Salt Lake/Salt Creek

Couple weeks ago, my girlfriend and I went floating in the Great Salt Lake.  The experience is uncanny: there are no tides, no currents, no waves, only dead stillness.  You lower your ears underwater and you hear nothing--no fish, no plants, nada.   You try to sink, but only float; as one fellow bather exclaimed, "This violates everything I know about water and swimming!"  The road-sign declares "America's Dead Sea!" and it's accurate: the Great Salt Lake is dead.  No living thing may enter this realm of death--even the act of floating is like the Lake pushing you back out of it.  Here, all entropy has ceased.

Entropy gets a bad-rap, you see; as a physicist friend of mine explained, entropy doesn't signify the relentless march of disorganization, decay, and death, no--entropy only means there are multiple possibilities for organization.  E.g. a room may have a couch and bookshelf neatly organized...or instead, the couch could be overturned with the bookcase stacked on top of it, or the books piled on the floor, or scattered across the room a hundred which ways,  or ad infinitum.   Just because only one or two of these arrangements qualifies to you as "organized" doesn't mean that other, "messier" arrangements aren't possible.  Entropy explores all other possibilities of arrangement, and of life.

It's not entropy you need fear, my friend explained, but lack of entropy.  A room with zero entropy is, in effect, an empty room.  A Universe without entropy would be  an empty Universe--that is, nothingness.  Entropy is what the Universe was before its creation, not at its end.  Entropy isn't what will destroy the Universe, but rather what energizes it, gives it life!  I was reminded of this explanation at the Great Salt Lake, with its utter absence of life, tides, currents--the Lake has zero entropy, and thus is dead still.

By contrast, this past week my family and I camped at Salt Creek, near my birthplace of Port Angeles, WA; Salt Creek is this gem of a campground that sits on some stone bluffs overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca.  (In your tent at night, you are lullabied asleep by the waves and the foghorns.)  I awoke early one morning to walk across a barnacle-covered rock-formation exposed by the low tide; I stood at the tip like some German Romantic, among the seagulls and bull-kelp and anemones and oysters and clams and crabs and shattered shells and shed-feathers and sea-weed and cold rolling waves, and asked myself why I felt such fulfilling peace here.

And the answer was immediate: because Salt Creek is alive!  And I don't just mean filled with life, no, Salt Creek is alive!  The tides, waves, currents, counter-currents, the wind and rocks and ever-shifting sands, the over-flowing life both above and below the surface, all form one massive, organic whole!  It is messy and disorganized and overwhelmingly large and doesn't push you out but envelopes you in and is just full of entropy! 

There are endless possibilities within the ocean, and there are endless possibilities for life--so many, in fact, that you can become frightened that life will destroy you.  And it will!  The Ocean has swallowed whole many a human, and life is saturated with death.  But it's a different kind of death, a living death, paradoxically--it's a death that renews, rejuvenates, revives.  In the ocean, death is but another possibility for arrangement, one of endless many.  Here, death is not the end.

But many still fear the overwhelming, soul-shattering possibilities of life, and thus try to minimize life's messiness as much as possible.  They fuss over small things and enclose themselves in tiny, carefully-controlled comfort zones.  They want the zero-entropy of the Great Salt Lake, that keeps you carefully buoyed up and unable to sink.

But the Salt Lake is also a living death of the worse kind--you float, yes, but there is nothing else.  Embrace the ocean, embrace the entropy, embrace life and all the death it has to offer...the Great Salt Lake is a wonderful experience yes but you can't stay long.  Don't just bob along the surface of the shallows that can't harm you (or do much else for that matter); no, no, no, for all your salt water needs, embrace the Ocean!

The D&C says that the Celestialized Earth is a "sea of fire and glass," whatever that means.  I don't believe that is a static sea; I believe it is like the ocean--unfathomable, endless diversity, endless variety, ever-changing, ever-moving, alive.