“In the stillness of the trees, I am home.”

– Wendell Berry

Last week the renowned poet Wendell Berry passed at the ripe old age of 92. He’s been a long time favorite author of mine for his values of authenticity and living close to the land. He was a farmer, a poet, and a staunch environmental advocate, using his writing to instill love and respect for the natural world in all of our hearts. His message was one of attention, presence, and care.

I would consider my life well-lived if I can continue to carry this torch he lit for us.

On a recent foray into the woods I realized Wendell had hitched a ride with me, in a sense. Some of his most memorable bits of writing were floating around my mind as I wandered through the dry late summer forests of Washington state.

“When despair for the world grows in me/I wake in fear...for what my life and my children’s lives may be...”

I’d spent the past couple weeks stuck to my desk, cleaning up my website in preparation for the holiday season. While it felt good to hit the proverbial reset button, staring at a big screen all day then inevitably staring at a little screen all evening while I scrolled the news made for a 1-2 punch that left me feeling all kinds of disconnected, anxious, and unsettled. Apparently being tethered to two AI-riddled Bad News Machines all day takes a massive toll on your mental health, who knew.

Well, Wendell knew. And I think many of us know, too, whether or not we want to admit it. He once said:

“The next great division of the world will be people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

In this increasingly dystopian and seemingly inescapable age of AI, our brains, our lands, and our hearts are being more exploited than ever. Several recent studies cite extreme and rapid cognitive decline from just a few minutes of AI use. This research in particular was staggering, and it’s straight out of 4 prominent colleges.

This isn’t conjecture, this isn’t a political stance. The negative impacts are very real.

At this point, with how destructive we have come to know generative AI is on personal, political, and environmental levels, there is simply no excuse to continue using the models built to scaffold late-stage capitalism. None.

Continuing to use the heavy hitters like ChatGPT (a major financial supporter of Trump), Claude, Grok, etc. means we're saying we don't care. we don’t care about the future of our planet. That we don’t care for the well being of children—especially our own, as we continue posting images of them to social media and shoving screens in their little faces. That we don’t care about the bodily autonomy of or extreme violence being committed toward children and women. Yet here we are, so many of us turning away, still supporting Elon Musk and Sam Altman and the rest of them whose AI models facilitate the extensive creation and distribution of explicit child sexual abuse imagery. If harming children isn't where we stand up and say "enough", what is?

AI is also homogenizing how we speak, think, and act. Memes and trending reels have already narrowed our lexicon to a few hollow and endlessly repeated phrases (yes queen, no cap, it’s a 10/10 no notes Borg-level assimilation, fam), but AI specifically warps our collective thinking, writing, emails, work projects, art, design, and so much more into a slurry of pseudo-sentient goop that leaves us all sounding, and somewhat actually being, lobotomized.

Ew.

I don’t need to explain more. The information is freely and widely available to all of us, for now. Which is exactly why I say there is no longer an excuse to willingly interact with generative AI now that we understand that the cons heavily outweigh any potential pros, if there are any.

So we have a choice: Be a messy, complex, real human creature, or hand our beautiful brains over to machines and the billionaires they serve.

I'd rather eat a data center than let my brain go so easily.

I like overthinking myself into oblivion, thankyouverymuch. I like creativity. I like having my own convictions and morals and beliefs. And I really like limiting how much of an accomplice I am to crimes against humanity and otherwise.

Thus the need for time in the woods, with Wendell and his words, to “come into the peace of wild things...”

____

Prime directive (how did this post end up having so many Star Trek references?): Get out of the screens, get into the real world. Look around. See the earliest signs of fall and bask in the knowing that the best season is just about here. See how the vine maples with their spirit finger leaves have the slightest tinge of crimson?

Look closer. Zoom in on the scraggly neon green moss draped over low pine boughs. Closer. See the delicate sun-bleached tail bones of a deer long since passed, lying in their pine duff grave. Closer. The frilly head of an early chanterelle mushroom peeks out from the spongy ground, promising a bountiful foraging season ahead.

Look closer, closer, closer….

While focused down low for most of the day searching for mushrooms, we quite literally stumbled upon a couple of patches of fallen wood that was unmistakably blue. Blue is the rarest color to find in the natural world, so seeing anything like a robin’s egg or a forget-me-not always catches my eye. For context, I’d gone on a quest last year to find the elusive elf cup fungus after seeing some remarkable macro photos of these tiny fungi–no thicker than a fingernail and small enough for a few to fit on the tip of a very sharp pencil. Sitting on the forest floor to get an up-close look at the blue-stained wood, thinking it could be this elusive fungus and not just spray paint (an oddly common thing to see in the woods), i picked a few pieces up and turned them over in my hands. The decaying wood was light as a feather. As I looked closer I could see web-like mycellium, new tendrils of green moss, a splash of bird poop….and then, an elf cup. One, then two, then a few more. So tiny, so fragile, so wondrous,

Truly a surprising bucket list find. Thank you, forest.

____

As the sun fell short and the shadows grew long, the woods sighed away the weight of another day. We picked our way back to the car, treading through crusty bracken ferns and prickly Oregon grape shoots, fresh and small after a recent fire. A feisty Douglas squirrel clung to a nearby tree trunk, barking at us to please leave his forest post haste as he had some important squirrel business to do free from prying eyes. A Sooty Grouse exploded from the low-growing salal, its zig-zag branches heavy with a summer's worth of growth and decaying black-purple berries.

The waning fireweed blooms waved farewell to the day with no promise of coming back tomorrow. A Hairy woodpecker escorted in the dusk with a somber drumming tune. The first crickets chirped awake. The slivered moon hung like a crooked sign, a beacon signaling the road to home.

“...I rest in the peace of the world, and I am free”