My first voyage at sea lies just ahead of me. We sail out tomorrow from the El Salvadoran coast straight across to Costa Rica. For four days now we’ve been readying the boat, and relaxing, waiting for the winds to settle a bit off the coast of Nicaragua. The other day I ran to the Pacific Ocean from our mooring on the Jaltepeque Estuary——this was my first time seeing the Pacific since being on the Oregon coast back in August of last year. My whole trip so far has been through the central highlands and along the Caribbean coast of Latin America, never venturing far enough west to greet her. And so coming back to the Pacific again felt like the turning over of some sort of psychic calendar, a return of sorts and yet unfamiliar, for here the water is warm and the beach opens up to the south. The path of the sun is more or less directly overhead the coastline.

Growing up in Chicago, I didn’t see the ocean for my first time until I was 14 years old, since all three coasts (the Gulf, the Atlantic, and the Pacific) are quite a journey from the continent’s interior. It’s therefore strange to be funneling down the isthmus of Central America, where a bus ride of only about 10 hours can take one from the Caribbean coast of Honduras to the Pacific coast of El Salvador——a distance that will only continue to shrink as I head further south.

Once my short little run had brought me to the beach, after swimming for a bit I sat down to pray, or meditate——the meanings of those two acts have been converging for me as of late——with a warm green sea in front of me to the south, and to my north the enigmatic Volcán San Vicente lofting up out of the haze of burning fields of sugarcane (which once burnt down to the stalk, men will labor to harvest under the oppressive Salvadoran heat for US $7.50 a day). And how cruel the random fates life deals out to the men and women it brings into this world: their burning fields and sweat-soaked brows making mystical my leisurely gaze of San Vicente’s high, rocky flanks.

I burst into tears, clearly a release that had been waiting to come until I was alone again in nature——a circumstance that has been surprisingly rare for me on this trip. The afternoon sun beat down on my skin. This is probably the tannest I’ve ever been, having skipped my first winter. I listened to the ocean with eyes closed for a while——could sense Vicente silently posturing upwards at my back. For some reason, behind closed eyes, I saw manta rays gliding through rich plankton seas, sieving the loaded water. I thought about how if evolution were to begin again from scratch on Earth, it seems almost certain that plankton (or something functionally identical) would again be selected from out the random chemical fervor, rising above the the less-effective alternative patterns of arrangement to become “locked-in” for another couple billion years of breathing oxygen into the world’s oceans. That niche of suspended oceanic photosynthesis seems destined to be filled time and time again. To imagine life trying to begin again without plankton in the picture seems akin to attempting to make a triangle out of just two sides. And of course, other planktonic organisms would arise to consume the photosynthesizers. It therefore seems almost preordained that eventually something like manta rays would arise to consume the whole proteinaceous mess, and on and on. Is it the manta ray itself that I love so dearly, or the seeming will of the world that would call such a pattern forth, time and time again?

Eventually I became struck with the thought that what I love most is not in fact the individual organic creations this world has produced, but rather the fact that these things were (and always will be) willed into creation by the simple existence of natural law——what I truly love is not the life that exists but that life exists——that life is simply what happens when what we’ve come to call “laws” are left to their own devices. These laws are not themselves perceptible, but their impact is clearly inscribed across the forms of the empirical world. They don’t exist in themselves perhaps, but reveal themselves like the hands of an invisible sculptor through their works alone.

Is a love for natural law a love of illusion? a love of pure concept removed from empirical nature? I think not——I have to think not. To me these laws are better seen as the essence of nature rather than simply some conceptual model that science has produced to try and explain why nature appears the way it does. In the midst of my more sacred moments of deep contemplation in nature, when concepts evaporate and I fail to see boundaries between individual organisms any longer, when trees and soil and air and birds all blend into one organic flux (these being the favorite moments I’ve ever held) it is this natural essence I feel I am still in contact with, albeit in a highly non-conceptual way. In these moments this essence doesn’t feel like a concept that still remains to be dropped; it feels like a vision of reality unencumbered by thought. The essence of the life force: not alive nor dead but demanded by circumstance, demanded by the initial architecture of existence (i.e., laws or a single reducible law)——demanded by some unseen force and obliged by all of life in its myriad forms. Perhaps this world’s empirical forms (both biotic and abiotic) are like the sounds that this universe calls forth, with natural law being the unseen speaker. I think it is the speaker with whom I’ve always been so enamored, but it is the sounds she has spoken that allow us to interpolate inwards to the core essence of all things and see her, somewhere beneath all form, murmuring since this world’s dawn. 

Whether or not the concept of the Big Bang some day falls from scientific favor, I think it’s best if we recognize the speaker in this initial moment, erupting into existence from a lack thereof, or from some unrecognizable “before.” This was her first word, and she spoke it into the deaf and blind early universe, long before organs arose to witness her. At this early point she spoke for herself alone, but the entire course of cosmic evolution is that message unwinding into higher and higher empirical forms. And though the complexity increases on the surface, the simplicity of the speaker’s voice, of natural law, is constant. Though all the life that has since responded to that call is awesome, we must not get lost in the light show, for she is always there beneath it all, like the inverse of mind: non-conceptual, unconscious, eternal, timeless. She is deeper than verbs and nouns, but for our minds perhaps saying that she wills matter into form is the closest we can come to knowing her. Love her if you can, try and know her if you desire, but understand that we are but her myriad adornments, selected for down the ages through birth—copulation—death. An answer to her initial call, but not the answer. A pulse of wind given life as it rustles through the pines, gone again on the other side.

I’ve lost my clarity, my presence. A million images flicker across the mind’s eye, trying to recreate the glory of the universe in a moment of emotional splendor, awe, terror, sublimity. To really know her, as I think I’ve said elsewhere on this blog, one must drop the images. The thoughts are synonymous with this world’s empirical forms——beautiful but illusory, she lies deeper than this all. To know her, the thoughts must drop off, so that the essence can come to light, in a muted way compared to its true glory——a true glory mind’s can only grasp at. But the grasping is worth the strain.