What Is There Beyond Knowing
By Mary Oliver

What is there beyond knowing that keeps
calling to me? I can't

turn in any direction
but it's there. I don't mean

the leaves' grip and shine or even the thrush's
silk song, but the far-off

fires, for example,
of the stars, heaven's slowly turning

theater of light, or the wind
playful with its breath;

or time that's always rushing forward,
or standing still

in the same -- what shall I say --
moment.

What I know
I could put into a pack

as if it were bread and cheese, and carry it
on one shoulder,

important and honorable, but so small!
While everything else continues, unexplained

and unexplainable. How wonderful it is
to follow a thought quietly

to its logical end.
I have done this a few times.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field,
in the middle of the world, breathing

in and out. Life so far doesn't have any other name
but breath and light, wind and rain.

If there's a temple, I haven't found it yet.
I simply go on drifting, in the heaven of the grass
and the weeds.

​God is a dyer, dipping every
Essence of the cosmos into
Vats of luminous colors.
A work so delicate, as to be forgotten.
 
Am I a woven white cloth turned purple,
Or am I a purple cloth, now
so purely absorbed
That the color and the cloth are one?
 
Once, before time, there was
No cloth, but only an enduring color,
Lovingly waiting
To shine forth its hue.

There are times when I yearn for the God of the Bible’s Old Testament; the one who transformed a grandmother into a pillar of salt just because she was defiant and turned to look at the destruction of her home – the place where she grew up and raised a family.  It’s not so much that I want vengeance, but rather, it is cosmic accountability that I seek.

I live with this uncomfortable paradox that is difficult for me to reconcile.  I feel that we are all touched by the Divine.  The bedrock of Quaker faith and practice is the belief that there is “that of God” in everyone, which I believe is true.  When I find myself at an impasse in life I know (now) that I need only wait in expectant prayer and the answer will come.  Here’s an example.

I have always loved music.  I play – not particularly well - the guitar and piano.  And as a result, I often hear the voice of the Divine in the music wafting through my head.  My wife is more than five years cancer free now, but the time when we were in the thick of her diagnosis and she was facing a major operation, was a difficult one for our family.  One day during this fearful period, the Sam Cooke song, Stand by Me became an ear-worm, sounding over and over again in my mind, all morning long.

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No, I won't be afraid
Oh, I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

As I was standing at my kitchen counter, looking out onto our back yard while waiting for my coffee to finish brewing the song popped up again and I found myself asking, “what is this about?” And as soon as I asked that question, the answer appeared.  It was the Divine speaking to me in a way that would seep into my soul.  Don’t be afraid.  Stand by me.  I broke down and wept.  Not a tear or two kind of cry but a sobbing, weeping, tears pooling on the kitchen counter cry of thanks and relief for the whisper of grace I was given.

So this is the paradox.  I know in my soul that the Spirit of God speaks to everyone just as clearly as I know the Divine speaks to me.  I know that God is whispering to our leaders to control guns, to honor equity, to stop hatred, greed and wars.  God is calling on Donald Trump to stop dividing our country for his personal gain.  The Divine is pleading with Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the carnage in Gaza and urging Putin to halt the war in Ukraine, and exhorting the Rapid Support Forces in Darfur to stop the genocide.  The problem is, they aren’t listening or if they are, they don’t care.  And that’s why sometimes I wish for the Old Testament God to pour down fire and brimstone upon those who commit atrocities for the sake of their own power and greed.  I want the Divine to smack someone upside their head, to cover their body in boils, to turn them into a pillar of salt – just to make an example so the world will understand: God is calling.  Listen up!

I’m not proud of these feelings of cosmic wrath and understand that they aren’t very Quakerly. So I prayed for guidance, and the answer I received was this: “Listen.  Have faith.  Shine your own light onto the world.”  I suspect this doesn’t just apply to me.  I doubt I’m the only one with dreams of vengeance and wrath. 
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The Bible says that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt because she was disobedient and looked back.  Maybe we are all called to look forward and not to look back, to become vessels of the Divine, to be the light of peace to those around us.  And just maybe, that will be enough.

Within the quietude of Quaker faith and practice rests a radical thought: that every day is holy.  This is one reason why we don’t celebrate major Christian holidays such as Christmas or Easter.  The theology is pretty straight forward and stems from the foundational belief that the spirit of God is found in everyone, without exception.  Every day is infused with the presence of the Divine and therefore there is no sense of waiting for the coming of God or seeking the Spirit which may be absent.  The spirit of the Divine is present within us.  It has always been and it will always be.  There is nothing we can do to earn this grace and there is nothing we can do to lose it.  God is with us all, now and forever. 

I try – and mostly fail – to live my life embracing the Spirit within me and within everyone I know and everything I see.  I sometimes imagine myself swimming in the water of the Divine each and every day.  Like a fish in a lake surrounded by water, we are all surrounded by God.  The Divine is in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, in the ground we walk upon, in the people we meet, in the clouds above and in the cosmos beyond. 

Seeing the holy in everyday life isn’t about grand gestures.  Rather, it is about noticing the wonder of the mundane; rejoicing in the dance of the dust in the sunlight streaming through your bedroom window.  It is about noticing the grandeur of a butterfly or the delight of a child at play, or the miracle of a seed transforming into a flower.  When we do the laundry or prepare a meal or meet with a friend in need, we are performing an act of worship – channeling Divine Light into the world.

And so, if we spend our days immersed in the glory of God, then every day is a holy day.  Or is it?

I am haunted by the recent images I’ve seen in the Washington Post about the bloody aftermath of the shooting of 19 innocent children and two teachers at the Uvalde Elementary School in Texas on May 24, 2022.  The newspaper has taken up the charge of bringing front and center the horror of what actually happens at a mass shooting.   For example in classroom 112 at the Uvalde school we learn that the children were huddled together in a corner before they were massacred.  One of the pictures in the Post shows the classroom at a distance where you can just make out the blood stained floor at the far upper left of the frame.  But then, the next picture takes you up  close.  The blood is deep and crimson and smeared, and there is a tiny blood stained tennis shoe in the middle of the gore.  It is heartbreaking.
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And then I am reminded of another picture, equally heart wrenching, of a Palestinian mother sitting on the ground, her head down as she is clutching the shroud wrapped body of her child.  The child’s limp arm protrudes from the white cloth.  And we know that this scene is repeated thousands of times.

How does one reconcile the carnage with the holy? 

Certainly there is goodness and light throughout the world if we only look for it.  But, that may be of little solace to the mother mourning her child whom she will never kiss again.  Perhaps with some time and distance, these families will return to seeking the light of the Divine.  But in the immediacy of it all, I imagine there is only darkness. 

Maybe the answer to the question of how does one reconcile the carnage with the holy is that we can’t.  Maybe all we can do is hold the paradox of light and darkness in our hearts. 
 
Holiness does not mean an absence of death, or disease, or greed, or cruelty.  Holiness simply means that in the midst of it all there is still the presence of God.  It is we who are holy and it is we who must shine the light of the Divine onto the profane.
 
In the words of the eastern mystic Rumi:  “If everything around seems dark, look again, you may be the light.”

“Why are you scrubbing the floor at nine o’clock at night?” Nicky asked his wife, Anna. “With the coal dust everywhere, it just gets dirty again,” he said.

“There are dirty-faced kids all over this coal town, but my children won’t be one of them,” Anna responded, as she used both hands on the brush to scrub the stained wooden floor.

Anna couldn’t stand the dirt. That’s not how she was raised during her younger years on the farm in western Ukraine where she remembers deep blue skies, the golden hue of wheat fields, the sweet smell of fresh-cut hay.

But now, here she was on her knees scrubbing the dirty floor of the cramped company house in the dust-filled coal town of Farmington, West Virginia, thinking of her children. I can’t keep them clean in this hell hole. Anna thought about the floors, about her children, and about her life following Nicky from coal field to coal field. It was mid-January of 1926, just one week after Greek Orthodox Christmas, and it was cold. Anna had to keep the fire lit in the kitchen in order to scrub the worn floor before it froze and iced over.

“Nicky, I need to go to the store tomorrow to buy milk and flour for making bread for the children. How are we doing on money?” Anna asked as she dipped her scrub brush into the gray, dirty water in the wash bucket, afraid of the answer she would get.

“We already owe them too much money. I can’t get ahead of the bills with what they pay me,” Nicky complained as he looked away from his wife and to the glowing fire in the kitchen stove. “You’re gonna have to make do,” he said, focusing his gaze on the fire.

Life in the coal fields was hard on everyone. The coal companies extracted more than coal from the land. They extracted the health, the livelihood, and the future from the miners and their families. The miners were paid in script instead of dollars because the script could only be spent in the company stores. Too often the script wasn’t enough to make ends meet, especially because the companies inflated prices at the store. That forced the miners to go into debt to the company just to buy food for their families. It wasn’t unusual for the coal companies to make as much money from the miners’ payment for housing and food as they did from selling the coal that the miners dug.

Finished with her scrubbing, Anna struggled to get up from her knees as she winced from the kicking baby in her belly. Not quite 30 years old, Anna had four children and now another was just a few months away.

“C’mon, Anna, you need to rest. Let’s go to bed,” Nicky said as he held out his callused and coal-stained hands to help her up.

Nicky’s a good man, Anna thought, as she gladly grabbed his hands for help. He’s a rascal, but he’s good to me and the children.

Nicky had moved his family from Western Pennsylvania to northern West Virginia because he was being hunted by the coal company’s hired police. Nicky was a “bootlegger,” which in the coal business is a fellow who locates a vein of coal to mine on his own, so he can sell his self-dug product to willing buyers. Of course, this was illegal since the coal company owned the rights to all of the coal under all of the mountains in the region. In Nicky’s eyes, everyone got what they needed. He earned extra money for his family; his friends and customers saved money on coal; and the “boss man coal company” took one on the chin.

The mining companies blackballed Nicky so he could no longer work in Western Pennsylvania under his own name. The pressure became too much, especially with Anna pregnant again. Nicky moved the family to Farmington, West Virginia, and found work using an alias—Nick Zapatosky—the name under which he would die.

​The sun rose red the next day in a haze of coal dust. Anna was up early to light the stove and make Nicky his breakfast of coffee and oatmeal. She would have loved to fix him his favorite eggs and sausage, but who could afford that? Nicky finished his breakfast and kissed Anna on the cheek as he put on his well-worn winter coat. “I can go with you to the store when I get home. Maybe we can pry some more credit out of them for food for the kids,” Nicky said as he grabbed his dented aluminum lunch pail and hard hat before stepping into the cold to join his fellow miners trudging through the blackened snow.

I’m going to have to get Johnny to help me haul water and get some more wood for the stove, Anna said to herself. She thought about her oldest who wouldn’t turn seven until the end of March, but when his papa was out working, Johnny tried to be the man of the house. Then Anna thought of Edward, a Quaker fellow who had taken a liking to the kids, even giving them oranges for Christmas. Oranges. Where in the world did he get those?

Edward was a Quaker and a member of American Friends Service Committee, or AFSC. The Quakers were good to the miners’ families. When the mine workers union was just forming in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, it was AFSC that made sure the families had food to eat during the bloody and protracted labor strikes.

Anna’s day was routine. When the children awoke, she gave them a breakfast of warm bread with sugar sprinkled on it because that’s all she had to feed them. The youngest, Julia, got what was left of the milk and the other three drank water.
Anna gathered her four children for their daily trek to the community well, where she would pump two pails of water and carry them home, careful not to spill too much. Johnny was in charge of helping the other children find scraps of wood and coal to use for the kitchen fire that day, a job that gets harder as the month wears on and all the miner families are competing for the same scarce provisions.

Once home, Anna began her chores by washing Nicky’s clothes so he would have a clean set to wear to the mine the next day, and figuring out what to make for supper. I do have some potatoes left and a jar of carrots that I canned last fall. That will do, she consoled herself.

Then suddenly she heard a loud Bang! Bang! Bang! Someone was knocking on their door and speaking frantically: “Anna, we have to get to the mine. Anna, come with me. We have to get to the mine. Something happened.” It was Edward’s voice. Anna opened the door, anxious that this was the news every miner’s wife feared but somehow expected.

Once he saw her face, Edward blurted out that there had been an explosion at the mine. Men were trapped; some were certainly dead. Edward had seen this before in other towns with other mines. The women and children could only wait and pray while there was a frantic effort to dig out the survivors—if there were any. To avoid creating a scene, the company would keep the families at a distance from the rescue efforts. Often it took days before the rubble could be cleared out of the mine shaft and the survivors and the bodies of the dead brought above ground. The bodies would be laid out on tarps, side by side on the ground, with no attempt to conceal their bloody and mangled figures from the families.

Anna just stared at Edward, trying to grasp what he was saying while thoughts raced through her mind: Is Nicky alive? Is he hurt? Is he dead? Oh my God, if he’s hurt or dead, this could be the death of all of us, Anna reasoned. If there is no miner to dig the coal, the company evicts the family from their home and cuts off credit at the store.

Anna turned to her children who were huddled near the kitchen table, “Johnny, get everyone dressed. We have to go to the mine. Something happened.” By the time Anna got her brood moving, they could see the other families rushing through the snow, also heading to the mine.

Edward stayed with the wives and family members as they stood vigil, waiting hour after hour for some sign of life exiting the mine. The women were whipsawed by conflicting reports. One of the mine bosses thought that all 48 miners died. Then a mine expert from the state arrived and reassured the families that most certainly there would be survivors. The reality was that no one knew for sure. Each woman was certain her loved ones were alive, but in her heart she was preparing for the worst. After all, that’s what a mine worker’s woman does. She deals with life—no matter how grim or how dirty—and she prepares for death that can come at any moment.

It was just after five o’clock on Friday, January 15, when the first miner walked out of the mine, nearly 24 hours after the explosion. First came one, then another, then a few together. One dad walked from the mine and into sunlight with a son on each arm. In all, 23 miners survived.

The women couldn’t be contained. They rushed to the exiting miners searching their grimy faces, looking with hope and desperation for the ones they loved. Anna found Nicky’s friend Mykola among the living. “Where is Nicky?” she asked, holding the man by his shoulders while staring into his weeping blue eyes. “Did you see Nicky? Is he still alive?” Mykola knew the answer. All of the survivors had scampered to the livery pens 10,000 feet back into the mine to avoid the lethal methane gas filling up the shafts. Nicky wasn’t among them. Mykola didn’t have the heart to tell her. “He wasn’t with our group” is all he could say as he gave her a deep hug and walked quickly away. That’s how Anna knew. Nicky was dead. She instinctively put her hand to her belly and looked at her children who were gathered around Johnny trying to comprehend what was happening. “Come children, let’s go home. There’s nothing more for us here,” Anna said as she gathered her children, turning her back on the mine, and marched home.

Within one week after Christmas, Anna’s husband was dead and the coal company ordered her and her children to move out of the company house and cut off credit to the store. Nicky was one of 19 miners killed by the mine explosion. There were pieces of coal still embedded in his back when they brought his crushed and blood-stained body to the surface more than 30 hours after the blast.

Edward talked with the mine workers union, and between the union and AFSC, they raised enough money for Anna to move her children and her husband’s body back to Pennsylvania. She was starting over, a 30-year-old single mom with five children. Anna, a Ukrainian peasant who could neither read nor write, now had to navigate life in Appalachian America during the coming worldwide economic collapse. And she had to do it on her own.

The day was cold and sunny when Anna brought Nicky’s body back to Western Pennsylvania. She looked up at the vibrant blue sky and vowed, “We’re home. We won’t be crushed by this.”

In June, the air was filled with the clean smell of mountain laurel as Anna walked to catch the streetcar to her job as a janitor, cleaning offices.

 
Author’s note: This story is a fictional account of real events. The child Johnny was my father. My grandmother Anna never remarried and raised her five children alone, working as a janitor cleaning offices at night while Johnny was tasked with caring for his four siblings. The role that AFSC played supporting the miner families with food and supplies during the prolonged and violent strikes in Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia during the early days of the United Mine Workers union is true.

The idea of reaping what we sow is often considered at the individual level and usually in the same vein as Karma: the actions we take come back to us in good ways and bad.  I find it interesting to look at this concept of reap what we sow at a societal level.  Does a society like the United States – collectively – reap what it sows?  Perhaps.   Here are a few examples.

In America, we sow guns – by the hundreds of thousands throughout the land.  Best estimates are that Americans own somewhere between 350 Million – 480 Million guns; in a country of 340 Million people.  And what do we reap from all these weapons? We “lead” our peer countries in the number of mass shootings, gun-related homicides; gun-related suicides and most recently, firearms becoming the leading cause of death among children.

We also sow carbon dioxide.  The US represents nearly 4.25% of the world’s population, but yet we emit 13.5% of the carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; eclipsed only by China according to the organization, Our World in Data.  The “harvest” from this overabundance of carbon dioxide is a growing number of climate disasters such as excessive heat waves, drought, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.  NOAA charts US climate disasters based on the total cost of the damage wrought by each incident.  According to NOAA, 2022 marked the eighth consecutive year with 10 or more billion-dollar disaster events impacting the United States.  In the past, the US experienced about 8 such events per year, but within the span of 2018 – 2022, we averaged nearly 18 events per year – more than double the historical number.

We also sow plastic; tons and tons of plastic.  The production of plastics, which are made from fossil fuels, has increased at exponential levels.   Half of all plastic – ever produced – was made within the past 15 years.  Consider this, in 1950 we produced a mere two million tons of plastic.  By 2015, we were producing nearly 450 million tons of plastic per year, and if unabated that number will double by 2050.  And the biggest producer of plastic waste in the world?  The United States. What do we get from sowing all this plastic?  Some studies estimate that there are between 15 – 51 trillion pieces of plastic floating in the world’s oceans.  In fact, the plastic garbage patch floating in the Pacific Ocean is large enough to encompass the combined midwestern states of Wisconsin, Minnesota, South Dakota, Illinois, Indiana and half of Ohio.  This sea-borne plastic begins to break down chemically from the interaction of sun, waves and seas into tiny “microplastic” particles, which have been found in every part of the world from the peaks of Mount Everest to the Mariana Trench – the deepest trough in the ocean. Microplastic particles breakdown into exceedingly smaller particles and seep into drinking water systems and into peoples’ lungs through the air.

Clearly, we the people of the United States are sowing some pretty nasty seeds and reaping untold carnage on ourselves and others.  But, what are we to do?  Well, the simplistic answer is to stop sowing bad seed.  Of course, that’s not so easy.  Countless numbers of individuals and organizations have been working for decades to stop the spread of guns and plastic waste, and to limit the production of carbon dioxide – with little significant success.

To me, all of these bad seeds stem from the same problem: people are trying – unsuccessfully – to fill a gaping hole in their heart. We look around and see a breakdown in community so we become fearful of others; fearful that life as we know it will be taken away; fearful that there won’t be enough resources to go around and thus greed and hording begins to take hold.  Many of these issues seem so large and intractable that a sense of powerlessness sets in and we begin to resign ourselves to a future of dwindling possibilities.

Maybe the issue isn’t to stop sowing bad seed, as much as it is to redouble our efforts to sow more good seeds.  We Quakers like to say that there is “that of God” in every person.  Put another way, we can say that the seed of the Divine is present within everyone, and what is needed is to shine the light of God deep enough, wide enough, and strong enough to bring that seed forth from each individual.

As advised by Maxine Hong Kingston, “In a time of destruction, create something.  A poem.  A parade.  A community.  A School.  A vow.  A moral principle.  One peaceful moment”
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The light of God is within you.  Let that light shine so others may blossom and illuminate the world.

 
I went to our back yard garden to sit in my favorite blue Adirondack chair, surrounded by white and yellow daisies and wildflowers my wife has cultivated over the years.  I wanted to listen to the birds while meditating.  I don’t often do this – go outside to mediate - but this year, we seem to have more birds chirping and singing in our yard than at any other time in the 36 years we’ve lived here.  I was looking forward to the joy of having birdsongs guide my way to stillness.

I was just beginning to settle into my meditation, when a neighbor from two doors down started up his very loud, gas powered lawnmower.  Knowing that my neighbor’s yard is smaller than mine, I figured he would only be mowing for about 20 minutes at the most and that I could find a way to ignore the noise as I tried again to settle into thoughts of peace.  Being a Quaker, I’ve learned that seeking the Divine requires quiet and not necessarily silence. 

Sure enough, in less than 20 minutes the lawnmower stopped.  The silence was stark and welcomed, the sound of the birds re-emerged and I found myself smiling.  I could once again focus on the bird songs, on the weight of my body on the chair, on my rhythmic breathing as I allowed my thoughts to float past, as if they were leaves in a stream.

Whap, Whap, Whap, Whap, Whap – the sound of my neighbor’s weed whacker punctured my reserve.  Jesus, I thought to myself, come on!  But then I caught my growing agitation and refocused my energy on letting things go.  Letting my irritation go.  Letting the sound of the motor sink to the background.  This letting go was working and shortly, the motor stopped and the silence returned.   Thank you – I thought to myself.

Even with all the interruptions I was finding some stillness while sitting in our garden.  I was pleased that I didn’t allow the noisy lawn care to drive me inside.

Suddenly, I was startled by the high pitched whine of a leaf blower the same neighbor was using to blow the grass clippings off his sidewalk and back onto the lawn.  At this point, I just had to laugh, and ask myself, what is the lesson I can take away from this comedy of meditative challenges.

As I sat there listening to the relentless sound of machine blowing grass and dust into the air I had a sense that even though it was irritatingly loud, the man and the leaf blower were both connected to the universe. 
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I went to my backyard to find the Divine in the sound of the songbirds.  Instead, I found the Spirit of God through the intrusive roar of a leaf blower.  My meditative thought is that the Spirit is everywhere and cannot be ignored anywhere; that the whine of a lawnmower is just as much the sound of the Divine as is the melody of the songbird.

Are we spiritual beings having a human experience or are we human beings having a spiritual experience, is the famous question asked by Jesuit priest and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  I believe it is the former, that we are spiritual beings at our core.  But, taking it one step further, I also believe that everything within the Cosmos has a spiritual foundation; that the spirit of the Divine is woven throughout the universe and that God is the weaver.

If it is true that the Spirit is woven through all things and for all time, then there can be none other than a spiritual solution to any problem.  In this context, all problems become spiritual problems. 

A few years ago, I was having an online conversation with a conservative Christian friend about what the bible says on the matter of the division between church and state.  My friend – a bible literalists – was adamant that there is a clear demarcation between church and state, citing the new testament passage of Mark 12: 13-17 where Jesus takes a coin with the likeness of Caesar and announces that all should “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”  The question Jesus answered was about paying taxes.  What I believe he was getting at is this:  What in the cosmos does not emanate from God?  If you are arguing over whether the religious should pay taxes, you are focused on the wrong question.  If everything comes from God, what does it matter?  Pay the silly taxes to keep yourself out of harm’s way – but don’t lose sight of the fact that everything comes from the Divine. 

From my perspective, Jesus was saying that everything is spiritually focused; that we actually live in a spiritual world but get lost and confused in our worldly machinations.  

A Quaker F/friend of mine has spent many an anxious moment pondering what can a person do to raise the consciousness of the general public – and of our leaders and decision makers – about the pending environmental disaster unfolding within our lifetime and most certainly within the lifetime of our children and grandchildren.  We Quakers believe there is “that of God” within everyone, and that the voice of the Divine leads and guides each of us.  If that is true – and I believe it is – then God is at this very moment whispering to those recalcitrant decision makers that the earth is crying out; that they need to pay attention; that they need to act.  Now.

If the Spirit is active and present within every person, then what is needed is a conversion of heart.  What is needed is a spiritual revival to awaken all to the call of the Divine on climate change; on gun control; on voter repression; on race, on  equality, and on all other issues of justice and decency.  

How do we get there, how do we get to this global conversion of heart?  We pray… for ourselves, for those who are or will be  impacted by these issues, and for the decision makers – that they will quiet themselves enough to hear the faint whisper of the Divine and act on it.  Is prayer enough?  No.  If prayer were enough, these seemingly intractable issues would be resolved.   

We must listen to the voice of God within our own heart and act on what we hear.  We must become models of a people who are spiritually focused and who believe – whole heartedly – that the answer to all problems is spiritual.  After all, we are a spiritual people living in a spiritual world, seeking a spiritual solution.  

Perhaps renowned spiritual leader Henri Nouwen said it best:  “Every time in history that men and women have been able to respond to the events of their world as an occasion to change their hearts, an inexhaustible source of generosity and new life has been opened, offering hope far beyond the limits of human prediction.”
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We must pray.  We must act.  We must believe that our prayers and actions will be enough.  And then, we must give over everything else to the Divine.

        
 
I have the joy of helping to care for our toddler granddaughter every Thursday, and on a recent visit, I was struck by how her words and actions could be translated into solid management techniques. 

I know what you might be thinking.  Many of us have had the unfortunate experience of working for a supervisor who acted like a toddler; who thought only of him/herself or who threw temper tantrums when things didn’t go their way.  But that’s not what I’m talking about here.  There are positive lessons we all can learn from observing little ones at play.  Following are a few examples.

Know What You Want and Provide Clear Directions – Any employee who has tried to get a clear directive from a waffling or overtly political  manager can appreciate the explicit tone of a toddler. There is no ambiguity about what our granddaughter likes nor in what she wants from adults.  “Pop-pop (her name for me), sit here and read the Color book with me.”  “You wear the green hat, I want the red one.”  “I’m going to hide in the closet, you stay here.”  Clear.  Simple.  Direct.

Be Authentic but Don’t Take Yourself Too Seriously – There is nothing more frustrating or disempowering in an organization than a manager that tries to be all things to all people.  It is equally important for a good manager to have a sense of humor and to not take themselves too seriously.  I’ve worked with managers who put themselves and their career above the good of their employees and the organization causing suspicion a chaos in their wake.
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That’s not what you get from toddlers who have no guile and who are uniquely comfortable within themselves.  Our granddaughter is exactly who she is and spends zero time considering how she may come across to those around her.  She will happily place heart and butterfly stickers all over her face and dance around the house feeling all the more special for it.  She will make a noise with her mouth and then laugh boisterously over her “joke.”  Happy is the organization when a manager can laugh at themselves, acknowledge their mistakes, and move on.

Be Kind and Inclusive – A good manager will ensure that everyone is cared for within the organization.  Employees will be more loyal to the company and will take more risks if they believe their manager has their back. My granddaughter innately knows this.   If we are playing tea party, she makes sure that everyone gets a cup and a cookie.  If I’m off in another room and happen to cough, our granddaughter will come running to me to ask “are you OK Pop-pop?” 

Here’s a real-world story that I wish every manager could emulate.  My daughter is a teacher and one day last year her school experienced a “code red,” meaning there was serious trouble in the building.  Everything turned out fine, but she was shaken.  On her ride home she called me, just to talk.  She finished up our conversation saying, “I just want to go home and hug my baby.” My daughter did go home and hug her baby (my granddaughter) who was 15 months old at the time.  As she hugged her child, my daughter began to cry.  Seeing her mother distraught, our granddaughter took the pacifier out of her mouth and handed it to her mom – knowing intuitively that her mom needed comforting from it more so than she. 

If a manager showed me that amount of kindness and empathy during a time of turmoil and strife, they would have my undying loyalty.

There is a lot we can learn from children, if we just open our eyes and our hearts and get out of our own way.    For me, it can all be summed up to this:  be honest, be authentic and be kind and everything else will take care of itself.
 

Science has caught up with what mystics and religions have been saying for hundreds of years: that there is a singular consciousness unifying everything and that death is no more than a transition from one perspective to another.

Quantum theory – through decades of propositions and experiments -  has upended scientific thinking about how the universe operates at both the micro and the macro level.  Here are just a few of the revolutionary ideas that have now become accepted fact among many in the world of physics:

• Matter and Light remain as waves until they are observed, at which point they collapse into electrons or  photons.  In other words, perception births reality.
• Science can only predict the probability of where or how these electrons or photons will show up.  Until they are observed they remain in a state of superposition, or said differently – in a state of multiple probabilities (or multiple universes) where “everything that can happen actually happens”.
• Time and Space may not exist as an object or thing, and perhaps was conceived in our minds as a way to measure progress.
• The Universe is “monistic” and everything is part of a unified whole.

One of the fundamental experiments upon which Quantum Theory rests is the double slit experiment which comes to the confounding conclusion that waves become electron or photon particles when they are observed and measured. When a light wave passes through the double slits, it continues to act like a wave.  However, if there is an attempt to measure the wave, then it somehow turns into matter (a photon particle) and ceases to act like a wave.

A similar experiment split the wave into two pathways, one shorter than the other.  At the end of the longer path is a meter to measure the wave.  A lab assistant randomly turns the meter on and off.  As expected, when the wave that had taken the longer path is measured, it turns into a particle.  Amazingly – the partner wave that split and took the shorter path – retroactively turned into a particle, as well.  The split waves are said to be “entangled” and the two act as one entity – doing so even when they are hundreds or thousands of miles apart.  When one changes, the partner particle matches the change and seems to do so instantaneously, calling into question the actual nature of space and time.

A couple of quotes from the famous physicist Stephen Hawking may be helpful…or not:

“ There is no way to remove the observer – us – from our perceptions of the world…the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.” 

“..One day there may well be proof of multiple universes. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility that somewhere outside of our own universe lies another different universe…”

So, here is what we have so far:  entangled waves in superposition wait - possibly in multiple universes – for an observer to birth them into existence as matter.  One has to remember this isn’t science fiction, but rather it is a set of proposals supported by a growing number of leading physicists, three of whom won the 2022 Noble Prize for their experiments on this very topic.

This raises all kinds of vexing questions, not the least of which is: what is the role of consciousness in these developments?  And, even more fundamentally – what is consciousness?

Dr. Robert Lanza – hailed by Time Magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people – has written several books on Biocentrism that weaves together the concepts of quantum theory with the idea that it is consciousness that created the universe and not the other way around.  And if there is no universe without a conscious presence to perceive it, then the only logical conclusion is that there must be a universal consciousness beyond our individual sense of self.

Lanza is one of many proponents of the Multiple Universe Interpretation of quantum theory, suggesting  - like Stephen Hawking - that possible alternatives of life may be occurring now in multiple universes.  For example:  In one universe Russia succeeded in sweeping through Ukraine in a matter of days, while in another universe there was no war at all and Ukraine won back its occupied territory through diplomatic initiatives.

Finally, Lanza speculates that consciousness never ends, and quite possibly we just transfer our conscious self into another alternate universe.

There is so much of quantum theory that I find baffling and have a difficult time to comprehend fully.  Kind of like religion or spirituality.  There is a great deal that can be read about the individual soul and the Divine, but at some point belief comes down to a quiet faith.  Now that, I think, I can handle.