Tuesday, March 15, 2011

design & disorder


an invisible hand


the inner judge within us can easily find flaws with the world,
at least my inner judge does,
until I find a way to overrule it on appeal,

I remember, as a kid, wanting to see the beauty in the forest
and having trouble getting past the bother of the messiness
for no gardener cleans up the forest floor,
I would love to marvel at the purity of the water
and get bothered by water striders,
who, like squirrels (who also bother me), eat what they can find
and neaten up the world a bit,
while annoyingly present in a process that feels messy,

I wonder about design and intelligence behind it all:
Adam Smith posited the invisible hand of the market
moving through countless individual choices,
a collective good made up from the hodgepodge of self-centered wills,
Charles Darwin argued the same,
with God playing dice with the universe,
and as each organism lives for itself,
random change works upon all
and somehow the whole can feel so right,
like a puzzle with each part fit surely to the whole,

random selfishness and competition at the heart of the universe,
life fueled by death,
and the world still expresses an unexpected wholeness that astounds.

by Henry Walker
March 13, ’11

1 comment:

Bill said...

I like this one H.