"Epharmony" is such a fruitful word, metaphorically speaking. The moon used to be my favorite word for wordplay with an extended metaphor—there are so many interesting heirophanies of the moon: madness, of course; women and their menses; all natural cycles are in fact reflected by the moon; birth, death, rebirth; light itself; the wisdom of the man-in-the-moon. And so on.

But lately I've shoved the moon rudely aside and replaced it with "epharmony," a word which offers me whole new worlds for fun and frolic. Epharmony is a botanical term describing how organisms adapt their structures and processes to altered evironments.  Radical adaptation to altered environments is certainly the story of my own youthful life, not to mention my early adulthood, after which I finally settled down to bloom where I was planted.

As a military "brat," I was dragged peripatetically from pillar to outpost, sometimes kicking and screaming, eventually rather looking forward to the coming changes, as I became less and less capable over time of solving the string of personal problems I obliviously created for myself in each new station. (When/how/where would I have learned how to deal with long-term issues, moving every year?) But I did learn to adapt to new circumstances, to new people, new interests, new routines and geographies, new cultures, languages, values too.

Another fascinating “heirophany” of the word "epharmony" that always feels good to me is the necessity in this day and age for humans to adapt to a rapidly changing world. Having had a lot of practice at this (if not at succeeding impressively in any one situation), I may even have something fresh, or at least something unique in the way of expertise to share with others dealing with the challenges of change. How to change, what to change, why, and even who are all good questions with an interesting variety of possible, if always partial, answers.

The word "epharmony" also intrigues me because the word reflects my interest in the nature of change itself, the fact that change can be fun, difficult, heady, and exhilarating--when you finally break through to the other side. Some global cultural changes, for instance, are more interesting and relevant than others, and some personal changes are wiser than others, and it’s fun to contemplate where the differences lie.

I also like the idea that change is nature’s way; in fact, change is the nature of life itself, the natural nature of nature, so to speak. We are, each of us, from moment to moment, changed, if by nothing else than through aging, becoming an instant older. And when our bodies change, what, if anything, stays the same?

"Epharmony" always brings to my mind a picture of an organism--I like to visualize a simple native plant, growing in harmony with its interesting environment. What new structures and processes is that plant creating, and why? How do these adaptive and adapted structures serve to help the plant survive? Thrive? Reproduce? How will changing our own structures and processes help us survive, thrive, reproduce? What--metaphorically if not scientifically--parallel human "structures" (our perspectives? our belief systems? our values?) should we consider changing, and in what ways are these very biological/chemical mental structures unique to our own particular selves and to our own particular sets of circumstances? What human processes (say, how we live? our routines? our ways of communicating? our ways of thinking? what else?) might we need to change? Can we? How? And especially, should we?

And what about our relationship with our larger, vastly changed global environment? What are the truly big and permanent changes our world is making, and how can we best adapt ourselves to live our best lives? When should we decide not to adapt to change? When should we stand fast and resist a particular change, be it internal or external? What is there to be learned about resistance itself?

Epharmonic organisms, apparently, are not into resistance; they're into acceptance. That’s what epharmonic adaptation to one’s environment is: acceptance of change. But to what external changes need we respond with personal change? Certainly not to every change in the breeze and temperature, but surely, to some degree, we must adapt somehow to the largest, most major trends, to large permanent alterations, major shifts in directions. Which are the seismic global shifts that will impact our lives and those of our children forever, and which are the mere breezes, the irritating hailstorms and temporarily disruptive floods that may distract us but will eventually deposit us back on a familar shore?

Which global changes shouldn't we miss? Which ones will leave us stranded and wilted, trapped within hardened, resistant structures and processes that don't work very well anymore, but that nevertheless we will not, or cannot, change?

I like to think of sunflowers turning their faces toward the sun as it travels metaphorically across the sky.

Epharmony (in botany-speak) (and I am not a scientist, but rather, licensed poetically) refers more to the uniquely adapted structures and processes of say, cloned plants finding themselves in a series of slightly altered versions of one environment--i.e., ten clones of the same tiny plant, planted in ten uniquely altered versions of a single environment. Each of these plants will develop somewhat different structures and processes in direct response to the minute differences in their environments, resulting in ten distinct plants—despite the fact that each plant embodies the exact same DNA.

Genetically identical twins are never exactly the same either; each begins to individuate in the womb, responding to whether they get more or fewer nutrients, comfort, whatever, and their differences only multiply throughout their lives. Nature give all life, all of her living organisms (of which group human organisms are but a single small if disproportionately influential type) the irrepressible urge to adapt and grow in harmony with their surroundings.

I like to think that epharmony in some way mirrors what goes on when a newborn human baby’s mind begins to grow.... Although babies’ brains, at birth, are perfectly structured for learning, they have as yet created little “content," requiring only an environment to grow in. Babies’ brains are very malleable, and absolutely require continual interaction with an environment (hopefully one proven to produce healthy, happy babies) in order to continue creating increasingly complex biological and chemical processes and structures which determine who they will become. Learning is a process involving a continual back-and-forth, give-and-take, call-and-response, nature-and-nurture-and-nature-and-nurture interaction of each unique brain with its own unique environment. Human babies seem to me to be the ultimate epharmonic organisms (speaking at least metaphorically), for they are very very good at learning, growing, adapting, and building the very brain structures and processes which nature dictates will best serve them in surviving in the very particular environments they were born in.

If babies can be in some sense epharmonious, adults find such epharmony more arduous. By adulthood, most of us have usually formed some rather rigid mental structures and processes, although clearly such formations were created in direct response to the ways our immediate environments nudged or knocked us about from our earliest years.

But as our worlds became larger, usually in adulthood--as the world changed and as we also became more aware of our larger contexts, at times the old brain finds adaptation and adjustment quite troublesome. We find ourselves strongly resisting adapting to all the new things we’re confronted with. Everything our brains have learned so far, in fact, works in concert to convince us that we are safest if we stay with the set of mental structures we already have.

That’s one reason why people find it so hard to be wrong. Of course we want to be "right." We are naturally programmed to feel extremely vulnerable when we are not right, when our brains feel out of harmony with our situation. We’ve gone along happily for years organizing our brains perfectly to work in our various unique contexts, and then suddenly none of our approaches seem to work for us anymore--because we’re now living in an environment that is severely altered. It’s perfectly natural to go rigid and resistant to an altered planet--even unto death. Trees, for instance, keep adapting, but they can’t go back and grow a new trunk or main branches.

Mental changes that might have come easily at ages three or six or even nine or twelve often become a real challenge as age creeps up—age, that is, as in adulthood. Even some eighteen-year-olds are already rigid in their thinking. And yet, some eighty-year-olds are not; they stay light and accepting and flexible and adaptive. They are not only “young at heart,” but apparently, young at brain as well. So what's the interesting difference here? What’s going on, metaphorically? Biologically? Fascinating questions indeed.

Also falling under the broad umbrella of “epharmony” are the concepts of resistance and acceptance. “Acceptance” always means “acceptance of change,” just as “resistance” means resistance to change. What else would there be to accept or resist, but change? Apparent resistance to or acceptance of sameness—as of a seemingly unchangeable and difficult future situation--such as living with a permanent disability (or any of the many other situations which, according to the serenity prayer, we cannot change)--is basically resistance to a new (i.e., changed) situation. In these cases, we are struggling with resistance to or acceptance of a change that just happens to be permanent.

I wonder where buddhist, hindu, christian, or other philosophies and religious traditions which encourage attitudes of acceptance and discourage resistance would find themselves on these questions about epharmonic relationships and all their concomitant issues of acceptance, resistance, adaptation, and change in response to our rapidly changing world?

And what about the words “response,” and “responsiveness,” not to mention “respondent,” “co-respondent,” “correspondent/ce,” and “responsibility?” All these words reflect the natural human impulse to respond in harmony with our surroundings. Adaptive, epharmonic change is always responsive change. Responsive to what? What does it mean to be, metaphorically speaking, epharmonically responsive in our own lives, to our surroundings? To what variety of external worlds are we each responding, and from what variety of internal perspectives? Are we natural organisms responding to a natural planet? Yes, of course we are, but are we only that? Aren’t we also responding in uniquely human ways to distinctly social, ethnic, political, religious, and economic “realities,” however altered? How do we know, how do we each decide, what is real, after all? What is out there, and what is in here? To what do we respond? And with what are we responding? Corresponding? What are we “responsible” to, and what are our “responsibilities?”

Shall we play awhile with the idea of resonance? With, "how we resonate to"…? Oh, let’s not. And let’s not talk about reverberating or reflecting either. But we could.

Because we do…. Perhaps we really cannot change at all, once we reach adulthood. Perhaps we are by nature designed only to be flexible and responsive to the particular environments we experienced during childhood, after which point we are programmed by evolution only to operate successfully in that same environment, and only with its familiar dangers and rewards. Maybe evolution works best only with cavemen who stay put; maybe evolution has left us with anachronistic, unworkable brains which can’t keep up with constant change over a long lifetime. Maybe only the young can grow and learn and change when change becomes necessary.

Maybe when we reach puberty, our brains shift from learning to just living and reproducing. In the same way that post-pubescent brains can no longer detect the phonic nuances necessary to become truly native speakers, maybe our adult brains are programmed to strand us if we find ourselves in an environment that keeps on changing. So are we no longer capable of learning new things? Are our brains too hardened to face such severely altered “environments” as we often find ourselves in, whether we stay at home or go abroad?

A considerable amount of interesting scientific evidence hints that this sad situation is at least partially true. And if it is true, even if only in part, then the narrower our earliest environmental contexts, i.e., the more finely we are tuned to one particular political, social, religious, or cultural environment, then the more rigid will be the processes and structures that our brains will have “grown” during our youth. And the more difficult it may be to change now, to adapt to our new contexts, to our changed world, this altered planet.

Difficult, yes. But not impossible. Not only science, but common sense argues against that result. To be sure, major changes in perspective often break through our barriers only when we're faced with unavoidable life-threatening and life-changing experiences, tragedies or triumphs which force us to realize that old ways won’t work anymore, that we must change in order to live. Sometimes it will require a near-death experience or the loss of a loved one for people to change radically in the way they look at things, at lots of things, deep within the very marrow of their brain’s structural and processing bones. But people at any age are capable of change—we have all seen fundamental change happen too many times to doubt that it is possible. Even our old brains are capable of change, though truly, change comes harder to grown-ups.

So is it change or die, then? I don’t know. None of us knows for sure, because we don’t know what the future holds. A lot of people bet their lives on the shaky hope of an unaltered future; and in the snail-paced past, such a strategy sometimes worked pretty well. But in the 21st century, will we ever again be able to grow up in one small mental place, live there and die there and never feel the need for radical mental change? Maybe. Maybe not. Considering our rapidly shrinking globe, considering the fact that information about everything everyone everywhere streams steadily into our homes from a multitude of media inlets (tvs, phones, books, magazines, computers, music, movies, what else am I missing?)—we can hardly be said, any of us, to be living in our old environments. Most of us feel ourselves to be hurtling through the dark at a blurring speed into a brand-new who-knows-what, yet still stuck with, unfortunately, our sticky old brains.

“Epharmony.com” invites you to share this challenging journey into the future. I’m trying to answer all these questions myself, and if I want to find answers that will work, I'll need companionable fellow-travelers, fellow-teachers. I am convinced that the only way my sorry 20th century brain will ever be able to wrap itself around the 21st, will be through co-respondence with many others on this planet who are equally challenged and equally determined. My chosen path is one of mutual acceptance, respectful dialogue, and thoughtful change; my goal, since they aren't going to let us back into Kansas, is to find a way we can all live peacefully and productively—that is, epharmonically--on this astonishing, altered planet.