sentient plants

I just read an article about plants that apparently recognize their relatives.  If expanding into an area containing their grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, or cousins, they refrain from sending out big networks of nutrient-sucking roots.  When surrounded by nonrelated plants they do so with impunity.  There is also research indicating that some plants can recognize other plants–by type–according to the way their shape and texture reflects the light.  some botanists even theorize, with some experimental support, that plants can feel emotion.

All this is being shot down by the scientific establishment for no other reason that “it can’t possibly be”, which sounds suspiciously to me like the fifteenth century scientific establishment insisting that the world was flat.  Maybe they don’t want more things to feel guilty about, like the pain of a grass blade as it is mowed, or dandelion genocide.  But largely I think it is a failure of imagination.

To me these discoveries are a reminder of how huge and mysterious the universe is, and how little we know about it.  just because plants are so profoundly different from us is no reason to assume that they cannot feel, think, and communicate in ways we do not understand, or may not ever be able to understand with the limits of our own perception.  I recall reading another article a few years ago about how trees may communicate through the vibration of their roots.  Just because plants do not move, or do not have what we recognize as a brain, is no reason to assume they do not possess their own form of consciousness.

Keep your doors of perception cleansed.

 

hitting the mainstream and beyond

Yesterday my husband brought home a copy of the Wall Street Journal, featuring–of all things–an article on home gardeners growing vegetables to beat high food prices. The trend towards home gardening definitely seems to be reaching critical mass, resulting in a splash of attention throughout the media universe.  Apparently the gardening trend has grown so dramatically that it’s affecting what matters to the Wall Street Journal, namely dollars and cents.  An annual survey by the National Gardening Associatio shows that the average amount spent per household on vegetable plants rose 21% this year, while the percentage spent on herbs grew 45%.  Perhaps shaken by the vagaries of the financial markets, the Journal echoes Michael Pollan in noting that while “the world may have gone crazy” you can control your lettuce patch and pea vines.

Another interesting facet of the Journal article is its assumption that home gardeners want to garden organically, complete with helpful hints.  This would have been a radical assumption on the part of Bon Appetit three years ago, forget a conservative bastion like the Wall Street Journal.  (which in the same issue also included a taste test of free range grass fed beef).  They interview a bunch of home gardeners, some of whom, unsurprisingly, live in my hometown of Portland Oregon, albeit in a neighborhood called “Gardeners Grove” that I’ve never heard of.  One Garden Grove resident, a vice president of an email marketing company, takes care to note”I’m not a tie dye wearing granola munching hippie”.  Perhaps not, but those tie-dyed granola munchers were onto something all along, weren’t they Mr. golf pants?

So gardening joins knitting as an old fashioned art that is once more trendy.  There’s a few things I take out of this:  one is that economic incentives will induce cultural change in a way that political incentives never can.  The other is that if something makes sense to you, stay true to yourselfand eventually the world will come around.  Sometimes what feels like being behind the times is actually being ahead of the times.  I remember, when we lived on Long Island (where, who know, people are actually tearing up their pesticide-laden lawns and planting vegetables) I mowed our postage stamp of grass with a reel mower only to have neighbors come over and ask “What is that?” or “Is your husband out of a job?’ (ie where is the gardener?)  Our soil was so saturated with these neighbors “grub control” that even the zucchini plants died.  And I had to drive half an hour to a Michael’s to buy yarn (forget boutique yarn stores).

Times change.

 

link to my friends blog

here’s another blog to check out:  lisaalber@wordpress.com

Lisa is my friend from my long running writer’s critique book and has an intriguing, creative mind.  Check it out.

thoughts on the center cannot hold, by Elyn Saks

This memoir is truly inspirational.  It tells the story of a schizophrenic woman and how she not only comes to terms with her illness but goes on to build a life that is very successful by many measures–a successful career as both a law professor (and advocate for the mentally ill), plus degrees in psychoanalysis and medieval philosophy, a happy marriage, and close friendships.

the book is interesting on many levels.  On one level, it proves beyond doubt that schizophrenia is a biologically-based illness.  When Ms Saks takes the appropriate medication she functions quite well; when she doesn’t she imagines aliens are taking over the earth and that she is killing millions of people with her thoughts.  She forgets to eat, forgets to bathe, looks as “crazy” as your average street person.  People tend to associate schizophrenia with creativity, but Saks is not especially creative.  she has a brilliant, but classically “left-brained”, analytical mind, one that lends itself well to her career in law.  The point is she could just as easily be an artist, or a scientist, or a mathematician like John Nash, or some very ordinary person with no remarkable abilities whatsoever;  the biochemical disorder that is schizophrenia strikes people of all temperaments and abiiities.

At the same time, it is extremely clear that Sak’s success in her life transcends biology.  She credits antipsychotic medication with her life, but psychoanalysis for learning “how to live”.  Schizophrenia is a burden she carries, like someone else might have diabetes, or cataracts, or dyslexia.  It’s a bigger burden than most–but–and this is key–IT DOES NOT DEFINE HER.  Her essence, call it spirit or soul or character or whatever you want, is what the psychoanalytic process (as well as the love of her friends and family) nurtures, and that is what allows her to transcend the biochemical malfunctions of her body.

Although Saks grows up in an intact, comfortably off family without any huge and obvious dysfunctions, her parents seem quite cold and distant, especially once her mental illness becomes evident.  One thing her father hammers into her from childhood on is “sucking it up”, “getting over it”, “being strong”.  This led her to dismiss her very real need for medication for way too long, but it also gave her the wherewithal to keep plugging along with her life–her degrees, her career—even when her mind was totally falling apart.  Failure was not an option.

Saks also is remarkable for the way, even when she is quite ill, she directs her emotions outward, caring about her friends and advocating for people with mental disabilities, when a lesser person might be drowning in self pity. 

We are a bunch of neurotransmitters, but this book clearly illustrates that we are way more than that.  Check it out.