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This picture, while commonly called black and white, is actually greyscale. The picture elements, pixels, as I do not shoot on physical film but with a digital camera, recreate the image with tones that go from black, an absence of signal, to white, a saturation of signal, but with the vast vast majority somewhere in the middle creating some level of grey. We call it a black & white picture for simplicity and ease of language, but the actual image presented is not binary, it is more complex than that. Our troubles begin when we take what is used for simplicity and speed of communication, black & white, and mistake that for actual reality. The same applies to so much of life.

To many, the founding of the United States is a binary event, either good or bad depending on the person’s perspective. Terrible things were brought into this world with the European settlement of these continents, diseases that killed millions and destroyed civilizations, kidnapping and enslavement of millions more. It is foolish to dismiss these events and actions as mere history, products of their time, and insignificant to today’s events. Today’s home is built on the foundation of what has been. It is also true that the founding of this nation brought forth fantastic new ideas. The very concept of true human liberty and equality expressed in those events reverberated around the globe, inspired countless struggles for freedom and set the conditions for those who followed to even conceive of righting the wrongs of history. The founding of the United States, like the photograph, is not a black & white thing, it is both good and bad, existing far beyond the straightjacket of binary thought.

Nature doesn’t exist in any binary. Everything out there is part of a spectrum of existence, gender, intelligence, consciousness, everything.

Reject the binary and see what is real.