The Territory of Life
Life is a mysterious event of complex and present becoming, a story that unravels every moment in every place.
Life is a mysterious event of complex and present becoming, a story that unravels every moment in every place. Life is a wild territory of relationships between what was and what will be.
The occurrence of modernity encapsulates us in a mechanistic view and perception of things, events, and reality. This mechanistic view assumes that there is causal linearity in all the processes, that the ultimate purpose is to serve the human being, and that fixing something is enough to fix “the part” that is broken.
This simplistic and tragic perception isolates us from the dialogue of life.
In its mechanical metaphor, the simplification of nature as a machine automatically strips it of its sovereignty, creative capacity, and highly complex becoming. Many contexts are part of life, place, or ecosystem —always in intense and mysterious dialogue. And not all dialogues are made to be heard, much less to be quantified, controlled, or categorized.
The richness of each moment is found precisely in this network of systemic exchanges that involves us, from the air we breathe to the water we drink to each food that nourishes us.
In this intrinsic tangle of life, the “parts” are never separable because they never exist outside the web of life despite their uniqueness and peculiar purpose. Everything is within, in deep immanence, in this valuable biosphere that surrounds us. We submerge, surrendering to these sacred dynamic connections that make up everything, that respond to everything — the core of co-creation.
In our mechanistic mind, we confuse complexity with complication -our dictionaries say they are synonyms-. The technological advent of industrial machines, which brings us so much production and comfort, comes from a need to tidy up reality and make it easier to control and bend it to our human needs. Now, without taking away the value of technical intrepidity, we mustn’t continue to confuse technology with life itself nor surrender our survival to it. Technology will not save the world —and, yes, the world needs to be “saved,” or rather, we must rescue ourselves from our own ignorance.
Since the primaeval times of fire management, technology has undoubtedly brought new possibilities. Still, it can also mutilate the wild, amputating the multiple enigmas that conceive us in its current use.
The human being’s hierarchy as the pinnacle of evolution (as the centre of creation to which everything else exists only to serve him) has helped base and excuse the sinister, destructive narrative that sustains so much of the invisible violence upon which our daily comfort is built. When power is represented by progress and property, capital and value emphasize that a forest is only precious cut down than in millennial growth and regeneration. We start from invisible and submerged beliefs of superiority that make any humble and sincere dialogue impossible. Or any deep regeneration.
We set out to plunder life to store up value because we believe we do not intrinsically possess it. We have to prove ourselves, over and over again. We have to fit to numb the fear. We exchange the immanent value of life for the quantification and quotation of time or skills. We silence the soul. We forget who we are.
The territory of life is wild, unpredictable, abundant, and spontaneous. It is not as tidy as we would like, but full of vitality, intensity, and plurality. It is neither ours nor controllable. The territory of life is the place of the soul, not scientifically reproducible in a controlled environment, but a space-time of stories full of meanings.
This visceral web of life conspires in our favour* if we allow it to. We don’t have to go to Mars to seek possibilities or greater (ever greater) “achievements” and “discoveries.” We just have to be here listening. In presence bound to the life we are, to the territory that sustains us every moment of our lives.
To conspire in our favour does not mean to have a life that is always happy and joyful, with no personal flaws or tragedies, where all our wishes and expectations are forever fulfilled. When life conspires in our favor, it opens our hearts to what is, despite fear and cultural limitations. It allows us to feel again that we are alive, responsible, and present.
