03 - Character

A young girl who is trying to be a synthesis of Buckminster Fuller, Rachel Carson, and Kate Bush builds a community to discover her true self and to realize her dreams of making a world that loves itself.

Luna was puzzled by humans. She hadn’t quite figured them out yet. Being human herself didn’t seem to help. She was a stranger in a strange land.

She regarded herself as a combination of three celestial bodies. It was a form of nominative determinism that came from being named for the moon, the sun, and the earth.

There was an otherworldliness to her, even though she was more grounded to reality than her peers. But her reality was a way of seeing everything as sacred, of the earth but fully integrated with the universe—wholly physical while also being intimately connected to the metaphysical.

To others, she was odd. To herself, she seemed to be the only even person in the world. She found a balance within that came across as a calm presence. Except that, mostly, she was invisible. Partly, because she was a girl. Or a woman. It was strange thinking of herself as an adult. People in this society never seem to grow up. They tend to be emotionally stunted at the age of five or six, when children are forced to give up their emotional and sensual reality for literate reality, in which you are only allowed to believe what has been recorded in print, in black and white, the authorized and authoritative map of religion, science, and history.

The map is not the territory. All her peers had was a map, but no idea how to navigate reality.

Through high school, she had done her best to go along with the game.

Her muse was Kate Bush. She remembers people wearing WWJD bracelets, but she had created her own private club of one, wearing her own invisible WWKBD bracelet.

What would Kate Bush do?

The thought experiment breaks down pretty quickly, when you don’t know any friends who can connect you with David Gilmour to listen to the hundred songs you have been writing since you were eleven and immediately being signed to EMI Records at the age of 16.

There was something about the swan-like elegance of Kate Bush that she found incredibly inspiring. Above the pond, she glided effortlessly through her public interviews, knowing exactly what to say. The depth of her lake was her art, which spoke more eloquently to the complex interconnections of her rational, emotional, and sensual worlds that remained out of reach to the social, economic, and political norms of the man made world above the water. The power of the feminine was to conceal the expansiveness of the hidden reality that was intimately connected to everything else.

Exploring the digital libraries of the internet revealed an obscure world that was a relief from an advertising-saturated media environment. When she was trying to discover a connection between quantum physics and metaphysics, she had put gravity and metaphysics together and found someone who had already made the connection.

A Medium article said, Love is metaphysical gravity.

Reading those words, something clicked. A sensation like a chill, but neither warm nor cold, radiated outward from her chest and extended all the way to her fingers and toes, and warm tears filled her eyes, blinking to let them spill down her face, allowing her to bring the words back into focus.

Scanning to find the author’s name, she read Ganga Devi Braun.

She was referring to the writing of R. Buckminster Fuller. The Wikipedia article described a man who had died July 1, 1983. YouTube was full of videos of people talking about his life.

Luna asked her father, do you know anything about Buckminster Fuller?

Yes. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

She found a book called Critical Path on Audible and began listening. The world shifted on its axis. After reading this book, the world made sense. It validated, affirmed, and supported her sense that the world was out of balance. Her intuition about this hidden sixth sense being the answer to the bias toward an understanding of the five senses became the cryptographic hash that unlocked the mysteries hidden deep in the lake of the rational, emotional, and sensual experience of being human.