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. 

Eventually it 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

NewScientist

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Iron in the birds’ inner ears

helps them navigate using the Earth’s magnetic field.

In other words,

the birds carry within them a piece of the earth,

a talisman, which speaks to the Earth and whispers

its knowledge back to the birds.

—Jarod K. Anderson

PACT

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Bats can hear shapes.

Plants can eat light.

Bees can dance maps.

We can hold all these ideas at once and feel

both heavy and weightless

with the absurd beauty of it all.

—Jarod K. Anderson

THE IMPOSSIBLE

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5%

   

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We perceive only a negligible portion of the vibrating ocean in which we are immersed.

We fail to detect the infrared and the ultraviolet, infrasound and ultrasound, and in general the very high and very low frequencies; we can’t even detect the X rays, gamma rays, radioactivity, and cosmic rays, which all still affect our bodies. And so many frequencies are still unknown.

The senses are therefore incomplete; our neural circuits can’t process the majority of inputs in order to translate them into images. According to some, our senses comprehend only 5 percent of the signals from the world, which means that we miss 95 percent of our environment.


—Citro Massimo, M.D. 
The Basic Code of the Universe

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First Light Edging Cirrus

    

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1025 molecules
are enough
to call woodthrush or apple. 

A hummingbird, fewer.
A wristwatch: 1024. 

An alphabet's molecules, 
tasting of honey, iron and salt,
cannot be counted– 

as some strings, untouched,
sound when a near one is speaking. 

As it was when love slipped inside us.
It looked out to face in every direction. 

Then it was inside the tree, the rock, the cloud.


—Jane Hirshfield

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love is a mystery

  

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All things feel.

—Pythagoras

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I revere trees when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves.

A tree says: The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.


—Herman Hesse
Notes and Sketches

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Respect the mind that stirs in every creature: love is a mystery known by metals too; every flower opens its soul to Nature; everything is sentient, and works on you.

Beware! From the blind wall one watches you: even matter has a logos all its own. Do not put it to some impious use. Often in humble life a god works, hidden; and like a new-born eye veiled by its lids, pure spirit grows beneath the surface of stones.


—Gerard de Nerval
1808 –1855

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in your body lies a priceless gem —Rumi

  

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Grace is always present. 

You imagine it is something somewhere high in the sky, far away, and has to descend. It is really inside you, in your Heart, and the moment you effect subsidence or merger of the mind into its Source, grace rushes forth, sprouting as from a spring within you.


—Ramana Maharshi

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Images, however sacred they may be, retain the attention outside, whereas at the time of prayer the attention must be within - in the heart. 

The concentration of attention in the heart - this is the starting point of prayer.


—Saint Theophan the Recluse

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Parting is one of the exactions
of a Mortal Life.
It is bleak - like Dying
but occurs more times.

To escape the former,
some invite the last.
The Giant in the Human Heart
was never met outside.


—Emily Dickinson
New poems of Emily Dickinson

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not to worry

   

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Each tree grows in two directions at once, into the darkness and out to the light with as many branches and roots as it needs to embody its wild desires.
 

—John O’Donohue
Anam Cara

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there are moments in moist love when heaven is 

jealous of what we on earth can do.  

—Hafiz

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Live to the point of tears. —Albert Camus

 

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Awareness matters, because
Matter is a materialisation of Awareness. 
Just as ‘energy’ is the formative activity of Awareness. 

Just as space is a vast universal field of Awareness, and 
Time is the presencing of things in that field, so 
All bodies are Embodiments of Awareness,
Formed of its Elemental qualities.


—Peter Wilberg
The Awareness Principle

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I taste what you taste. 
I know the kind of lyrics your Soul most likes. 
I know which sounds will become resplendent in your mind
and bring such pleasure your feet will jump and whirl. 
When anything touches or enters your body
Never say it is not God,
for He is just trying to get close. 

I have no use for divine patience 
— my lips are always burning and everywhere.
I am running from every corner
of this world and sky wanting to kiss you; 

I am every particle of dust and wheat
— you and I are ground from His Own Body.
I am rioting at your door;
I am spinning in midair like golden falling leaves
trying to win your glance.

I am sweetly rolling against your walls and your shores all night,
even though you are asleep.
I am singing from the mouths of animals and birds
honoring our Beloved's promise and need:
to let you know the Truth.
My dear, when anything touches or enters your body
never say it is not God,
for He and I are just trying to get close to you.

God and I are rushing
from every corner of existence,
needing to say,
"We are yours." 


—Hafiz

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say i am

  

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This long-living ghost of a samsara which is the creation of the mind of man and the cause of his sufferings disappears when one ponders over it. O Rama, maya is such that it brings delight through its own destruction; its nature is inscrutable; it ceases to exist even while it is being observed.

Dear one, wonderful indeed is the maya which deludes the entire world. It is on account of it that that the Self is not perceived even though it pervades all the limbs of the body.

Whatever is seen does not truly exist. It is like the mythical city of Gandharvas (fata margin) or a mirage. That which is not seen, though within us, is called the eternal and indestructible self.

Just as the trees on the bank of a lake are reflected in the water, so also all these varied objects are reflected in the vast mirror of our consciousness. This creation, which is a mere play of consciousness, rises up, like the delusion of a snake in a rope (when there is ignorance) and comes to an end when there is right knowledge.


—Yoga Basishta Sara
Chapter 2, verses 5 - 11

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a sweet question

  

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Skill in living, awareness of belonging to the world, delight in being part of the world, always tends to involve knowing our kinship as animals with animals. […] 

Relationship among all things appears to be complex and reciprocal - always at least two-way, back and forth. It seems that nothing is single in this universe, and nothing goes one way.

In this view, we humans appear as particularly lively, intense, aware nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections, simple or complicated, direct or hidden, strong or delicate, temporary or very long-lasting. A web of connections, infinite but locally fragile, with and among everything - all beings - including what we generally class as things, objects.


—Ursula K. Le Guin
Deep in Admiration, excerpts
(Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet)

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The moon came to me last night
With a sweet question.

She said,
“The sun has been my faithful lover 
For millions of years.
Whenever I offer my body to him 
Brilliant light pours from his heart.
Thousands then notice my happiness 
And delight in pointing
toward my beauty.

Hafiz, 
Is it true that our destiny
Is to turn into Light
Itself?”

And I replied, 
"Dear moon, 
Now that your love is maturing,
We need to sit together
Close like this more often

So I might instruct you 
How to become
Who you
Are!"


—Hafiz

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These days I can see us clinging to each other 

as we are swept along by the current 

I am clinging to you to keep you from 

being swept away and you are clinging to me 

we see the shores blurring past as we hold 

each other in the rushing current 

the daylight rushes unheard far above us 

how long will we be swept along in the daylight 

how long will we cling together in the night 

and where will it carry us together


—W.S. Merwin
Here Together
Garden Time

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i do not have it, i am it. —Nancy Mujo Baker

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Contemplative and philosophical traditions, Eastern and Western, insist on this: that the source and ground of the mind’s unity is the transcendent reality of unity as such, the simplicity of God, the one ground of both consciousness and being. 

For Plotinus, the oneness of nous, the intellective apex of the self, is a participation in the One, the divine origin of all things and the ground of the openness of mind and world one to another. 

For Sufi thought, God is the Self of all selves, the One—al-Ahad—who is the sole true 'I' underlying the consciousness of every dependent 'me.’ 

According to the Kena Upanishad, Brahman is not that which the mind knows like an object, or that the eye sees or the ear hears, but is that by which the mind comprehends, by which the eye sees, by which the ear hears; atman—the self in its divine depth—is the eye of the eye, the ear of the ear, the ground of all knowing.

—David Bentley Hart

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The mystic and the physicist arrive at the same conclusion; one starting from the inner realm, the other from the outer world. 

The harmony between their views confirms the ancient Indian wisdom that Brahman, the ultimate reality without, is identical to Atman, the reality within.


—Fritjof Capra

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The witnessing force behind mind, that characteristic self or spirit 

is called atman; the God in you.

—Gian Kumar

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because you are, all can be

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Without imagination there is no world.

Your conviction that you are conscious of a world is the world. 

The world you perceive is made of consciousness; what you call matter is consciousness itself. You are the space in which it moves, the time in which it lasts, the love that gives it life.

Cut off imagination and attachment and what remains?

Just live your life as it comes. Keep quietly alert, inquiring into the real nature of yourself. Perception is based on memory and is only imagination. The world can be said to appear but not to be.  

Only that which makes perception possible is real.

You agree to be guided from within and life becomes a journey into the unknown. Give up all names and forms, and the Real is with you. Know yourself as you are. Distrust your mind and go beyond. Do not think of the Real in terms of consciousness and unconsciousness. 

It is utterly beyond both. 

It gives birth to consciousness. 

All else is in consciousness.

Nothing you can see, feel or think is so. Go beyond the personal and see. Stop imagining that you were born. You are utterly beyond all existence and non-existence, utterly beyond all that the mind conceives. Question yourself: Who am I? What is behind and beyond all this? Soon you will see that thinking yourself to be a person is mere habit built on memory. Inquire ceaselessly.

Just be aware of your being here and now. There is nothing more to it. In reality you are not a thing nor separate. You are the infinite potentiality, the inexhaustible possibility.  

Because you are, all can be. 

The universe is but a partial manifestation of your limitless capacity to become. You are neither consciousness nor its content. 

You are the timeless Source. Disassociate yourself from mind and consciousness. Find a foothold beyond and all will be clear and easy.

—Nisargadatta Maharaj
I am That

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The question ‘Who am I?’ is not really meant to get an answer. 

The question ‘Who am I?’ is meant to dissolve the questioner.


—Ramana Maharshi

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When past and future dissolve there is only You

—Rumi

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note to selves

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My Guru told me: “Go back to that state of pure being, where the ‘I am’ is still in its purity before it got contaminated with ‘I am this’ or ‘I am that.’ Your burden is of false self-identifications—abandon them all.”

My guru told me, “Trust me, I tell you: you are Divine. Take it as the absolute truth. Your joy is divine, your suffering is divine too. All comes from God. Remember it always. You are God, your will alone is done."


—Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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The song sings the singer. The Spirit sings the song. —Basil Braveheart

largerloves

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What if, instead, we were to start with an ontology in which fluidity and solidity are not mutually incompatible properties? Continuous variation is more comparable to rhythm.

Following Lefebvre (2004), rhythms result from the concurrence of difference and repetition, in which time and space are mutually implicated. In a world marked by rhythm there would be neither pure solidity nor pure fluidity. 

Conversely, a world that was purely solid or purely fluid would be without rhythm. This is consistent with the ways indigenous communities around the circumpolar north have been reporting their experience of climate change as things going out of phase. 

They may report, for example, that sea-ice recedes or that migratory species arrive earlier than expected, judged in relation to other environmental comings and goings with which they usually coincide. These are not punctuated contrasts but disturbances in the rhythmic fluctuations of a solid-fluid world in perpetual becoming: where nothing is solid or fluid but everything solid-becoming-fluid or fluid-becoming-solid (Serres 2000).

The Inuit notion of sila perfectly reflects this ontology. Referring interchangeably to both weather and climate, sila is translated as the breath of life and the reason things move and change. It also means intelligence, consciousness or mind, and is understood to be a fundamental principle underlying the integrity of the cosmos. 

In the words of Nuttall, “it is an all-pervading life-giving force connecting a person with the rhythms of the universe, integrating the self with the natural world”. 

Conversely, lack of sila can mean that either people or the environment are going crazy. The emphasis on breath here is critical. In breathing we both surrender ourselves to the environment and launch ourselves into it. With every inhalation, the atmosphere enters into and becomes part of us; every exhalation in turn releases part of us into the atmosphere (Ingold 2015, 84–88).

No other process matches this continual rhythmic exchange with the environment – one that continues throughout life. Through breathing we are immersed in our surroundings, and our surroundings in us. 

In a living world of solid-fluids, marked by constant rhythmic transformation, no organism could endure that was not open, through respiration, to its surroundings.


—Cristián Simonetti & Tim Ingold
Ice and Concrete, excerpts

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Not only do plants and animals, orchids and wasps, sing or express themselves, 

but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified thing on earth.

—Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari

A Thousand Plateaus

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the lives our lives prepare

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A sign installed in the largest wildfire burn I’ve ever seen, along the BC/YK border. Borrowing the aesthetics of BC Recreation Site signs, once again pointing to the overlaps of outdoor recreation, resource extraction, and the consequences of the climate crisis. Most recreation sites in BC exist along previously built logging and mining roads.

“Forced into a great and difficult transformation” was a line I heard in a lecture on Buddhist philosophy I was listening to on my drive up north. But it became another mantra I thought about while living in a place that’s been utterly transformed by resource extraction over the past century, and as I thought about the burnt landscapes I drove through.

—Liz Toohey-Wiese, 2024

More here.

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If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
here, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.

—Wendell Berry

A Vision

wait - what ?

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dear world

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The reciprocal truth of the observer changing what is observed is that what is observed changes the observer. This was a view espoused by Goethe, and not just in the obvious ways you might imagine. 

According to him, we literally grow faculties. 

He held that an object properly contemplated generates in the beholder the faculty proper to its own perception: ‘Every new object, well contemplated and clearly seen, opens up a new organ within us’. 

Contemplation of the world in a spirit of openness and humility fundamentally enlarges our being, where dogma and complacency simply narrow it. Equally it enables the greater reality of the cosmos – whatever it may be – to fulfil itself through us.


—Iain McGilchrist
The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, 

and the Unmaking of the World


 

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People ask “what can I do”?

Know thyself. The work is great, but we are capable of greater things than we know.

—Dr. Iain McGilchrist
Darwin Lectures 2024, excerpts

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One regret, dear world, 

That I am determined not to have 

When I am lying on my deathbed 

Is that 

I did not kiss you enough.

―Hafiz

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trans(formation

Brahmin moth, transformed

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The one Reality appears to our ignorance as a manifold universe of names and forms and changes. Like the gold of which many ornaments are made, it remains in itself unchanged. 

Such is Brahman, and That art Thou.


—Adi Shankara

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Just as one might have to turn the whole body round in order that the eye should see light instead of darkness, so the entire soul must be turned away from this changing world, until its eye can bear to contemplate reality and that supreme splendour which we have called the Good.


—Plato

 

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The unlike is joined together, and from differences results the most beautiful harmony, and all things take place by strife.

—Heraclitus of Ephesus

On Nature, Fragments 

G. T. W. Patrick version

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how much of a tree is alive?

   

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Only 1% of a dormant mature tree is biologically living while the rest is composed of non-living, structural wood cells. In other words, very little of a tree's woody volume is composed of "living, metabolizing" tissue; rather, the major living and growing portions of a tree are leaves, buds, roots, and a thin film or skin of cells just under the bark called the cambium.

These living cells make up a very small percentage of the total volume of a tree's cells. Instead, non-living or "dead" cells comprise most of the volume of a tree, providing vital structural support for the living cells.

Interestingly enough, trees start out in life as a germinating seed with every living cell in hyperdrive, but as a tree seed becomes a seedling, then a sapling, then a mature tree, its living contents become less and less as a percentage of the total volume. Trees increasingly lose their living cytoplasmic cells as metabolism ceases in each cell, and although they are no longer alive, these non-living cells now provide protection, transportation, and physical support for the living ones.

Non-living cells provide a vital role in the process of how a tree grows — from the "heavy lifting" of holding up the tall branches to the tree's bark, which protects the thin layer of living cells underneath.

New cells are formed and living cells cease metabolization as they transform into transport vessels and protective skin, creating a cycle of creation, rapid growth, slowing metabolism, and death as the tree climbs ever-higher into a healthy, full plant.

For most intents and purposes, wood is considered to be the product of living cells in trees harnessing the environment around them to make proteins and form protective vessels and shells for the trees' sustained growth. Wood is only technically considered dead when it's separated from the tree itself, as it still serves a vital role in the plant's life when attached to living cells in the tree.

In other words, although wood is largely made of non-living cells — cells that no longer reproduce but instead transport nutrients to living cells — it is still considered "alive" if it is attached to the tree itself. However, if a branch falls off or a person cuts down a tree, the wood is considered "dead" because it no longer transports living matter through itself.

As a result, wood that has been separated from a tree will dry up as the protoplasm hardens and the protein turns into the wood one might use in a fireplace or for building a shelf. This wood is considered dead, though the piece it was once attached to — if still attached to the tree itself — is still considered alive. 


—Steve Nix

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And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be 

are full of trees and changing leaves.

—Virginia Woolf

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there is a be(ing

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The Tao is forever changing —

Alteration, movement without rest,

Flowing through the six empty places,

Rising and sinking without fixed law,

Firm and yielding transform each other.

They cannot be confined within a rule,

It is only change that is at work here.


—The I Ching, Book of Changes

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There is a being wonderful, perfect; It existed before heaven and earth. How quiet it is! How spiritual it is!

It stands alone and it does not change; It moves, but does not on that account suffer. All life comes from it, yet it does not demand to be Lord.

I do not know its name, so I call it Tao, the Way,

And I rejoice in its power.


—Lao-tzu
Tao Te Ching, 25th Chapter

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God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being and let God be God in you.


—Meister Eckhart

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we are never alone

This is a detailed model of one human cell, obtained using x-ray, NMR and cryoelectron microscopy datasets by Evan Ingersoll and Gael McGill.

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"You are mostly not you,” microbial ecologist Rob Knight wrote in his fascinating exploration of the human biome, in which he pointed out that only 1% of the genes in our bodies are human and the remaining 99% are microbial.

—Nicola Davies 
Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes

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We are beginning to encounter ourselves—not always comfortably or pleasantly—as multi-species beings already partaking in timescales that are fabulously more complex than the onwards-driving version of history many of us still imagine ourselves to inhabit.

The work of the radical biologist Lynn Margulis and others has shown humans to be not solitary beings, but what Margulis memorably calls ‘holobionts’ – collaborative compound organisms, ecological units ‘consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life’, in the philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s phrase.


—Robert Macfarlane
Underland: A Deep Time Journey

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Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis — a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while they are still unfertilised eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right — a colony enclosed within a single body. A multi-species collective. An entire world.

All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them. And we cannot fully appreciate our own microbiome without appreciating how those of our fellow species enrich and influence their lives. We need to zoom out to the entire animal kingdom, while zooming in to see the hidden ecosystems that exist in every creature.

When we look at beetles and elephants, sea urchins and earthworms, parents and friends, we see individuals, working their way through life as a bunch of cells in a single body, driven by a single brain, and operating with a single genome.

This is a pleasant fiction. In fact, we are legion, each and every one of us. Always a “we” and never a “me.”


—Ed Yong (treasure
I Contain Multiudes, excerpts

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