Spontaneous, Redemptive Evolution Is Still Possible 

I spend some time on writing retreats every year, not always to produce spirit-writing but always to think deeply about things and fill up some pages. Sometimes I think deeply about big ideas; sometimes I think deeply about small but very precise ideas; and sometimes, when the muses are with me and I’m very, very lucky, I think deeply about beautiful stories. The key ingredients in these retreats are solitude and having nothing to do but the work at hand. They’re not social times. They’re not teaching times. They’re not times of monk service, and they’re not tourist times either, although I usually conduct them far away from home, in foreign countries whose landscape and culture resonate with the work.

One thing I can’t allow to intrude are politics or world events. The world constantly brims with weapons of mass distraction and sometimes—and writing retreats are exactly those times—I have to disconnect. That means disconnecting my laptop computer from the Internet so as to render it merely a glorified typewriter. It means that I choose places to stay that have no WiFi and no television, either. It means that should I go out to eat somewhere and find myself surrounded by people discussing a financial crisis, an environmental catastrophe, a political cataclysm, I promptly up and leave.

The world is awash in people who do not know how to pass the time doing nothing. It is filled with people who can’t stand still. It is full of people who crave stimulation, even if that stimulation hurts or kills them. It is not, sadly, filled with meditators. Yet meditation is precisely the best antidote to what ails a world writhing in the pain of injustice and loneliness, poverty and war. It’s also a great support system for a world filled with joy and adventure and love. It’s a balancing force, one that deepens the good and counters the bad and I must do it even when I have created the physical space I need to write a book, because even when I’m alone, I’ve still got all that noise in my own head.

Today I stand in a mountain forest somewhere in Asia. Precisely where must remain a secret, because to share the detail would be to violate the sanctity of the retreat. In any case, there are some animals around, but they are shy because in this country anything that moves is hunted and killed and eaten, and anything that grows in one place is likely to be harvested too, one way or another, for food, shelter, decoration, or some psychotropic effect. Even before I ascend to the realm of the immortals for another Daoist lesson, I am aware of the animals and I am aware of the plants. How can I describe that awareness? It’s energy and it has a kind of buzz. Not one I hear with my ears but one I detect with some different organ system, some different part of my brain, some different combination of senses. How am I sure it exists? Only by its absence. I don’t feel it when I’m in an office building, for instance, nor in an airplane or a hospital.

There is rustling of leaves and the calling of birds and the croaking of frogs in this forest—all input separate and distinct from biological energy—and those things soothe me. I have to adjust my feet from time to time and shift the way I use my hips because the ground I’m standing on is uneven and if I’m to be as straight-spined as I like to be while meditating, I’m wont to tip over. All the same, because nowhere can we find a complete lack of distractions, I find my way into a trance, and into an open field, in mud up to my ankles, a line of beautiful, bark-mottled alder trees standing sentinel, the familiar smell of wetlands in my nostrils.

The sun is bright and the air is warm. A light breeze penetrates the perforations of my jade-studded monk’s hat. A cacophony of flies seems bent on laying eggs in my ears, and it is only after repeatedly brushing them away that I realize they are buzzing to the tune of Troy Caldwell’s “Heard It in a Love Song,” made popular by the Marshall Tucker Band. I put this together with the sphagnum and cattails and conclude I’m in the American South. When the flies add another ‘70s offering, the Charlie Daniels Band belting out “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” I get the message loud and clear, though it isn’t midnight and I didn’t arrive here by train.

A rare indigo snake slithers past, two meters long and resplendent in iridescent black scales. Songbirds bicker. Thunder booms in the distance, but I see no clouds. I feel the urge to trudge along and look for my turtle mentor, but the depth of the mud discourages me from taking even a single step. The flies change to backwoods bluegrass now, insect banjos loud in my ear. The sun transits slowly, directly overhead now, beating down with a fervor. Beads of sweat caress my temples on the way down to my white collar.

“I’m here!” I cry at last, figuring it can’t hurt to announce myself.

“And so am I,” a small voice replies. “Been waiting on you here for a while, but I understand that of late you have had other important places to be.”

I look down and spy him at once, a diminutive creature with a round, rugose, reddish-brown shell, a lighter colored center to each scute. It is a male North American bog turtle, the rarest turtle species on the continent, an object of legend to conservationists and the greatest possible lust to domestic fanciers.

“I thought all of you were gone,” I say. “I remember way back when I was an intern at the Bronx Zoo, my boss, the curator of reptiles, said bog turtles would be extinct within ten years if we didn’t do something.”

“Well, he did something,” the immortal replies, wiping an eye with the soft side of a leg. “Lots of others did, too. Preserves and laws, regulations and enforcements. Rules and more rules, which only the law-abiding care about. Even so, we’ve got our secret ways, don’t you know? Always have, always will, at least until the end of days, which, of course, is coming soon.”

“Ah,” I say. “Am I here to learn about the impending apocalypse?”

“Let’s take it slow,” the little turtle says when I crouch down to it. “Follow the trajectory of the folly of man, if you will.”

“I’m a little tired of doom and gloom,” I say. “What about a good joke?”

“A joke?”

“Humor is a Daoist tradition, not that you’d know it with what I’ve been learning from all of you lately.”

“Why did the dead baby cross the road?” the immortal asks.

“Dead baby jokes are in terrible taste,” I say. “Not funny. Really.”

“Because he was stapled to the back of the chicken.”

I have to turn away and bite my hand not to laugh. Really. I just don’t want to. It’s just wrong. But I can’t help myself. I double over in my attempt to restrain a guffaw.

“Don’t talk to me about man’s folly,” I say. “Talk to me about enthusiasm and love.”

“You’re not really here to dictate the lesson,” the bog immortal says sourly.

“Just frame it for me in a more positive way, will you? I have to put the spirit-writing together in a way that won’t drown readers in negativity.”

The little turtle thinks for a minute. “I don’t think humans are essentially negative,” he says at last. “I think what happened is that happy-go-lucky people became too serious after the dawn of agriculture. In the wandering stage, before planting anything, there was time for love and laughing. Fighting, of course, too, but the fundamental need to protect and preserve property was missing, leaving emotional space for experience and bonding.”

“Free and easy wandering is exactly how we Daoists describe the ideal life,” I say. “We crave it, though it’s not so easy to find anymore, nor to craft.”

I hear thunder again but see no clouds. It’s so odd. I want to ask the immortal about it.

“Sex,” she says, before I have a chance.

“What about it?”

“There are young and adventurous humans, but most of you settle for too little of it in too predictable a pattern. Bonobo apes do better. Look at them for inspiration. All that creativity ended with the dawn of agriculture.”

“On the other hand, intellectual freedoms blossomed when we had enough food,” I say.

“For a while. Then all that agriculture became a burden. Plus, it sent human population out of control. It’s time for you to stop trying to command everything and return to surrendering.”

“Do you mind if we find some shade?” I ask. “These robes are so heavy in the sun.”

The turtle nods, so I pick him up and walk to the edging alders.

“Tell me more about surrendering,” I say.

“It meant it in the sense of settling for less of some things while gaining more of others. Your ancestors accepted a poorer diet to be assured of regular, if not monotonous, meals. More precisely, they stopped chasing resources when they began planting crops, thus the complex and nuanced set of foodstuffs required to keep them in optimum health were no longer on the menu.”

“I eat a lot of veggies,” I say. “I’m like a hunter-gatherer monk, vegan and all, chasing seeds, greens, fruit, and nuts.”

“Really? Most people I’ve seen who eat that way don’t have such a belly.”

“Nice,” I say. “You know, I’ve seen fat turtles, too. You’re not so much better than me. I see rolls of fat around your axillae, where your limbs go into your shell.”

“Pure muscle,” the bog turtle says, a bit defensively. “Turtles only get fat in captivity when we are fed processed junk instead of the food nature holds for us. It’s like what happened to you people when you started caring more about your crops than you did about your bodies. The narrow task of sowing and reaping replaced walking long distances, hunting, gathering, and climbing, all the activities to which you were adapted, and which kept you happy and healthy and fit.”

“The thing is, turtles don’t have a choice,” I say, settling in against a tree, the small of my back itching a bit because of the rough bark. “You have to endure because that’s your architecture, which doesn’t exactly entitle you to a position of moral superiority. Humans moved because we could. We planted because we could. I believe that our biological reality has a lot to do with our destiny.”

“Being able to do a thing doesn’t always make it a good idea. A bobcat can eat her young. A bee can fly straight into the sun and burn up in an instant. Possible, but not advisable. Wisdom is as much about knowing what not to do as knowing what to do. Too, being built for a thing doesn’t consign you to do it forever.”

“Well there we agree,” I say. “I’m looking for some kind of spontaneous and transcendent piece of evolution so humans can survive in a beautiful world.”

“That’s what’s needed,” the bog immortal replies. “Anyway, your possibilities narrowed once your activities did. The gene pool people could dip into grew smaller. Shallower, too. Why? Because you just hung around. You didn’t wander long distances as you were built to do, spreading your seed and the like.”

“You’re only talking about seeds because I did,” I say, spying a berry on a bush, reaching up for it, and offering it to the little turtle.

“No, seriously,” he says, his beak smeared blue as he consumes my treat. “With agriculture, your life became localized and you didn’t meet strangers. You narrowed your gene pool and became inbred, something we turtles do with fewer ill effects than your kind does, though we get the occasional two-headed hatchling and such when we’re stuck inside a perimeter by real estate developers or when a pond shrinks from climate change. You people got sicker, too, with rare or new diseases, all because your diet was deficient, and you didn’t use your bodies they way nature intended. By the way, when I say disease, I don’t only mean physical afflictions. Your brains got sick. You acted strangely. You become obsessed with your land, your stuff, security, not having to worry about food even though you substituted that with all kinds of other worries, like social status and protecting what was yours from other people who would take it from you. Once you started trading what you had with others, you developed class distinctions. You institutionalized slavery. You created your own hell in the name of not having to worry. This new torture you inflicted upon yourselves extended even to your unborn children, as the destiny of an individual member of society predetermined in an unimaginable way. What perversity.”

“I asked you for a more positive take on humans,” I say. “I’m not really feeling that here.”

“This is nothing, monk. I’m just getting started diagramming all your wrong turns. Do you know what came next? After agriculture?”

“Industrialization?” I suggest timidly.

“Just so. That lovely phase in people history in which a privileged few enjoyed new heights of power, luxury, and privilege, while the exploited majority lived short lives of heavy labor in factories with toxic air and other crushing conditions.”

“There’s that thunder again,” I say, shielding my eyes to scan the sky. “So strange. Not a single cloud.”

“That’s not thunder; that’s a helicopter. They do the surveys from up there so they don’t get their boots wet, then they come down and snatch us.”

“What surveys? Who snatches you?”

“Scientists. They’re obsessed with numbers and with morphological relationships. They get theories in their heads and hunt us to prove them. Get a grant. Write a paper. Get a job. Get tenure. It’s all about them. They care so little for us that they pickle us in foul smelling liquid. I’ve seen jars and jars of my kind floating, dead and bloated, their eyes gone white, their limbs shedding wisps of skin, just so they can measure us, count our scales, cut us open to see what’s inside us. Inquisition, that’s the word. To a turtle, it just means genocide as it has to so many other species. Only monsters murder living things simply to understand them better.”

“You’re saying biologists are flying in to kill you?”

“If they find me, I die, so I’d better get back to your lesson, yes? Wouldn’t want to leave before you clearly understand where your species has been and where it’s going. So then, once you people industrialized, vast numbers of you began living and working in close proximity to one another. Pandemics could and did spread rapidly, taking millions of lives. All of us nonhuman beings became your victims on a new scale as you began to so-called ‘terraform’ our planet. You cleared forests. You dammed and diverted rivers. You restructured ecosystems according to your own pleasure and agendas. You synthesized religious and mythological justifications for murdering other sentient beings. The lessons of nature were lost on you, and with them all balance and harmony, and the loss of so much began in great earnest.”

The thunder becomes a whump-whump as the helicopter comes into view. It’s dark blue and bears an insignia in the shape of the State of Georgia, replete with a whited-out image of a deer, a fish, and a bird. It grows closer, lower, circling in apparent search of a clearing where the ground is firm enough to support it and the trees give quarter.

“See that sign? Department of Natural Resources. That’s what deserts, jungles, oceans, forests, grasslands, plains, marshes, swamps, tundra, and taigas have become for your kind. Anything and everything that lives and grows is nothing more than a thing to be plundered.”

“I don’t feel that way.”

“So what? You’re just one little monk. Honestly, only the people close to you care how you feel. Your kind has chopped down, blown up, burned, flattened, stripped, razed, and utterly decimated the entire world, not just at the surface but below it. You people are a cancer, monk, and the victim is Planet Earth.”

“I hope you’re wrong.”

“It’s no longer a debate or even a discussion. It’s the way it is.”

The helicopter sinks below the tree line. I know it has touched down because I hear the engines shut down, first a slowing of the rotors, then a whine, then quiet. A moment later, two men appear at the edge of the clearing, not a hundred feet from us. One wears a gray shirt and green trousers and has a badge and gun on his belt. The other wears bush pants, hiking boots, and a tie-dye T-shirt. His hair goes past his shoulders, and his lanky frame and beard make him look like a Gen-Y messiah.

“Why do I see police?” I ask.

“If all the world is a resource and resources need to be protected, is not a worldwide police state the inevitable next step for your kind?”

“You’re so harsh. I wish you could judge us with more compassion.”

“What compassion have you shown turtles? Here comes the scientist, obsessed with classifying rather than appreciating, more interested in building mind castles than preserves, indulging intellectual curiosity instead of acting as protector and restorer.”

“People do have their vanities.”

Pudgy and with a sweat-stained shirt, the lawman leans against a tree while the biologist works the wetland, turning over logs, scanning hillocks, and crouching to poke puddles with a snake stick, a long metal rod with a grasping hook at the end. I hear a rattlesnake sound off.

“Hope it bites them both,” the bog turtle says bitterly.

The police radio crackles. It’s the helicopter pilot reporting that the chopper is sinking into the mud. The expression on the officer’s face says he’s glad for the excuse to cut his babysitting short. He tells the biologist they have to go, in response to which the young man plunges his hand into the grass and comes up grinning jubilantly, a five-foot rattler dangling and twisting angrily in his grasp. He drops the snake into a canvas bag and knots it tightly.

“One less snake in the bog,” says the immortal. “Soon there will be none. Know where it’s going? To some museum where it will ‘contribute’ to a scale-count study or some such nonsense. Then on to a giant metal shelving unit where it will stay until some clumsy rube knocks it over, mops it up, and throws it into a dumpster.”

“Let’s make sure you’re not next,” I say.

“Nothing you can do about it. That kid’s good. He’s been here before. He doesn’t miss a trick. Eyes like an eagle, persistent as a panther. If he’s this close to me and I’m out of the mud, I’m done for.”

I try to step on the turtle, gently, to push him down into the mud. I’m too late. The biologist sees the turtle and strides over, his speed hampered only by the pull of the muck.

“This is the end of me,” the turtle says. “Before I go, use your spirit-writing to catalyze the transcendent evolutionary change you mentioned. Choose a new version of humankind rather than the thundering oblivion of global climactic catastrophe and atomic Armageddon. Learn the difference between destiny and fate.”

“Come on,” shouts the lawman. “Our ride is sinking! Chopper pilot’s nervous. We gotta go!”

The young scientist raises his patience finger. He’s upon us now, and though I attempt to shield the bog turtle, he moves right through me, an uncomfortable feeling to say the least. He feels something, too. His face snaps shut like a clam. He pauses, shrugs, and picks up the turtle.

“Talk to him!” I cry.

“He can’t hear me any more than he can you,” the turtle answers faintly, his head inside his shell. “My kind has been imploring your kind for mercy for millennia beyond imagination. It’s no use. It has never been any use.”

“Please try,” I implore him as the biologist turns the little turtle around in his hand, tries to pull on a leg, turns him on his back, runs his fingers along his marginal scutes.

“STOP!” the little turtle screams.

The biologist suddenly looks as if he’s stuck his tongue in an electric socket. His long hair flies up and out, and his T-shirt, advertising a rock band named for an aardvark, floats away from his skin. The bog turtle tumbles from his hand, landing face first in the mud, tail sticking up in the air.

“What the…” the biologist whispers.

“Keep talking to him!” I say, “Make sure he knows your voice is real.”

“I don’t want to be pickled!” the bog turtle yells, righting himself. “I want to live out my life where I am, not be a victim of your curiosity. I’m not a toy. I’m not a rock. I have a family. I have ancestors and memories and I take joy in the crunch of a frog’s leg between my jaws and in sinking my beak into the bulb of a water hyacinth or lily. I want to seduce my mate and consummate the deed. I want to see my children hatch and grow. I have a right to all that, and it is as real and strong as your right to do the same things in your life and far more real than your right to kill me. Now go away and leave me alone!”

The biologist collapses to the ground and sits there staring, his pants stained, his boots dripping, the bag containing the rattlesnake flopping one way and then another as muddy water seeps in. He runs his hands over his face and over his forehead, pushing his locks out of the way and painting his face with mud like a Native American warrior.

“This can’t be,” he mutters. “It’s my own subconscious. My guilt.”

“It’s the turtle!” I bellow, even though he can’t hear me at all. “It’s not about you!”

The bog turtle sinks into the mud. The lawman tromps over and grabs the scientist by the elbow.

“Don’t ignore me! We’re outta here right now. Come back on your own if you want.”

“The turtle spoke to me.”

The lawman yanks the younger man to his feet. “I don’t appreciate babysitting potheads,” he says. “I got real work to do.”

I feel badly for the biologist, the way he keeps looking back over his shoulder at the bog turtle as he’s dragged away.

I bend to the turtle. “You see?” I say. “Miracles are possible. Spiritual evolution is possible. If the history of Planet Earth is about anything, it’s about unpredictable change.”

The look the immortal gives me says that the lesson went the other way this time, and that I’ve succeeded in at least shaking his impossibly pessimistic view of humankind.

Then I’m back in the forest, meditating, the wind blowing, the energy of all those living things buzzing around me.

Inexplicably, I find myself filled with irrepressible joy.