#evolutionary intelligence

My name is Liz and I live in the Pacific Northwest USA, land of water and mountain, temperate rainforest and volcano. It’s a maximalist, high energy region.

(Photo taken at Weowna Park, an old growth forest preserved in the Lake Hills neighborhood, my home.)

Since context is key to understanding anything, I’m here to share the context for myself and this blog.

I trained as an occupational therapist (OT) because it is the only profession I know of that explicitly links meaning with physical activity and health of the mind/body. An “occupation” by our definition is anything a human does that has personal meaning. I’ve always been weirdly obsessed by the concept of meaning, so OT resonated with me. It seemed to link brain, body, and meaning in its practice of therapy, which is all about action with one’s body in our sensory world. It’s not a passive therapy in any way.

Except.

I have come to realize the type of meaning my profession serves is only meaning according to Western Civilization; it is meaning divorced from human Evolutionary Intelligence or biospheric homeostasis, designed instead to maintain the industrialization of the human body and relationships. Basically, the inspirational aspects of occupational therapy are burned out by its focus on personal independence within the context of Civilization, on helping cement the idea that every person is an island who doesn’t need anyone else, or shouldn’t. Needing someone else is disability, even though we label clients with shades of independence: independent, modified independent, minimal assist, moderate assist, max assist.

(Bumble bee on a cosmos in my garden last summer.)

But: is a bee needing her hive a disability? Is a wolf needing his pack disability? Humans didn’t evolve to be perfect or islands, ever, let alone to not need anyone. We’re not just kinda social as a species, we’re obligate social. Yet our cities, packed with people though they are, are incredibly isolating and lonely. Our modern industrialized family structures are alienating. We didn’t evolve for this kind of separation from one another, especially women, who find their strength in community with other women. Think about it: isolated nuclear families make the secrecy of abuse possible, just like glassed in corner offices make the secrecy of corruption more likely. Our social structures bring out the worst in us, and modern medicine is designed to be a crutch to allow us to hobble along without actually changing anything about the way we live and consume. I feel that Occupational therapy is just another facet of this broken system.

(Bumble bees on my butterfly bush last summer.)

Standard OT may have disappointed me, but it also gave me the starting point for creating a new framework of human occupation for therapists to use based in the realities of Evolutionary Intelligence and the truth that we must change our lifestyles before we can save our planet. It’s the time and place to be honest with ourselves.

Our deep neurological and bodily programming connect us with the biosphere, the same as every other species. This can be true while we and they still retain our identities as autonomous species with our own unique genetic/energetic profiles. Remember: every living thing is shaped by the forces of internal homeostasis and external homeostasis working together, at the same time. I believe that homeostasis is a primary driver of evolution that our society can’t see- or won’t see -because it is so at odds with the goals of Western Civilization.

(Pottery is my hobby. I think it’s high time for a new Arts and Crafts movement; artists are historically the most brave truth-tellers.)

This blog is a journey of intuition and research to discover whether a profession created in the context of industrialized Western Civilization, Occupational Therapy, is capable of guiding people through the de-industrialization of the human animal so we have a chance to find real meaning and save our biosphere.

I welcome any and all conversations about this stuff!

Garden status: high energy overtop a layer of still calm (turn up the volume to hear our excited hummingbird, Axl Rose, and some dark-eyed junko and golden-crowned sparrow chatter.)

For the last three years, I’ve spent an average of two hours a day sitting in my rocking chair on my porch, observing the garden, absorbing nature. It all started because life was drowning me: I was no good to my family, no good to my community, I didn’t even know myself outside of how civilization defined me. I started waking up at 4:00am, so I began getting up and watching the sunrise. The quiet of my porch and the nature that crept in from the periphery were the only things that pulled me out of my own head. They gave me space to breathe and feel something other than the pressure of busyness. They made me realize nothing in nature suffers, or tolerates suffering, like humans do.

Why would that be? How can a small suburban garden have the power to cause such transformation in a human body? This question brought me to the concept of evolutionary intelligence, which is now only used by computer scientists to describe how machine learning intelligently builds on itself, on past programming, to create better artificial intelligence. But we humans - and every plant and animal!- have just such prior, deep programming built into our genetics, echoes of our evolutionary past that stuck because they helped us maintain balance, homeostasis; they helped us survive to reproduce. These traits are built into our species intelligence.

(Squirrel friend before the snow. When I can’t sit in my garden, I sit at my window.)

Civilization broke the human contract with nature long ago, and one of the most exciting things I can think of is rediscovering all the things we’ve forgotten, all the connections that can give our lives meaning again.

Photo: magic beans.

Or scarlet runner beans, if you prefer.

Video: Garden Status: misty, busy, war zone-esque?

The northern flicker woodpeckers have learned to use chimney tops and transistor boxes to amplify their drumming. Even on a misty morning like this the sound bounces around, echoing off the taller trees in the neighborhood, broadcasting their competition to all.

There is a warmth, now, a sweetness: the promise of spring.

Photo: valerian coming back after a short winter break. Those old leaves and stalks I left to decompose over the winter have fertilized the plant and turned to soft threads, and they are exactly the kind of thing little birds will use for nesting material in the coming months.

Photo: artichoke flowers that have been slowly picked apart by jays over the course of the winter. They have big seeds the birds love, and they reseed really easily. The ‘hair’ of the flower looks just like elk fur, and it, too, is excellent nesting material.

An evolutionarily intelligent garden is a garden the animals can use, too, not a garden built on the aesthetics of civilization. A smart garden is messy, in a controlled way; it honors the Conservation of Energy and the interconnectedness of the biosphere, even in urban and suburban areas like I live. The animals need all the help they can get.

And when we help the animals, we help ourselves. Every bit of energy on this planet is connected regardless of the stories Civilization tells us. Tapping into that connection, making it conscious- that’s the thing I want for every person on this earth. That’s when things change and get really interesting: when we rediscover our inheritance as part of this complex and unfathomably interdependent biosphere.

It’s not easy to tell our crow friends apart, but this one has a stunted and twisted break that makes her easy to identify. It’s gotta be tough having a misaligned pair of tweezers for a mouth. She looks a little disheveled because she can’t groom herself well and she doesn’t have a mate to groom her, yet. She gets chased by other crows in her family sometimes, but she still forages in the garden with them and chases the eagles and hawks out of the neighborhood with them.

She and an old male with a stiff leg (and his mate) are the easiest from our neighborhood’s family to pick out, although many of them are individually distinctive mid-molt. One crow last summer had a feather sticking out at a 90deg angle from his right wing for an entire week! It was excruciating not to be able to smooth it down for him.

Side note: why *don’t* we call birds dinosaurs? Like, ‘I’m going dinosaur watching’ gives the whole venture of birding so much more gravitas and thrill, while also having the benefit of being accurate. Birds are in the same family as T-Rex, they are the keepers of the Dinosaur Brain, so different from the Mammal Brain. Watching them through the lens of mini velociraptor changes your whole perception of a flock of junkos. I suppose it suits science somehow to say dinosaurs are extinct.