That the earth is the third planet from the sun is only coincidental to what I mean by the “third thing.” It’s not about the earth’s relation to the sun, but its relation to us. That and the number three, as we’ll see.
The number three has its own distinction, showing up throughout human vernacular, myth and spiritual liturgy, and as I’ve just demonstrated, patterns of speech. The nursery rhyme is about three blind mice, not two. To the one who rubs the golden lamp, the gypsy grants three wishes. In Taoism, the number three gives birth to all things. Buddhists have the Three Jewels—the Buddha, the Dharma (teachings), the Sangha (community). Three kings travelled to the manger to visit the Christ child who would be crucified at 33 and rise on the third day. Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras considered three the perfect number, representing beginning, middle, end; past, present, future. And as we all know, the third try’s the charm.
A quick way to picture its power is to consider it in a geometric sense, to see what a third thing can do to two. A two is simply two ones, a binary in the shape of a line. A this-and-that structure, one point to another. But then add, equidistant between them, above or below, a third point and ting! You have unity again, a triangle, the most stable shape in the universe.
Though we think of geometry in terms of buildings and structures, it functions as well between people, providing various forms of alignment. Let’s take the example of a work site. I’ve spent decades at job sites where among a healthy mix of tradespersons—carpenters, electricians, plumbers, drywallers, tilers and housepainters like me—there’s also the hardened divide of the American political binary—Republican vs. Democrat, red vs. blue, left vs. right. The divide is large and exercised to screaming in the culture at at large, yet it’s barely peripheral at the work site. And the reason is simple: the work site functions as a third thing, drawing each worker and subcontractor into the practical geometry of shared purpose. We don’t show up and face each other, but are instead turned to face something else—the job itself, and whatever part we have in it. It’s a subtle move but it points us in the same direction. Wherever we stand on the line, left vs. right, we are still on the same side. I’m sure many other work-places function the same way.
There are other third things. They’re everywhere, in fact. Sports is a prime example. Players on a softball or soccer team have between them a round third thing, a ball. Political opinion has little meaning when the matter at hand is passing for the goal. The fans join in as well. Whenever the Seattle Seahawks make the playoffs, “12th Man” flags (the twelfth man means the fans) begin hanging off porches in the team colors of blue and green. In 2014 when they made the Super Bowl, the celebration parade drew 700,000 people. Third things are powerful things.
And sacred. A man and woman holding between them their newborn child make together a triangle, a shape of union, human and fleshed. Note how the child, entirely helpless, exerts a near-cosmic binding power upon the couple. This is another feature of third things, the power to bind separate elements into a single creative force.
Which brings us to the Earth, the third thing of all third things, the third thing that is also the one thing. If we are in need of a binding element, something eternally neutral to triangulate our locked-in positions, it is everywhere at hand. Consider that living matter is literally a binder. What binds mineral-sand and dust together but the goo and excreta of tiny living organisms? What binds pigment into paint but the proteins, fats and oils of plants and animals? What binds people but shared purpose and what is more shared than life?
*
Two shoppers shout at each other in the parking lot of a COSTCO. One shouts in the color red and the other shouts in the color blue. Who will convince who? Neither, of course. This we know. And of what help is the parking lot, with its hot asphalt, its lack of visual distraction. The hard surfaces merely reflect the anger back.
Now place the same two before a creek in a woodland. The creek flows by with its liquid sound and a third voice enters the exchange. This voice is unlike theirs. It has neither word nor opinion, and flows with the deepest imaginable neutrality. There is nothing red or blue, left or right about its passage. Whatever arguments our two antagonists can throw at it, it’ll flow the same. It’s not merely nonpartisan, but pre-partisan, sub-partisan, unable to be part-isan because it is of the whole. It is the same with the willow, alder and maple around them, and the sound of bird-calls in their branches, wind through the many shapes of leaves. The third thing is not only before them, it is all around them, an omni-neutrality.
A kingfisher goes chittering by, following the open air over the creek’s course. The eyes of both immediately fix on the bird and follow it as it disappears around the bend. The sun breaks through the clouds and washes the green and brown details with fresh light, and now the eyes need to appraise the surroundings all over again. What was it they were arguing about?
Let’s take this a little further. It’s high summer and the creek has run dry. The summer rains, which used to gather high in the mountains and feed the watershed during the hot, Mediterranean summers, have disappeared. They both remember as kids hiking with their parents in the mountains and timing their routes to miss the late afternoon storms. They’d watch them gather through the day, as moist winds from the sea converged with moisture transpiring from the vegetated land, climbed the slopes and rose into boiling thunderheads.
Now all one sees are a few wisps of cloud. It was a long time coming, centuries of cutting, plowing, herding, mining and paving away the watershed. Oak forests gave way to pinyon and scrub. Marshes to hotels and sandy beaches. Fire followed drought, which was followed by flood, eroding the land, drying it further. Toba rocks, a kind of porous limestone, retain the evidence of once-seeping hillsides as they protrude like dry bones through the last skin of soil. When the sea breeze comes in the land can no longer provide the added moisture to make the storm. The aquifers aren’t filled and the creeks dry up in summer. Our two antagonists not only face a third thing, it’s a third thing in in a state of crises, something that demands a response.
The climate authorities aren’t much help because such watershed declines don’t show up in their models, and are treated as insignificant to the global heat balance. The attention is on building solar arrays and industrial wind towers. But they know their place, grew up in it, and know that what’s needed is more direct, to restore the soils and vegetation of the watershed and get the water cycle moving again.
Such an effort has in fact taken hold on its own. Up a ravine they see some people building a small structure, and walk up to investigate. At the bottom of a shallow gully two rough wooden posts have been pounded in, with some other poles stacked crosswise against the direction of flow when it rains. “What are you up to?” asks the lefty. “We’re building a check dam,” one of the crew says. “They idea is to hold back the flow of water when it rains, so it will sink and refill the aquifers.” “That makes a lot of sense,” says the righty. Then they both ask “Can we help?” “Of course!” comes the response and now our antagonists are hauling boulders to bolster the log dam, and through the effort have shifted from antagonists to protagonists. And look, they’re at a work-site.
*
Is it dreamy to speak this way about the earth, to grant it such transformational power, to envision its ability to bridge our divides and draw us into better arrangements? It’s certainly no dreamier than the current, shoot-for-the-moon, infinite-growth orientation. What is more dream-fixed than ignoring a collapsing biosphere? How but by being bound in spells, screen-spells, do we continue at this project, racing faster, working harder, ruining more and more land.
It too is a third thing, this dream that looks away from the earth. Yet it functions more like an anti third thing. Rather than bind, it isolates. It freezes one against the other in constant competition, its shape a line, back and forth, left and right, or the ever rising line of the sales forecast. That line also points away, at least from the plants, soils, animals and places that must sacrifice themselves to keep the line rising and the dream alive.
The third thing doesn’t require dreaming, but waking up. It’s more like a property of physics, the round Earth that triangulates everything. It’s also alive, meaning it responds to our efforts and brings its own powers, processes, pathways and beneficial relationships to the project. And it’s local, within the reach of our abilities. Remember our protagonists who started building check dams? It’s 16 years later and together they’ve built hundreds of them, and taught others through workshops as part of a broad movement which spread through the region and has seen wetlands and forests restored, landscapes rehydrated, agriculture turned into regeneration. Slowly, the aquifers began to fill. Soil cover grew. Vegetation began cooling the land and fountaining moisture into the sea breeze, such that now in summer, high in the peaks they sometimes form, storms, like returned sea creatures coiling in their reoccupied nests.
Our protagonists have met at a mountain trailhead. They’re going for a hike, but rather than time their route to miss the storms, they’ve timed it to walk straight into them. The conditions are good. The air is cool and wet. They want to go meet this creature they helped coax back to the land. They want to hear it’s sea-language of rain. Get in its head. Be drenched by it.
