By Taina Lyons
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change.
God
Is Change.
Earthseed: The Books of the Living
Saturday, July 20, 2024
-Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
Today is July 20th, 2024, which is the opening date of the dystopian Afrofuturist science fiction novel, The Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler. Published in 1993, it follows the life of Lauren Olamina, a teen who has the supernatural ability to feel others’ pain as her own. The climate of this society has deteriorated into a vigilante state of chaos, violence, water shortage, and dangerous drug use. Lauren, the daughter of a minister, is intent on starting her own religion, “Earthseed,” based on the tenet that “God is Change.”
This novel has been hailed as one of the most important texts of the Afrofuturist subgenre, and among other things has inspired a graphic novel, an opera, and the "Octavia E. Butler" landing site on Mars. Through Parable of the Sower and its sequel, Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler brought awareness to such important societal issues as systemic racism, environmental crises, poverty, violence and addiction. The core philosophical tenet God is Change weaves throughout the tale and left me wondering: When the world is changing in catastrophic ways that mirror the apocalyptic reality of Parable, what do we surrender to and what do we try to change?
Too much surrender is apathy and indifference.
Too much resistance to change is delusion and a waste of energy.
How do we find grace and power in Change?
I recently wrote a post about clutter, entropy, and purpose, which you can read here. Simply put, entropy is the amount of disorder or randomness in a system and essentially is the state toward which our universe is constantly moving. Some lay examples of this are a clean room becoming messy, or sugar dissolving into tea as the molecules go from a more highly organized to lower-ordered state. Entropy is the God of Change, like the Greek God Chronos, who rules the inevitable passage of time.
The crux of this law of physics is that time moves in one direction because things tend to move from order to disorder. (I need to insert a major tangent about non-linear time, which I’ll come back to at the end of this article.)
The observation that everything changes, or that life is Impermanent, is also at the heart of Buddhist philosophy. According to teachings about Impermanence, how we deal with this truth relates directly to our suffering as humans. As much as we would like for things to remain, they simply don’t, and denial of this creates a delusional stance toward reality and a disconnection with what is. We are allowed to have feelings about this, and even to throw the occasional existential tantrum, but what Octavia Butler invites us to explore in relation to Impermanence is, how can we make peace with change and effect the change we want to see in the world?
People tend to love novelty but fear change and loss. This tension keeps us stuck in the pursuit of happiness (our fundamental right!) but often at a loss about how to feel at peace with the nature of our ever-changing lives. Remembering that we are not passive victims of Change shifts the energy toward creativity—just by being here in this world, we affect change. Life is a co-creation. All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.
As we experience our bodies aging, relationships and life circumstances changing, children growing, the movement of time can feel nostalgic, even melancholy. Or it can feel excruciating when change brings with it losses that leave us traumatized or grieving—such as illness, accidents, death of a loved one, or the ending of an important relationship.
When trauma or loss occurs, it can be hard to move forward. The marching of time can feel cruel and painful. We might find ourselves mired in the feeling that If things could only go back to the way they were before X happened, I’d be ok or I simply can’t/won’t go on. Something fundamental may have changed, either in ourselves or in our lives after a trauma. This requires us to grieve, to feel and adapt to the way things are, or to go through a process of rebirth and revival—a phoenix moment to integrate and adjust to a new reality.
In order to rise
From its own ashes
A pheonix
First
Must
Burn
-Parable of the Talents
Grieving is an essential part of our dance with change.
Another is an attitude of continuing to be in relationship with Life. The alternative is to become a ghost, living but not alive. How to do this, how to stay open to life, feels like a central challenge to spiritual development. At least in this moment in time, I believe the way one responds to life in the present is the single most important tool we can cultivate. I’ll say it again in another way. The capacity to respond creativity, lovingly, and wisely in the present is the most important skill you can develop to stay in connection with life and have an impact on the world.
Kindness eases change.
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.
-Parable of the Talents
So then what do we accept and what do we work to change? How can we embrace “positive obsessions?” The answer needs to be guided by love and wisdom. That which you cherish is worth devoting your energy to. If what you love is coral reefs, or your dog, or poetry, or a beloved, there is a need for deep listening and communication with reefs, your dog, the spirit of poetry, your beloved. Could the thing or person you love be the connective tissue to love more of the world, all of the world? By loving them, we love their changing as well.
God is Change--
Seed to tree, tree to forest;
Rain to river, river to sea;
Grubs to bees, bees to swarm.
From one, many; from many, one;
Forever uniting, growing, dissolving--
Forever Changing.
The Universe is God's self-portrait.
-Parable of the Sower
If you love something or someone that is dead or dying, support your beloved to die well. Death is just another change. It’s the killing of what we love that I can’t accept. Many things are being killed in our communities and ecosystems. There are languages with dwindling numbers of speakers, species down to double digits, people murdered by gun violence (daily), and ecosystems that are in danger of collapse. Loving these things, and other parts of the world that are most impacted by exploitation, requires protecting them from that which is causing harm.
The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.
-Parable of the Sower
A new relationship with Time
A few years ago a friend of mine and I were going to a gathering where we would be doing a performance at a certain time. We were stressing about getting ready, about being on time. She looked at me and said, “Fuck the time,” to which I replied, “Yeah, Fuck time!” which descended into a hilarious orgiastic laugh-fest involving a wall clock.
In a space of less rigid, controlled time, I see consciousness loop-the-looping, cycling through days, seasons, and lifetimes, punctuated by death, the benevolent pause in the eternal drumbeat. Cultures carry us through this cycling of time. They give us songs, practices, flavors, and rituals that outlive us and weave us into the tapestry of life. It is a most elegant way to create with and through time. Some cultures even hold that healing moves forwards and backwards in time affecting ancestors and descendants.
The idea of Time as a concrete structure is partly a cultural creation—the US government has 21 atomic time-keeping devices in a lab in Colorado that keep time to a trillionth of a second. If these clocks were disrupted or stopped, we would effectively not know the time. (I imagine a creaturely little troll, counting sand into eternity...)
In an interview for NPR, theoretical physicist Chanda Prescod-Weinsten highlights how this kind of time-keeping is part of what keeps the Capitalist wheel turning, organizing people and keeping them productive and efficient. Yet physicists understand that time is stranger and more bendable than this linear system. Time changes based on gravity to the extent that at the event horizon of a black hole, time breaks down completely. According to Prescod-Weinstein, time is more a technology than a fundamental part of the universe. Linear time has its place, for helping us make plans to be at a certain place for a certain purpose on time but most people commonly have varying subjective experiences of time. Like, when you're engrossed in an activity and time flies, or when you're getting through a boring task and it seems to take forever.
So what if Time is a capacity of the mind like Imagination? How could we play with it, have more fun with it, and find greater liberation through it? How could we bring the thread that connects us to a more peaceful, liberated reality into the present?
We can invite more connection with Kairos, another God of Change, the representation of mystical time—the way happenstance, serendipity and chance influence the course of our lives. Creating space in our schedules for intuitive guidance and spontaneity opens us to relationship with Kairos, to the magic of timely connection and exchange.
And we can remember that the conditions we experience in the world are largely the result of conditions that were set in motion in the past, and set into motion what we could like to see fruit in years to come.
Here’s to making a little more time for fun, kindness, and magic.
This piece is written in honor of ancestor Octavia Butler. Thank you to the guidance and support for the writing of this piece.
Commentaires