Protecting the Networks Of Life

Each year during the Holy Nights, the days between Christmas and the Epiphany, our family gathers to record our lives from the previous year, month by month. We do one month a night, in reverse. As such, on December 25, we will review that December. On the 26th, we review November. On the 27th, October. This continues until the eve of January 5th, when we close out with January, the first month that started the wheel of the year turning.

We’ve done this for at least a decade. It was a special book, that Anderson family journal. Another thing lost in the fire. However, we didn’t let that stop us, and even though the kids no longer participate in the documenting of the year, my husband and I still continued, buying a new journal in December of 2020, the first Christmas after the fire, and documenting that tumultuous year, one that started with lockdowns in China, continued with Covid lockdowns in America, peaked with the fire on our land, and then ended in a rental with a family weaving together a new life from ashes.

To make the activity easier, I’ve adopted the habit of writing down highlights as I go through the year. I use my planner for this, which makes sense. The planner is where I put the appointments, so sometimes I add an extra note so we can recall it later. Like, movie night at the Hoovers, or dinner with the Kadlecs. I’ll put in the restaurant name or title of the movie to help jog our memories later, when we sit down during the Holy Nights to document the previous year in our personal “Book of Life.” The other day, as my husband and I recalled June 2022, we realized that we couldn’t remember what we did for his birthday. Turns out, I didn’t have ANYTHING written for that day to jog our memories. The entry in my calendar was blank. It was the same with the 4th of July. We must have done something on those days, but neither of us could recall and without my notes, we were left with our own memories—and unfortunately, there were none. Just holes in both of our brains.

To be fair, these two events occurred during a massively busy time. We’d taken delivery of the first of our sons’ tiny houses on June 20th (that event was documented in my planner), the next one came on July 1st. We moved out of our rental and back to the mountain on July 9th and Walt retired from Zoom on July 7th. In the middle of all these events there was mad dashing to get the land ready, the house packed, he was insane at work preparing his team for his departure, and his birthday as well as the 4th fell in this timeframe. It’s impossible for one mind to hold everything that happened, however, there are two of us. Why would both of us draw blanks?

I’ve noticed my mind has more empty spaces lately. Could be because I’m 50 now, but when I query the people around me, they too say their minds are working differently. There’s a constant distraction. A buzz of some sort. A fog that hasn’t lifted. Could be Covid, though I haven’t had it yet. Could be the vaccines, but this started before I got them. Could be the trauma of the pandemic in general—the massive disruption to our lives as well as the fear. In my case, it could be the trauma of the fire, coupled with the pandemic. As I enter the final decades of my life though, I find myself wanting to protect this precious web of neurons in my head, and while trauma is a key factor in understanding neuroscience, the things we take into our bodies, via our senses and food, are critical to both the development as well as the destruction of our brains.

Webs of Life

I’ve long believed that the intelligence of the Earth, which includes all aspects of the planet including plants, animals, weather systems, etc. as well as human interactions and thoughts, is a field we can tap into at any time. Many indigenous cultures called this the “Web of Life” and its weaver is Grandmother Spider. Others call it the “Book of Life” or Akashic Record. Like the main character in my Egyptian trilogy, Natasa, I call it the Way. However one imagines it, the essence is this—all life is intelligent, and all life expresses itself through the bodies they’ve been given. For example, humans have five senses with which to “take in” the world experience. We express ourselves through our movements and what we make and do with our hands, as well as through our language, both written and spoken. Human speech is not the only qualifier for intelligence, it just happens to be one of the keyways we express ourselves in our bodies while alive. A tree is also interacting within the field of life through its body, only that interaction is different. We can’t have a conversation with a tree that is purely human, they don’t have a larynx for example, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t conscious or incapable of granting wisdom. It is within the realm of the Way; our imaginations, stories, and intuition, where we can observe the tree and hear what it has to say. That most modern society doesn’t even consider this possible is the reason we’ve created a system of life that is in the end, anti-life.

The human brain is a beautiful network of neurons, not unlike the network of mycelium we’ve discovered in the forest floors, the internet we’ve created with our own hands, or the Web of Life. The brain is the connection to our bodies, each other, and the field of intelligence. Without it, navigating the material world is difficult and navigating the Way is even harder. We place a lot of value on our thoughts, but recalling memories, which is a form of storytelling as well as intelligence, is also important. As we lose our memories, we lose our sense of time. We’re not sure where in our brains memories are stored—I’m of the opinion that they’re stored outside our bodies in the intelligence field of which I speak—however we do know that the health of our brain is the key to accessing them. It’s one thing to have a memory that isn’t true or contains elements that perhaps didn’t really happen. Our minds are a curious thing. We’ve all heard tales grow taller with each telling. Yet to draw a blank, to have nothing to recall, this leaves us outside time, outside the experience of life.

I’ve watched the brains of my elders change dramatically in the past two years and I know in my heart, my own brain is changing as well. I believe in exercising the body and eating good food. I’ve cut back on caffeine and meditate every day. Yet still, I’m distracted. Something isn’t quite the same as it was before 2020, and the time has come to look deeper at my habits, those that promote connection to the web of life, and those that don’t.

Habits For Life

At the start of the pandemic, I bought two cases of wine from our local winery to help them stay in business, or at least, that’s what I told myself. At that moment in time, my relationship with alcohol had been defined in my twenties and remained quite steady—I drank on date night, we call it Wine Wednesday and my husband and I split a bottle, and then on Friday and Saturday evenings. If we were at home, it was often one bottle of wine I’d drink between the two evenings. If we were out, I could drink most guests under the table. I’m Polish, after all. Regardless, for the most part I was a three night a week drinker. Two bottles of wine split between those nights. Thus, when I bought the two cases from Beauregard, I thought they’d last a long time, however my husband no longer had to commute to and from work, and many of our routines and rituals changed. Suddenly, we popped a bottle open every night, because hell, we were on lockdown, not able to see our friends, go to work or the gym, see family, and what else did we have to do? Every single activity we’d belonged to, things that kept us busy and active, had gone away, instead replaced with Zoom Tails, so then, it wasn’t surprising it got to a bottle a night, and often my husband only took one glass and then switched to beer. This lasted until early August of 2020, when I first realized this new habit had occurred, yet the world was still a mess, and I was going to have to figure out a way to nip it in the bud before it became a permanent part of my life. Unfortunately, two weeks later, my home burned down, and I simply didn’t have it in me to notice any habits, because all the anchors of my life were now gone—from my community to my home—and a person can handle only so much trauma. Wine to the rescue.

It was also March of 2020 when I’d first finished my article about technical advancements in communication and how it affects the brain. I was proofreading my essay based on the groundbreaking work of Dr. Leonard Shlain with the help of his daughter Tiffany and it dawned on me that there was tons of evidence that the advent of the Smartphone and social media was literally re-wiring our brains, the very organ needed to interact with the field of consciousness, and we were playing with fire as a species.

Dr. Shlain’s basic thesis is this: that with each invention of communications technology, from language itself to writing to the printing press to radio to the internet to the Smartphone to social media and 24/7 information in our back pockets, there is a period of instability within our physical brains in which the left or right hemisphere is overwhelmed. As a result of this literal brain damage, there’s also much violence and instability in the world around us. He proposed it takes at least two generations before the brain has evolved enough to handle the new form of communication and until then, we’re literally insane.

I’m not going to go into more details, I’ve written about it over and over. Read my essay, The Gods are Crazy and So are We. The point here is that I knew back then, in March of 2020, that my relationship with social media and scrolling through newsfeeds and YouTube wasn’t doing me any favors and had managed to get off most of it when the fire hit in August. I’ve written about how beneficial social media has been since that disaster in my most recent essay, A Rare Ode to Social Media. However, now that the event has passed and I’ve rebuilt my life physically, I realize I use it more now than I did pre-pandemic, and this is a habit worth addressing.

Both alcohol and the use of our Smartphones are bad for our brains and both mess with dopamine receptors, literally re-wiring connections as we use them. Sure, there are studies that point out a few drinks of red wine a day are good for us, and that playing Minecraft can improve your child’s math skills, and they’re both right. But alcohol is ethanol, a known poison, and studies also show that social media is making us anxious, angry, and narcissistic, which can lead to alcohol abuse. In my heart, I know the two habits are intertwined. It’s no coincidence that as we enter an age of climate chaos, our own minds are in chaos and we’re drinking more wine than ever before to manage it. We’re also drowning in information.

It's the time of the year for resolutions and mine is to address these dual dopamine enhancing habits in my life. I don’t think I can quit one without the other. They’re knitted together the way nature is. You can’t extract something without looking at the whole. In addition, I’m a firm believer is as above so below—the way we treat our own bodies reflects the way we’re treating the planet. Poison within, poison without. I also know that no matter how often I exercise, do yoga, meditate, eat well, and take the right vitamins and supplements, if I drink a bottle of wine most nights and spend hours a day scrolling mindlessly through my feeds, I won’t become the old lady I’ve longed to be since I was little—a fabulously dressed forest witch with long, gray hair, dancing, observing, and serving until her last breath. A Swiss cheese brain isn’t a part of that vision.

The truth is, knowing the dangers of something doesn’t protect me if I’m still consuming it.

I’ll start with Dry January, which I’ve done in the past, but this time with a different outlook. Normally, I see it as proof that I’m not an alcoholic—if I can go 30 days without a drink, I’m obviously in control, right? This year, I’m engaging with it in a new way, and instead looking at how my daily life has changed since 2020 and how I may have replaced some life affirming activities (volunteer work, teaching, visiting with friends, etc.) with wine to cope with the amount of loss and dislocation from home and community I’ve experienced.

And as for social media, I’ll be stepping back. This will be hard, because 1) I LOVE interacting with all my friends online and 2) creators are told that without Facebook, IG, or Twitter, we can’t sell books. Well, I’ve invested countless hours pushing my work out into that web, hours I can never get back, and I haven’t sold a lot of books. As for my friendships, we know each other now, and there are ways to stay in touch without holding our phones in our hands all day. The time has come to let go, to write for the love of writing, of course share my work when I’ve created it, but to stop endlessly interacting in cyberspace. I will have to trust that the divine intelligence of this world will use the internet to find those who are interested in my work, rather than search for readers myself. The most old-fashioned network is word of mouth, and even with all the changes in our lives, this is still a powerful method.

Besides, I have a new book to write, and I need a clear mind to do so.

As for keeping a connection with each other, if you’re reading this and know you want to stay in touch without the need to follow each other on Facebook, you can do a few things. 1) Text me 2) Message me on Messenger or IG 3) Sign up on my website, I’ll be very active there www.nicolesallakanderson.com and continue to publish essays and updates on my books 4) For those interested only in my wildfire/nature essays, sign up for my Substack 4) Comment on my website or Substack 5) Email me. While I’ll occasionally post on FB and Twitter when I have a new essay or update about my novels, I believe in the power of one-to-one communication and will respond to every message, text, email, and comment on my website. This is the best part of the internet. I don’t want that to end, yet I want to preserve my mind and I don’t believe I have to have my phone on my person 24/7 to create human connections. At least, that’s what I hope.

I wish everyone a powerful 2023. May you manifest at least one miracle and resolve to look at the synchronicities in life and how the field of intelligence is speaking to you so you can live the story of your heart’s desire.