March in Colorado. A big blizzard swept down off the mountains last week, dumping nearly two feet of wet, heavy snow on the Denver area. A giant evergreen in the park behind our house went down. From our upstairs window, I could see it lying there, right over a path where people walk their dogs. It would be a lot of work for the city parks department to haul it away to a dump where it would be dirt in a thousand years. On the other hand, it could be a cozy fire in our fireplace next winter. It was possible. The tree was near the road.  I had a pickup and a chainsaw. I used to work as a logger in the Pacific Northwest, so I knew what I was doing. I knew I would suffer much from joint and muscle aches the next day, but I decided. I decided on a morphogenic idea. I waited patiently. The next couple days were warm. The snow melted. The tree was still there. I went to work. Maybe I was violating some obscure city ordinance. But I’d decided to take the chance. Nothing’s more powerful than a good morphogenic idea.

It starts with a word.

Everything starts with a word.

“In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was made Flesh.”

Morphogenic is a word. It’s an adjective. It describes a noun. It turns a noun into some kind of noun.

In the sentence, “I have an idea,” the word “idea” is a noun. A “morphogenic idea” is not just any kind of idea, but a certain kind of idea.

The Ben-Gurion Canal is like that, an idea that became a certain kind of idea.

I was able to figure all this out because the word “morphogenic” first came to me ten, twelve years ago, so I’ve had lots of time to think about it.

It happened while I was drinking cold coffee from a Styrofoam cup watching the slow-motion scene of New Jersey longshoremen starting out their day, loading and unloading ocean freighters.

I wasn't uncomfortable. I was sitting in the roomy driver’s seat in the cab of my big ol’ Freightliner loaded up and poised to take off, hauling 20 tons of Heineken from Belgium, fresh off the docks. Drinking cold coffee. A cold early winter rain. Black clouds transformed into dirty Jersey winter gray with the rising sun. Again I checked my on-board Qualcomm link to my company’s dispatch center back in Omaha.

Nothing.

Still nothing.

I was loaded and fueled and ready to go. I had the power, the horsepower, to take the load anywhere in America, barely slowing down to cross mighty rivers and mountain passes in the sky. Anywhere with a road was possible.

Initially, dispatch said the load was going to El Paso, where it was still summer and all the truck stops had the best Mexican food. Maybe I’d take a couple days off, take a taxi to bars where I knew other truckers hung out, maybe do some writing.

But then, suddenly, after I was loaded and ready to begin my next cross-country adventure, there was a change of plans. The beer distribution company in El Paso cancelled its order. So, I’m just sitting there in my truck in the parking area of a New Jersey port on a cold rainy day until somebody decides what they want me to do with 20 tons of Heineken.

I was anxious to get going, but I couldn’t just take off not knowing where I was going. When I got to the first intersection, I wouldn’t know whether to turn to the left or to the right. To avoid going around in circles, or even into the Atlantic and losing my job, I had to know where I was going. I kept glancing at my Qualcomm screen, waiting for the word expressing a place, a noun, so I could put the machine in motion… Amarillo, Bangor – it made no difference as long as it was somewhere and not anywhere.

Leibniz said whatever is possible demands to exist. But the realm of the possible is limitless and can only exist in our minds as ideas. The capacity of the mind to hold all the ideas of what’s possible is virtually limitless – Chicago was possible, or L.A., or the Walmart Distribution Center in Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis grew up and the Citgo Truck Stop Cafe had the best catfish and hush puppy dinners in the world. I had the machine and the know-how. I could go anywhere where there was a road.

Maybe in another dimension we’re doing everything possible all at once, but in our everyday world shaped by time and space and laws and company policies we have to choose.

At that moment waiting at the port a word came to me that I’d never heard of or thought of before – morphogenic. I knew the etymology before I knew the word. In ancient Greek, morph meant the form or shape of something, like in morphology; and genic -- the root of “genesis” -- meant to create. I just put them together.

Of all the possible places I could imagine going, only one of them could be morphogenic… the one I was waiting for via Qualcomm, the one I needed to get the wheels moving.

The idea of a shipping canal from the Gulf of Aqaba to the Mediterranean through present day Israel has been around for centuries.

In 1945, when the first atomic bomb was successfully exploded, the idea became a possibility.

In 1957 it became morphogenic.