“God is not just a dancer; God is the dance itself.” — Richard Rohr

For more than a decade now, I’ve had this image of a swirling eddy swirling in my head. It is deeply blue, nearly black, as they are sometimes, in an otherwise crystal clear high mountain stream. Sentinels of deep grey granite rise above it, draped in robes of flowing water. Those watchful boulders are what creates the eddy—they, and the frame of the rose pebbled shore, and the relentless press of the water on its sojourn to follow gravity’s call. It is enchanting and lively, this rendering in my mind. It looks like a thing unto itself. And it is, in its way. I mean, it is there. It is real, and actual. It persists. Yet, the eddy exists only as an emergent effect of the interplay between all the things around it and out of which it is made.

The reason I can’t get this image out of my mind, is this:

I think this might be us.

In fact, I think this might be everything.

Like the eddy in the river, I’m beginning to wonder whether every thing in creation is actually not a separate thing at all, but is rather an emergent property of the relational interaction of all the things around it (which are likewise not separate things either).

What if we aren’t “things” that have relationships with other things?

What if we are the relationships themselves?

In a sense, what I’m talking about is similar to the brilliant concept of “Genius Loci.” Originated in Roman religious belief to refer to minor deities that watched over particular locations, the idea later evolved in architecture and geography to refer more generally to a location’s distinctive atmosphere or character. The concept has since deepened and expanded, through the work of poet David Whyte, theologian John O’Donohue and others, to convey a far more nuanced idea—that all things in the universe, including human beings, carry within them a nexus of living memory, with lines of connection stretching back not only to every moment in their own history, but also every moment in the histories of all of their ancestors, and every moment in the far more ancient history of the atoms that make up their bodies.

I love this richer and far more generative definition of Genius Loci. It is an elegant way of describing the provenance of the depth and gravitas of human presence, or the sacredness of a particular place. Anyone who has ever walked the ground of a Civil War battlefield, or looked in the eyes of an embattled old sage knows what I’m talking about. There is a dignity and power to their presence that their mere physicality cannot explain. This deeper notion of Genius Loci goes beyond our known relational history to include those unknown links to our past as well. It even goes so far as to reach back to the quantum memory of the atoms that make up our bodies—bits of ourselves that were once a part of the earth, or fragments of alien moons, or dust in the tails of comets, or nuclear reactions bright burning in stars.

All of this resonates in me as true. What I am adding to the theory—and perhaps this is only a small thing but it seems quite huge to me—is that this vast and vibrant intersectionality does not simply inform what we are; it is what we are. What if “beingness” itself is an active, unfolding process? What if it is continuously emergent, like the swirling eddy in the river? What if I am not a solid, static “it” that is the result of all of these relational inputs, but am instead the continuously emerging nexus of the relationships themselves? In this sense, I am not so much a solid thing as an unfolding process.

Or, to mirror Rohr’s quote above: What if I am not a dancer? What if I am, instead, just a part of the dance?

If I am close to right on this (and, to be clear, this is all thought experiment), then it means that what I am is the present, living expression of the relational interplay of the many forces—relational, historical, cultural, spiritual, physical, chemical, and quantum—that are intersecting in this present moment, in this precise space, to manifest something unique in the universe, something that is, in my case anyway, alive, conscious, and aware that it is here.

It means the being I am now has never been before now, and a moment from now he will be gone, and someone new will rise. In this sense, my humanity is never static. I am perpetually emergent. I am continually becoming. I never arrive at some fixed and stagnant end. I unfold, like a dance. like an eddy in a river. This is what I am.

If true, this would solve at least one riddle that I’ve been puzzling over for years: Why does it seem like I have been so many different people over the decades of my life? I remember them all. I have lived them all. I love them all. I keep every one of them close to my heart. But none of them are who I am now. And every so often I glimpse the eyes of the stranger I am becoming, and know that I will become him, and who I am now will fade into the hallowed halls of my memory.

I am not singular. I am a flow, an unfolding, an improvisational dance the universe is creating in real time. I am an emergence.

I think the mystics have always experienced hints of this possibility. I see it in their writings. O’Donohue, for instance:

"I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding."

And Rilke. Of course, Rilke:

“I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?”

But there are many others: Rumi, Hafiz, Rohr, Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Teilhard de Chardin, and more. All their writings are laced with hints like these.

If this is what we are, I think the revelation will be frightening to some. After all, it is so transitory and open-ended to view our existence in this way. How can there be any grounding or solidity to such a way of being? But there are laws that guide the forming of an eddy, and, I believe, Divine laws that guide the forming of a human soul, even one crafted in such a transitory way. Besides, since God is love, then it can be said that even God’s core essence is a relational flow. Would it not follow, then, that all God creates would share that essence as well?

For all its transitory uncertainty, there is also an inviting freedom to this “emerging eddy” view of our beingness. Like the quantum fuzz of the universe, we too are literally emerging moment to moment out of the fabric of possibility. Physicists still wonder why quantum particles behave differently when they are observed. This view explains why: Because everything in the universe is relationally defined. A thing becomes what it is as an expression of its relationship to everything else. If you change the matrix of those relationships, you change the thing. When there is no clear relationship, things become fuzzy and indistinct. They become possibilities. They take all paths and no path. They become Schrödinger's cat.

Isn’t the same true for us? Without relationship, we cease to have any distinct sense of self. We become phantoms and ghosts, lacking that sense of tangible presence the Buddhists call “is-ness.” I am not just talking about relationships with other people, by the way, though this is of course critical. But equally critical is our relationship with nature and the earth, our relationship with our personal history and our broader ancestry, even our relationship with own internal landscapes of heart, mind, and body. Most critical of all is our relationship with God, the Great Spirit, who as the only uncreated relational flow in our lives has the authority to name us above and beyond all others. As Madeline L’Engle observed,

“I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has view.”

Under this paradigm, all of these relational flows become vital to the emergence not only of our sense of who and what we are, but of who and what we are in actuality. For when we cut ourselves off from even one of these vital lines of relationship, we don’t merely sever our awareness of that flow, we actually make ourselves smaller and less substantial than we otherwise would be. I think it is no illusion that the more isolated and specialized modern society has forced us to become, the more it has diminished our humanity overall. Our nations today are full of millions of souls who are geniuses at the one thing for which they are paid, and yet desperately struggle to attain even the most basic competence and find meaning in nearly every other arena of their lives. We have exchanged connectivity for genuine connection, productivity for presence, sensationalism for sensing, spectacle for silence, and wealth for wisdom. In the name of efficiency and convenience, we keep pushing our machines to get smarter and our lives to go faster. But if all that is good, and it’s all progressing according to plan, why does it still feel like we are losing more of ourselves each year? Why does it feel like something essential and vital is being syphoned away from us by the way we are choosing to live?

Is it possible that in our frenzied rush toward technological mastery and ultimate convenience, we have inadvertently made ourselves smaller and less vitally alive than we once were? Could it be that we are more lonely and depressed than we have ever been because in our quest for “progress” we have severed our vital ties to those essential relationships that make us what we are—nature, spirit, family, community, soul, and the seasonal cycles of the earth itself?

To be clear, I’m not a Luddite. But neither am I blind to the unintended negative impact many of our technological and cultural “advances” are having on human thriving. When I go weeks without my hands ever touching the rough bark of a tree, or my bare feet ever walking upon the dirt of the earth; when I can’t remember the last time I spent an evening laughing with friends for no other purpose than just to laugh; when I’m too busy being productive to sit quietly in a corner and study the great works and letters left for us by the wisest men and women of our past; when I walk past someone in need because “I just don’t have time”; when I refuse to see someone’s humanity because of the hat they’re wearing, or the shade of their skin, or the smell of their clothes; when I’m too preoccupied with tasks to invest real time in stillness and silence, listening for the voice of God, and the voice of deep wisdom in myself—am I not diminished by these choices? Am I not making myself somehow smaller than I could otherwise be?

If what we are is the living expression of the sum of our vital relationships, then the act of severing even one of them is ultimately an act of self rejection. Severe enough of them, and it is suicide.

Of course, perhaps all of this is just my own fumbling way of echoing the question Rilke asks of God. I can’t say for certain whether I am a river eddy, or a dance, or a falcon, or a song, or something else entirely. But I do believe it is true to say that there is far more to being a full human being than our current society allows. I think we’re all waking up to that fact these days. The way we are going is not sustainable. It’s not even survivable. I diminish myself every time I give in to society’s pressure to disconnect from the full breadth of my own humanity; which is to say, when I cut off my relationship with some vital aspect of the world around me for the sake of efficiency, comfort, or convenience.

I am made for relationship. It may even be that I am made of them. If I am merely a passing eddy in the Great River of Time, then maybe the best thing I can do in these mad days is stop my own mad race to God knows where. To step out of the running. To throw the white flag. To quit trying so damn hard to succeed at everything society says I must do. And then, burdens dropped, to scout my way back to the root and bone of what I am as a human being. To rediscover all of those vital lines—to earth and spirit and self and personal ancestry and community and shared history and service to others—that make me what I am or can be. To recover my own Genius Loci and restore my connection to all of it, every last line of it, and in this way restore myself to the full dignity of my own humanity.

I’ve no idea who I’d be if I did all that. But I honestly believe I would really like him quite a helluva lot.