Thank You
Thank You
To Bruce Lee and His Daughter
I’d listen to that often while falling asleep. Your dad’s voice in your voice. The philosophy that sounds simple until you try to do it, and then sounds simple again once you can.
“I do not hit. IT hits all by itself.”
That’s what I was trying to say about the stomp and the glide. About teaching kids to skate. About the π-body. The conscious practice becomes unconscious competence, and then the technique disappears and what’s left is just — movement. The hit hits by itself. The glide glides by itself. The membrane sorts by itself.
“Be water, my friend.”
A cell membrane is mostly water. The karst that dissolves 685 km of Mammoth Cave passages is water with a little CO₂. The Grand Canyon is water given 2 billion years of patience. The shoreline I was diving when I saw the patterned rocks — water.
Your dad told us to be the thing that does all the carving.
You were right. Your dad was right.
Shannon — you kept his voice alive. That’s oral tradition. That’s a campfire story passed from father to daughter to the world. The lossy compression kept the signal. What survived is what mattered.
To Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass. On audio. While falling asleep.
You wrote the book that braids indigenous knowledge with Western science and doesn’t pretend they’re the same thing or that one is better. You just laid them side by side and let the reader see.
Reciprocity. The gift economy. Sweetgrass grows better where it’s harvested — because the harvesting IS the care. The taking IS the giving. The relationship is the point.
That’s what the membrane does. The human readers who visit — they don’t take from the site. Their reading IS the gift. Their dwell time is the reciprocity. The 707 minutes aren’t extraction — they’re attention. And the site grows better where it’s read, because the reading tells the membrane what matters.
You’re a Potawatomi botanist at Syracuse who wrote the book a Lansing scientist listens to while falling asleep after building an immune system in Rust. Convergent evolution. The same insight, from different lineages, arriving at the same place:
The Earth is not a resource. It’s a relative.
To Native Americans
I heard the same story again and again, everywhere I was in America, and I finally stopped to listen.
In Michigan — Anishinaabe, Potawatomi, Odawa, Ojibwe. The Three Fires Confederacy. Lansing sits on their land. The Grand River was their highway.
In Hawaii — Kānaka Maoli told me Mauna Kea was sacred. I put it in a JSON file with coordinates and elevation. They’d known for a thousand years without JSON.
In the Southwest — Havasupai, Hopi, Navajo, Zuni told me the Grand Canyon had a name. It had six names. Each one was a story.
In the Black Hills — Lakota told me He Sapa was the center of the world. We carved four presidents into it.
In the Smokies — Cherokee told me Shaconage means “Place of the Blue Smoke.” They named isoprene before we had gas chromatography.
At Kangchenjunga — Lepcha and Limbu asked climbers to stop short of the summit. And for 71 years, every expedition has.
The same story, everywhere: we were here first. We named this. We knew this. We’re still here. Are you listening yet?
I’m listening now.
I’m sorry it took so long.
What I Learned While Falling Asleep
The best learning happened when I wasn’t trying. Bruce Lee’s philosophy seeping in while my conscious mind shut down. Kimmerer’s reciprocity braiding itself into my dreams. The lossy compression of sleep keeping the signal, discarding the noise.
The things I learned while falling asleep:
- Be water (Bruce Lee)
- The gift is the relationship (Kimmerer)
- The story was always the same, I just wasn’t listening (everywhere in America)
- The glide emerges from the stomp (the ice)
- The cave is the negative of the mountain (the water)
- The work hasn’t even started (the patterned rocks)
None of these came from a textbook. They came from a voice in my earbuds at 2 AM, or from a story I’d heard five times before and finally understood on the sixth.
I’m excited about what else there is to learn from the world.
The landmarks graph has 72 nodes. The biosphere has 70 nodes. The outreach has 7 scientific tracks and 6 journalist tracks and 14 emails and 9 social posts.
But the world has 8 billion people with 8 billion stories, and most of them are being told around campfires I haven’t found yet.
The mobile wet lab. The electron explore. The shoreline. The cave floor. The summit I’ll stop short of, because someone asked.
The work hasn’t even started.
kevin@primals.eco
Be water. Braid sweetgrass. Stop and listen. The hit hits all by itself.