Let me show you something beautiful. Call it bunchgrass if you like.

The form of these  is a balance between all the forces acting upon them. Their spacing, for example, is a function of rain fall, slope pitch and root system extension. These are not so much at individual grass plants of great age but multiple instances of force and balance, all related to a central set of energy flow patterns. In effect, this is the world, deep in time and space, where time, space and identity are one. That that appears different from the ponderosa pine needles below, part of the same community …

… means only that together they make a more complete picture of the totality of presence in this place. Creation is a glimpse of unity, not of difference and not of a technique for generating difference so it can be removed. It is not in the head. It is not a game. Here, let me show you:

That’s a view looking Northwest into the Coldstream Valley from the north shore of the Commonage above Kalamalka Lake, if you like. It also shows a continuous grassland, in which one slope catches the sun and another catches the clouds. There’s a hidden dimension here. Here’s a clue:

The young ponderosa pine above, far more ancient than the grasses in the foreground, has hollow, grass-like needles. Look how it catches the wind that catches the lake. It is water, wind and grass in one. And just look up onto Turtle Point, right in the sun’s path:

The ponderosas and Douglas firs are vanishing into the sun, just as the lake is, and the trees are as broken up into waves as the waves themselves. It would be easy to say these are just illusions given by the inadequacy of cameras and the human eye, but that would be to miss the creativity in the scene: it is the biological bias of human perception and cognition that creates the narrative of connection that binds the scene together. That is the same balance that the form of the grass expresses, or the differences in sun capture in the interlinked slopes below.

Grassland Cob

That moment is  the complex living organism called Earth. We (and I include deer, porcupines, bunchgrass, pines and other people in this) are not part of this organism. We are this organism. Any creativity that does not come from such unity comes from the stripping away of self-imposed barriers to reveal it. The unity was already there.

The earth — the unity — does the stripping away, through unity. These are bodily responses. Contemporary science, art and religion, which were created out of an old unity of thought and to express an identical individualizing impulse can not speak of this response. It is what we bring to art. In that space, there is no creativity, because it is everywhere. Tomorrow I will talk about the possibility of staying there.