Foggy Waters

I am depleted. I need to escape the constant drone of the city where my senses no longer recognize the pervasive audible buzz of noise. A walk in Elora usually helps me clear my head.

I park near the bridge and look down over the Gorge. The scene evokes an intuitive message that I understand from experience, knowledge and reason. It reminds me of a tapestry by Ghazi Ahmet, depicting members of an orchestra listening to each other's contributions to the entirety of the piece.

The song of nature echoes through the Gorge. Its timbre holds a repetitive warble of a romantic invention of an adagio by Schubert, reminiscent of ancient Hungarian Folk Music that resonates in my core and awakens my natural animal instinct.

The primitive brain, concerned with survival is alert, listening to what is heard and unheard. The zephyr spirit of the west wind sweeps through my conscience and subconscious. Mother Nature whispers a constant, zero frequency message that functions at a level below speech and demands that I solve for the algebraic third unknown variable, 'Z', that is a function of X (time) and Y (space) in a curving wave.

I walk along the Irvine trail. The voiced consonant ‘Z’ moves as a super-fluid through the air and water crossing the blood-brain barrier, causing mysterious quantum interactions within DNA, stem cells, and consciousness, leaving a mark on the mental maps of civilization.

I come upon a plaque commemorating Captain William Gilkison of Irvine, Scotland who purchased 14,000 acres of land in Nichol Township. Joseph Brant, a Christian missionary and Mohawk military and political leader - under Power of Attorney for the Indigenous people of the Grand River territory - sold this last parcel of the Six Nations’ land. Gilkison married into a prominent business family. He was prepared to build ‘a new city’ in Canada. During the 19th century, British imperialism coincided with revolutions in America, France, Haiti, Serbia, Ireland, Latin America and Greece. Imperialism brought about the Highland clearances in Scotland, the colonization and control of India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Africa and China.

Gilkison named the town of Elora after the cave temples in India. In Sanskrit, ‘Elora’ means clouds. In Hebrew and Arabic, it signifies ‘My god is my light'. In ancient Greek, it means ‘compassion and mercy’.

In spite of good intentions, the horrors of brutal and escalating conflicts for domination were tainted by habits that lacked the concept of harmony. The dumping of clear-cut trees, human wastes and animal carcasses into the Gorge fed the fire of 1868 that burned for 10 days in the new city. This awakened the original spirit of the Irvine clan. The trusted armour bearers, secretaries and negotiators for Robert the Bruce, had been gifted Drum Castle, and were granted free autonomy in care of the Old Wood. The residents of Elora worked to redeem the natural balance of the area and honour the concept of freedom.

Standing at the zenith of the Gorge, looking beyond where the Irvine and Grand Rivers converge, the Tooth of Time stands as a still point, slowly transformed by the ravages of the constant flow of a current coursing through the Gorge. There are people wandering along the path. Many step inside the ‘Do Not Enter’ areas, defying warnings that do little to stop people from taking unnecessary risks.

I feel my muscles tighten. 'Z' measures the physiological distance between muscle fibres during contraction. It cannot be sustained, even when endurance is increased.

In a flash, the skeletons in my mind's closet twitch to life. I triage memories linked in neurologically hard-wired pathways. In my childhood, warnings evoked fear. Fear is a powerful teacher that alters the frontal cortex. Fear responses are intended to protect the individual. There have been numerous deaths in the Gorge. The warnings of the power of the Gorge deserve respect.

A deep breath in and out helps me recover from my memories of the many deaths of those who ignored warnings. Warnings are based on incomplete narratives of personal and collective cultural trauma. They are intended to let the mind function objectively. However, reason does little to control the ghastly horrors that are probable. Repeated warnings about threats such as exponential increases in population, carbon emissions and ways to prevent disease, blunt emotional responses are ignored. The health warnings and nasty pictures of various cancers posted on cigarette packages become invisible to those who want to smoke. Similarly, these warning signs along the Gorge, designed to legally protect corporations against any liability, are ignored.

In English, 'Z', the last letter of the alphabet, can be added to any letter and create an imaginary concept that resonates beyond an end limit.

Beside the path, squat, dark rock homes built in the 1800s are nestled between newer, far larger and brighter homes. The contrast sets up a gestalt, that forms a whole, that is more than the sum of the parts. The negative and positive space forms an optical illusion of the hourglass of time. The Canadian philosopher Marshal McLuhan says the 'medium is the message'. A sort of quantum super-positioning of economics, materials and imagination has changed the form and function of a home. Once homes were a simple shelter to protect from nature. These new homes have become a sanctuary used to view and enjoy nature.

As I walk along the trail, I look through the fog, and the outstanding features of the Lover’s Leap and the caves in the Gorge come into focus. Local myth describes the tragic myth of an Indigenous princess who leapt to her death after her warrior lover was killed.

I recall a different myth of a lover's leap. I came of age during the hippie generation that Rennie Davis of the Chicago Seven called the 'Great Turning'. Along with many of my generation, I did the lover's leap, adopted the ideals and wore the t-shirt and blue jean ‘uniform’ of the working class as a sign of rebellion during the 'Make love not war' era.

During the 1960s, the masses had access to travel, sexual freedom, drugs and cultural influences from the East that altered perceptions and led to a cultural revolution. The ideals of John Lennon whose song, “Imagine", became the anthem for political activism, challenged the global status quo. Coca-Cola marketed living in “perfect harmony' with love and peace.

However, over a half a century later, economic, societal and cultural polarities have increased. I cannot help but wonder if humans can control themselves, and avoid arrogance, exploitation, poverty, corruption and crime.

The trail zigs and zags. 'Z' was the mark of Zorro used by the swordsman Don Diego in his defence of people against oppression. Many biological systems follow Marx’s model of the oppressed and oppressor: predator and prey; host and parasite, obtaining resources through domination, suppression, repression, slavery or genocide.

Sumerian civilizations from 3500 BC had slaves who worked and socially transformed cultural knowledge and wisdom. They were treated better than peasants. The Dali Lama had 6,000 slaves in the Tibetan vale of Kashmir. In 1959, after what the Chinese call a ‘peaceful’ liberation that involved the execution of monks, the murder of tens of thousands of supporters and destruction of monasteries, the serfs were released. There were cases reporting corruption of Buddhist values. China gained control of most of Asia’s freshwater supplies, dams and mining. However, the influence of the Dali Lama permeates global culture. The Anjali mudra, with prayer hands at the heart centre, regularly is used in salutations throughout the world.

Several horror movies use 'Z' in their titles to elicit fear of the endless possibilities of cause and effect that can be seen in hindsight.

Mankind has repeatedly responded to threats in the name of ‘Protection' by repeating behaviors that evoke the horror of reality. The Punic wars were fought by Romans seeking to expand their territory and protect their rights to the water passage between Sicily and North Africa. In what was considered a brilliant military strategy, Romans, exempt from legal restrictions, stopped food supplies to the Phoenicians of Carthage. Herein lies the first example of genocide in the Western world.

Genocides occurred during the war crimes of the Nazi Holocaust and in Rwanda in the name of protection. Historically, direct and indirect social and biological genocides were once the global cultural norm affecting the Indigenous peoples of Canada, Australia and the Congo, to name a very few.

My thoughts wander to a friend who has sponsored five Ethiopian boys for years. The media describes a battle between government and tribal powers. By preventing voting by those tribes opposed to the existing government, the Ethiopian Prime Minister, a 2019 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, was re-elected. Massacres of the innocent, rape, sexual slavery, and the torture of thousands has followed. Blocking humanitarian aid routes for food and medical supplies, is creating another genocide, this time in Tigray. If the boys survive, perhaps the regular emails and emotional and financial assistance, for living expenses and education that allow for hope, will help these young men find resilience to deal with the trauma of insanity and inhumanity and help others.

I am grateful that I could pursue an education. I was drawn to study math and science. Prescribed reasoning let me disconnect from my gut feelings. I worked as hard as I could, zoning out in a mental freeze state, dissociated from emotions. Using the memory of rules, I could prove solutions by following rules, even if I did not understand why they worked.

I wanted to understand how the irrational unspoken rules of the intuitive spirit of the law differs from interpretations of the letter of the law. As I studied, truth appeared as a solid attainable possibility, discovered through observations. Following the rules let me commonly see: double rainbows that mirror each other; two pendulums synchronize with each other; the location of a weight, not the weight itself, affects a pendulum swing. I learned that statistics are not intuitive. There is a 99% chance that two people in a room of 70 people will share the same birthdays. I also learned that small changes can result in statistically significant differences.

'Z' represents the Zeta potential, that describes potential difference -Voltage- across phase boundaries. Voltage and current control the power to do work over time. 'Z' is used to measure impedance or resistance. Voltage, divided by the flow of a current influences the resistance. Variation in resistance can lead to attraction and repulsion of particles. The mass of a body is a measure of the resistance to change from a state of rest or motion.

'Z' defines the atomic number that represents the number of protons in the nucleus of a given element. The massive, electrically-neutral, short-lived ’Z’ particle carries a weak force that acts upon all known subatomic particles. Discovery of the ’Z’ particle led the way to understanding the Brout-Englert-Higgs Boson field that forms aggregations of particles with mass.

I climb down the steep stairs to the rocks at the base of the Gorge. I sit on the stone, electrically grounded, open to accept and offer what is needed to flow with the universe. There is a chill in the fog. A shroud of cold air settles close to the surface of the river around an island in the stream. A tree with sprawling roots has found a way to anchor and survive on what sustenance is obtained, as new water mixes with waters that are stored in the bedrock that came from the last glacial event 450 million years ago. There is little choice of the direction of the movement of forces that will pass from the dark depths through the channels of space. Possibilities of cause and effect are considered in hindsight.

In psychology, a ‘Z’ test compares a sample of a population to the whole. I stand on the median, the middle point on a skewed normal, shadowed by the mean state of mankind - called the average -that sums all numbers and divides by the total number.

I am a baby boomer, a product of no birth control and to some extent, hopeful relief after the horrors of the world wars. Baby boomers will soon be gone, but they can still influence the chimeric spirit of the future. I am from the old school, and know better than to completely trust technology. Granted, it can provide a means of global awareness that supports many diverse points of view. At its outset, technology spurred many global cultural changes. Electricity and advanced communication led to a youth movement that questioned traditional values. However, technology does not stop human error nor does it consider what questions are asked, and what is not asked. Everything can go wrong in a blink of an eye. Progress can be lost, just like that. Technology can disappear with earthquakes, volcanoes, power outages, solar flares and censorship.

In contemporary terminology, I parented an offspring of Generation X and another of Generation Y, the first of the indigo children. They entered into Y2K as Millennials, along with Generation Z, the children of the mid-1990s. These generations have had their curiosity sated through fast, easily-accessible information delivered by ‘intuitive’ computers, the Internet and social media. Many do not know how to deal with silence. They have become addicted to Vagus nerve stimulation through thumb pressure on a keypad, and the truth they choose to believe is that which is most often mentioned and in accordance with what they want to accept.

The next generations are a diverse conglomerate techno-culture with the potential for great good and evil. They will set limits and their flexibility and resilience will be tested. They must take their own risks to navigate through the brain fog created by hormonal changes, diet, medical changes, medications and indistinct stress of multiple global economic, political, personal, natural and crises, that are so constant they are hardly noticed. They will act according to those warnings of the hidden horrors of destructive domination and exploitation they choose to respect.

The mists begin to clear. There is a deposition of frosty icy thorns that forms along the outer edges of leaves, then sublimates without warning; disconnecting from the solid into a vaporous phantom essence that permeates into the fog. Sublimation applied to psychology is a positive protective post-traumatic defence response to stress that harnesses the energy from the pain, shame and fear of a psychological upheaval and redirects the mind from its dark animal despair. Changes happen through action. When light is absorbed, changes occur and deform space-time into a black hole that absorbs what can never be repeated ,and a new cycle begins. The next generation holds the tools, skills and intellectual and emotional beliefs that can undergo sublimation and deposition.

A 'Z' group, defined as a finite subgroup is made up of cyclic group. My internal judge surrenders to the zeitgeist, the spirit of this era as it flows into others within a greater wave. As a child, it is hard to know what to believe when aspects of life feel fundamentally wrong. The next generations hold the ultimate piece of the human puzzle. It is up to them to carefully follow a slow movement forward through the myriad of credible and imagined information that have multiple interpretations, that go in opposite directions. They must choose how to address the struggle to relieve suffering in the material and ethereal world.

The next generation are prepared, with the skills and tools to use compassion and hope along with reason and the unknown variable, 'Z',. They are prepared to accept the human condition which, throughout history has often been driven by ignorance, greed, hatred, anger, fear and delusion and with faith that harmony is possible and can transform time and space If they form a critical mass, placed on an imaginary fixed point of an invisible pendulum, they might be able to moderate the swing so it can synchronize with the balance of nature.

The smell of trees spice the air and act as a smelling salt. I awaken from a stupor. From under the grey cloud front, I see patches of light - that bounced through space from the sun eight minutes ago - reflecting blue. The trees changing colour reflect the longer wavelengths of yellow, red and gold pigments onto the flowing water, then back into the October mists. I recalibrate my focus. The mechanism of how we see is full of reversed and inverted reflections.

I see a Great Blue Heron, that represents innate wisdom, self-determination, patience and evolution. It is facing into the sun, ready to hunt. Alexander the Great tamed his horse, who was afraid of its shadow, by turning it towards the light. I feel rewarded that I have done my best to answer Nature's demand to solve for Z, the unknown variable.

My heart holds the song of nature. My emotional compass is reset. I am ready to stay the course and contribute to the light of the long wavelengths of golden memories that can penetrate the foggy waters and warn of hidden dangers. I leave the Gorge with courage and strength renewed.