I’ve taken to reading something well and deliberately written in the morning.
I’ve also deliberately taken to reading slowly. I always learned that reading fast was better, and I got very good at it. But sometimes it’s not just a way of getting the words in your head for a story to be known; sometimes it’s something that needs to percolate. Not downpour, but mist; not rain on the desert, but rain on peat and moss and marsh and fen. Rain to be cleaned, to cleanse, to make slow changes.
So I’ve not finished reading his newsletter yet, because I got caught, like a leaf on a twig in a rain-swollen stream, I got caught and I’m still floating this way and that as the current rushes by, on this:
Today, Rob Brezsny’s newsletter said:
In his book The Medusa and the Snail, science writer Lewis Thomas said that the English word “error” developed from a root meaning “to wander about, looking for something.” That’s why he liked Darwin’s idea that error is the driving force in evolution.
“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA,” said Thomas. “Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”
And I wonder. If we can blunder and stumble into fractals and starbursts and plants that talk with each other and the animals but not with humans, if we can mistake and error our way in to touch and taste and sex and breath and hands that can make fire and astronomy and infinity and religion and fish and fins and the fact that fish do not actually exist…
maybe my ability to fuck up is okay. maybe it is generative. maybe it helps to make us, collectively, whole.