through the screen doors of discretion

Fabian Oefner - Millefiori

Trees Have Feelings Too

The wood-wide web or the mycorrhizal network, as scientists call it, is a vast system of root connections hidden beneath the trees that is made up of the filaments of fungi growing in and around the plant’s roots producing many of the forest mushrooms we enjoy. Providing more absorption for the trees than the roots they grow on their own, mycorrhizal fungi dramatically increase the plant’s water and mineral supply. The tree also makes and delivers food to the fungus in this mutual give-take relationship. This fungal system is so complex that it also serves as a conduit between trees, connecting acres to one another.

I went to hear Dave Snowden speak (more on that later), and in the course of his commentary he said the word remember with an emphasis that sounded to me like re-member. The visual in my mind was immediately of someone sticking the arms and legs back on a dismembered person.

Remember and dismember have different Latin roots. Remember comes from memor, mindful, and dismember from membrum, limb. They both come through Old French, and feel much closer there, remembrer and dismembrer.

Be mindful of your limbs lest they be removed from you.

In Vedic and Norse mythology the universe is created with a dismemberment. In the Ṛgveda, Puruṣa is the first sacrifice, and three quarters of him is used to create the universe, from meters and stanzas and chants, to the sky, sun, and moon.  His dismemberment shows how order is established, his sacrifice is the creation of order. He was sacrificed by the gods, and became the gods, and man, and all the universe. In the Vedic world, he can be seen both as a cosmic giant as well as a miniscule self, that which is reflected as the figure in the eye of another.

Ymir, a norse giant who existed before there was anything was also torn apart by the gods in order to create the world.

It is the mystery of these stories, how can something exist before nothing, and be torn apart by the thing which it creates by being torn apart.  You do not re-member a being in these stories, you cannot put the pieces back and create the primal being, being torn apart has created more than the being, and yet, in all cases, some is left over, not used, not turned into the creation. It is the mysterious unknown. A quarter of Puruṣa is not accounted for. 

Through dismemberment it becomes clear that a thing is larger than the sum of its parts. 

In our culture (and in business school), we speak of motivations as intrinisc and extrinsic. Creating a productive workforce is about using the right levers and pulling them in the right manners, to produce the desired outcomes.

These are complicated by money put into the system, and how humans feel about remuneration and the value of work, versus the value of themselves.

As part of #TheAdelphiProject I have been re-reading the RigVeda as well as Calasso’s really interesting book about it, Ardor. (Which also happens to be about everything else in the world, too.)  There is quite a long passage of interesting, but it really boils down to this:

“If Vedic men had been asked why they did not build cities, or kingdoms, or empires, the could have replied: we do not seek power, but rapture – if rapture is the word that best describes the effect of soma.”

We, I believe, in the west, and particularly women, are taught to engage with power. We are taught that we have power, we have to take it, step in to  it, own it, and with this power we can have anything.  Empowerment, dis-empowerment, these are the words of our modern era.

But what a question, rapture or power? If you could live in a world where you got to choose which to have as a driver, which would you choose? Would you build a city? Or would you live in a world separate from the vagaries of daily mortal life, of hatred and malice? Would you live in a world of knowledge?  Can we even make this split in our world today? Or are we so caught up in power it is almost impossible to escape?

Choosing out of the power structures that rule the western way of life doesn’t move one into a high realm, it means you aren’t playing, so you aren’t winning, though you may not be losing. In a world built on war and sports metaphors, rapture as an end goal may be outside the conscious space that we can even discuss as a constructor for a model of reality. 

A pair for today by W. S. Merwin, who began writing about our place on the planet, and the way we treat it, well before the late twentieth-century language of “climate change” entered our vocabulary. Memory

Climbing through a dark shower I came to the edge of the mountain

I was a child and everything was there 

the flight of eagles the passage of warriors watching the valley far below 

the wind on the cliff the cold rain blowing upward from the rock face

everything around me had burned and I was coming back walking on charcoal among the low green bushes wet to the skin and wide awake Witness

I want to tell what the forests were like I will have to speak in a forgotten language

Learn more about W. S. Merwin’s The Rain in the Trees.