about what is actually scientific about our senses.

Our sense of development follows a natural curve of increase following and leading to inexorable decrease and decline. Our sense of History, of time, of our own being, must follow also ever-fluctuating cycles and circles. There is a sense of birth, growth, maturity, decline and demise, and then a new beginning somewhere else, that we have not yet adequately explained.

Learning to follow the seasonal pathways of the Way, we are also learning to lead the Way along our many returning paths.

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. (Black Elk)

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ROUNDNESS

Roundness is a way of being in time and space. The feel of perception, the way of experience, the texture of reality, it is the fabric composing the tapestry of life.

Earth's designs, its diverse multitude of many kinds of elements, follow the principle of roundness, coordinating its natural rhythms of its many parts, composing the grand mosaic of its web of life called nature.

Things move in round ways. Changes happen in curved directions. Earth's forces, its lines and rays, curve always round its never-ending horizon. We can only touch one point of its round surface at any single moment in time

The principle of roundness is found in a person's life, in the rhythms of one's body and soul, in the calendrical cycles of living, in one's family, and in one's own stages of life. It follows our ways of living and leads it us upon our way in Life

Roundness connects us to the entire earth. It gives us wholeness and our natural identity. It gives consistency to our reality and is the ground of meaning beneath our feet. It gives unity to diversity and reason to adversity. It lies along our entire path through life. All we must do is to follow it until its end.

GRAND WHEEL OF TURNING

Circles within circles

Within ever greater circles

The gears and cogs of the Universe

Grinding slowly around and around

The Grand wheel of turning

Changing everything

Crossing our cycles of being

Making of us all

But hapless children of fortune and fate

Following us upon our wake

And leading us to our destinies

Always just ahead, and always right behind

Barely within our touch

There is nothing that begins or ends

That is not also ending and beginning

Turing our days into night

And our nights into day

Always upon the brink of our horizon

Governing the waking and waning of our moons

And rotating the constellations across our skies

Regulating the flow of the tides

And shifting the currents and directions of the winds

By it's turning

We are born, grow up

Become old and then finally die

States and empires rise and fall

Along its path

Whole civilizations flourish and then vanish

In the endless sequence of its revolutions

To be replaced by other peoples

Species emerge, evolve

And finally become extinct.

Our sun is its brazen shield

Blazing in a steady state

The symbol of all life

It continues to turn

With the passing of the seasons

Its grand wheel touches our ground

At the very moment our feet tread the earth

Its path is unstoppable by petty people

Who would play god with the Universe

EARTH RHYTHMS

Earth Rhythms

Natural rhymes

Crickets chirping

Children crying

Water splashing

Rain falling

Leaves rustling

Winds howling

Getting back in touch

With primordial motions

And primitive devotions

Seasons ebbing and flowing

Clouds forming and blowing

The clash of thunder and lightening

Tides falling and rising

Fish biting

Waves rolling and breaking

Birds mating

Building nests in trees

Feeding babies

Ceaselessly calling

Salmon running up rivers and streams

Spawning and dying

Fowl flying northward then returning

Southward

Turtles returning from across the vast seas

To lay eggs on the same sandy beaches

From which they emerged

Crabs marching across the ocean floor

In single file columns

Caterpillars metamorphizing into Butterflies

Reptiles that warm in the sun

Cooling in the shade

Snakes shedding skins

Tadpoles turning to frogs

Human beings who put flowers on graves

And hold family reunions

The earth that pirouettes through space

Steadily and gracefully

About its endless axis

The moon, its partner

Swinging smoothly round and round

In their cosmic dance about the sun

Galaxies that twirl and whirl

About the vast empty voids

Of infinite space

ROUND EARTH

The earth is round

It has no edges

It circles round the sun

And spins upon its axis

Without beginning

Or ending

The horizon

Receding forever

The sun never setting

But that it is also rising

Half a world away

There is no path

That does not eventually lead

Back to where it began

There is no way

That can be taken

That does not turn round

Sooner or later

Everything connects

To everything else

However remotely

Nothing exists alone

Isolated upon the earth

Understanding the earth

Begins and ends

In the roundness

Of its days and of its seasons

Of its moons

And of the many spheres

Surrounding it

And the many ways

Encircling it

WAVES

Waves forming somewhere out at sea

Rolling in upon the shore

And breaking over me

Turning into broiling frothy foam

Diminishing to a gentle film of water

Flattening over the smooth sand

The edge of the vast sea

Continuous and undulating

Wave upon wave comes crashing in

A never ending pounding

Curling in a long low roar

Like a strong forceful arm

Of some mysterious underwater sculptor

Shaping the rocks

In beautiful round and jagged designs

Carving away the cliffs

In jagged and contoured relief

And gently smoothing over the sand

In the soft palm of your hand

I walk your entire length

Until my legs grow weary

And my feet are sore

And yet you do not end

I follow the shifting undulations

Of sand and shoreline

And yet find no edge

I climb the many cliffs

And squint into the blinding sun

Seeing far-off sails

Sitting upon the surf

But no other shore

Of any distant land

Ocean waves

Where do you begin?

Coming halfway around the world

To finally come unrolling softly upon this beach

Gently melting the sand

Beneath my hard feet

WAVES OF STILLNESS

Upon the end of a small winding trail

That crosses the same stream of trickling water

Again and again

A small pond of water rests

As still as can be

The surface like glass

Reflecting all the trees,

The blue sky and clouds

The sun glinting brightly

On its silvery green surface

Over on the opposite shore

A small beaver mound

Made of sticks and mud

The pond itself created

By the beaver dam

Running long and low across its width

The trees all around

Hewn and toppled by the industrious fellow

Now no where in sight

I sit to wait for him to appear

And admire the stillness of the place

No birds sing or fly

Only a few insects buzz about

A fish comes gently to touch the top

And sends out concentric rings of waves

That slowly spread out across the surface

Until they bounce from all the sides

And suddenly shatter into an exploding maze

Slowly the ripples subside back down into the stillness

And then a small water spider scoots across the water

Sending out smaller ripples of waves

Not reaching the middle of the pond

Then a small Mallard wobbles out of some grass

Followed by a single file line of her offspring

She enters the water like a feathered tugboat

Towing a string of smaller boats

As each cuts the water

They send out v-patterns of ripples

Slowly reaching across the pond

As the ducks reach the other side

They climb ashore and waddle into a thicket

And the ripples of the pond

Soon slowly cease

And the pond becomes still once again

I pick up a smooth stone from the bank

And throw it out in to the middle

It goes "k-plunk" with a small splash

And rapidly sinks to the bottom

Sending out a nice bold concentric pattern of waves

Across the entire surface of the pond

Breaking apart and then finally subsiding

Back into the stillness

I pick up another smooth, flat stone

And send it side-arm skipping across

One, two, three sets of concentric rings

Until it sinks upon its fourth strike into the water

The ripples all radiate outwardly

Until they interfere with one another

And quickly break apart

Soon subsiding back to the stillness of the water

As if its surface had never been touched

I wait a little longer for Mr. Beaver

But never ever shows

Or breaks the tranquil stillness

Of this place

WIND

The wind comes in all directions

Never stopping, sometimes slowing

Always wandering from one place to the next

It blows through the trees of the forest

Bending them over and making leaves rustle

And fall whirling to the ground

Always cooling, ever unsettling

Taking the moisture from everything

It whistles between the crannies of mountain crags

And whispers mysteriously around all the narrow window sills

Telling of the ancient places it has been

Of the great oceans that it has crossed

Of the clouds it's carried along

The sands it has blown across the vast desert spaces

Of the tempests, typhoons and tornadoes

It has in its fury attended

Like so many ceremonies

Of some ethereal state

How many spirits ride within you

How many souls have you stolen away?

That now secretively calls out

From your immense spaces

What forces you harbor

Bending everything

By all things unbending

What patience

To slowly carve away

Great mountains of stone

To slowly bury over

Great cities in your wake

You secretly harbor eternity itself

In some safely hidden cave

From whence you came

A cave of absolute stillness

Where time it self never intrudes

Somewhere deep beneath the earth

RECYCLING

Mostly water, and a few pounds of chalk

A few trace elements

And a mind

That can't be turned off

Not much to give back

To the earth

At the end of one's days

For all that we take

Along our way

But the Earth asks for little

For it has enough

And still takes a lot

Soon a billion bodies

To be buried beneath the ground

To be recycled

Food for worms

That burrow through the soil

Nutrients for plants

Whose roots reach deep enough

Perhaps a nice young oak, or a tall pepper tree

Plenty of bacteria

To mulch us back to dark rich soil

We've always returned to the soil

And mixed the with the decay of all life

This handful of smelly dirt

It contains our entire history

And consumes our whole heritage

Perhaps this handful is my father,

And this, my grandfather

But this loam grows the plants

That feed the grazing animals

And the birds and insects

Fed upon by yet other animals

Some we in turn shall eat

And eat in turn we must

Or else return too soon to the place

From which we've all come

And so it goes on

This recycling of the earth

And so it's gone on

Time immemorial

We are but one spoke

Of a giant spinning wheel

Blowing with the winds

From the heavens rising

Turning with the currents

Of the ever flowing water

This is the way

Of the earth

Beneath our feet

STONE HENGE

Monumental megaliths

Stone giants

Standing in a circle

Celebrating an ancient rite

In solemn silence

In sublime stillness

Rough-hewn

By the hands of unknown masons

Stillness shrouded in mystery

Silence hidden in secrecy

Your weather worn faces

Your withered old postures

Your mighty arms fallen

Paying homage

To the many moons

The perennial passages

Of the great span of seasons

Perhaps sacrificial altars

Of the vernal equinox and summer solstice

An ancient calendar

Predicting the spring planting

And the first frosts of fall

Predicting perhaps

An eclipse or two

Heavy stones

Hinges of the cosmos

That pivots about your axis

Nature's fulcrum

Sacred shrines

Of the earth's fecundity

Center of balance

For earth's being

SQUARENESS

Conceived in a square bed

Born into a square crib

A life spent sleeping

On square mattresses

On spring boxes

Inside of square walls

Of square rooms

Of square houses

Sitting on square blocks

Taking square vehicles

To work in square spaces

Of square cubicles

Of square buildings

Doing business

Fair and square

At the down town

Market square

Making sure

Things are squared away

And

Finally

Buried

In square coffins

In square holes

With small square marble markers

With epitaphs in square letters

We live our lies

Bound by squares

Trying to figure out

How to cut corners

And round out

Hard edges

STRAIGHTNESS

Straight arrow

Between two points

The shortest span

Between two times

Crisscrossing in every direction

Planes of perfect flatness

World-views of perfect proportion

And absolute perspective

A life of hard edges

And sharper angles

Straightness that does not bend

That cannot turn

But only breaks

NATURE'S WEB

A lone widow

On a small island

Nature spins her common yarn

With the spinning wheels f time

The spindle whorl never stopping

Spinning but never slowing

Twisting and turning the golden threads

All interlaced with silver fibers

From her own gray woolen hair

The golden threads she braids into magic rope

Without an end

That she steadily coils about her feet

In unending spirals falling

Into a single bottomless pot of clay

Made from the mud

From the bottom

Of her still lake

This vessel she planted in a round hole

Deep into the earth

Opening like a dark mouth

Of a deep wishing well

From this magic golden rope

Grow all the many brown fibers

That she weaves into a big round basket with her other arms

It's rim as wide as the most distant horizon

A bountiful cornucopia every year she fills

With fresh leaves and fruits of trees and many kinds of grain

This big basket she uses to hold all her balls and skeins of yarn

That she has spun from the finest gold and silver threads of

Silk, cotton, flax and other fibers

That she then weaves upon her wooden loom of life

Its ends and beams and legs

Split and chinked with great age

Weathered by the passing of many seasons

Spent in ceaseless spinning

Her many other arms deftly moving the shuttle

Back and forth in unending devotion

With the spirit of a garden spider

Her woof is the wandering wind

From whence comes the blowing breath

The weft is the meandering water

From whither pulse the currents of blood

Her treadle pumping rhythmically

Slowly grows her mysterious cloth

Unfolding out in all directions

A fine fabric without seam or edge

Its outer side catches the light of the sun

Casting it off in a rainbow of colors

Its other side is never touched by light

Absorbing all in the dark shadow

Of its endless night

Its mesh is sometimes too fine

To be seen by the eye

Sometimes so coarse, as to pass unnoticed

The web of its weave casts out to the furthest horizon

Thrown to the limits of her encompassing reach

Catching up bits of dust and clods of dirt

Pieces of stone and grains of sand

Like so many small fish brought in from the sea

And with this she weaves a wonderful tapestry

That tells the entire tale

Of her home, the earth

And of all the living creatures

Her mystical little children

Who walk and run down her trails

Who play inside the web of mythical tales

Growing old with the passing of her many stories

Turning gray like tarnished silver

Finally falling fast asleep

Within the many folds

Of her fine warm cloth

To be unwoven back into her big brown basket

And then in time to be spun again

A little later on in her long unending story

Like a spider

Nature weaves her web

Telling a tale in a tapestry

Entangling everything imaginable

In its silver and golden threads

EARTH BEING

Dwelling in the deepness

Of the still lake

Dwelling on lonely mountain tops

In the cool shadows of big rocks

And under the shade of old trees

Hidden deep within the forest

Lurking in dark caves and crevices

Dwelling in those forgotten places

Well away from the beaten path

We look but do not find it

Hiding in the shadows of our field

We hear something but do not pay heed

To what is whispering in the blowing wind

We sense it lurking all about but take no notice

As it stalks in the wake of our presence

We search for it but cannot find it

As it visits the many places of our absence

Always just one step ahead of us

And just one step behind

It taunts and teases without touching us

It dwells always all around us

In every nook and cranny of our world

But whichever way we turn

It is no longer there to find

Patiently we must wait for it

For years on end

For life-times

For ages

In motionless, silent meditation

Not flinching a muscle, not moving an eye

Without giving it the slightest attention

Cautiously it will creep up to us

From the corner of our eye

Never can we turn our head toward it

Or else it will be frightened away

It is a wild creature

And few people have its spirit tamed

Enough to be comfortable in their presence

And never enough to directly look upon it

Or to try to touch it with their fingers

Sometimes we startle it inadvertently

Catching it off guard

But it quickly stalks away again

Before we can even bat an eye

Earth being is disappearing

It is vanishing before our eyes

We are filling its resting-places

With asphalt and concrete

It is running out of hiding places

And its dwelling space is quickly diminishing

It is becoming like a frightened creature

Evading the very edges of our existence

Receding from the margins of our experience

Estranged from our old world

Some say it is a big hairy ape-like creature

Others that it is a dragon with a dogs head and a cat's tail

Others claim it's a small elf or only a fairy

Anthropologists search for our lost tribes

Bone collectors hunt for its missing links

It might be a big bear, or even a were wolf

Or just a whale or just a nocturnal raccoon

We think we'll find it in every cave we explore

Those who've claimed to have seen it

Say it looks surprisingly familiar

And still others think it's just a lost and lonely old man

Reared perhaps by wolves

Whoever or whatever it was or may be

For time immemorial

It has haunted our imagination and hunted our being

It calls to our most primordial roots

While in the forest

And waits for us to answer

While we are left only to wonder

In silent amazement

What it really is

EARTH REINCARNATION

Somewhere across the vast expanses

Of our empty universe

Another small planet is just beginning

Very similar in the way our earth began

It may be a watery or fiery planet

The optimum distance from its average-sized sun

For life to soon start forming

In ways very similar to the way our own formed

And its life will then begin evolving

In directions of its own

Just like our own once did

And perhaps even one day

Another kind of human

Will begin walking and talking upon this land

Of this distant and lonely planet

An up-right, two legged creature

With agile hands and nimble fingers

With a quick eye, an intelligent face

With a nose, two ears, a chin and some teeth

Perhaps this alien being

Will be very similar to our selves

But also very different

In the great Wheel of Being

The earth cannot die

Without being somewhere reborn

In a different time and place

With a different sense of History

Ours has been but one instance

Of many lifetimes of an earth