Imagine better than the best you know. —Neville Goddard

  

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If it looks like wisdom but is unkind, it’s not wisdom.

If it feels like love but is not wise, it’s not love.

—Lama Surya Das

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all my relations

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In their relationship, plants and mycorrhizal fungi enact a polarity: plant shoots engage with the light and air, while the fungi and plant roots engage with the solid ground. Plants pack up light and carbon dioxide into sugars and lipids. Mycorrhizal fungi unpack nutrients bound up in rock and decomposing material. 

These are fungi with a dual niche: part of their life happens within the plant, part in the soil. They are stationed at the entry point of carbon into terrestrial life cycles and stitch the atmosphere into relation with the ground. To this day, mycorrhizal fungi help plants cope with drought, heat and the many other stresses life on land has presented from the very beginning, as do the symbiotic fungi that crowd into plant leaves and stems. 

What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.

—Merlin Sheldrake,

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures

 

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The beginning of wisdom, I believe, is our ability to accept an inherent messiness in our explanation of what’s going on. Nowhere is it written that human minds should be able to give a full accounting of creation in all dimensions and on all levels. Ludwig Wittgenstein had the idea that philosophy should be what he called “true enough.” 

I think that’s a great idea. True enough is as true as can be gotten. The imagination is chaos. New forms are fetched out of it. The creative act is to let down the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended and then to attempt to bring out of it ideas.

―Rupert Sheldrake

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Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego; which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

—Terence McKenna

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I need to be silent for a while. Worlds are forming in my heart.

—Meister Eckhart

Daniel Ladinsky version

from Expands His Being

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wilder(ness

 

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The marvel of a basket is in its transformation, its journey from wholeness as a living plant to fragmented strands and back to wholeness again as a basket. A basket knows the dual powers of destruction and reaction that shape the world. Strands once separated are rewoven into a new whole. The journey of a basket is also the journey of a people.


—Robin Wall Kimmerer
Braiding Sweetgrass, pg 256

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The inhabited regions of earth – if prehistoric people had such a conception – were simply the location of a band within some traditionally determined hunting area. The idea of wilderness with connotations of wasteland, badlands, or hinterlands was not conceivable, just as a round earth is not conceivable to people who believe in a flat earth. 

Paul Shepard argues that space for prehistoric people “is a society of named places – not categories such as ‘river’ or ‘mountain’ but proper names, marked in tribal memory and sometimes in myth… Seeing all nature as a society may have made possible the evolution of intelligence to that acute degree of awareness without which the vast physical universe would be found terrifying, even intolerable”. 

Home was a natural world of plants, animals, and land with which archaic people were bound. 

The idea of “being lost in the wilderness” logically necessitates a geographical referent conceptualized as home as distinct from all other places; but for Paleolithic people home was where they were and where they had always been. 

They could not become lost in the wilderness, since it did not exist. The conjecture that the conscious life of Paleolithic people was devoid of such ideas as “being away from home” or “in the wilderness away from the inhabited regions of earth” is thus plausible.


—Max Oelschlaeger
The Idea of Wilderness

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… stay at the center of the circle and let all things take their course. —Lao Tzu

 

      .

They asked al-Hallaj, "To which religious School do you belong?
he answered, "God's own."

He who limned 
a thousand worlds with paint -
you layabout! - do you expect
He'll use your color or mine?

Our paints and tints
are but opinions and fantasy,
He is colorless
and we must adopt His hue.

Look: a shadow lies crooked upon the ground because the very earth is laid rough; but no, that crookedness is straightness itself, for the perfection, the "straightness" of the eyebrow is in its sinuous curve.

Only because it is bent
is this piece of wood a bow.
Reality is a sphere: wherever you place your finger,
there is its dead center.


—Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
Divine Flashes

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This place where you are right now, 

God circled on a map for you.


—Hafiz

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Love, in fact, is the expression and the agent of universal synthesis. —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

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The many stuffs—matter, energy, waves, phenomena—that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all; but from other worlds. 

Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.


—Nelson Goodman
Ways of Worldmaking

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[...] there is something in the transfer, in the belief, in the folklore of what you do as a cook that makes your food that much different or that much better. 

If I want to believe that the enzymes (in the Kalbi Marinade mother sauce) break down the tough sinew and protein in the meat, I transfer that energy to the marinade, and that belief and that spirit transfers to the food. Somehow it's going to transfer to you and we're all going to be ok.


—Roy Choi 
from his excellent Masterclass

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A mountain is composed of tiny grains of earth. The ocean is made up of tiny drops of water. Even so, life is but an endless series of little details, actions, speeches, and thoughts. And the consequences whether good or bad of even the least of them are far-reaching.


—Swami Sivananda

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I have been many things,

Before becoming as I am.

I have been a narrow multi-colored sword.

I have been a tear in the air.

I have lived as the faintest of stars.

I have been a word among letters,

A book among words.


—Taliesin, 500 ACE

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Every person is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone. —Tomas Tranströmer

  

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This is a place where a door might be
here where I am standing
In the light outside all the walls

there would be a shadow here
all day long
and a door into it
where now there is me
and somebody would come and knock
on this air
long after I have gone
and there in front of me a life
would open


—W. S. Merwin

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Tie your heart at night to mine, Love,
and we will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.
Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly.

Love, because of it, tie me to a purer movement,
to the grip on life that beats in your breast,
with the wings of a submerged swan,
So that our dream might reply
to the sky’s questioning stars
with one key, one door closed to shadow.


—Pablo Neruda

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question

 

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It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. 

Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.

—Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

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What do you have to do?

Pack your bags,

Go to the station without them,

Catch the train,

And leave your self behind.

 

—Wei Wu Wei

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whiskeyriver

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how trees talk to each other

 

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Like humans, trees are extremely social creatures, utterly dependent on each other for their survival. And, as it is with us, communication is key.

After scientists discovered pine tree roots could transfer carbon to other pine tree roots in a lab, ecology professor Suzanne Simard set out to figure out how they did it. What she discovered was a vast tangled web of hair-like mushroom roots — an information super highway allowing trees to communicate important messages to other members of their species and related species, such that the forest behaves as “a single organism.”

The idea that trees could share information underground was controversial. Some of Simard’s colleagues thought she was crazy. Having trouble finding research funding, she eventually set out to conduct the experiments herself, planting 240 birch, fir and cedar trees in a Canadian forest. She covered the seedlings with plastic bags and filled them with various types of carbon gas. An hour later she took the bags off, ran her Geiger counter over their leaves and heard “the most beautiful sound,” she says in the Ted Talk.

“Crrrrr… It was the sound of Birch talking to Fir,” she said. “Birch was saying, ‘hey, can I help you?’” “And Fir was saying yeah, can you send me some of your carbon? Somebody threw a shade cloth over me.”

She also scanned the cedar’s leaves, and as she suspected — silence. The cedar was in its own world. It was not connected into the fungal web linking birches and firs. The birch and fir were in a “lively two-way conversation,” Simard says. When the fir was shaded by the birch in summer, the birch sent more carbon to it. When the birch was leafless in the winter, the fir sent more carbon to it.

The two trees were totally interdependent, Simard discovered, “like yin and yang.”

That’s when Simard knew she was onto something big… In the past, we assumed trees were competing with each other for carbon, sunlight, water and nutrients. But Simard’s work showed us trees were also cooperators.

They communicate by sending mysterious chemical and hormonal signals to each other via the mycelium, to determine which trees need more carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon, and which trees have some to spare, sending the elements back and forth to each other until the entire forest is balanced. “The web is so dense there can be hundreds of kilometers of mycelium under a single foot step,” Simard says.

The mycelium web connects mother trees with baby trees, allowing them to feed their young. A single mother tree can provide nourishment for hundreds of smaller trees in the under-story of her branches, she says. Mother trees even recognize their kin, sending them more mycelium and carbon annd reducing their own root size to make room for their babies.

This new understanding of tree communication had Simard worried about the implications of clear-cutting. When mother trees are injured or dying, they send their wisdom onto the next generation. They can’t do this is if they are all wiped out at once. “You can take out one or two hub trees, but there comes a tipping point, if you take out one too many, the whole system collapses,” she says. Often clear-cut forests are replanted with only one or two species. “These simplified forests lack complexity making them vulnerable to infection and bugs.”

To ensure the survival of the planet’s lungs at a time when they are most crucial, Simard suggests four simple solutions to end the damage caused by clear cutting :

1. Get out in the forest more — this in and of itself will remind us how interdependent we are on this ecosystem.

2. Save old growth forests as repositories of genes, mother trees and mycelium networks.

3. Where we do cut, save the “legacy” trees so they can pass on important information to the next generation.

4. Regenerate cut patches with diverse native species

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Bumble Bees, Levitation and Earth’s Magnetic Grid

   

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Aerodynamically (a bee) can’t fly…. there’s a hollow cavity inside his system and when he beats his wings he starts to resonate with this energy that goes back and forth similar to a guitar strumming on one side of the room and hitting the same chord on the other side of the room, or somebody hitting a high C and breaking a crystal. It’s the same thing. It’s resonance. 

(He) eventually reaches the resonance of the field around him (this resonance is the Earth’s rotational frequency due to its spin and is measured on today’s devices as 7.83Hz). 

Once the bumblebee hits that resonance, the frequency of his surroundings, he becomes a free agent. He creates a magnetic bubble around himself and he can go anywhere he wants… That’s not in any of the science books…. We have a conventional way of doing things and we have a natural way of doing things and they’re totally different. They’re diametrically opposed in many many cases.


—Ralph Ring

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Move over, Schrödinger’s cat – birds may be the true quantum animals. 

The bath of cells in avian eyes could prolong a delicate quantum state that helps to explain how some birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field. 

It is thought that light reacts with receptors in the birds’ eyes to produce two molecules with unpaired electrons, whose spins are linked by a special state called quantum entanglement. 

If the relative alignment of the spins is affected by Earth’s magnetic field, the electron pair can cause chemical changes that the bird can sense. 

In 2009, researchers at the University of Oxford calculated that such entanglement must last for at least 100 microseconds for the internal compass to work. But how the sensitive state of quantum entanglement could survive that long in the eye was a mystery. 

Calculations by Zachary Walters of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, now show that interactions with cells in the bird’s eye allow the electron pairs to stay entangled for longer through a dampening effect. 

Rather like the way a car with stiff shock absorbers takes longer to stop bouncing after going over a bump, the signal from the electron pair dies away more slowly under strong interactions with the cellular bath. 

Predicting exactly how long entanglement is sustained won’t be possible until the  mechanism is better understood, says Walters. But he believes there’s a good chance his model could account for the 100 microseconds. 

Erik Gauger part of the Oxford team, is intrigued by the findings. “It seems possible that this might be the mechanism allowing for the persistence of quantum coherence,” he says. “But it is probably too early to say for sure."

—Gilead Amit

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newscientist

more 
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bee(loved

 

  

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A pink gentian grows in southern Africa, which is pollinated by handsome, furry carpenter bees. The flowers of the gentian spread their petals wide, revealing to all a curving white style and three large stamens. Each stamen ends in a long thick anther that seems to be covered in yellow pollen, an obvious temptation to any passing pollen-feeding insect. But that is something of an illusion.

The yellow anther is hollow, and the pollen is held inside. The only way it can escape is through a tiny hole right at the top of the anther and there is only one way of extracting it. The bee knows how.

As it alights on an anther, it continues beating its wings but lowers the frequency so that the note of its buzz falls to approximately middle C. This causes the anther to vibrate at just the right frequency needed to release the pollen and the grains spout out of the hole at the top of the yellow fountain. The bee then industriously gathers it up and packs it into the carrying baskets on its back legs.


—Sir David Attenborough

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I dreamed

  

 

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I dreamed I spoke in another’s language,
I dreamed I lived in another’s skin,
I dreamed I was my own beloved,
I dreamed I was a tiger’s kin.

I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,
And when I breathed a garden came,
I dreamed I knew all of Creation,
I dreamed I knew the Creator’s name.

I dreamed–and this dream was the finest–
That all I dreamed was real and true,
And we would live in joy forever,
You in me, and me in you.


—Clive Barker 
Days of Magic, Nights of War 

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And I asked myself about the present: 

how wide it was, how deep it was,

how much was mine to keep.

—Kurt Vonnegut 

Slaughterhouse-Five

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Wo La So, the beginning of a journey

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ངང་པ་མཚོ་ལ་ཆགས་ནས། རེ་ཞིག་སྡད་དགོས་བསམས། མཚོ་མོ་དར་ཁ་བཅགས་་ནས། རང་སེམས་ཁོ་ཐག་ཆོད།

In love with the lake, the swan wishes to stay longer. But ice covers the lake, And the swan flies With no regrets. 

'The album title, Yeshi Dolma, is the name of Tenzin’s late mother, and is a tribute to her strength and the hardship she endured and her generation endured after fleeing their homeland after the Communist China occupied Tibet. Yeshi Dolma raised nine children on her own, five survived. She also fostered a hundred orphaned Tibetan children in exile. Homage to all the elder generations. 

Written during lockdown in 2020, Wo La So is about non-attachment. Based on a poem by the Sixth Dalai Lama, the song paints a beautiful picture of letting go and accepting change.'

—Tenzin Choegyal and Camerata, Queensland’s Chamber Orchestra
composed by Tenzin Choegyal and Katherine Philp,
arranged Katherine Philp

Recorded at the Concert Hall, QPAC 

Filmed by Pixelframe

new album, Yeshi Dolma

 

 

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streaming

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When the path ignites a soul,
there's no remaining in place.
The foot touches ground,
but not for long.
The way where love tells its secret
stays always in motion,
and there is no you there, and no reason.

The rider urges his horse to gallop,
and so doing, throws himself
under the flying hooves.
In love-unity there's no old or new.
Everything is nothing.
God alone is.

For lovers the phenomena-veil is very transparent,
and the delicate tracings on it cannot
be explained with language.
Clouds burn off as the sun rises,
and the love-world floods with light.
But cloud-water can be obscuring,
as well as useful.
There is an affection that covers the glory,
rather than dissolving into it.

It's a subtle difference,
like the change in Persian
from the word "friendship"
to the word "work."
That happens with just a dot
above or below the third letter.

There is a seeing of the beauty
of union that doesn't actively work
for the inner conversation.
Your hand and feet must move,
as a stream streams, working
as its Self, to get to the ocean.

Then there's no more mention
of the search.
Being famous, or being a disgrace,
who's ahead or behind, these considerations
are rocks and clogged places
that slow you. Be as naked as a wheat grain
out of its husk and sleek as Adam.
Don't ask for anything other
than the presence.

Don't speak of a "you"
apart from That.
A full container cannot be more full.
Be whole, and nothing.

—Hakim Sanai (1044? - 1150?)
Coleman Barks version

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owner(ship

 

  

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The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room, 
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way around.


—Margaret Atwood
the moment

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To love is to undress our names. —Octavio Paz

   

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We commonly speak as though a single 'thing' could 'have' some characteristic. A stone, we say, is 'hard,' 'small,' 'heavy,' 'yellow,' 'dense,' etc. 

That is how our language is made: 'The stone is hard.' And so on. And that way of talking is good enough for the marketplace: 'That is a new brand.' 'The potatoes are rotten.' 'The container is damaged.' ... And so on. 

But this way of talking is not good enough in science or epistemology. To think straight, it is advisable to expect all qualities and attributes, adjectives, and so on to refer to at least two sets of interactions in time. ...

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that 'things' somehow 'have' qualities and attributes. A more precise way of talking would insist that the 'things' are produced, are seen as separate from other 'things,' and are made 'real' by their internal relations and by their behavior in relationship with other things and with the speaker. 

It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever 'things' may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).


—Gregory Bateson (1904 - 1980)
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

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january

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Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once …

and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

―Susan Sontag

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your(self

 

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Be melting snow.

Wash yourself of yourself.


—Rumi

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the nothing that is

  

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One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.


—Wallace Stevens
the snow man

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needful Icelandic words

  

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afdrif, the fate of somebody
afturganga, a ghost, “one who walks again”
álfadans, dance of the elves
átt, the direction of the wind
augabragð, the twinkling of an eye
álfatrú, belief in fairies
bíldóttur, having black spots around the eyes of animals
blámóða, blue mist
blika, a cover of clouds, often foreboding storm or rain
blær, soft, calm wind 

draugagangur, the walking of ghosts, a haunting
draumaland, land of dreams
dúnalogn, calm as death
dýjamosi, bright green moss growing in quagmires
fenna, to fill with snow 

fjallavættur, a mountain spirit
fjúka, carried away by the wind 

flygja, a ghost who accompanies a certain person
föl, a thick film of snow covering the ground
galdraöld, the age of magic
grængolandi, deep and dark green
gullbúinn, adorned with gold
hlakka, the cry of a bird of prey
hrafnagervi, the outward form of ravens 

huldurdalur, hidden valley
kaf, to plunge into deep water
kollgáta, the true answer to the riddle
kossleit, looking for kisses
leirskáld, a bad poet 

lumma, a pancake, or, the palm of a small hand
mói, ground covered with heather
morgungyðja, the goddess of the morning
mosavaxinn, overgrown with moss
náttúrufegurð, the beauty of nature
norðankaldi, a light breeze from the north
rammgöldróttur, full of witchcraft and wizardry 
rósóttur, with a design of roses
selslíki, the shape of a seal
sjódraugur, the ghost of a drowned man 

smáminnka, getting smaller and smaller
sólskin, sunshine
stirndur, set full of stars
sumarsól, the sun in the summer
sæbrattur, rising steeply out of the sea
sælurdalur, the valley of bliss
undirsæng, a soft feather mattress
veturnætur, a few days before the first day of winter

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kossleit

💗

frozen frequencies

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The physics of beauty requires math. The sunflower has spirals of 21, 34, 55, 89, and - in very large sunflowers - 144 seeds. Each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers. This pattern seems to be everywhere: in pine needles and mollusk shells, in parrot beaks and spiral galaxies. After the fourteenth number, every number divided by the next highest number results in a sum that is the length-to-width ratio of what we call the golden mean, the basis for the Egyptian pyramids and the Greek Parthenon, for much of our art and even our music. In our own spiral-shaped inner ear’s cochlea, musical notes vibrate at a similar ratio.

The patterns of beauty repeat themselves, over and over. Yet the physics of beauty is enhanced by a self, a unique, self-organizing system. Scientists now know that a single flower is more responsive, more individual, than they had ever dreamed. Plants react to the world. Plants have ways of seeing, touching, tasting, smelling, and hearing.

Rooted in soil, a flower is always on the move. Sunflowers are famous for turning toward the sun, east in the morning, west in the afternoon. Light-sensitive cells in the stem “see” sunlight, and the stem’s growth orients the flower. Certain cells in a plant see the red end of the spectrum. Other cells see blue and green. Plants even see wavelengths we cannot see, such as ultraviolet.

Most plants respond to touch. The Venus’s-flytrap snaps shut. Stroking the tendril of a climbing pea will cause it to coil. Brushed by the wind, a seedling will thicken and shorten its growth. Touching a plant in various ways, at various times, can cause it to close its leaf pores, delay flower reproduction, increase metabolism, or produce more chlorophyll.

Plants are touchy-feely. They taste the world around them. Sunflowers use their roots to “taste” the surrounding soil as they search for nutrients. The roots of a sunflower can reach down eight feet, nibbling, evaluating, growing toward the best sources of food. The leaves of some plants can taste a caterpillar’s saliva. They “sniff” the compounds sent out by nearby damaged plants. Research suggests that some seeds taste or smell smoke, which triggers germination.

The right sound wave may also trigger germination. Sunflowers, like pea plants, seem to increase their growth when they hear sounds similar to but louder than the human speaking voice.

In other ways, flowers and pollinators find each other through sound.
A tropical vine, pollinated by bats, uses a concave petal to reflect the bat’s sonar signal. 

The bat calls to the flower. The flower responds.


—Sharman Apt Russell
Anatomy of A Rose: Exploring the Secret Life of Flowers

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