BluePattern

It’s rare these days to run into somebody who has a sure and true command of language. Language at its essence. Language with the power to move people to action, like Demosthenes in ancient Greece who so moved his listeners that they charged off with conviction before he was finished.

Bah! We don’t need to stuff like elocution and rhetoric. It’s like salad: healthy but so easy to skip. We can subsist on the linguistic doritos that travel through our cellphones, crackberries, facebook status messages and Twitter.

Every once in awhile, though, you find somebody who reminds you of the power of oratory. We all have an inborn capability to be moved by speech, just as we are by music. It builds a vision inside us and resonates with things we believe in but have somehow forgotten.

One of my professors back in college — the archeologist James Adavasio — had this ability, delivering a :55 minute lecture with no notes as if he was channeling the latest archeology show on Discovery. No uh’s or um’s, just a wide sweep across disciplines and countries before closing with a well-composed finale about the sweep of humanity through time.

I admire the ability to speak well, probably because I can’t. I especially admire people who speak well about things that are truly important. When I saw this clip of Wade Davis from last year’s TED conference, I was reminded again about how valuable it is to have among us people who can speak about critical matters.

If we are to meet the challenges of our world in crisis, we need more people like this; people who have not lost the art of stirring the minds of their listeners with the heartfelt construction of words.

You have big ambitions. You have big ideas with big impacts causing world-changing events.

Who doesn’t? Each of us who has even the mildest, dust-covered interest in doing something positive for the world is stirred and inspired by modern eco-heroes. Big heroes, thinking big and traveling to exotic places to fight the encroachment of loggers onto the evaporating green puddle of our world’s rainforests (”By jet?” you ask . . . “The end justifies the fuel and the plastic pillow wrap!” I answer).

With ideas, the hidden becomes manifest. You can be that guy driving his Jeep to the ends of the earth to learn about how this-and-that native group makes medicine from a local tree. Or single-handedly set up a foundation for alleviating blindness. This is how it should be — inspired by lofty goals and gritty determination, the greatest of us change the world for the better.

But sometimes one has to stop and lower the big idea filter.

The big idea filter: the glorious shiny batch of stories and goals that each day’s events radiate through. It’s the stacked sheets of cellophane in front of our eyes, with semi-transparent images from every movie, daydream, good book, conventional wisdom and ethical hand-me-down we have.

Sometimes, like today, I get a nagging feeling that big idea filters are killing us. Big idea filters are notorious for filtering out THE BORING STUFF. And it’s the boring stuff that is choking our planet and poisoning our bodies.

Take me for example: I’m studying traditional chinese medicine at Five Branches Institute in the hopes of one day helping a lot of people with a holistic and less technology-intensive way of healing. Heck, maybe I’ll help patch the gaping wounds of our public health system. I try to write stories about sustainable development. I donate to environmental charities.

But I still can’t bring myself to change THE BORING STUFF. Cripe! It’s everywhere. All those boring little frickin’ things that have an impact on the world but don’t seem to fit into the glamorous world of the world-changers.

It’s the mundane. The drab. The stuff a detective following me might scribble into his notepad while wishing for a better job. 9:45 - McQuillen stopped at Walgreens to pick up pen for school and energy bar for breakfast. 10:13 - McQuillen filled up gas and lost pen while getting back into car . . . moron. 12:02 - McQuillen bought lunch at Staff of Life.

Here’s a picture that detective might have taken of the remains of my lunch from Staff of Life grocery store:

This my friends is an in-the-wild look at the reclusive but remarkably prolific boring stuff. In thirty minutes I added this small assortment of trash you see to our collective, global, species-ending problem . . . well at least the kombucha bottle is recycleable.

But don’t worry! This is small stuff. BORING STUFF! It pales in comparison to the world-changing events I’m working on. Besides, it’s not my fault the sushi makers put in that extra piece of green plastic, the one that looks like a two dimensional front lawn from a second grader’s art project. Nobody sees boring stuff, because we can still manage to tuck it away in land fills, whale stomachs, and poorer countries that take trash for cash … all the while hoping that the world’s resources holds out at least another twenty years or so.

And even right out in the open, after a nice hearty lunch of smoked salmon sushi (probably not wild-caught), I don’t see this stuff through my big idea filter. It keeps me from changing my trash-making habits. It filters out the sushi container, the cookie wrapper and the disposable chop sticks so I have more time for big ideas. And nobody points fingers at me, because disposable sushi containers with green plastic lawn replicas are simply how things are.

Others have much more impressive and effective big idea filters. John Edwards sports a big rosy one as he tells Americans to ditch their SUV’s . . . ehhh . . . of which he owns a few. A mammoth one shields Leonardo DiCaprio as he lives the glorious energy-intensive lifestyle of a mega star while stumping for the plight of planet earth with a somber, evocative documentary and an eco-website.

Who doesn’t want to live like Leonardo? Who doesn’t want to leave the boring stuff to the common guy? “I NEED to jet around to inspire you, man!”

The troubling thing about big idea filters is that when so many of us want to be world-changers, there’s so very little time to worry about the boring stuff. And so that boring stuff, so real and so lonely, collects around the feet of every world-changer and world-changer-wanna-be and, with nowhere to go, simply waits.

This curled mollusk in me
deep between my stomach and memory
small twirl of lime and water
pulls downward
when I stand before the breaking waves
it pulls me downward
towards the foamy, retreating water

When something comes into your life,
something extraordinary,
it comes in at an angle,
a line through the flat plane of your existence.

Its impact sends ripples in all directions,
so that it affects not only
the left and right,
the up and down,
the light and sorrow of your life,
but so too does it ripple the time before and after.

So if you had the courage to look into your future,
you would see these ripples, now waves, advancing
and understand just why recent strange moments
are all born of future events.

Not far from here there is a bright mural
painted on earth red brick. From the sky,
looking downward, there is nothing to see.

Understanding the way
is like watching
the tall green reed turn
flat side to thin
and seeing nothing except
the morning sun behind.

Recognize that the sacred
is folded away from your site,
and that precious things viewed directly
show nothing of their shape.

Recognize the sacred
in the shape of each wave
as it breaks and churns
and see how it comes from a source
which intersects your life at an angle
and is gone.

Zurich Zoo

Along a small alley
in a lost corner of the zoo
a large rat-like animal was wound tight
against the far wall
among dried leaves and a paper cup.
As it twitched in fitful sleep,
a soft, heaving corner in the euclidean lines of its cell,
I wondered how
this faintly grunting thing,
raised in captivity,
should move its legs
as if running along a sun-drenched plain.