Abundance

The pecan groves give, again and again, Such generosity might seem incompatible with the process of evolution, which involves the imperative of individual survival. But we make a grave error if we try to separate individual wellbeing from the health of the whole. The gift of abundance from pecans is a gift to themselves. By sating squirrels and people, the trees are ensuring their own survival.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

"Experience doesn't fit expectations, you have to recalibrate..."

Awe is the perception of something so physically or conceptually vast that it transcends your view of the world and you need to find ways to accommodate it. It's a basic sense that what you have experienced doesn't fit in with your expectations of the world, so you have to recalibrate.

Paul Piff, University of California, Irvine.

Piff and colleagues say that an exercise designed to inspire awe encouraged subjects to endorse more ethical decisions, lower their sense of entitlement and report more 'prosocial' values in which they pay more attention to the needs of others than their own.  Piff and Dacher Keltner write:

Our research finds that even brief experiences of awe, such as being amid beautiful tall trees, lead people to feel less narcissistic and entitled and more attuned to the common humanity people share with one another... 

We suggest that people insist on experiencing more everyday awe, to actively seek out what gives them goose bumps, be it in looking at trees, night skies, patterns of wind on water or the quotidian nobility of others.

See also The science of awe


Image: Eucalyptus Regnans by Patche99z via wikimedia.

Dazzle

I was reminded, again, today of the role of forgetfulness in the generation of wonder.

I have lived through several dozen springs but I had forgotten, again, how intensely bright can be the green of leaves on a tree in their first days of emergence.


'Dazzle' is from Ronald Johnson's What the Leaf Told Me.


P.S. In Calmly We Walk through this April's Day Delmore Schwartz writes :

...May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day...

Your lungs, a tree

If you were to stretch flat all the membranes of an adult [human]'s lungs they would occupy over a thousand square feet [or 93 square metres]; equivalent to the leaf coverage of a fifteen to twenty-year-old oak.

from Adventures in Human Being by Gavin Francis (2015)

If all of the capillaries that surround the alveoli were unwound and laid end to end, they would extend for about 992 kilometres (616 miles).

Image: Leonardo da Vinci

An unceasing flux

You share some of your genes with the tree through the window, but you and that tree parted company very early in eukaryotic evolution, 1.5 billion years ago, each following a different course permitted by different genes, the product of mutations, recombination and natural selection. You run around, and I hope still climb trees occasionally; they bend gently in the breeze and convert the air into more trees, the magic trick to end them all. All those differences are written in the genes, genes that derive from your common ancestor but have now mostly diverged beyond recognition... 

But that tree has mitochondria too, which work in much the same way as its chloroplasts, endlessly transferring electrons down its trillions upon trillions of respiratory chains, pumping protons across membranes as they always did. As you always did. These same shuttling electrons and protons have sustained you from the womb: you pump 10²¹  protons per second, every second, without pause.

from The Vital Question by Nick Lane (2015)

Image: Magus6 via wikicommons

"Humour and wonder can be a double act"

Man’s a phenomenon, one knows not what,
And wonderful beyond all wondrous measure. 

[Byron's] knowingly unknowing way of seeing things is not really—or not only—felt as a predicament, but also as an energising pleasure, something akin to Camus’s sense of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus, born of the confrontation between a human need to understand things and the recalcitrance of the world to human understanding. ‘Living’, Camus notes, ‘is keeping the absurd alive.’ Indeed, the absurd is a commitment to a certain style of life; ‘one does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness.’ Should the manual ever be written, what its author might be tempted to say is that wonder, like its close relation the absurd, acknowledges the maze inside amazement, but without implying that a removal from the maze would always be desirable. Part of what feels funny (sometimes darkly, sometimes lightly funny) about wonder is the feeling that puzzlement may sponsor plenitude.

—  from The Funny Thing About Trees by Matthew Bevis


Image: Apollo and Daphne by Antonio del Pollaiolo, circa 1470 (Wikipedia). Bevis quotes Tom Lubbock: ‘the picture gives no impression of gradual, graceful, organic transformation. The fleeing nymph raises her arms in alarm and appeal, and they just go whom! ...tree! —  with a flourish like a conjurer's bouquet.’

Different light and different silence

In the Ondariva gardens the branches spread out like the tentacles of extraordinary animals, and the plants on the ground opened up stars of fretted leaves like the skins of reptiles, and waved feathery yellow bamboos with a rustle like paper. From the highest tree Cosimo, in his yearning to enjoy to the utmost the unusual greens of this exotic flora and its different light and different silence, would let his head drop upside down, so that the garden became a forest, a forest not of this earth but a new world in itself.

— from The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (1959)

Awe-full lines

I found myself lying on the bank of a cart-road in the sand, with no prospect whatever but that small aspen tree against the blue sky. Languidly, but not idly, I began to draw it; and as I drew, the languor passed away: the beautiful lines insisted on being traced—without weariness. More and more beautiful they became, as each rose out of the rest, and took its place in the air. With wonder increasing every instant, I saw that they “composed” themselves, by finer laws than any known of men. At last, the tree was there, and everything that I had thought before about trees, nowhere.

from Praeterita by John Ruskin (1885, recalling 1842). Ruskin writes elsewhere:

Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss.

Image of European aspen by Willow

A miracle for those with eyes to see

Acacia nilotica — known as thorn mimosa, scented thorn, Vachellia nilotica, or prickly acacia…is a super plant. It can grow up to 65 feet tall, with a crown as wide. It thrives in poor, dry, and saline soils, adding three-quarters of an inch in diameter each year. It needs little rain. It is resistant to fire. By its fifth year it can produce up to 175,000 seeds annually, and although most of its seeds do not sprout when the pods drop, they still can germinate 15 years later. The seeds are rich in protein. Of all the acacias, the nilotica has one of the deepest rooting systems, up to nine feet, which means it can tap into relatively deep ground water. The horizontal spread of its lateral roots is 1.6 times greater than the umbrella span of its crown. Prickly acacias may stand two dozen feet apart but underground they clasp the soil together in a tight, resilient web. Along a river they create an indigenous natural revetment. 

Africans use prickly acacia’s seeds as food flavoring and dye, its glabrous bark for tea, its leaves as fodder and antibiotic, its sap to bind pigment to colored fabric, its twigs as toothbrushes, its thorns as awls, its inner bark and pods to tan leather. It is a nitrogen fixer, so grain yields are richer in its shade.

— from The Men Who Planted Trees by Anna Badkhen.

Image: Inland Niger Delta.

Green thought

There is a kind of brain chauvinism. We think that a brain is something that is absolutely needed to have intelligence. Not so... 

[Darwin] was right...If we need to find an integrative processing part of the plant, we need to look at the roots.

— Stefano Mancuso quoted in Root intelligence: Plants can think, feel and learn, an article by Anil Ananthaswamy who also quotes Michael Marder:

Our task is to think about... concepts of attention, consciousness and intelligence in a way that becomes somehow decoupled from the figure of the human. I want [us] to rethink the concept of intelligence in such a way that human intelligence, plant intelligence and animal intelligence are different sub-species of [a] broader concept.

See also these posts from the blog of Barely Imagined Beings, The Intelligent Plant by Michael Pollan and The Mental Life of Plants and Worms... by Oliver Sacks


Image: MoonShadow-DarkRaven

The tree of song

Once there were seven Gond brothers who wanted to give away their property and mingle with the common folk. The Great God appeared in the youngest brother's dream and told him that their calling was to sit under the Saja tree and play music in praise of him. Now the Saja tree is the tree of song.

— from The Night Life of Trees (2006)