Thanks, Little Joe. Looks like an interesting book. I wonder if there are also recipes in it.

One thing I learned fairly recently is that there is an abundance of healing plants, along with a whole edible landscape, literally, just outside the door where I live. Making connection to this world takes time and a certain amount of effort. I catalogued and drew 50 wild, edible, indigenous plants a couple of years ago, and learned the latin names for them also. I sure wish I had more time to go deeper and further into this understanding of the medicinal plants, and then how to prepare them as well.

Spring is coming and we have an abundance of stinging nettle, Urtica dioica, just outside, for example. It's good as a pesto sauce, but has healing properties as well. Many people around here want to banish it from their gardens and outlying areas as it stings when touched, and so therefore is not fun to walk through. I told them to call me before they remove them in the spring so that I could harvest the tender tops.

Thanks for the head's up... Spring is coming and so there comes a wonderful harvest time of natural bounty ready to be picked.

I find that if you use these secrets that others appear,like a grand kaleidoscope that is formed from with in! Passion flowers that grow here locality which unlocks the brain hemispheres for example. Have a wonderful day!

http://www.gaianstudies.org/articles2.htm

http://www.passionflower-anxiety.com/Pa ... fects.html

little joe

You too, little joe, have a wonderful day! The sun is shining outside today after a few days of cold and grey and rain in this rainforest area where I live.

I love the gaian article you linked here, and loved the two poems, by different poets, and discussion about how humans are so related to our natural environment, and how so many of us have lost our connection to the wild of nature, and how when we lose this connection, we cannot really and truly understand ourselves.

"By Stephen Harrod Buhner

Written 2003
Copyright © 2003 Stephen Harrod Buhner

More than once
I have walked
in deep forest
searching for the path
that lay concealed
beneath my feet.

Human beings, throughout most of their habitation of Earth, have been so completely interwoven into their environment that, until recently, there was no separation between them. This understanding is reflected in information shared by the majority of indigenous and ancient cultures: They did not experience themselves and nature as separate entities. The intimate interweaving of humanity with the rest of life throughout evolution means that the entire development of the human species as a distinct species cannot be separated from the landscapes in which it developed. Such deep interconnectedness to environment is so fundamental to us as a species that, ultimately, it is not possible to understand ourselves as human beings without understanding something of wild nature itself. Because the experience of nature and other life forms is so deeply interwoven into our emergence as a species, human beings possess a genetic predisposition for wild nature and for other life forms - though it must, through specific experiences, be activated. Edward O. Wilson calls this innate feeling or caring for living forms and systems, for nature, biophilia.
This innate affinity for all life forms - for things that do not even appear alive to Western perspectives - has been routinely denigrated since the time of the Romantic poets. It is rarely taught during the educational process at all.
...
emerging interdisciplinary research - initially begun by "popular" researchers rather than institutional scientists - is indicating that the heart is not merely a muscular pump but a part of the brain with the same number of sensory neurons as that possessed by certain subcortical portions of the brain. There are tightly interwoven biofeedback loops that exist between the brain and heart - what is exchanged is information about the heart's perceptions of the world. The heart uses a highly detailed emotional language to perceive and describe the world and these descriptions are sent to the brain for analysis and response. The two organs essentially engage in analysis through two differing mechanisms to reach the best understanding of the world in which an individual human lives. While the mind apprehends through analytical modes, the heart uses its capacity for generating unique complexes of feeling-gestalts to apprehend the internal reality of the world around it. The heart apprends a living world - a world in which all things possess interior depth, point of view, and livingness. As the Jungian psychoanalyst James Hillman comments, the heart is the organ that "perceives the correspondences between the subtl[e]ties of consciousness and levels of being. . . it is concerned with the interpenetration of consciousness and world." The heart has a natural capacity to find the eachness of things, to experience an intimacy with each particular event. The ancient Greeks called this capacity aithesis. Developing the capacity for aithesis allows the unique living essence that is present in all things to flow into the human through the organ of perception that is designed to receive it - the heart.
...

Ancient and non-technological cultures generally view the Universe as living, not a machine made up of bits that can be understood by dissembly and study. These two perspectives, as they are internalized, not only shift how life is viewed, but also how life itself is experienced.
The tension between these two perspectives - Universe as alive and universe-as-machine - is readily perceivable. Consider Norbert Mayer's poem:

Just now
A rock took fright
When it saw me
It escaped
By playing dead
and contrast it with Ken Wilber's observation that:
[A]ll you and your pet rock can
share is, you fall at the same
speed.
If you let yourself relax into the statements and internalize them you will notice a distinct difference in how each of them feel.
I recite Mayer's poem to many hundreds of people each year; the reaction is invariably the same. As the last line is recited their faces light up and they laugh - it reminds each of us of something we have always known - that the Earth, plants, rocks are somehow alive. There is a natural, childlike, joy in this that is immediately felt throughout the body.
Wilber's statement, in contrast, is quite different in its effects. Sometimes people do laugh, though not nearly so many as with Mayer's poem. The use of the word "pet" as an adjective before "rock" creates a sense of sarcastic denigration so the laugh is a sarcastic one: At Wilber's cleverness, the thought of a person being dumb enough to think of a rock as a pet, and the image of a person and his friend the pet rock falling together. Most often there is a silence as the sentence penetrates the body, then a sigh of pain, a general sadness. The childlike joy accompanying Mayer's poem dissipates. Mayer's poem activates a sense of personal aliveness and childlike wonder. Wilber's moves the listener up out of the body into the mind, into thinking, into sarcastic cleverness; some listeners feel dumb or foolish. And perhaps this is the point of the comment - to make foolish the belief, and anyone who would espouse it, that rocks are somehow alive, that they have equal value to people, that there is this kind of livingness in the Universe.
Each statement represents a distinct epistemology. As each is internalized they shape individual experience and perception.
In earlier times, when nature was perceived as alive, with intelligence and soul, a natural process took place. People bonded with nature much as people bond with their pets or family now. This bonding process - which has decreased in frequency the more the mechanistic worldview has pervaded society - engendered a certain kind of attitude toward nature. It is an aspect of biophilia - the genetically encoded or innate emotional affinity towards all other life forms on Earth that Wilson has described. But it also represents the emergence of a deeper aspect of biophilia, that of biognosis.
The continual immersion in nature where the bonding process is supported and encouraged allows it to deepen into a direct, depth knowledge of nature that cannot be reduced to the assembly of a collection of bits of accumulated information. Knowledge of the complex interactions of natural systems or the contribution of individual members is gained without being able to pinpoint each step in the process. There may in fact be no steps; it comes in dreams or a flash of understanding. The knowledge, because of immersion in biophilia, is directly communicated from the landscape, plants, or animals themselves. There may be a predicating factor that bursts the knowledge into awareness but the many elements that went before are and remain unconscious - an expression of the ancient interplay between organisms interwoven in the matrix that gave them birth as species - an interplay between species that are, at their core, relations.

...



The Importance of Restoring Biophilia
The loss of connection to plants, to the land, to Earth leaves the holes with which we are naturally born unfilled. No matter how much ritalin or prozac is poured into those holes, synthetic pharmaceuticals can never fill them; merely human approaches can never heal them. Pathologies come from the empty holes that are unfilled, from lack of contact and communication with the wild. The holes within us possess particular shapes - that of stone or tree or bear. It is not only plants that are our teachers and healers; not only plants that are among our community of life; not only plants that have a language we have long known.
Without deep connection to the land our healers remain anthropocentric - human centered - in their approaches, their theories of human health generated in isolation from the environment with which we evolved. They contain the same category error that all reductionistic sciences contain. The solution is reconnection to the natural world and the living intelligence of land. The solution is rekindling our capacity to use the heart as a sophisticated organ of perception. This goes far beyond the exploration of sentimental emotions such as love, or sadness, or fear. It moves into the ability to sophisticatedly think in emptional complexes that come to us from the touch of the world upon our heart. It enables us to identify the thousands of unnamed emotions that daily cross the faces of those we meet. It enables us to understand the point of view of the external world and to hear the language of plants.

CEMETERIES
When we allowed
science to convince us
that there is no soul
or intelligence in matter,
the Earth's physical forms
became only cemetery markers
showing where spirits once moved
through the world.
The autopsy
of the material world
then began in earnest.
Its dissected parts
litter the landscape
and we walk, depressed,
among lifeless statuary,
only accidental lifeforms
on the surface of
a ball of rock
hurtling around the sun.

The metal gate is unlocked.

Other kinds of flowers
nod in sunlight
outside that wrought-iron fence."

The entire article should be read. I quote the parts that seemed the most important for me right now.

peace