Musings about Entanglement

 

Musings about Entanglement

Thinking about entanglement takes me back to one of my happiest memories, forward to my many distressing thoughts about our troubled future, and then, surprisingly, another important step further. I have been on a truly amazing journey just by exploring this one simple word. I hope you will find it as fascinating and rewarding as I have.

First – a step back into the past.

It is 1986, and I am travelling up the rugged west coast of Oregon in the United States with my son Craig, then 10, and my daughter Janet, then 5. It is a grey, windy, wet day. We reluctantly put on our rain gear and Wellingtons to go wandering on a rocky, log-littered beach. Behind a pile of big logs, we find a real treasure – a large knotted and twisted tangle of old, wet, ocean- worn rope. Our mood suddenly changes, and the day feels brighter. We sit for the next couple of hours slowly untangling the rope. Sometimes we struggle just to figure out which part to start with – and sometimes, suddenly, a long length comes free. The rope’s entanglement has given us the simple joys of being together and working towards a common goal.

Our shared joy in untangling of a rope only barely touches the surface of the role entanglement has in all our lives. Everything that keeps our society going, even just getting you a carrot for your lunch, involves the efforts and energies of most of humanity, and the support of all of the natural world. For example, you can trace the supply chains that bring the carrot to you: the farmer and her family, their seed supplier, the manufacturers of their machinery, the miners, and engineers who built the machinery and so on, and on …. In this way, you quickly discover that everything we have requires an amazing entangled string of inputs which involves virtually everyone on earth when you follow the many branches of the string to their ends. And these branches also reach into all of nature, as our existence on earth is part of the complex web of all of life, not just human life. Thus it is the entanglement of our lives that makes our lives, and the lives of all other creatures possible. We need each other.

However, as the world has become much more interconnected and complex, our entanglement is increasingly revealing its sinister side. Our demand for resources is rapidly increasing with the increase in both the human population and the greed of many for more and more goods. At the same time, environmental degradation and destruction from careless use of these resources means that we have to increasingly compete for everything we need and want. This competition creating an almost endless list of problems such as economic collapse, climate change, and biodiversity loss. These complex, interacting disasters threaten our very survival, and the survival of all other species on our planet.

All these problems share one common factor: they result because our competing needs are entangled together. We all have a myriad of differing viewpoints and approaches to solving these problems, and when resources become scarce, cooperation changes to greed-fueled competition.

However, when we focus only on the increasing carnage resulting from the physical aspects of our entanglement, and the resulting misery that it creates , we are completely forgetting an even more important aspect of our entanglement together.

We, and all the other creatures on this earth are spiritual creatures. As such, we are all entangled at a deeper level than our mere physical needs. You might call this entanglement our connection with our true selves, or the god within, or the natural world. These connections, as mysterious as they are, include everything that makes life worth living. This includes friendship, our connections with nature, creativity, our curiosity, and our love of beauty, joy, and laughter.

My increasing awareness of our entanglement with each other, and with the whole of nature, as an inner force that enriches my life has helped me find the strength to face what I see as our very uncertain future. I can still find joy by focusing on the smaller, near-by things in life, rather than the seemingly hopeless web of conflicts, disagreements, and fears that entangle us all. From this clearer and more peaceful viewpoint, I can discover the little steps that I can take to enrich my life, and the lives of those around me. 

This focus on what it truly important to me each day helps me to be grateful to be part of the unfolding dramas of our entangled world, without the need to try to untangle it all.

Our entanglement is truly a gift for us all to celebrate – I hope you will join me in this celebration!!