The line on the map is not to be found at the edge of the sea.

      – Donella Meadows

Yesterday I awoke to a hard rain falling on the rooftop. Safe and warm inside, I decided to venture outdoors with a book, the fantastic Under the Sea-Wind by Rachel Carson. Perhaps most important, I chose the real paper book, with pages that did not e-link to anything else.  I could dive under the water with Carson’s creatures, come up gasping for air.

The descriptions in Sea-Wind reminded me of this quote from Dana Meadows, part of a beautiful poem-essay that reminds us of all the fictional categories we’ve invented to map the world. Land and sea, here and there, red and blue, me and you… all helpful distinctions at times, but all exaggerated in their definition.

Friends, we are lucky to be able to explore with our minds and with our hearts and with our feet. And when we do, we find the world is indeed magnificently organized, not in boxes and lines but in glorious swoops and swirls and webs.

Let’s not make less of it.

Let’s revel in the crisscrosses and overlaps.

Let’s delight in the edges that dissolve as we draw near.