Last week’s newsletter was about what makes us human—and what makes us crab-like. The idea came from an article I read called “Homo Crustaceous,” by paleontologist-futurist Michael Garfield.
Beyond exploring a cultural obsession with crabs throughout human history, Garfield makes a surprising case for our similarity to these intertidal scavengers with an exoskeleton:
Firstly, humans do live in something like an intertidal zone: the turbulence and inescapable betweenness of our lives as we move in and out of the ‘virtual’ world. And, secondly, we encase ourselves in exoskeletons more literally every day as we become increasingly supported and defined by our technologies.
If our technologies are leading us away from what it means to be human, how can we find our way back? What does it even mean to be human? Singer-songwriter Will Varley provides at least one answer in his new song, “Machines Will Never Learn to Make Mistakes Like Me“:
Part of being human is being imperfect. We might say that our mistakes and failures lead us into a future that’s more human than crab-like.
Some friends of ours, the Stiflers, have a wall calendar by artist Nikki McClure. Each month features a word and image McClure cut from a single sheet of black paper. August’s word is “dissolve.” With all the ways our digital technologies might be evolving us as we move into the future, McClure’s word choice makes me think we might do better dissolving back into nature. Maybe that’s an action we can take to become more human too.
Last week I put together two playlists that express these contrasting sentiments: 1) my crab mix – A Digital Evolve? and 2) my human mix – A Natural Dissolve. You can read the rest of the newsletter here and listen to the playlists below. I hope you enjoy!
The Great Wave off Kanagawa, by Katsushika Hokusai – Image via Open Culture
I like being in and around water. With its many lakes and rivers, my home state of Wisconsin provides ample opportunities to enjoy it. There aren’t any oceans, of course, but the expansive Lake Superior to the north and Lake Michigan to the east evoke the illusion of one. Standing on those shores, your gaze finds no land on the horizon, and the waters can swell into waves that are big enough to surf.
These deep waters conjure the unknown. One of my favorite lines from the Harry Potter books comes from Dumbledore, as he and Harry are crossing the dark waters of a sea cave to locate one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes:
There is nothing to be feared from a body, Harry, any more than there is anything to be feared from the darkness. It is the unknown we fear when we look upon death and darkness, nothing more.
The first thing you see in the famous image is the foreboding wave, suspended in midair and ready to crash. But a closer look reveals three fishing boats being tossed about on the tumultuous sea, along with a small Mount Fuji in the distance. The way in which the great wave overshadows Mount Fuji—a sacred symbol of Japanese resilience and strength—is significant. Hokusai intended it as a commentary on how Japan was becoming more open to western influences—a time of instability and uncertainty for the country that had firmly closed its doors to such influences for over two hundreds years. The sea that protects life in Japan also has the capacity to engulf it. The vivid “aliveness” of the wave itself is “the embodiment of Hokusai’s belief that Art has a life of its own—a life force.”
Certain things in life, like Art, have their own life force—things like Love and Grief. As much as we’ve advanced as humans, there’s still a lot that we don’t understand about these two related emotions—and about Grief, in particular. Grief remains as unexplored as the ocean, as chaotic as the waves crashing. It’s not until we’re plunged into its depths or tossed about by its waves that we truly come to know Grief.
In her book The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recounts the harrowing year following her husband’s sudden, unexpected death. She describes how Grief “comes in waves”:
Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be. … Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of ‘waves.’
Author Elizabeth Gilbert also compares Grief to a “wave”—or rather, a “tsunami”—while discussing the loss of her life’s partner in a TED interview. With raw insight, she explains how Grief is connected to Love through how we handle such waves when they hit:
I have learned that Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans, or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.
The only way that I can ‘handle’ Grief, then, is the same way that I ‘handle’ Love—by not ‘handling’ it. By bowing down before its power, in complete humility.
When Grief comes to visit me, it’s like being visited by a tsunami. I am given just enough warning to say, ‘Oh my god, this is happening RIGHT NOW,’ and then I drop to the floor on my knees and let it rock me. How do you survive the tsunami of Grief? By being willing to experience it, without resistance.
Both Didion and Gilbert have faced realities of loss that seem unimaginable to those who have not gone through them. But psychotherapist and grief advocate Megan Devine cautions that a key problem with how our culture approaches grief isn’t an inability to imagine that kind of pain, but a fear of doing so—we can imagine it, but we don’t want to. Rather than face such tremendous pain alongside those going through it, we turn away from it. According to Devine, this results in us failing to connect with those in grief. Pain is a reality of being human. To ignore that potential for ourselves—or our loved ones who are experiencing it—is to deny what it means to be fully human. And for those treading in their darkest waters, it only adds to their suffering.
Grief no more needs a solution than love needs a solution. We cannot ‘triumph’ over death, or loss, or grief. They are immovable elements of being alive. If we continue to come at them as though they are problems to be solved, we’ll never get solace or comfort for our deepest pain.
Instead of treating grief as a problem to be fixed, Devine proposes that we simply allow it to exist. The only way to handle grief’s waves is to let them wash over you. Educator Parker Palmer says that “the human soul doesn’t want to be advised or fixed or saved. It simply wants to be witnessed, exactly as it is.” By acknowledging and bearing witness to the pain of those in grief—by swimming in the dark and wavy waters alongside them—we help them know that things can be made better, even though they can’t be made right. There’s no turning back, no jumping forward, and no skipping around. The only way out is through—with a willingness to let the waves move you as they will—as you find a way to live this new reality that has met you.
Jellyfish made of recycled plastic water bottles at the
Monkey Bar
At the very beginning of 2025, I wrote a newsletter about letting go to welcome in. The Spanish put this idea into action beautifully during Las Fallas de Valencia. Artists create beautiful monuments called fallas in the main plaza of the city that serve as a commentary on current social issues. Then, on the final day of the festival, they set the fallas ablaze in an event called La Cremà (see pictures here)—a symbolic cleansing and renewal of society. I like the idea of letting something go to create space for something new.
Las Fallas will be in full swing soon. The festival takes place each year from the 1st to 19th of March in Valencia, Spain. You can check out this year’s festival map and explore the festival website to learn more about what makes this such a special event (also refer to Rosetta Stone’s guide and this article from Move to Traveling). The following video gives a good idea of the esthetic and emotion involved with Las Fallas.
We tend to welcome in the new year with so much hope for the future. As winter wears on in the colder parts of the world—and as administrations change—that hope can quickly diminish. February, after all, is the worst month of the year. It would seem to make sense, then, that Las Fallas takes place in the spring—a season of rebirth and renewal. Maybe there are some things that we’d all like to see burn and go away right about now.
In Grenada, recycling plastics is difficult. But there’s a group here that’s working hard to change that—they’ve organized a plastics drop-off that happens once a month. We save any plastic recyclables we accumulate throughout the month and when the next drop-off date arrives, we load them up and make the trip. The Monkey Bar also helps alleviate the plastics issue—they repurpose plastic bottles in many of their art installations (see the jellyfish featured above).
Instead of burning away the bad to make space for the good, I wonder if we might just remember the good we’ve forgotten—recycle it and bring it back. Can we recycle our hope once we’ve lost it?
Last Sunday, Angie and I hiked out to Hog Island. Right now, it’s the dry season in Grenada and our trek felt strangely similar to what we’d experience on a very nice autumn’s day in Wisconsin. The leaves are changing colors, ever so slightly—light yellows and browns—and some are even falling off their trees. The temperature has calmed down a bit and the sun hits you at just the right angle so as to create the golden, breezy feel of fall.
Trees were all around us and I was thinking about hope. Sarah Vos, of the Dead Horses, has a song called “Swinger in the Trees” (see full lyrics), that is based, in part, on a Robert Frost poem called “Birches” (see reference). The song ends like this:
All these strangers Passing by me But we choose not to see, Yeah we choose not to see (I wanna be) Oh, we choose not to see
There is always hope, There is always hope. There is always hope (I wanna be) A swinger in the trees
There is always hope, folks. Choose to see it. Recycle it and reuse it. And, watch Sarah Vos sing about it here:
Lynda Barry is a cartoonist and professor at UW-Madison who teaches a class called The Unthinkable Mind. In the class, Barry combines neuroscience, psychology, and drawing to help students build the skill of creativity and apply it to their life’s work. Last week I saw this Instagram post by Barry and it reminded me of the incredible link between art and science. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, widely considered to be the father of neuroscience, also understood this connection. Cajal’s work drew inspiration from both the sciences and the arts, and his drawings of the brain beautifully communicate its complexities.
I like how this work is both artistic and scientific. Referencing visuals and producing them ourselves has always helped us understand the world better. Branching in particular is helpful, I think in part, because it’s all around us. Its reproductions and reflections are seemingly endless, as Barry’s lesson plan highlights.
I’ve enjoyed watching Angie study medicine these past few months. To me, her notes look like works of art to and I’ll often ask her to send me pictures of them, like this one, which of course reveals some branching:
Angie’s notes
As we wrap up 2024, thinking about branching has me thinking a lot about the big decisions we make in life. Looking into our past, we might envision a fork in the road that was created in the moment of deciding—one path branching off to the left and another off to the right, each leading to a separate reality that was created by our choice.
Or maybe we can envision a separate reality that was created simply by circumstance, as is the case in the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, where Gwyneth Paltrow’s character experiences two alternate realities based on whether or not she successfully catches a subway train. Throughout the rest of the movie we see her life play out along these two separate paths.
The idea of alternate realities has always fascinated me. Even more fascinating is the theory suggesting they may actually be real. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics proposes that every possible outcome of every event creates a new universe or world that runs parallel to our own. Physicist Aaron O’Connell talks about the feasibility of this idea in his 2011 TED Talk.
Alternate realities have long been the subject of some of the best science fiction. If you love speculating about these branching realities as much as I do, here are some great stories to check out:
Ted Chiang has a short story entitled “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” from his book Exhalation, that looks at this idea. It’s somewhat of a redemption story in which characters use a device called a prism that allows them to communicate with versions of themselves from alternate realities—realities that stem from divergent past decisions the characters have made. You may already be familiar with Chiang’s work from the movie Arrival, which was based on his short story “Story of Your Life,” from Stories of Your Life and Others. It dawned on me that one of my family’s favorite holiday movies, It’s a Wonderful Life, also deals with alternate realities. Blake Crouch’s book Dark Matter (recently made into an Apple+ series) was first described to me as an “It’s a Wonderful Life” for the 21st century. And then, of course, there’s a wealth of amazing works by the Spanish-speaking world that dive into choice and the alternate realities it produces. Check out Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Garden of Forking Paths” (also see this TED Ed video on his mind-bending work) and the Spotify podcast Case 63 (based on the Chilean Caso 63).
