TEASEL w/ SNOW | ON THE TRIANGLE OF RELATIONSHIP

The way of force and

outward mechanical power

always runs in a straight line.

For it, the way of water

and the meadow meander

is just a waste of time.

In a room without echoes,
we quickly stop
our play.

The strength of the triangle of relationship, it seems to me, is
that it in a gentle yet forceful way lifts us out of the isolation
of the linear, fragmentary style of thinking which is so char-
acteristic of Western thought. The basic idea is that, for every
thought, every action, and every resource or artifact, there are
always at least three sides, or three questions we must ask:
How is this thought or object related to myself; How is it re-
lated to others (society or culture)? And how is it related to the
Earth, or the wider context? Here’s a rough sketch:

The key point is that these relationships co-exist in a move-
ment of relational resonance which, although they are nor-
mally implicit and largely invisible, are at the same time,
regardless of how we think about them or act towards them,
indivisible. That is, when we pick up an isolated object, we are
in actual fact picking up this triangle of relationship. We can
easily imagine this in a visual way, say, like taking an apple
and mapping out the normally unseen relationships not just to
my own body as I eat the apple, but also to those who grew it,
delivered it to the store where I bought it, as well as perhaps
the actual place—the orchard—where it was grown. We might
also imagine the triangle in terms of sound, as for example a
singing voice in a large reverberant structure like a concert
hall or cathedral. We have the sound of the voice as it appears
to the singer him- or herself, but also the sound of the voice as
it appears to others who listen to it in the same space. And, of
course, there is the acoustic space itself, the wider context of
what for the singer is the whole world, both literally and in the
ritual sense.

Thus, we move naturally and easily from the top of the
triangle, me, to others, we, and to the world or Earth, all, and
back again. Notice also that this movement occurs both one-
at-a-time (like musical melody), and all-at-once (like musical
chords), a feature which is very unlike visual mirrors, but
distinctive and natural to relational resonance as a whole.
With this sonic image in mind, it is easy to see the distortional
nature of isolation and fragmentation. Think for a moment of
the same singer, but now in a space completely devoid of reso-
nance. Musicians find such spaces deeply disturbing. “There’s
no echo!” they say. They call such spaces ‘dry’ or ‘dead.’ In
other words, the room or hall gives nothing back to them. So,
it comes as no surprise that, without the natural sustaining
resonance of echo, which both gives energy to the sound and
makes it possible to blend and tune with oneself and others,
we very quickly wish to stop singing altogether.

Now, if we go one step further and generalize this movement
of resonance and think not just of sound but also relationship
in terms of meaning and responsibility, we have, I think, the
beginnings of a strong model of ethical awareness. Here we
have the image not of sound, but of a woven fabric. I pick up
a strand or thread—any thread, it makes no difference—and
simply follow it to its source. This naturally reveals others
connected to the same thread, as well as how the thread is
woven into the fabric of the larger whole. Take coffee, for
instance. In isolation, coffee is just a savory, pleasant, habit-
forming stimulant for which we as users naturally wish to pay
the best possible price for the best quality. But if we begin
thinking about coffee with the relationship triangle in mind, a
far richer story is revealed as we follow the highlighted thread
of a single pack. It leads us to those who market, distribute,
process the coffee, and most especially, those who actually
grow and harvest the beans. Ultimately, we are led to the
wider earth-bound ecological context which sustains both the
growers and the coffee plants themselves.

If we follow this path of relationship, notice first that there is
in principle no real fundamental difference between the ethical
and environmental dimensions of awareness. They are but
two inseparable aspects of the same movement, one which
emphasizes responsibility, and the other which emphasizes
understanding. Second, notice that in the current era, coming
as we all do, including myself, from a state of radical isolation
and fragmentation, the more consistently and energetically
we pursue the thread, regardless of where it leads us, we are
unavoidably going to be in for some shocks and highly dis-
turbing information. The sweat shops and child labor behind
my favorite running shoes; the half-lives of all the toxins
found in their soles. The flame retardants in the laptop I love
and depend on turning up in the breast milk of young mothers
in the far Arctic North; or a kid in India, or China, or Africa,
working barefoot atop a mountain of electronic waste, eking
out a living by stripping away the equally toxic metals of the
same computer once I’m forced to throw it away. Or, coming
back to our first example, the coffee farmer in the high-coun-
try of Ethiopia who explains that he gets only 3 cents for each
kilo of green beans he produces, and looks straight into the
lens of the camera as he tells us that he needs at least 8 or 10
cents just to survive.

So one sees that the beauty and the strength of the triangle of
relationship, just as with the musician with whom we began
in the natural world of relational resonance, is that—like it or
not—both harmony and disharmony are necessarily revealed.
Both the good and the bad. One can’t have one without the
other. This is a fact. And perhaps this is why the ethical
awareness of the compassionate mind has evolved out of the
inherently self-destructive isolation of the brutish brain. Where
does this intelligence come from? Simply our genetic struc-
ture? Or from some much deeper and more subtle source? As
with all really fundamental questions of existence, we find, I
think, as we follow the triangle of relationship far enough that
we are led to a point where we can only say with the honesty
a small child demands, “I don’t know.” For here the known
world ends, and the uncharted land of the spiritual wilderness
of the extraordinary human mind begins.

ON THE TRIANGLE OF RELATIONSHIP

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