Once upon a time, I went floating in the Great Salt Lake. The experience is uncanny: there, there are no tides, no currents, no waves, only dead stillness. You lower your ears underwater and you hear nothing–no fish, no plants, nada. You try to sink, but only float; as one fellow bather exclaimed, “This violates everything I know about water and swimming!” The road-sign declares “America’s Dead Sea!” and it’s accurate: the Great Salt Lake is dead. No living thing may enter this realm of death–even the act of floating is like the Lake pushing you back out of it. Here, all entropy has ceased.

Entropy gets a bad-rap, you see; as a physicist friend of mine explained, entropy doesn’t simply signify the relentless march of disorganization, decay, and death.  No, like all things, it’s far more complex than that–entropy means there are multiple possibilities for organization. E.g. a room may have a couch and bookshelf neatly organized…or instead, the couch could be overturned with the bookcase stacked on top of it, or the books could be piled on the floor, or scattered across the room a hundred which ways, or ad infinitum. Just because only one or two of these arrangements qualifies to you as “organized” doesn’t mean that other, “messier” arrangements aren’t possible. Entropy explores all other possibilities of arrangement, and of life.

It’s not entropy you need fear, my friend explained, but lack of entropy. A room with zero entropy is, in effect, an empty room. Likewise, a Universe without entropy would be an empty Universe–that is, nothingness. Entropy is what the Universe was before its creation, not at its end. Entropy isn’t what will destroy the Universe, but rather what energizes it, gives it life! I was reminded of this explanation at the Great Salt Lake, with its utter absence of life, tides, currents–the Lake has zero entropy, and thus is dead still.

By contrast, a week later I camped with my family up at Salt Creek, which is this gem of a campground near my birthplace on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula; the campground sits on some low stone bluffs overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and, further in the distance, the Pacific Ocean. I awoke early one morning to walk across a barnacle-covered rock-formation jutting into the sea, exposed by the low tide; I stood at the tip thereof like some German Romantic, among the seagulls and bull-kelp and anemones and oysters and clams and crabs and shattered shells and shed-feathers and sea-weed and fog and cold rolling waves, and asked myself why I felt such sudden, fulfilling peace here.

And the answer was immediate: because Salt Creek is alive! And I don’t just mean filled with life, no, Salt Creek is alive! The tides, waves, currents, counter-currents, the wind and rocks and ever-shifting sands, the over-flowing life both above and below the surface, all form one massive, organic whole! It is messy and disorganized and overwhelmingly large and doesn’t push you out but envelopes you in and is just so full of entropy!

There are endless possibilities within the ocean, and there are endless possibilities for life–so many, in fact, that you can become frightened that life will destroy you. And it will! The Ocean has swallowed whole many a human, and life is saturated with death. But it’s a different kind of death, a living death, paradoxically–it’s a death that renews, rejuvenates, revives. In the ocean, death is but another entropic possibility for arrangement, one of endless many. Here, death is not the end.

But many still fear the overwhelming, soul-shattering possibilities of life, and thus try to minimize life’s messiness as much as possible. They fuss over small things (“vanities of vanities”) and enclose themselves in tiny, carefully-controlled comfort zones. They want the zero-entropy of the Great Salt Lake, that keeps you carefully buoyed up and unable to sink.

But the Salt Lake is also a living death of the worse kind–you float, yes, but there is nothing else. Now don’t get me wrong, the Great Salt Lake is a wonderful experience, I’m glad it exists and is well worth the visit, but you can’t stay long. You can’t live there.  Don’t just bob along the surface of the emptiness that can’t harm you (or do much else for that matter); no, no, no, for all your salt water needs, embrace the Ocean!

Both Revelations and the D&C says that the Celestialized Earth is “like a sea of fire and glass.” Whatever that may end up meaning, I don’t believe that it refers to a static sea; I think this sea of glass and fire will be like an even more glorified version of our own ocean: unfathomable, of endless diversity, endless variety, ever-changing, ever-moving, fulfilling, enlivening, alive.