14
Mine, mix, fill, place, tamp, wire, repeat.
Just a couple of rows left. Way up there. Even framed in a few windows and bagged around them. The bottom layers had turned to stone with the mass of twenty rows compacting the mix. The whole structure was becoming more than solid. It was wolf proof.
Each microscopic particle of sand is covered with jagged edges, when rammed intensely, they all puzzle piece together into a tight block, with the wet clay acting as an electrostatic glue. It was no longer a dirthouse, with each slam it slowly transformed from rubble to rock, reverse erosion.
It had taken longer to percolate than it took to integrate the expanded team. The whole system lent itself to a freeform workflow as its elegant simplicity invited uncluttered momentum.
“Man, this sure got a lot easier with a few extra hands,” expressed Cap. A curious assessment thought Miles, seeing as how the old timer had a permanent residency at the mix station, regardless of the roster.
“I know that’s right,” she agreed.
“It’s a beautiful thing, really,” mused Levi. “The basic building blocks are all the same from top to bottom, so it’s not intimidating to jump into the flow. I bet you could have twenty people helping out and not be in each other’s way.”
“That’s that monolithic design,” expanded Cap. “A single construction technique from start to finish.”
“It’s a mosaic of individuals composing the big picture,” she illustrated. “Like how amino acids fit together to form the blueprint of life on Earth.”
“Or how swirling gasses coalesce into the cosmos,” Paul added.
“Exactly,” she concurred. “Just as each thread of human experience weaves the fabric of our lives.”
“I thought that was cotton,” teased Miles.
“Oh hush,” she fought back. “But cotton is a part of the collage too. All of life is. Each grain of sand working together to shape the story of our planet’s evolution.”
“Layers of nested perspective,” waxed Levi.
“Ooh, I like that,” she nodded. “And once you pack one up tight, you’re ready to unfold another, until eventually you step back and realize the potential of your manifested reality.”
“Layers of something, alright,” Cap griped. “And it’s getting pretty deep too. At least from my perspective.”
“Ha ha, too much hippie mumbo jumbo for a boomer, I reckon.”
“Touché,” he ceded. “Musta forgot who I was talking to for a second.”
“Also a common side effect of your generation,” her deadpan delivery broke stitches among the working class.
“Hey now, I’m not too old to whip you kids at some extreme croquet,” which he proceeded to do, as their philosophical survey rambled down the hillside.
“So we’re all in it together as we paint the larger narrative,” paraphrased Miles, as he bounced past the wicket. “But at the same time, aren’t we competing for our own quality of life over that of another’s? Isn’t that the foundation of evolving a developed world? Even down to the wars we wage over resource management?”
“Yes and no,” she allowed. “But that mindset of winning at all costs has nearly defeated the planet herself. Viewing the rest of life as an enemy has set us at war with the world, and just like any war, we’re all gonna lose.”
“Alright then, enlighten me to the true nature of nature, why don’t you.”
“Gladly. Not that I’m any kind of expert or anything, just a fangirl of Earth magic is all.”
“You’re overqualified by my calculations.”
“Aw,” she almost blushed. “Well, in that case, I shall continue,” she continued. “So yeah, there’s natural competition, friendly competition, but it’s not rooted in the besting of an opponent as much as a cooperative push to the limits of the possible. The web of symbiosis is much thicker than the hairline fractures that separate us. We can’t even begin to fathom the intricate relationships among the selfless members of the Earthling race.
Like how when a grandmother tree is cut down, and the rest of the forest redirects their energy towards keeping her stump alive, a competitor would revel in the newly freed up resources, but instead, what we see is a personal sacrifice of nutrition as a community reaches for the greater good.”
“That’s incredible, they really do that?”
“Oh yeah, and as you dig deeper, you find a seemingly infinite array of complex partnerships. And we used to be an integral part of a lot of them, happily contributing our own harmony to the ensemble, until the dissonance of commodity came in like a wrecking ball.”
“Is that what broke everything?”
“One layer of it anyway. The myth of human superiority, and its unapologetic exploitation of anyone and everyone, including themselves. The strings are pursed to persuade us of an inherited reign over nature, simply a resource for the taking, and for resale, while the only trace of competition that remains is in the clearcut profits of an overgrown marketplace.
Our natural born inclination is to be a part of the whole, a cooperative community that flows together to make the most out of the least. This other thing, the absurdity of individual self-servings, that kind of indoctrination can only be forced into the wounds of a broken population.
They’ve been convinced that life’s a competition. It’s dog eat dog, so you best be looking out for number one, and at all costs. The itemized milestones of maturity on your credit report equate to points in the game of life, as they relieve you of any sympathy towards the less-privileged, who it turns out, are simply not as good at friendly competition as those with a head start. Be loud and proud that you’re winning, flaunt your opulence as all others fall below the property line, and somehow we’ve managed to create a society in which individuals of every class struggle to keep up with the basics that were already inherent to the abundance of community living.
If instead, we view the Earth as a whole, all of humanity and beyond, each of us a cell of a higher power, then we can begin to understand our role among the incubator of life. So now picture our adolescent planet in its prenatal stage of embryonic development, and as that lifeform grows and starts to take shape, the individual stem cells follow natural law and compete for nutrients. They adapt themselves into the specialized members of a symbiotic system, one that would crash if any one cell took it upon themselves to compete their way out of existence, but as long as everyone adheres to the code of conduct embedded in their DNA, we end up birthing the next baby steps of evolution.”
She let Miles mull it over before following up, “D’that get’ya all sorted out over there?”
Sorted out? He thought it was more like his limited understanding of the world had been shattered into a thousand puzzle pieces of what he knew to be a masterpiece, yet the only certainty he could recover were the few stray ideas that refused to become dislodged from one another. But he was beginning to see the bigger picture, see that there was one at least, and he knew that every rearrangement of preconception would bring greater clarity, as the interlocking connections of individual experience fit together to tell the greatest story of them all. The story of one.