Here’s the best way to preserve nature. Fence off your vineyard, so the deer have to go around, then dig out a slope far too steep, line it with rocks, and seed the near-vertical slope with wild rye, because that “stabilizes slopes.” Soon the deer will come and rototill it all up.

There appears to be a belief that nature is inert and that it is not the creation of animals other than ourselves. Nature is erosion. This principle, the principle of disruption, is essential for life. In fact, we could throw away the term “nature” and talk about disruption instead, including our own (the vineyard, the road, the rocks, the fence, the gas tank, and so on.) The migrating robin…

… the January (way too early) pussy willow…

… the fallen leaves that disrupt the sun …

… the dynamited (and rusting) cliff…

If this were an open pit mine, this would not be allowed, but when it is outside of the narrative it is invisible.

… the footsteps that lift mud up into the snow…

… the siya? bush growing from a split rock…

…the orchard falling over…

… beautiful landscaping itself…

These are all disruptions. Mathematicians and physicists speak of the principle of entropy, of how systems lose energy, decay, flatten out and eventually lose the ability to do anything at all. I think that is a cultural understanding. Disruption would be a better principle, as it includes both states of increasing energy and opportunity and ones of decreasing energy and opportunity. If we used it as a term, we’d be able to work out terms for the difference, but with “entropy”, no, it has already been determined on a scale of laziness. (Surprisingly, WordPress’s auto-correct algorithms may have bot it right. They replaced “Disruption” with “Distrucktion” back there, and when I tried to type it in again to show you here, they messed with me again and printed “Distraction.” In that, they got it right.) Let’s take their entropic hint and keep our eye on the main prize here: disruption.

Zones of change. Moments of breakage and new opportunities, and even wonder. Something we’ve never seen before.

The entropic society is enamoured with the notion of creativity, as its opposing force. I don’t think that’s quite it.

We look for boundaries to enter. We enter them. That’s more.