The problem with the humans is that they were all pulling for it, every last one. Apocalypse for breakfast, apocalypse with lunch, apocalypse on a toothpick in the afternoon bloody mary. The Situation, they all said, has gotten so far out of hand that it is on a beeline trajectory to explosive entropy, calamitous chaos, destructive downfall, impertinent implosion. It was headed in the direction from which grammatical whimsy never returns.

Strangely enough, although they all agreed on this viewpoint, the humans of this planet heavily, heatedly, vehemently disagreed about the causes. Some thought it was the pollution and the rising waters and the rampant, resource-guzzling, constantly-upgrading manufacturing process of the computer systems used to analyze these phenomena; others thought it was the last scene of the epic battle of Christ v. Antichrist (live on pay-per-view!); others believed it was politicians flooding social media with idiotic troll armies. To some, it was their looming divorce, to others, it was the tropical storm sent to smite the homos, to others, it was the incoming comet on a collision course with the upper half of the Western hemisphere. Still others: aliens!!! Any way you roll the dice, impending doom had everyone’s chips.

Not that everyone would admit to it, though. Oh, no; on the contrary, people were working tirelessly to abort that future. But ironically, in order to play one’s whole hand to avoid the catastrophe, one must believe in the catastrophe. Devotedly. Resolutely. Unwaveringly. Maniacally. Fanatically.

Right?

So, what juicy little secret fuels so many engines trying to save the world? That’s right: people want apocalypse. They want apocalypse to come clean up the mess. They’d like it to gesso the living hell outta this dystopian canvass so they can paint something fresh from the start: something with a heart that isn’t so incessantly frosted with the cold breath of bail bondsmen, advertising pop-ups, and chronic identity crises that contribute to the horrible, suffering deaths of children and puppies and chickens. The whole species seems to have developed this character part that would rather blowtorch the bedroom than clean out the closet or decide on a new wallpaper scheme.

This is where Livia comes in.

She felt, at times, like the only human who knew the world itself—the living earth, inclusive of all its parts—was hell-bent on survival and perfectly equipped to continue. She believed, always, that the whole of the Earth was quite capable of bringing into balance its Shadow, its Light, and most fantastically of all, its Color.

When Livia had conducted her top-secret research, back when it had had a reason to be top-secret, way back in the day, before the Military Industrial Complex developed such a hard-on for mechanized warfare, tweetable policy, and the chilly back-door draft of the video game empire, she had felt utterly inspired and wholly supported by the workings of Nature. Yes: even in the wake of all the horrific human error of the second World War, even then, after some of the worst mistakes the species had ever made in its ruthless quest for illusions of spotless control. She had seen a very clear picture of the dumbfounding fallibility of human culture. And she had witnessed an unassuming group of birds commit heroic, selfless feats of grandeur and unimaginable tricks of intelligence. In those early days of her research, dedicating her toil to her late husband, she had received this message, loud and clear, and it began to ring true from every direction she went: Nature is completely aware.

Nature had this one in the bag. Humans were not a threat to It, humans were an act of It.

Human beings—the ones experiencing all the emotion and all the turmoil and all the determination—were the ones telling stories about what was wrong. Nature has always had its own story, and its story has proven to be much, much longer than any human story has ever been [1]. Nature had it clear as a bell: It was fully surrendered to the Flow that licked the face and washed the shores of any crumbled crisis that humans brought into being. As an Act of Nature, humanity was quite welcome to participate in healing the industrial scars that its dance brought into being. It was quite welcome to kiss the hand that fed it. It was quite welcome to sing along with a different chorus anytime it wanted. It was quite welcome to reach for the nearest tree and hold on for dear life. But no one was required to quit playing the villain. Or the saint. All those story-tellers, all those manipulators and prospectors and inventors, they were all happening inside of a large, beautiful, graceful ball that rolled as it pleased through the endless Breath of Quantum Gravitation. Everyone welcome. All included.

Now, for Livia, human as the rest, this recognition had taken something of a plunge after her lifeblood work was rejected and suppressed, after she had survived an attempted rape, a successful blackmail, and a vindictive dismissal. When she met the further censorship of her findings even after she had gained the courage to publish on her own, Livia S. Columbia decided to let herself go off the deep end for a while. She studied the Darkness.

She walked in the alleys alone at night and slept in the bright of day. She rolled cigarettes with chemically-processed Phillip-Morris tobacco and a pinch of cayenne. She camped out beneath billboards and inside abandoned toy factories. She read only Cosmopolitan and GQ. Occasionally, she dressed up like a trendsetter and went shopping all day at the big mall. She bought an expensive, unnecessary item at each of the largest department stores, ate a big lunch, and then returned her items in the afternoon before wasting the gas to creep all the way back home. A later version of herself would have called all of this “research,” but at the time it was simply the only thing to do. She was living on credit, searching for nothing, and discovering various ways to take someone else’s word for the (American) Dream. She was diligently dog-earing the manual of someone else’s Instructions for Living Properly. Every day, she was trying out someone else’s complex.

The Pigeons still followed her everywhere she went. Out of habit, she spoke to them with her mind and body. They seemed to follow her pain unquestioningly, lonely and lost as she felt. Slowly, surely, her wandering brought her further out of town, deeper into the forest. There, in the quiet company of the unseen, she began to find the skills that brought her into life again.

She noticed the opening and closing of the sky, imagining how the clouds looked from above the shadows they made. She began to watch for the shadows of approaching cars as she sat beside the highway, feeling the forest sigh persistently in its own vigil. She could feel the cool air of bird shadows passing, before she heard or saw their flight. She began to see the shadows arrive on store clerk’s faces before they attempted to hide their discomfort from her. The Shadow itself began to appear as one seamless character, one shapeshifting, innocuous, intangible Happening that occurred universally, as an affirmation of the relationship between all beings in process. A choice, but not a doom. A sensation, but not a diagnosis. A constantly-moving pattern of Life living Itself.

Once Livia was nearly fledging age within her new awareness, she began to actively re-engage the Pigeons in communication. She found them even more supple and adventurous than they had been in her earlier laboratory-bound work. She found them more capable of abstract thought, more willing to try difficult intellectual tasks and attend to long explorations of subject-object relations. She found them a lot more cunning, notably cheeky. It seemed their social awareness was just as well-tuned as their intelligence, and they were capable of a type of empathy she hadn’t been receiving from the likes of her own kind.

Together they migrated to the northerly stretches of the Boundary Waters, out beyond strands of rarely-trod roads, deep into the birch & pine of a liminal forest preserve, where they were left alone, very much alone, to discover the infinite possibilities of communication in the infinitesimal synapse between dark & light, between breath & bird, between doing & being.

As it turned out, what was possible was to accept the shape of the whole world’s Shadow. To actually accept it; not “take on,” not “process,” and not “assume responsibility for” it, but just “accept” the shape of the Shadow, for what it was. In that ever-deepening breath of clarity, Livia relinquished all enmity. Her vision clarified to the reach of a Hawk [2], and she could see new colors between the spectral rainbow. Feathers of a brilliance beyond any conception of black and white. There, in the timeslice of Ma [3], she could at last see the Shadowdance in fullness. It was not a noun; it was a verb.

Through adaptation to unconscionable trauma repeated en masse, the people had turned the Shadow into a Thing, into an Enemy, into a Beast. They had lost their connection with its natural movement, with its meaning. The dance of sunlight and space through the breathing poplar forest. The ridges and veins of the living neighborhoods holding their ground to the soles of feet and paws of hounds and hands of children. The vastness between breathing stars. Instead, flailing for control, the people had made their Shadow into an Other and then treated it like most colonized cultures treated their Others; they sought to annihilate it.

Annihilation, in a world of infinite connectivity, meant all engines going down: Suicide. Apocalypse. Doom. Extinction.

Livia and the Pigeons were learning that all beings were perfectly capable of living and dying without killing themselves in the process. They were learning that Nature had been fighting malignant cell networks since before radiation treatments were invented. And they were learning that Nature had already read the suicide note, and it was, in every waking moment and doubly in dreams, turning this ship around.

They were also learning, step by step, breath by wing by prayer, how to help with the turning.

-**

1. Consider the Monarch.
2. 20/2 by optometrist’s measure. Which means 100/10, you know. And 1000/100, of course. So we can get a proper understanding of Scale. Imagine this kind of visionary watching your dreamscapes.
3. 間