A Kimmerer tale

 Robin Wall Kimmerer is such a great author. "Braiding Sweetgrass" was my first joyfully owned reading of hers. 

She is published often by Emergence Magazine, who has Sunday sharings on their newsletters. Here's one from last Sunday, the trees and life, and microbiology! Such images!

Becoming Earth: An Experimental Theology

The Trickster

 A podcast…about the trickster. The Emerald with Joshua Sherei.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-emerald/id1465445746?i=1000701811853

I took my time listening to this podcast…and about 3/4 way through I was struck by the metaphor of the body and culture. So I’m going to go back and listen to that again…it seemed to go very quickly, while talking about looking for slowness.

Summer Solstice

I may do a ritual for Summer Solstice this year...which I don't believe I ever have. Let's see, just have a circle to represent the elements and directions (N,S,E and W.) Earth, air, fire, water. Easy to find in all my collections. I can set this up as an altar, a place to meditate upon as the longest day of the year offers all that sun-time! Music helps set the mood of reverence, probably some sunshine songs.

"Sunshine on My Shoulders" by John Denver (from the Wildlife Concert)

It's up to God

 Commodification of everything is the biggest problem of how things are run these days, in my humble opinion! 

For (Heraclitus), reality is not a constellation of things at all, but one of processes. The fundamental ‘stuff’ of the world is not material substance but volatile flux, namely 'fire,’ and all things are versions thereof (puros tropai). 

Process is fundamental: the river is not an object, but a continuing flow; the sun is not a thing, but an enduring fire. 

Everything is a matter of process, of activity, of change (panta rhei). Not stable things but fundamental forces and the varied and fluctuating activities they manifest constitute the world. 

We must at all costs avoid the fallacy of materializing nature.

—Nicholas Rescher

Thanks to Love is a Place blog.

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For me I've been considering how scientifically thinking people approach problems so differently than religiously thinking people.

My maintenance man put a new part in to replace the crumbling one in my air conditioner. I said but what about the cause of the problem? Can you fix the thing that made it crumble in the first place into rust particles?

He mentioned we live in a rain forest. He apologized for saying he was going to be religious (a nice touch.) And then he said it's up to God. 

I said it needed to be born again!

This is what it's like to live in a red community...a right wing Christian neighborhood, while many of my friends are Democratic liberals. I never realized it would extend to the approach to repairing things!

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So while looking at machines which fall apart and those who fix them just pray about it, I'm considering the process rather than the thing itself.

This process for me is cause and effects. Try this or that, if it works, then the way has been found. A process.

For my maintenance man, he only goes to the thing that works...just replace the broken part, and don't even think about what caused it. All causes in his mind are to a great force beyond all understanding, to which he prays, I'd imagine, regularly.

Which brings me to climate change.

Many neighbors have experienced some drastic events here in western North Carolina, with the hurricane last September changing the faces of many valleys and mountain-sides. Some of them just cope with what needs to be done (food, water, shelter) and say it's God's will. 

They actually find comfort when someone dies, has unfortunate circumstances, or even does something illegal...to say God is the answer to your questions...He wants this to happen this way.

I can't approach any of this in this manner, excuse me very much. I have too much faith in a scientific process, to figure out what things might be done by us to change the results of what's happening in nature, so we can still survive and maybe thrive, a few generations coming along. This also requires my owning responsibility for much of climate change...and looking at men (generic I mean) who have caused it.

So we're responsible. We're able. We can change our behaviors. We can support ideas that might offer solutions to problems. OK, I've gotten off on a tangent here.

But my concept of a divine force isn't that I can just let it do it's thing, and I don't have to do anything.

 Link to the following: 

Supracellular: A Meditation by Sophie Strand

“I want to think and feel and weep and grieve with my whole multispecies, polynucleated mind.”

Letting her consciousness slip from the confines of her brain into the long tubes of hyphae that make up the mycelial network beneath her feet, author Sophie Strand wonders how much better we might think if we involved the wide web of more-than-human beings around us. She challenges the idea that our minds are individual—like siloed cells resisting exchange with the outside world—and offers a practice of opening up to a “supracellular state” in which thinking is less bound to an organ and more a relational process that moves through the fungal, geological, microbial, vegetal, ancestral threads that connect us with our ecosystem. This exercise in embodied empathy enables Sophie to enter the minds of rivers, black bears, and chanterelles; and as the borders between physical matter dissolve, her self flows into a wider space of multiplicity. She feels in the extended web of her cognition both the wonder of the land’s otherness and the pain of its increasing disruption. This essay is the first in a series of four we are sharing over the next month in partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature.

Emergent divine feminine

 “The Goddess doesn't enter us from outside; she emerges from deep within. She is not held back by what happened in the past. She is conceived in consciousness, born in love, and nurtured by higher thinking. She is integrity and value, created and sustained by the hard work of personal growth and the discipline of a life lived actively in hope.”

~ Marianne Williamson

Stained glass, artist unknown

On thinking

 Evan Thompson describes:

Part of the problem, however, comes from thinking of the mind or meaning as being generated in the head. That’s like thinking that flight is inside the wings of a bird. A bird needs wings to fly, but flight isn’t in the wings, and the wings don’t generate flight; they generate lift, which facilitates flight. Flying is an action of the whole animal in its environment. Analogously, you need a brain to think, but thinking isn’t in the brain, and the brain doesn’t generate it; it facilitates it. The brain generates many things—neurons and their synaptic connections, ongoing rhythmic activity patterns, the constant dynamic coordination of sensory and motor activity—but none of these should be identified with thinking, though all of them crucially facilitate it. Thinking is an action of the whole person in its environment.

Evan Thompson, “Spring Forward or Fall Back: Changing Times for Neuroscience,”
Psychology Today, May 13, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wakingdreaming-
being/201505/spring-forward-or-fall-back.

I quoted this from an article which I'll link tomorrow!