Integrated System ~ Field Notes ~ 1
Every obscure obsession you’ve had … none of it is a coincidence. All of it wants to be integrated into the most coherent expression only you can manage. Until then, you will always feel something is missing.
Those eureka moments in the cafe, on the trail, in the your living room, under the sun … they are nodes on a currently-undetectable web. Once detected, it’s game over. Or rather, the True Game begins.
Integration (and fragmentation) must be happening everywhere. We perceive only a fraction of it through. If we could see it all, we’d have it all.
By seeing the mechanics of an integrated system, we, knowingly or not, gravitate toward and adopt such rhythms in our own lives, to the point of becoming more complete.
How many places have you travelled to that did not change/transform you in any way, and all you have are some memories and photos? Is that not a waste of time?
When something is integrated, it gets lighter over time, not heavier.
Our biggest mistake is believing that the behaviour of individual parts of an integrated system, summed (or whatever else) together, can predict the behaviour of the entire thing.
A forest isn’t the sum of its trees, fungi, insects, rainfall, and soil. Something else happens when those things are in relation. You can model every part in isolation and still have no idea what the forest will do.
But every institution we have, from medicine to economics to education, operates by breaking things into parts, optimizing each part separately, and assuming the whole will follow.
Education separates subjects as if knowledge isn’t one continuous fabric. Consequently, the government and corporate worlds live and die by this fragmentation.
It’s in the integration between parts, not in the parts themselves. But the integrations are invisible when you’ve already taken the thing apart to study it.
Side effects happen when foolishly tampering with an integrated system, and emergencies happen when side effects persist.
Every day I am discovering a new someone, who has cultivated their own integrated system functioning in line with Nature, and I’m inspired. My eyes are becoming attuned.
An edible garden with trees of all sizes, a bakery/cafe with a dedicated farm that cycles compost, a sugar maple and shiitake integrated operation, a food forest with dozens of animal species … there is so much life out here.
I thought gastronomy was the final form. No no no. There are deep deep layers and at the bottom is the most unbridled yet integrated (and fruitful) expression of Nature.
Her wings are a multi-purpose apparatus; movement, shelter, and drip, integrated. Nature wins again.
You can be limited and think with your brain. Or you can be integrated and think with every cell in your body
An integrated system is something emergent, non-additive, non-multiplicative, multi-dimensional, and unable to be metricized. We stand before it in awe.
Imagine: a town/city where everyone runs their own small business around their their unique abilities, like different lifeforms in a forest, from shrub to tree to bird to snail. Integrated, decentralized, and resilient. The way Nature intended.
Leave a Reply