“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
Flicking through Google looking for things on cybernetics, I found this nice quote from John Muir on Alan B. Scrivener‘s “A Curriculum for Cybernetics and Systems Theory”, which has a lot of other good stuff on it.
The Muir quote is from Chapter 6 of his ” My First Summer in the Sierra published 1911 accessible on-line from the Sierra Club. The paragraph below puts the quote in context. (For those like myself of a non-theistic disposition substitute something like ‘the wonder of existence’ for his references to ‘the Divine” and ‘God’ and we have a great example of network thinking.)
“The snow on the high mountains is melting fast, and the streams are singing bankfull, swaying softly through the level meadows and bogs, quivering with sun-spangles, swirling in pot-holes, resting in deep pools, leaping, shouting in wild, exulting energy over rough boulder dams, joyful, beautiful in all their forms. No Sierra landscape that I have seen holds anything truly dead or dull, or any trace of what in manufactories is called rubbish or waste; everything is perfectly clean and pure and full of divine lessons. This quick, inevitable interest attaching to everything seems marvelous until the hand of God becomes visible; then it seems reasonable that what interests Him may well interest us. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go; for the mountains are fountains–beginning places, however related to sources beyond mortal ken.”