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notices and features - Date published:
5:30 pm, December 21st, 2021 - 47 comments
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The current rise of populism challenges the way we think about people’s relationship to the economy.We seem to be entering an era of populism, in which leadership in a democracy is based on preferences of the population which do not seem entirely rational nor serving their longer interests. ...
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https://twitter.com/cryptonature/status/1471400767227666432?s=21
https://twitter.com/cryptonature/status/1471448574001127425?s=21
It was finally getting around to reading Supernature 20 years after it got trendy that alerted me to how magic works in nature. Lyall Watson followed that up with Beyond Supernature & various other books. Some scientists are capable of thinking outside the square but as far as I'm aware, reductionism still captivates academia.
Holism has only captured part of it, via subversion. The trick is to call it systems theory or the science of complexity. Anything to avoid telling the truth works as well in the academic world as in politics!
Coincidentally, one of the books I brought home from the library this afternoon is this: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/7455612/listening-to-the-endless-cacophony-of-nature/
Due to my focus in recent years: "What is communication? How does data differ from information?" Plus the relation between form in nature, and informing…
From p10: "one of the largest known living organisms is the underground-growing mushroom Armillaria ostoyae. One specimen covers an area of around 2,385 hectares in an American nature reserve in Oregon… Experts estimate that this fungus is an impressive 2,400 years old."
It’s been known for some time now that trees actually communicate with each other, pass on information, & some even help each other – particularly saplings – to survive.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/05/04/993430007/trees-talk-to-each-other-mother-tree-ecologist-hears-lessons-for-people-too
Cool, thanks.
Yeah, so that's an excellent example of interspecies signalling of a threat. An ecologist would probably cite it as emergence of a commons economy. Sort of like folks in a neighbourhood will disregard their differences to collaborate in response to a natural disaster.
Seems like fungi are colonising the internets. (Star Trek Disco rocks for bringing Paul Stamets name further into human civ). Been seeing a noticeable upswing in sharing about how soil based life forms communicate.
https://twitter.com/cryptonature/status/1435683422425559045?s=21
Curiously enough, our filming was interrupted, in a nice way, by a friend arriving with Winecap mycelium, for me to trial in my forest 🙂
Yeah, you may also recall a conversation we had onsite here around a year ago with We The Bleeple on root fungi ecosystems.
From Gezza's link:
Putting aside how scientists tend to learn by killing other life-forms (I still find that distasteful), what we have in this quote is proof of provision of intergenerational equity – inasmuch as the process of dying initiates a process of sharing natural resources with the young. Humans aren't as good at it.
Just finished a day-long interview/forest-garden film-session with Happen Films on this very topic, weka. I'll send the link when they go to "air". It was an "in-depth" exploration of these issues you've raised here, plus more 🙂
😎 might even put up a post.
Please do. Pleeease!!
Will your post focus on fungi…or imagination?
I was thinking of a post about the film when it comes out. Unless you would like to write something?
Oh, I see what you meant.
You're very welcome to do that, weka, but I have to say, I went far beyond anything I've said on film before 🙂
Of course, it all depends on the editor.
They might consign my flights of imagination to the cutting-room floor, but the film-makers seem confident that I'd make the cut 🙂
We'll see.
there's another post going up tomorrow that you and Robyn might be interested in 😉
Ooooh! Okay.
Have you seen this?
https://www.odt.co.nz/rural-life/rural-people/southland-foodies-battle-reconnect-community
Based on Peter Wohlleben's book The Hidden Life of Trees.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Peter+Wohlleben
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/201828427/the-hidden-life-of-trees
The work and words of Monica Gagliano are very, very useful for understanding this field of endeavour.
I have two books entitled The Cosmic Serpent, and one of them is his. Shamanic investigations of nature are an alt arena that I've not specialised in but do have books by others that have & his was worth reading. My niche in kiwi culture has long been alt Aotearoa but not many even in that niche are adventurous or diligent enough to do practical shamanic research. I dabbled somewhat but never met anyone here who were as enterprising as Narby or John Perkins, McKenna…
I think that "window" has shifted, Dennis, and the interest/expertise in that field has grown remarkably. The title "shaman" is not attractive to everyone, and instead we now see a plethora of authors/scientists/etc. offering materials on the topic, but not claiming esoteric status. Merlin Sheldrake is a good example of someone wishing to be widely accepted, whilst working in a previously peripheral area of investigation.
Young Merlin is less adventurous mentally than his dad. Well, that's the impression I formed but I haven't really investigated him enough perhaps.
It was the generation born in the early 1940s who were the psychedelic pioneers & I'm on the trailing edge of that. Confidence in using one's mind to explore nature via altered states of consciousness is probably inversely proportional to mental health. Well, has often seemed that way to me, at least. The point being that only those sure of their situation & having a naturally resilient psyche ought to do it!
Young Merlin's playing it safe, for the moment, in my view. I suspect he's plenty smart and saw his dad get pummelled by the fraternity in his early years. In any case, the atmosphere for passionate wonderings has passed along with the hippy movement that gave wind to its wings; it’s all a lot more serious now, but more likely to bring profound change, for all that. We're still morphically-resonating, habitually realising and looking toward the teleological attractor at the end of time 🙂
Hmm. Well, your reference to imagination got me pondering, aware that other mental faculties come into play with psychedelic adventuring.
Cultural framing is a determinant. Hippie was a cultural framing. Science, both practice & theory, is culturally framed. Discovery need not be.
So it's all down to how we interpret discoveries. I still use scientific framing in suitable contexts, whilst being aware that my own preference is for metaphysical framing (more basic, more integrative, more transcendent).
The natural human tendency is to interpret discoveries in terms we already know (self-reinforcing, in-crowd elitism, etc) with the typical consequence that we end up missing the point. The point is meant to pull us out of ourselves. That's according to the original meaning of educate.
What if the human psyche has atrophied as a result of civilisation? In respect of attunement to nature, I mean. What if we a inherently capable of reconnecting to nature at that deeper original level, provided we transcend social conditioning? That was the whole point of why the hippie thing shifted out of city & suburbs in 1968 & became `back to the land'. Well, the experiential challenge of Green authenticity persists, and each younger generation sorts into those who engage the challenge & succeed, those who fail, and the bulk who never try…
As the Maharishi said….'that's ..real ..groovy..man'!
Woulda learnt it from the Beatles when they flew to India to check him out. The grooves were in the vinyl…
Lennon then wrote a song with no tune called Instant Karma. I was not impressed.
Shoulda stayed with this formula: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq0aeEYLkIE
Lennon's tribute to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tSk5U4oHhu0
"What if we a inherently capable of reconnecting to nature at that deeper original level, provided we transcend social conditioning?"
Quite so, Dennis. Of course, we are and we must. It's a fairly straight-forward process, as described best by Goethe; sit quietly amongst plants, observe closely and at length, draw what you see; the results will speak for themselves. The next stage, achievable after much practice, is to imagine the plant to such intensity that it "is" the plant you practiced on. This not easy 🙂
"…provided we transcend social conditioning…" and our own personal conditioning…
Darwin wrote,
"I strolled a little beyond the glade for an hour and a half… the fresh yet dark green of the grand old Scotch firs, the brown of the catkins of the old birches, with their white stems, and a fringe of distant green from the larches, made an excessively pretty view… a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing… it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw and did not care one penny how the beasts or birds had been formed."
Walt Witman suffered a debilitating stroke, but strove on to learn…
"Above all, however, Whitman found vitality in the natural world — in what he so poetically called “the bracing and buoyant equilibrium of concrete outdoor Nature, the only permanent reliance for sanity of book or human life.” Looking back on what most helped him return to life after the stroke, Whitman echoes Seneca’s wisdom on calibrating our expectations for contentment and writes:
For Robert and Dennis..
https://youtu.be/94bdMSCdw20
"Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing, and think.
One lesson from affiliating a tree — perhaps the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that same lesson of inherency, of what is, without the least regard to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes or dislikes. What worse — what more general malady pervades each and all of us, our literature, education, attitude toward each other, (even toward ourselves,) than a morbid trouble about seems, (generally temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the sane, slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books, friendship, marriage — humanity’s invisible foundations and hold-together? (As the all-basis, the nerve, the great-sympathetic, the plenum within humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily invisible.)"
fungimentally mushrooms have been kept in the dark …far too long.
Mushrooms are the temporary reproductive structures of massive, seldom seen, subterranean creatures more closely related to you than to plants. Fungi. Some are miles wide. Some live thousands of years. Some help trees speak to one another. There’s magic beneath the forests.'
And yet we kill them willy-nilly – almost every 'cide known to and made by man, destroys those treasures (and that doesn't even begin to cover concreted cityscapes, asphalted road networks and broad scale industrial pastural farmland that starves and isolates fungi communities into non-existence).
That said (breathlessly), we can put it all back.
And we must.
I have to admit..I am guilty of eating them…had a mushroom omelette ..today.
You only ate their sticky-outy-bits – no harm done 🙂
while the world is spinning,spinning,spinning…Boris and co…will carry on…wining,winning…
Lockdown party inquiry could expand to cover No 10 garden event | Coronavirus | The Guardian
A former national party cabinet minister taking on an important public post:
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/458375/ex-cabinet-minister-simon-power-to-replace-kevin-kenrick-at-tvnz
This time I applaud the decision.
He's his own man – very smart and a man of integrity. They've made a good choice.
With a bit of luck we won't have to watch anymore tacky game shows like the one I watched the other night – the Xmas episode of Give Us A Clue. Having never watched it before I took a punt it might be okay. Charades after all can be fun.
OMG the Xmas bling. The players were lost amongst a gigantic display of baubles, bangles, beads, Santa Claus', reindeers, holly, ivy, silly hats, fairies, elves, and masses of glitter everywhere. In the middle were a bunch of celebrities trying to outdo one another on what was left of the set.
S'pose its some peoples idea of entertainment but sadly not mine. Entertainment with class I say.
Do me a favour Anne!
How more elitist could you get ..and Westpac exec on his C.V!
The description of the show is largely tongue in cheek Blazer. But I don't resile from my critique. Apart from a few humorous moments (the best one lost among the melee) it was pretty awful.
And I don't hold his former banking position against him.
Forget the…show…
'He's his own man – very smart and a man of integrity. They've made a good choice.'
Where's a..bucket.
You have obviously met him somewhere along the line…and he was a 'lovely person'!
You have obviously met him somewhere along the line…
Nope. I watched him perform in the House at Question Time and thought his answers were always rational. Didn't necessarily agree with him though and he had his moments debating with the then Labour opposition. But I never saw him resort to rudeness or malice as some in National have been wont to do.
That's a big leap to 'a man of integrity'….bankers have no moral virtue..period..prove me ..wrong.
Piss off Mr Knowall.
I can't argue with…that.
Being polite is not a qualification to run a cultural institution. Nor is banking. What a strange appointment.
He does wear a suit, however, so folks will be reassured TVNZ remains Dorksville Central. Cultural continuity is critical. The world keeps changing, so the only way mainstreamers can cling onto a semblance of sanity is for such islands of sameness to provide a refuge for them.
heh