In his poem, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Richard Brautigan writes of a cybernetic forest ‘where deer stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers’ and a ‘cybernetic ecology’ frees us from our labors. In this imaginary future we live in a utopia where we are watched over by a loving grace that is a product of human constructions and human ingenuity. This utopia dangles in front of us, a carrot we can never catch. Loving grace is possible but only in the future….in the future….in the future…

Connecting to the love and grace of our world now is possible if we shift our perception. We are already immersed in a world filled with machines of loving grace, although they are not constructed by human hands: forests that provide us the oxygen to breathe while teaching us to be limber in the face of changing winds; migrating birds who sing and soar and inspire us to pause, look to the sky, and expand our earth-bound perspective; ephemeral streams that build and grow into rivers that hydrate and grow us as well as our plant and animal kin; complex ecosystem services that clean, filter, and recharge the living world we inhabit with a gentleness and efficiency we cannot emulate.

We connect to these living machines through sound. We feel their energy through vibration. The invisible world of sound becomes a felt phenomenon through the intimacy of human touch. A gentle caress generates a response, but the vibrating energy of the world continues whether we engage with it or not. The richness of loving relationships comes alive from reciprocity – the more we engage with the machines of loving grace around us from positions of respect and reverence, the more loving grace we receive.