It’s striking to realise a personal sense of pure elation from the effect of sunlight in its many forms. Even more so, when light and water mix, and with sounds. I find it healing.
In our rivers, shallow oceans, even at the bottom of swimming pools and upon cave roofs, we are familiar with light refracting back and forth through gentle and chaotic laps of surface waves. A lace-like dance of photons hits our retinas, processes in our brains and triggers emotions.
These hypnotic and beautiful patterns of light are officially known as caustic networks. Most of us would assume caustic is a type of chemical capable of burning, and definitely something to avoid. But caustic, in terms of physics, means patterns formed by the intersection of reflected or refracted parallel rays from a curved surface. Keith Beven, Professor Emeritus of Hydrology at Lancaster University, describes beautifully the physics of caustics and water here at On Landscape.
Earlier this week, Twitter friend Tim Sykes @RiversAndPeople, asked me to create a more relational word for caustics. I jumped at the chance, and spent a few days thinking about it.
I agree. I think a new common word might be useful in garnering interest in something so characteristically Earth-y (rock/water/sun), ecologically effecting, and mesmerizing in its affect upon us.
On studying the patterns at my local river, The Wye, I saw dynamic nets, webs, lace and lattice-work. PIE root *(h)uebh- “to weave;” also “to move quickly” source also of Sanskrit ubhnati “he laces together (Etymonline.com), which is probably where old French Latiz originated.
Lumen, latin for source of light, combined with lattice spelled phonetically for ease of pronunciation across different languages ~ lattiss.
Lumilattiss.
I invited Tim to blog, and so here he writes. My gratitude.
I enjoyed a sense of fun as I rolled-up my trouser legs and waded into the chalk stream, a winterbourne, watched by seven circling red kites and a herd of curious black bullocks. It’s not unusual for me to dip my feet in this winterbourne for its soothing effects on my racing mind and two things struck me as notable this day: the chill of the flow was toe-numbingly energising; and the crystal-clear water amplified the bright sunshine illuminating my pale feet so they seemed to glow ice-white. The sunrays were reflected and refracted by the water, casting a shimmering, shifting net onto the flinty stream bed and my feet. Lost in the moment I was transfixed by this dancing water-crazed light-lattice of star-like nodes and chaotic wavy light threads.
Afterwards I felt joyful, glee, but I struggled to describe exactly what I had sensed at the time: I think my self was suspended in a trance-like state of fascination. That evening, contemplating this further, a friend enlightened me to the technical name for this familiar phenomenon: a ‘caustic network’. To be awestruck by ethereal light is not unusual, a recent night on a beach watching shooting stars mesmerised by the dancing flames of our campfire was similarly spellbinding in a primitive and sublime way. It struck me that such a wonderful natural fluvial phenomenon deserves a non-technical, more soulful name and I asked Ginny, my twitter-friend what she would call it. As you are reading this blog you already know of Ginny’s passionate gift for forging new language and better ways of thinking to express how we celebrate and conserve the natural world and our relationship in and of it: and hence the word lumilattiss was born…
Tim Sykes is a mature, part-time post graduate research student at the University of Southampton. An ecologist by training, he is exploring our deep relationships with chalk stream winterbournes in their flowing, pooling and drying phases, particularly intrinsic and relational values. He tweets @RiversandPeople, so please do follow!
Wye at Hay, firesmoke and St Mary’s Church tower. Photo by me.
For clarity, just in case people don’t understand this word I now use instead of Environmental Ethics in the field of Philosophy.
I contend there is no such thing as an external ‘environment’, based on new/ancient understanding of the interconnectivity of all, within and without. We are symlings among symlings, inhaling, ingesting, excreting, respiring, transpiring what is without and within. All is flow in the nagorasphere.
In a sense, environmentalism never truly reflected reality, and so was always going to fail in the long run. Evidence abounds.
Sym ~ assimilated from Greek form of syn- word element meaning “together with, jointly; alike; at the same time;” from PIE (proto-indo-european) ksun or sm meaning “together”.
Bio ~ from Greek bios “one’s life, course or way of living,” from PIE root *gwei- “to live.”
Ethics ~ from Latin ethica, from Greek ēthike philosophia “moral philosophy.”
The word average has an interesting etymology. It originally seems to have been derived from an Arabic word, ‘awariya, ” meaning damaged merchandise.
Since the Middle Ages, the shipping and insurance industries adopted the term, I guess due to the high risks of damage from voyages on the high seas. If a ship were in trouble, and cargo, or ships masts, or other material goods, perhaps even crew or living cargo (human or not), were thrown overboard in order to save the vessel, then losses were calculated by producing a mean ‘cost’ for each claimant for Insurance purposes.
Italian avaria and French avarie meant “damage to ship.”
Later, during the 18th Century Georgian or Enlightenment era, the word evolved into the general mathematical term we recognize today.
Climate policy is dominated by the science and maths of global averages. We are all attuned to hearing mentions of the 1.5 to 5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial averages.
As Dr Peter Scott, Head Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office writes,
“To understand changes and variations in our climate, it is essential to know how the surface temperature changes – from month to month, up to decade to decade. Global-average temperature records provide this vital information. From these records we can see how warm specific months, years, or decades are, and we can discern trends in our climate over longer periods of time. Global records go back about 160 years, giving a long period from which to draw conclusions about how our climate is changing.” (Met Office website)
We live in one biosphere, yes. Global averages are extremely critical, of course, for a global overview. But I contend this is now an ethical problem because regional variation in outcomes is real. Global average obsession must be reigned in. Averaging is damaging.
It does not relay the real story of what is happening in terms of human equity or volatility, and at the higher ranges or peaks of temperature. Nor does any other kind of global average; precipitation, ocean warming, drought, for example.
The differences in regional water availability, (living) biomass and ecosystem function, migratory capacity, and human access to energy for cooling technology vary, sometimes drastically, from place to place. To sideline all these variations will be affecting lives directly, both Homo sapien and Tere sapien. We are reaching the point of moral injury, quite frankly, if these lives are devalued by the process of concentrating on global averages in the public sphere.
Bioregionalism matters!
I suggest the scientists and communicators, particularly those living in the relative safety of the northern hemisphere (though that is also changing), recognize the shortcomings of constantly emphasizing global averages to persuade populations and policymakers ~ it has become an averimania!
Instead, we should be discussing localized impacts, especially given economic disparity. It might even lead to those disparities being properly addressed and a new kind of fair politics going forwards into increasingly uncertain times.
Along with preventing emissions, there is an absolute duty to plan for extremes, mass movements, and potential conflicts. Because these are where life is most at risk, and since all things are interconnected, the risks are compounded by multiple and cumulative breakdowns in life-flow.
~~~~~~
I was fortunate to be sent the following from my Twitter friend Verónica Ansaldo, who is from Chile, in response to this blog. I attach it here, with her kind consent; a brilliant quote, and I’m grateful.
Averages hide inequalities. Nicanor Parra, a famous Chilean poet and physicist wrote: “There are two loaves of bread. You eat the two. I dont eat any. Average consumption: one loaf per person.”
As a Fluminist, I continue to challenge human chauvinism underpinning the Anthropocene; reductionism and homogeneity continue to catalyze schisms and death rather than unity and life.
I call for a purposeful expansion of the human moral imagination and creativity to help close the transilience gap, and my own work is a particular inquiry on love and language as agents of, and for, nurturing education and change inseparable from that richer imagination.
The word creative stems from proto-indo-european ker meaning to arise, to grow. I contend it must be part of the Great Turning (Macy), more the decay of economic growth and the rise of ecological growth. With an ecofeminist eye, and using my own body of work as “narrative scholarship,” I hope to actualize Deleuzian aims of creativity and practicality, opening a new opportunity of rhetorical ‘doing.’ (Miller)
All offers to help define the potential of a new era of life in natural accord, a life of organicism; the Symbiocene (Albrecht).
The word ecosystem itself is a human construct, an abstraction. In reality, there are no absolute boundaries within our one biosphere. The biosphere is the ecosystem (Margulis, Lovelock). The idea conveyed by ecosystem is that there are particular types of unities where different types of organisms persist in time and space. What is inside an ecosystem is internally related to all other things within that system (the holistic, ecocentric view of Naess ~ Deep ecology). Beyond Deep Ecology is an emergent symbiotic view of life (Haraway, Morton) that talks about “tentacles” and “entanglements”. Organisms have boundaries that are more distinct at macro level than ecosystems, yet are nested and entwined.
Post-microbiome discoveries, I conclude we should have a much more porous view of the organism than ever before. The human body (like all others) is a holobiont as it shares a common life with trillions of other organisms in the same time/space. Beyond “entanglement” this view needs to capture the essence of a shared life. We need more than “entangled” or “enmeshed” to overcome the residual Cartesian mechanism and atomism.
I contend flow is unequivocally shared and proliferated by and between all species towards life-love and flourishing. We exist and, with true understanding and demonstrable love as care, we may live a good life to the best of our ability. We do this in symbiosis, both internally and externally, with many other beings, as do they. If the opposite occurs, flow of life-love is stemmed and, therefore, diversity, resilience and vivacity of life is lost, and we are all depleted.
Since I is really we, all being connected in our one, shared biosphere, the concept of Phronesis must evolve to incorporate traits in all life systems; a love-wisdom. This in the spirit of continuing a stream of non-anthropocentric thought via the discipline of Environmental Ethics since the 1970s. To progress, I also propose we now develop a discipline of Symbioethics, as there really is no such thing as an external ‘environment’.
I think the need for neologisms is justified when present conceptualizations fail to give adequate expression to critical features of life in symbiosis revealed through new and exponential scientific study. Ancient and indigenous cultures may already possess this kind of ‘knowing’. Fluminism and many other of my neologisms are an ecolinguistic response to a mass gap in understanding here in industrialized and community-fractured Britain. As Reuther almost put it: New Earth New Humans. As I put it: New Humans Healing Earth.
There must be a radical new assimilation of our complex relationships on the basis of these scientific discoveries, and critically, new and diverse responses embraced across the arts and humanities. Language and literature are an extension of 21st Century humans, though not exclusively. By naming a new or emerging genre, A Literature of Symbiosis (Sym-lit), however, I hope to focus minds.
There are more than 48,000 species of them around the globe, some yet undiscovered by humans, and all of them, bar one that we know of, are predators. They are hugely diverse, reflect all spectrums of light, and are individually character-full.
I am being lured into their web of life.
Araneae are air-breathing invertebrates, with eight legs, fangs to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude silk. Silk is a protein fibre, and used to create food traps, nests, egg coverings, and air transport systems. Imagine if we, through our own bodily secretions, could produce all these things: fishing lines, bed linen, baby blankets, and parachutes. There are at least 7 types of silk-making glands, and all spiders have at least three. Some silks are stronger than steel for their weight. Spiders are an essential group of living beings (predators are essential), who may live deep in caves we humans will never visit, and float as high as the clouds when ballooning across continents. They have their own microbial symbioses, most of which we still have little idea. Some spiders are crucial for distributing fungal spores. In rainforests all around Earth, some larger spiders rely on narrow-mouthed frog species for survival, and in utter reciprocity.
They can fish, fly, cave and row. The largest family jump. Some can sing, dance, and vibrate.
The diving bell spiders live in bubbles underwater for most of their lives.
My booted foot was once challenged, briefly, by a female Sydney funnel-web spider, the males being the most venomous in the world, and, in my view, both most fearfully angry. And unforgettable.
But the vast majority of spiders are harmless to humans. Most are solitary, though some are social. Some females cannibalize their male mates. Some males offer gifts in the hope of sparing their own lives. Some even fake them. Some mothers offer up their own dead bodies as food for their offspring.
Spiders have been evolving for some 300 million years, and are powerful, intricate and exquisitely adapted. Their relevant-stimuli (emotional responses to you and I) are basic, understudied, yet apparent. And they do feel pain.
I want to credit these rainbow warriors with a special kind of wisdom. Spider Wisdom, more spider than Spiderman. To have such wisdom is to be fiercely beautiful amongst all other life ~ to be spennowan.
From my rooftop terrace on a hill in the city of Cardiff, in a vague state of suspended covi-disbelief you’ll recognize, I face due South into the eye of the midday sun. A man-jumble of roof, balustrade and wall contains what would otherwise be a 180 degree arc-view from East to West. The sky is none-the-less enormous, and I love it. Each day, I observe the clouds as if they are hastily evolving species, manifesting the effects of water and sky-physics, and stealing creature-ly shapes, every once in a while, stored deep in my imagination
Everything seems in tension, between closed and open, the constraints of the streets, confinement and grief within homes, yet pinned down by the freedoms of the sky. Stitching it all together, between roofs and clouds like needles and silk threads, are the city birds. They occupy their own levels, sometimes overlapping, and to see them interact has been, so much, my corona-consolation.
It is their intrinsic worth that sings the sweetest. Our deadly human pandemic** has liberated their song by silencing most of the dirty noise of vans and cars. They are bright and loud and confident. Right now, Bard Blackbird, perched on the end of our roof ridge, belts out beauty as if he is making up for a century of submission.
“My birds”, I call them. Forgive me. I feel to have almost become one of them. I relate to them all in my own state of birdetal being.*
The regulars who stop by most up here on my balcony are the adaptable and the generalists. Pigeons, with their glittering necks, have made this their day-time home, pairing and caressing with utter devotion before returning for the night somewhere safe where they roost. There are also the maggies (magpies) and the jack jacks (jackdaws), who are the real dancers, and the preening gulls who are dedicated, with true equality, in raising their young and to the mastery of flight. There is a satin crow I call Jet, who talks to me sometimes, and a pair of collared, cooing doves who are building their nest three chimney pots down. I’ve even had a little grey wagtail visit in winter, but she is very special ~ my beautiful, elegant river bird, completely out of place.
Below, in our neighbouring terrace gardens, there are year-round sparrows who cheep and chime nearly all of the time. And there are robins, one I call Rufus Ragnar, who rises from pruned shrub islands to sing whenever Bard takes a break. There are more garden birds I can’t see from up here, but I hear them. And they all fall silent when the sparrow hawk strikes.
High above, there are the ones who never pause. Highfalutin herring gulls, the Jonathans, cast the best shadows over me on a sunny day. Victoria Park jack jacks who flock like a clock to lime trees by the Taff a quarter to sunset every evening. There are the starlings who dash about, shining in splinters of luminescence, and the herons who flap in lazy zigzags, high up and unexpected. Few are the mallards, who cannot fly without telling us all well in advance they are coming. There are new and curious red kites circling; and the peregrines, supreme and terror-flying. We all stand stock still when they are about.
Life. It’s all here among the rooftops and chimneys. No compromise. The main events, have no doubt, are love and loss, youth and aging. And we are all joy, bitterness and reflection. Sometimes, my pigeons sit quietly next to me, on top of the poorly whitewashed roof terrace wall, three floors up, taking in the same, wide view with thoughts of matters much, much further away than we can ever truly reach.
The Goldfinches ~ Carduelis carduelis
Goldfinch by me
The birds I least expect to see in number over a city, especially in Summer when more return from Spanish migration, are the goldfinches.
In the ‘wild’, their long finch beaks are so perfect for the delicate extraction of difficult seeds to forage; the Senecio family (groundsels and ragworts), thickset thistles, and the Dipsacus fullonum (the teasels). Yet they thrive here mainly because of the fine, beautiful black niger seed sold in garden centres and pet shops, poured into feeders and dangled around small terrace gardens and on patios for them to enjoy. As they fly over the rooftops from one feeder to another, they remind me of nursery school children released into playgrounds at break time, chirping with the unfettered emotions of liberation. Their sounds and sight lift me up too, especially since I am currently ‘shielded’ and confined to my flat.
The collective noun for goldfinches, as The Lost Words elegantly reminds, is a charm. Collective nouns arose from the feathers (quills) and inks of early medieval French and English hunters, mostly by the ruling classes, or those that documented their elite colloquialisms in celebration of their elite pursuits. Our Eurasian relationship with goldfinches is as historically complex. Not only were they hunted, but captured, traded and kept confined as pets, at least since Pliny the Elder wrote about this strange human obsession, just after the death of Jesus Christ.
“The smallest of birds, the goldfinches, perform their leader’s orders, not only with their song, but by using their feet and beak instead of hands.” Pliny the Elder, Natural History.***
Deep inside our pre-frontal cortexes combined with cultural memory and emotional response, we are somehow wired in what constitutes beauty. These birds are certainly a dash of colour with their blood red faces, black and white stripes and yellow brushstrokes painted along their wings. But this doesn’t explain the cultural need to covet and possess. Perhaps we may look to their celebration in aesthetics, as many iconic artists have tethered goldfinch imagery, in paint, to wood and canvas.
Many of these images are rooted in Christian religious symbolism. One of the greatest artistic masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance is, it is said, Raphael’s Madonna Del Cardellino, The Madonna of the Goldfinch painted 1505-6. The bird is cradled by the child, John The Baptist, and in the presence of Mary and her child Jesus. It is the depiction of the boy’s crucifixion as a prophecy that came to pass, as was John’s life and death. Legend has it, as Jesus died on the cross at Golgotha, a goldfinch flew down to his Crown of Thorns to remove them from his injured scalp, and was splashed with a drop of His blood. The idea of any goldfinch bearing witness of the crucifixion is utterly within reason, as they were once numerous in and around the City of Jerusalem. Not so much now in 2020, as they have been hunted, trapped and sold as pets continuously for over 2000 years, and their habitat smashed for human development.
Sixteen to seventeen centuries on, during the Golden Age of Dutch painting, goldfinches appeared once more in images such as Gerrit Dou, Young Girl at the Window, 1662. Fabritius’s painting, completed just a couple of years later, is surely one of the most famous, even more since Donna Tartt wrote her novel ‘The Goldfinch’ and won 2014’s Pulitzer Prize. The book was never about goldfinches. This is a sophisticated story of a boy who rescued (stole) Fabritius’s painting from a gallery in New York, after surviving a terrorist explosion. The burden of this secret is carried through the trials and tribulations of his life.
“Sometimes we want what we want even if we know it’s going to kill us.”
Theo, the boy, hid and prized the painting, perhaps in a symbolic processing of his mother’s death. She had died from the bomb blast, just like the real and violent end that came to the painter himself. Fabritius was caught in the explosion of the Delft gunpowder magazine in1654, which killed at least 100 people and destroyed a large part of the city, including his studio and many of his paintings. The Goldfinch survived all, and is perceived as something of a resurrection.
Art historian, Linda Stone-Ferrier contends that, in the Netherlands, both real goldfinches and painted ones were found commonly in and near windows, as a symbol of neighbourly social exchange. For its time, Fabritius’s Goldfinch must have been hugely novel in its life-size and three dimensionality; a trompe l’oeil, fooling the eye into believing it reality ~ perhaps, installed near a window as a trick to lure the good will of passers-by.
But with my Fluminescent sensibilities, I see the photos of the painting and feel pain. The golden chain glints hard and sharp, tethering a tragic bird, otherwise born to fly free, to its wall-mounted, closed, tin box of seed. This is yet another disembodiment, that the bird cannot ever forage for him/herself, the whole scene being fixed for hundreds more years in some nightmare painterly incarceration.
In his Guardian article 2014, Caspar Henderson writes of the modern painter ATM, and the mythical murals he painted around London ~ the birds of his childhood ~ one being a goldfinch.
“Typically between two and three metres high, and depicted with their subtle natural markings, they seem like giant projections from the collective memory of places now hidden beneath the roar of the city.”
Again, I feel an intense isolation, the bird painted away from his/her ecological flows. It’s a giant ghost, out of scale, captive to the wall, street, and city, waiting upon the spell of the human gaze for a life they cannot ever truly live. The mural reminds me of when I see wildflowers named with chalk on a pavement. I crave for so much more, for the flowers themselves, and for human passers- by; arrows to show the species that sustain them, and those they sustain. The real beauty of nature, I contend, is in the direction and dynamism of all the arrows.
ATM has said he was inspired by the early prints of John Gould, tending to show, at least, a favourite flower or perch in composition. But once again, these are aesthetically appealing to the human eye, and in danger of being only extrinsically valued by us and, therefore, the only lives worth saving. Nature is so much more. Species in isolation are trompe l’oeil tethered by golden chains.
My goldfinches live seemingly vibrant and free lives, with their flights of excitement, overheard and overhead, several times each day. But really they are here only at our behest. Niger seeds, native to Ethiopia and Malawi, are commercially grown in huge quantities in India and Africa, and traded to Europe in the bird seed markets. They resemble sunflower seeds in shape, but are smaller in size. They are encased in a thick, seed coat, and can be stored for up to a year. Before they are exported, they are sterilized by intense heat to prevent germination, and to kill off any other seeds in the mix.
Do we want our birds simply as trompe l’oeils, feeding on seeds blasted by heat in India and shipped here for distribution and profit, while the goldfinch’s true seeds of delight are languishing brown under the damp spray of pesticides or the latest Weed-Burner-Killer-Wand-Butane-Gas-Blowtorch, marketed for the sake of what is deemed beautifully tidy by Dekton or GoSystem on Ebay or Amazon (sometimes the same places you’ll find niger seeds for sale).
So much energy, capital, and dependence upon markets is nurtured, whereas our own groundsels, thistles and teasels are classed as ‘weeds,’ and purged for the sake of a false idea of what beauty truly is ~ clipped, manicured and tidy. How compulsive are we, as a species, to want to force and possess beauty, regardless. These beings are part of the flows of all life (Fluminism), the interconnections (the arrows), being the most worthy of protection.
I want goldfinches to be all the things we Eurasians have historically not allowed them to be. Heedless of religious symbolism and childhood myth, I want them to sound their excitement released from 2000 years of chains. They may be a mirror to the image of ourselves, in that we too need to feel those infinite connections impressing within and without us. Neither do they need our trickery, our trompe l’oeils.
They want to be real, foraging for their natural, local seeds pollinated in resilient ecological flows with plenty of cover against predation. Fluminism is the love that provides it all.
~~~~~~~
*In deference to the wonderful work by Irigaray and Marder “Through Vegetal Being” published by Columbia, 2016.
** Latin pan- “all” + dēmos “people”.
*** Rackham, Jones, & Eichholz, Book 10 translated 1938.
Horns honk along the major streets in the cities of Minnesota. Signs are waved by shouty blonde-bleached women draped in the Stars and Stripes. MAGA white men in blue and red baseball caps, wave their high velocity rifles, like long, skinny phalluses, yelling that Dr Fauci be sacked.
In Denver, the nurses step out into the road, almost naked compared. Their basic PPE greens are like shoots from an ancient woodland floor ~ they appear vulnerable, but are, instead, a sturdy green resilience. They voice the number of deaths over and over again, blocking the Trump-cultists threatening to bulldoze the woods from the safety of inside their shiny 8 cylinder Chevrolet Silverados. It connects across space-time with the beauty of Ieshia Evans smiling in the face of a cirque of armored men in Baton Rouge.
America today; at least, the America that is attracting today’s headlines.
Evidence emerges, the self-righteous have been whipped up by extreme libertarians, gun rights and racism drenched through their fake army fatigues. Thousands have joined Facebook groups in just 24 hours. Flash protests and speeches are organized to undermine any sense of common clinical sense. WHO and China, now Town Hall, blamed for their current lifestyle. Everyone blamed, apart from themselves.
It’s all happened before in 1918, as Tim Mak explains so well on Twitter. The Land of the “me, myself and I” pop up to condemn their fellow Americans yet to be infected. They contend these human sacrifices are acceptable, for the sake of so-called freedom; a gas-guzzling, zero-maternity leave America built on the ethos of harsh frontier work and brutal slavery.
Whatever the outcome (outright civil war or a fade to nothing), time is burnt through like oxygen in a fire, time squandered that otherwise would yield deep changes forquired for the good of all life on Earth. Fear-strings are pulled by a tiny majority that pinch tight around the ill-informed and brainwashed, and time is vaporizing in front of our eyes. Markets crash, oil prices plummet to minus. White people feeling fear, not love. Now they are raging. A selfish and self-righteous zombie mob.
Whether we like it or not, America is both effecting and affecting the global state, a state that is already supremely vulnerable.
The “Extremis” don’t have the heart, nor head. In COVID-19, burning fossil fuels, particulates or in roads, they blind themselves to the many who will suffer a second wave; disease, droughts, conflicts, migrations, or the multiple, violent hurricanes yet again about to hit the Atlantic basin. They’ve forgotten the real meaning of Liberty.
Neither do they have the imagination for wilder lives other than as trophies, nor for what it must be like to be enslaved or industrially farmed. They have no clue for the microbiotic symbiosis that, with an undisturbed peace, serve so well as to give life not take it.
I feel a seismic frustration that deep-change is pinned against a concrete border wall, threatened by bail-outs of billionaires with you, me and the nations already drowning in criminally enforced debt and capital-austerity. I fear a charge on GDP will be unleashed to make up for lockdowns, the likes of which we have never seen before, with more lives thrown against the wall for the sake of money. I am frustrated that individualism sets all adrift from the reality of interconnected life, pinched tight by those fear-strings, fed my media and corporate oligarchs.
I’m going to call this feeling my Frustopianism.Frustropia is a good world possible, but delayed. The Frustration (verb) is that life everywhere could be so very different.
~~~
But, as a Patientist, I need to be ever more watchful and imaginative. The great Joanna Macy’s “Great Turning” cannot end here.
Change is of the utmost importance for the good of all life. It is a prerequisite, a forquisite, for evolutionary adaptation and survival. In biology, tropism is the suffix given to a process of turning, the processes from deep within DNA from generation to generation that effect change. It’s often, though not exclusively, attributed to vegetative processes.
Heliotropism is a process whereby a plant responds to the stimulus of sunlight by turning and growing towards the Sun. Selenotropism is the motion of plants in response to the direction of the moon.
I want to block the zombie mob, the Trump-cults with their 8 cylinders and their phallic guns. I stand with the nurses in green, the carers, the caring and the cared-for, turning ALL to the symbiotic relationships between all living beings that aid life not destroy it. I call it symbiotropism.
Symbiotropism ~ a mass turning towards symbiogenesis, like looking at the light of the Sun and the Moon and growing towards them ~ the love, the Baha and our global, diverse and beautiful moral community called Life on Earth.
Billions of living beings. They did NOTHING to deserve this. The shame of every single person who could have effected change and did not. #Nausirage#Ecocide
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