#but mostly it just makes sense like getting the reveal of the natural habitat of a legendary pokemon would

[catsaysmlem]

living like this is EXTREMELY sexy of him ngl. this set design deserves an award for completely understanding the character and for not being afraid to go All OUT. and i need to point out no other action movie guy could ever or will ever be able to carry this living space off without it looking like he's trying and failing at doing too much. but not maverick as played by tom cruise. with him and him alone does it look simply like getting a peek into the natural habitat of someone known for having jetfuel in their blood.

[ecopunkfox]

It’s often jarring to me how disconnected a lot of plant people can be from ecology. It makes sense when I think about it because they started with plants, caring for individuals disconnected from a system, either in truth or from that persons perspective. While I didn’t use to care about plants - when I started plant classes that weren’t general ecology, I was scared. I told people I just wanted to learn about animals. But I wound up loving plants, too.

It started in ecology classes, of course. I knew I wanted to learn about animals but animals need plants, so I needed to learn some amount about plants. Then I got into dendrology, my first plant class, which involved over 100 plants I had to learn to identify and provide the family, genus, and specific epithet for. I hated it at first because the identification was hard for me, it was my first class like that and I hadn’t switched into that mindset yet. I loved the information about environmental requirements and wildlife uses for each plant, and once I’d gotten about halfway in I started loving everything else, too. I felt like my world had just opened up. Walking around in the woods, I knew all of the plants and how animals would interact with those plants, how they change through the seasons and spread, what conditions they’ll follow in their spread, etc. so much information, so much history, packed into every moment. I told my mom I understood the feeling that religious people get when they feel close to god (I’ve always been an atheist, but feeling connected to the earth in that way feels akin to spirituality to me). Later, habitat management expanded on that even more with non-woody plants and even more emphasis on the ecology, and then, my last semester, actual plant ecology. Everyone had been warning me for years how hard the class was gonna be and I should’ve learned by then that would mean I’d love it (the same was said of ecology, herpetology, and mammalogy), but I was still scared going in. Id had succulents for a few years at that point and tried growing some herbs that failed and some pepper plants on a balcony which actually did pretty well. I still thought I didn’t want to get more into plants, that I’d probably work at a zoo or something. But wow I loved that class so much.

After moving to my current apartment, which has a brick area in back in full sun, I started actually gardening. I mostly used my knowledge of ecology for caring and looked up stuff when I’ve had issues, but I’ve never done traditional gardening techniques and have been more focused on the entire system, encouraging insects and certain weeds instead of viewing myself as in a constant battle against nature, like a lot of gardeners view it. I’ve covered the bricks in containers and covertly ripped out the non-native decorative bushes that were here when we moved, replaced with blueberries and blackberries. When I try to list out all of the species I’m cultivating on those bricks, people get bored and cut me off with a comment about how many that is, especially for the area I have.

So for me, I came to plants through ecology. It’s impossible for me to view plants outside of that framework. So seeing gardeners who don’t actually know anything about the system around their garden or are shocked by basic ecological principles or are at constant war with insects, is weird. Even though all of the people getting into gardening I know are like that, my mom who has always gardened when she had space is like that, often articles I find online about gardening are like that. My partner’s grandfather is like and a lawn stan, too. But I still have the assumptions that they know what I know/see it how I see it, and the moment of confusion when they in some way reveal that not to be the case. You know, the old “everyone else knows what I know and thinks like me” trap

[chaoticevilbean]

Voltron Humans are Weird 5/?

Allura was panicking. She had told the Paladins to behave themselves and to try to avoid scaring the natives while she was speaking with the delegation. But they just... didn't listen. Instead of staying in the social room where they had been led, where there were plenty of refreshments and seats, the five humans had disappeared. A few civilians saw the group heading towards the forest nearby, where there were many deadly creatures and poisonous flora. Even Shiro had gone along with them, despite the fact that they knew the forest was dangerous. And their tolerances couldn't possibly include such foreign substances.

So now, Allura was sitting with the delegates, having finished their discussion, simply waiting for the Paladins to return. It had been vargas since the message was delivered that they had disappeared, and the only reason there wasn't a panic was due to Allura assuring all present that Voltron was composed of clever warriors who could handle the forest. Hopefully.

"Princess, we need a little help," Shiro's voice crackled from the Altean's comm.

"What sort of help?" Please don't be medical.

"Some of the civilians are panicking and we have no clue why. We need someone who knows more about their culture."

"I'm on my way. I'll bring the delegation." Allura was quick to explain the situation to the diplomatic party, glad that this was likely just a simple misunderstanding. She prayed it was something as simple as smiling with teeth or a throwing something.

The Paladins were located near the outer edges of the city. They were easy to find as they were surrounded by a circle of hysterical Rynnians. Each of the humans had bags slung on their shoulders, the largest on Hunk and Shiro and the smallest on Pidge. Allura was relieved at the sight, given that the humans at least knew what was and wasn't toxic to themselves. If they had gathered something too dangerous, she could simply get them to put it away from the other beings. She and the delegates pushed past the edge of the crowd, almost to the Paladins.

Then the stench hit her. She stopped instantly, recoiling back in horror. They smelt of blood, reeked of death and must and something else foul. The Altean pulled back enough that she wasn't overwhelmed completely before addressing the Terrans.

"What in Altea is that? Is one of you injured?"

"I KNEW IT!" Lance shouted triumphantly, turning towards Keith. "I quiznaking told you! It's the smell!"

"Lance, are any of you injured?" Allura repeated, narrowing her eyes the best she could without squinting. The Blue Paladin turned giddily towards the royal, a bright grin on his face.

"No. The problem is that all of you are herbivores!"

"Of course we're herbivores! Most known sentient species are herbivores! Only a few are carnivorous!"

"No, princess. I mean, you're all herbivores. That means you don't handle the smell of blood well!"

"One of you is bleeding‽"

"No! We just went hunting!"

Silence. Dead silence. Allura was frozen, staring in utter terror at the human.

"Rynnian civilians, please vacate the area temporarily while the situation is handled." The crowd was fast to comply, the delegates backing up and several warriors lining the edges of the streets. Once the common folk were far enough away, Allura once again spoke to her team.

"Lance, please confirm that your species refers to the gathering of edible flora as hunting."

"Nope. We're omnivores!" The boy did a hip wiggle as he spoke, and Pidge facepalmed heavily at his antics. Hunk giggled and nudged Keith into smiling. Shiro was just tired, and decided it would be best to take over the conversation as soon as possible.

"Omnivores... How?"

"Princess," Shiro spoke up, drawing the alien's attention. "We're technically evolved from natural omnivores that mostly ate an herbivore diet. As we developed, our tool-making skills grew exponentially. As humans joined together in larger groups, gathering enough flora to sustain each member became a lot harder. With our better tools, we made better weapons and managed to develop better hunting skills. By now, our diet is still largely herbivorous, but with more meat than before. The Castle provides us with the necessary nutrients to keep us healthy, but nothing satisfies a human like a nice steak after going without for a long time."

"... what are in the bags?"

"I think you know."

"What are in the bags, Shiro?"

"Three of those large antlered creatures in what me and Hunk are holding, and the other bags have small game and lots of plants Pidge said were safe to eat."

"That is the smell?"

"If you smell blood, then yes."

"As much as I fear the answer, I must ask: what is a steak?"

"A slab of meat made tender and cooked with seasonings. Often served to a little undercooked so it isn't too chewy and satisfies our carnivorous nature. Now, if you'll excuse us, we know what's wrong and can probably get all this to the Castle with little problem."

"Yeah," Hunk agreed, shifting his bags a little. "We couldn't get past the Rynnians because they were panicking saying we were hurt or something and we just couldn't get through."

"If you must, get the... food," Allura shuddered at considering flesh and blood to be a meal, "back to the Castle as soon as possible. I'll tell Coran to not panic."

The Paladins nodded and swiftly rushed towards the large ship. Lance and Hunk could be heard discussing something called tacos, and Allura was loathe to find out what they were. With a deep breath, the princess turned to the delegates, face twisted in a grimace.

"I am very sorry about all this. If you would like, I can send you the guide my advisor and I are creating to document humans and their... strangeness. It is still in its preliminary stages, but it will likely help to avoid another incident."

"Are you sure we should be trusting beings that eat meat," the lead diplomat inquired. "Only three other species are carnivorous, and one is-"

"I do understand your concerns," Allura interrupted. "But I must tell you that it would be better to keep on the good side of Terra and its inhabitants. I know the only race outside their own solar system that is carnivorous is the Galra, but humans are nothing like those of the Empire. For one, they are not outside their solar system yet, though the Green Paladin informed me they soon will be. Secondly, humans seem to have strong senses of justice. They will not harm any sentient being, and many times will avoid harming non-sentient beings if they find the creatures to be appealing in some aspect."

The delegation discussed privately for a moment before facing the Altean once more.

"Please tell us all you know."

Humans are omnivores. They mostly eat flora and, so long as their nutritional needs are met, can eat only flora for the entirety of their diet. However, they prefer to include the occasional meat in their meals. They can hunt better than many natural predators due to their sentient nature. Terrans will not always attack fauna if they are hungry. They instead wait for habitats with a plentiful amount of animals and use weapons to hunt. They can and will hunt if in an environment where there isn't enough flora to sustain an herbivorous diet. They will do the same if in a large group, hunting and surviving together.

Humans can make their own tools. These tools include weapons. If stranded or surviving in uninhabited terrain, they will create tools to aid in their self-preservation. Do not assume a Terran is weaponless. They hunted before their advanced toolmaking skills and sentient nature. Avoid fighting a human that is trying to survive. If stranded with a human, reminding them of your likely herbivorous status will probably cause them to gather whatever food you need to survive and will sustain themselves on mostly meat.

If a human smells of blood, remain calm. Ask if they are injured. If they are not, ask if they have been hunting. If they have not been hunting, ask after the smell. Attempt to not panic if it is revealed they have killed a non-sentient creature for their carnivorous meals, which are listed below. The common examples are tacos and steaks. Tacos can be made for herbivores as well. Simply request 'vegetarian' and check for possible poisons disguised as 'seasonings'.

[mst3kproject]

1112: Carnival Magic

Those of us who have heard of Al Adamson tend to associate him with movies like Psycho-A-Go-Go and Blood of Dracula’s Castle, so it’s weird to see him trying to make a family-friendly talking animal movie.  He fails at it, of course, but I don’t think that’s got anything to do with the genre.  Al Adamson just wasn’t any good at making movies.

Markov the Magnificent is a carnival magician who can talk to animals.  You’d think he’d use that in his act but instead he mostly just annoys the other performers until they insist he be fired. This leads to the secret coming out… but it’s not Markov’s powers that are revealed, it’s those of his buddy Alex the Chimp, an animal who can talk to people.  With Alex on stage, and Markov finally using some of his mind-reading and spoon-bending abilities, the carnival is suddenly the biggest thing in town.  Unfortunately, some of the attention they attract is the wrong kind, like that of a scientist who would like nothing better than to dissect a live chimpanzee, I guess just because it’s the evilest possible thing to do.

Out of curiosity, have any of you ever seen a chimpanzee in a zoo?  If so, you may have been surprised that it didn't look like the ones you see in movies.  Movie chimps are skinny and pink, while zoo chimps are dark grey and look like they could tie you in a knot with one hand while lifting a small car with the other.  Why is that? Because every chimp you've ever seen in a movie, tv show, commercial, or circus is less than about seven years old. When chimps reach puberty they not only become much bigger and stronger, they quickly realize that humans are smaller and weaker, and it gets very difficult to convince them to wear cute costumes anymore.

A movie about saving a talking animal from evil scientists so he can pursue a career in show business sounds like it ought to be fun, I guess.  It would probably work better as a cartoon, where we could be confident that no real animals were abused in the making of it. Even so, most of what actually happens in Carnival Magic is just kind of dull and depressing.  Occasionally you do get an attempt at something ‘zany’, but it never quite lives up to the kind of antics a description of the plot would lead you to expect.  When Alex decides to steal a car and go for a joyride, for example, that sounds like it ought to be funny, but it somehow just never works.  The music is an oddly un-fitting banjo piece and the screaming girl in the back seat reminds us constantly how dangerous this would be in real life.

(If you’ve ever tried to look up this movie on Wikipedia, by the way, you will have doubtless discovered that Carnival Cruise Lines owns a ship called the Carnival Magic.  Should I ever find myself on board, I believe I will decline any offer to dine with the captain.)

When Alex is not getting up to supposedly hilarious hijinks, the movie has two modes. One is pastel people wandering around the carnival apparently having fun, and the other is the various characters telling us about their traumatic backstories.  Markov’s pregnant wife died in a car wreck, leaving him with nothing but a talking ape and a broken heart.  Stoney the carnival owner forces his daughter to dress and behave like a boy so she won’t remind him of the wife who left him.  The carnival publicist ran away from home to escape a controlling and abusive father, and so on.

Of course you can make movies about this stuff.  People make some very good movies about this stuff.  Most of those movies, however, do not include scenes of chimpanzees wearing bras on their heads.  Seeing this kind of material in Carnival Magic makes it feel like we just tuned in to that hilarious sitcom our friends have been urging us to watch, only to catch the Very Special Episode in which one of the characters did drugs or had cancer and then it was never mentioned again.

I think the ending is supposed to be about the entire carnival coming together to save Alex from the evil scientist, but we haven’t seen any sign that Alex has unified them.  The people around Markov are already his friends and already committed to the survival of the carnival as a whole.  If Alex had inspired carnies who were on the point of running away to become accountants or something to remain with the show that would be one thing, and they do succeed in saving Alex, but the scene is presented as if it’s a climax without a story.  It’s also absolutely ridiculous watching the carnies sneak up on the secret chimp dissection lab, because they’re all very ordinary, out-of-shape people in street clothes doing their best to act like they’re on a police raid.

The evil scientist, Dr. Poole, is kind of a strange inclusion, himself. In my review of Octaman I remarked on how a lot of movies set up a conflict between scientists who want to study something and showpeople who want to ruthlessly exploit it.  The 70’s King Kong remake is a pretty good example, but in that movie – and in many others – those who want to put some oddity on display for money are the bad guys and those who want to learn from it are good.  Carnival Magic inverts this by suggesting that to study something is to destroy it, whereas to show it off is to help it be enjoyed by all the world.

There is a point to be made here.  A fair bit of what we know about anatomy and physiology of both humans and other creatures has been learned by doing atrocious things to both the living and the dead.  I don’t think, however, that Carnival Magic was the right way to make that point.  For one thing, Dr. Poole’s desire to dissect Alex alive makes no sense.  It’s not Alex’ physiology that makes him remarkable, it’s his behaviour.  Watching him alive could surely teach us infinitely more than taking his corpse apart.

For another, the options we’re given is Alex being a specimen or Alex being a literal circus freak!  Arguing that science should leave an animal alone to live out a happy life in its natural habitat seems reasonable – telling science to leave the same creature alone so it can perform for crowds of strangers is kind of horrifying.  It’s like if Free Willy ended with the titular whale returned to the aquarium having been saved from a taxidermist or something.  Sure, it’s better than death, but the audience still knows that this is not what’s best for this creature. If we’re supposed to believe that Alex wants to be a star, then that should have been established at the beginning of the movie, perhaps by him escaping Markov’s trailer and trying to entertain people.  One or two short extra scenes about this would have made the whole arc much more palatable.

Several characters describe Alex as being something more than an animal, so I think we’re supposed to regard him as a character in his own right.  This doesn’t seem entirely successful, because Alex doesn’t come across as having goals or desires of his own.  He happily goes along with whatever Markov wants to do, and when Markov’s not around he wanders about getting into mischief with no real sense of direction.  Part of me wants to believe this is an intentional attempt to portray a non-human mind that simply doesn’t prioritize the way we do.  Another part just wants to call it bad writing and I’m not sure which I ought to listen to.

As characters go, Markov’s not a great one, either.  Main characters in a movie ought to have a chance to learn and change, but Markov is pretty much the only human in the movie who doesn’t.  Ellen learns to break free of her father and become her own person, and Stoney learns that she can still love him regardless.  Dave the PR guys learns to be patient with women.  Kirk the tiger tamer grows more bitter and hateful until it destroys him, while his girlfriend Kim comes to realize what an ass he is.  Markov is exactly the same at the end as he was at the beginning – a guy with weird powers that he doesn’t put to any good use, and a talking ape for a surrogate child.  Perhaps nearly losing Alex is supposed to show him how much the chimp meant to him, but he already spent half the movie telling us that Alex is all he has.  He knows he’s got issues related to the death of his wife but seems unwilling to move past them.

In my review of Cry Wilderness I noted that it edged out Carnival Magic for the coveted title of ‘Worst Fucking Movie of Season 11’ mainly by being more racist. There’s a bit of racism in Carnival Magic, too, and it’s got a similar flavor although it’s not nearly so all-pervasive.  Cry Wilderness had its slightly magical Native Americans, here to help and support the white people.  Carnival Magic mostly cannot be bothered to have anybody who isn’t white say lines, but it still manages to have its slightly magical Buddhist Monks who raised Markov and presumably taught him his powers.  This is dumb, and actor Don Stewart sounds like even he doesn’t believe it.

Considered as a whole, Carnival Magic is pretty messy and never manages to settle on a tone.  Alex’ antics, Kirk’s revenge, and the various personal stories don’t quite feel like they’re all part of the same narrative. If I go back to that ‘sitcom’ metaphor, it’s like several episodes combined into a movie, but instead of being stitched end-to-end like in Riding With Death, they’ve been intercut to look like they’re all going on at once and it still doesn’t feel like a unified whole.  Yet for all that, there’s something weirdly fascinating about it.  Maybe it’s the contrast between the cheerful carnival setting and the often dark personal stories.  Maybe it’s trying to puzzle out what Adamson hoped to accomplish by the juxtaposition.  Whatever it is, it’s another reason I’d rather re-watch this than Cry Wilderness.

[eenefangirlanalysis]

The episode opens with the school at night and cars driving into the parking lot. Something must be going on. 

Season 5 is one of my favorite seasons. I know some are not fond of it due to, well, the school aspect. But I feel that this season brings out characters true colors along with the actual tone of the whole series. 

Ed, Edd n Eddy took place in the summer for four seasons, including the movie. Viewers get a look into the Eds life for one whole year. Was their life like this a year prior? Based off on how different everyone’s personalities were in season 1 it’s a safe bet that things have changed. Friendships, social life, and personalities. That’s life. We change.

Each character fears change, but mostly Eddy. 

Edd’s life is based off on routine. He’s used to the same routine each day. His day becomes unbalance if there is a change. Big Picture Show is the best example. He’s nervous during the whole journey and is scared to walk outside the cul-de-sac. Edd is also afraid to grow up not knowing who he will become. The adult figures in his life are not present to help him see the world. 

Edd was the first character to be introduced to viewers. In the end, Eddy is the main protagonist of the show. We learn his big secret that he has been keeping from everyone, including himself, the whole series. In the end, he learns what he has done wrong and faces his reality.

That being said, Edd also goes through massive character development. In season 1, he is a passive kid who lets Eddy boss him around. His biggest change is how he sees the world. Notice how the backgrounds look unfinished. I know it may be deliberate mistake on the artists part, but I think it’s how Edd viewed the world. 

I have a head canon that Edd was home schooled after the dodge ball incident occurred. Edd is still bonding with Ed and Eddy in season 1. He even introduces them to the sticky note relationship he has with his parents. At the beginning Edd was reclusive constantly in his room and had little to no communication skills. Ed and Eddy bring Edd out into the world and show him the true relaties. 

Season 5 is also puts Edd more in the light as the main character. A Fistful of Ed is the most emotional and very important episode which puts Edd in the limelight. If writers unfolded his secret in Big Picture Show viewers would have had a whole different meaning of who Edd’s character is.

Okay, I got off topic. What I am trying to get into is that there are other characters. They’re not important in the Eds memories. Though this is an important shot to note to viewers. 

A stage has been set up in the gymnasium. Kevin is testing the mic. Hmm, I wonder if he signed up to volunteer. I’m also intrigued that Kevin is the one testing the electrical equipment. He is into mechanics. So, maybe he has an eye for electrics.

A banner with the word ‘Spell’ is hung up over the stage. And it’s revealed. This event is a spelling bee!

This is one of the first social events the school has put on thus far. Viewers get even more of sense in what their daily school life is like during the year. 

Meanwhile backstage our contestants are studying, or gloating.

Jonny warns Edd that he has no chance against Plank.

And our friendship between Rolf and Jimmy has returned! Rolf asked Jimmy to help him cram for the spelling bee! That is so sweet! But how physical were these spelling bee sessions. In true running gag fashion Jimmy has a band aid speculating that he has been hurt. Oh, his brain hurts! 

“W... O... C.... H! Wrist Watch!”

I’m curious to find why/how Rolf signed up for the spelling bee. It’s clear from his reactions and behavior that it wasn’t his idea. He doesn’t understand the English language.

What sort of ESL program does the Peach Creek school system have? Rolf despises school. He states in the first school episode that school is the torture of being mercilessly judged. That is sad to think about. Is he also an outcast? Technically, he has the cul-de-sac kids but I have a head canon that they are their own group of outcasts. They don’t seem to interact with anyone else. They’re different. 

I think this was Rolf’s own doing. He wanted to prove to himself that he could succeed. He has invited his family to attend the spelling bee. We’ll analyze more into his behavior once his spelling bee scene comes up.

“I can’t feel my toes anymore, Rolf. We’ve been practicing for hours!”

Jimmy’s coach attire resembles Eddy’s suit from One Size Fits Ed. He was inspired by Eddy! Eddy has at least inspired or helped each member of the kids throughout the series.

Rolf then compares himself to Edd.

“What prayer does Rolf have against this-this too smart for his own hat Ed-boy?”

Roll Credits!

Jeez, Rolf if you’re an EddJimmy shipper make it subtle!

Edd escapes from the nervous tension to retreat into the bathroom. He does wish Rolf good luck. Surprisingly he doesn’t mock Rolf like he does to Ed later in this scene. I think Edd is silently gloating, however. 

Edd becomes slightly antagonist in season 5. He’s back in his natural habitat. And he also just came out from a summer that changed his view on the world along with himself. Due to this change Edd may feel that he has more power. That’s why he drifts from Ed and Eddy. Only to realize that he is not fully independent. 

Can we talk about Edd’s attire? I love the way Edd dresses. He wears mismatch colors. And he’s wearing jeans with a tux. He cares deeply about everything being in the right place and yet it doesn’t matter what he wears. Edd is one interesting character to psychoanalyze. 

[still-finding-our-way]

R5, R6

(SX 540672) 12/12/ 2020

Serendipity, rhizomes and lines. 

On my studio desk I have a number of rocks, stones and pebbles. None are particularly rare or precious, most have been collected locally yet every one is an object of beauty. One such stone is a sharp piece of flint. Small enough to hold in my palm, it has become my go to de-stress stone. I like to let its razor sharp edges bite, just a bit, into soft skin. My teasing wake up call. It has volume and weight, four planes—a tetra. One side runs smooth, curving to meet a granular knobbly surface, bone-like and skeletal, like the indenture of a clavicle or ankle bone. The underside of the stone is cut sheer, sliced through its core, creating a flat expanse onto which it is able to stand upright, before rising into a terraced plane, each step the size of a thumb print, a patternation that reveals the cryptocrystalline formation of flint (‘crypto’ meaning ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’). I found it on a beach in Cornwall. A dark grey stone with a white thread running through its centre. Its shape and size tickles my imagination, and as I turn the flint over in my hand I play with the idea that it was used as a Neolithic arrowhead, chipped away, stone on stone some 5000 years ago. The structure of flint requires a level of skill and expertise to shape; one wrong strike will send fracture lines through the stone rendering it useless as a tool. Our early ancestors were artisans and makers. Over and over, I have drawn this stone, feeling it’s texture, the sharp edges and definite weight in my palm. It does not take up much space and yet every time I draw it, a different angle or plane opens up. It is never the same. A small rock, inert and fixed, offering infinite possibilities.

You think you know something, someone, some place. A line on the horizon, a spit away from the sea and moor. Clambering over rocks, swimming in icy rivers and streams, climbing trees and making dens. 'Whence cam'st thou, mighty thane', pronounces Duncan in Act 1 of Macbeth. The utterance of such a question now comes with a cautionary red flag, one that implies exclusion and ‘you are not from here’. Too bad, coming from a white working class background, where histories and lives are lost, undocumented and unrecorded, I have no idea where my roots are tangled. I cometh from nowhere, no fixed abode, shallow rooted, spun together by frail relatives that can’t, or don’t want to, remember. To remedy this unknown, I was gifted by my eldest daughter a DNA test for my 50th birthday. The results from my spit reveal a blueprint that aligns with peoples who cluster around the North East of England, with a smattering of Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Scottish and Irish. Farmers and seafarers I suspect, a web of people who somehow managed to survive hunger and disease, violence and brutality, the lustful fumble in the hay and the traumatic birth. The odds were not good—about one in 400 trillion chance of being born according to the boffins. In staking a claim on the improbability of existence we got lucky, very lucky.

Where we come from and who we are. Layers of paint, fresh applications, still wet bleeding into others, making new colours and new pictures. Blending and binding. Some work and some don’t. It seems so arbitrary how we come to be. I should make time to salute the stream of past people, winding all the way back to the bones of dear Lucy, 3.2 million years ago, and her mother and grand-mother, all coming and going, doing their time. But, I won’t, it's enough to breathe in the noise of now. One heart beat, a blink of the eye and we are gone. Serendipity, luck, random, the throw of the dice. The cells didn’t bind in the correct sequence and the possibility of life just slipped down the toilet. Is it any wonder we seek out patterns to create order and structure, finding comfort in numbers and story; assigning value in the unexpected, and agreeableness in what wasn’t sought. Ones and zero’s, lines and dots, giving shape to all things. Artists do this all the time. Seeking opportunity in the accidental and unintended. Any stick, stone, door, book, conversation opening up new creative possibilities. The rhizomes seeking out a good place to settle, a place to nourish. The patterns, whether real or not, helping to make sense of the intensity of the here and now. 

Jennie’s story is fascinating. Her blue eyes, flaxen hair and Bridget Bardot pout might have you thinking she is of Swedish heritage, whilst my dark skin, hair and black eyes has in the past suggested Mediterranean roots. Not so, the paint palette is muddied. I will let Jennie tell her story. One thing to note here though, Jennie is an adventurer, she has travelled all over the world: on her own, through work, with friends and lovers. Occasionally I have joined her but mostly I skirt the edges of Western art history, moseying around European capital cities, museums and galleries. Both of us are wanderers in different ways. Parallel lines. The same but different. I am amused to read that women of ‘a certain age’ partake in what Jennie and I are doing—walking and exploring local history. I also note the term ‘a certain age’ is often used to describe middle-aged women, usually accompanied by a roll of the eyes and a double-fingered quotation sign. It is basically code for women no longer of a fertile age—post 40 and therefore deemed unattractive, and given age tends to gift experience (though not always) they carry a certain confidence i.e., speak their mind and know what they want.  

A simple stone. We are breathing, blinking and unstill. 

We ask ourselves how did we not know about this walk? It is literally a stones throw from Jennie’s parents village, just over the hill yonder, where Jennie spent her teenage years and part of her adulthood, and where I lived for awhile whilst homeless and lovelorn. Of all the places on Dartmoor this is an area that I would confidently say we know well, and yet here we are discovering new trails, hidden valleys, different perspectives and layers and layers of history, a thread of which connects with Jennie’s recent travel’s with her son to the other side of the world. The walk begins in the small Devon village of Meavy on the southwest of Dartmoor, a place I have cycled and walked through many times, enjoying a sup or two at the Royal Oak on the way. The route follows the river Meavy upstream to Burrator dam not far from Down Tor, where Jennie first set this adventure in motion as we glugged champagne and watched the setting of a glorious October sun. From Burrator, the road winds through Sheepstor village and into the woods where earlier in the year, at the height of bluebell season, I waited with my children for the badger's to come out. Hunkered down amongst bramble and fern at dusk, quiet as mice, hearing the birds hush and darkness settle. The children were not scared but reverent and awed by being in the woods at night, a time and place synonymous with the darker side of fairytales: of wolves, witches and being lost, and where the unknown and the unformed lurk. We whispered and signed to each other in the darkening gloom, until we no longer needed words and laid back in a bed of fern, faces turned upwards, watching the patchwork of sky between the canopy high above turn from indigo to midnight blue and then merge dark into the tall trees, the cool air lulling us to sleep. 

The ax strikes and life reclaims as swift as the blade can cut. My hand brushes the damp surface of a lopped off tree stump in the woods down from the reservoir, and I stop to observe a platter of squirming, burrowing, scuttling, squirrelling, decaying life; three empty acorn shells evidence a previous luncheon. I have set the objective to notice more when I am on these walks, to seek out habitat changes and to learn and know the names of things. But always I surrender to just being, breathing in the light and air, the atmosphere. I feel happy on these walks, a sense of euphoria and lightness washing over. It feels good to leave aside the cerebral and to let the physical, the motion of walking awaken a realm of sensing and scanning. She doesn’t say but I know Jennie has arranged this walk pre-Christmas because she is aware I am struggling with sadness—a sadness caused by my natural melancholia and tendency to ruminate, and a much bigger life crisis. Battle hardened to general romantic crisis’ I am not so experienced with career rifts, and so I have withdrawn and pulled down the blinds. But it won’t do and I know, as Jennie does, that the moor will help to alleviate the mental muddle I am in, and even if the effects are only temporary, it will store up the memory bank, to plunder and remember during the times when I get locked in. 

Ten minutes into the walk Jennie spots a Heron standing stock still in the woods by the river Meavy. Camouflaged against the bare trees, charcoal grey and ochre, we watch it rise and drift across the valley. Great grey wings, near 6ft in span, pulse slowly, its head and neck arrow-like thrust forward piercing space. It has a primordial presence. In mythology it is linked to the sacred Ibis, a bird revered by the Egyptians as representing Thoth—their god of wisdom, writing and magic. I take it as a good omen. The wood is dazzling, ice cold water tumbling down from Burrator reservoir. Wood, rock and foliage glisten from the early morning downfall, the ground water-logged from weeks of incessant rain. The element of water is strong here, 4210 mega litres—enough to quench the thirst of a city and the surrounding hinterland—held in check by towering granite slabs that form a 23.5 metre high gorge. Completed in 1898 and extended in 1923, the reservoir pools run-off from the surrounding moor and water from the river Meavy. Standing downstream from the dam in the wooded valley I hope the granite wall holds strong. The sun breaks through and turns up the volume on colour. Saturated greens: acid, moss, lichen, pine and fern. We watch a man on the other side of the steep valley, oblivious to our presence, pissing freely, a spray of urine forming a perfect arc; glinting golden droplets catching the sunlight.

Having learned nothing from our previous walks we decided not to take the obvious path and instead followed the course of the river upstream. This meant having to clamber over rocks and fallen trees, until we reach the imposing dam wall and are forced to scrabble up the steep bank, thick with mud, to get back on the road. Jennie leads the way, an experienced hash runner not deterred by the muddy terrain, she turns into a sure-footed mountain goat, while I, slip-sliding, defy gravity and somehow fall up the slope. Walking over Burrator bridge we pass the man we saw pissing earlier and beam broadly, making sure we hold eye contact for a bit longer than comfortable for him. We then follow the road up to Sheepstor village, and—given we are women of ‘a certain age’—we are keen to nosey round St Leonards, the C15th village church. But sadly, the door is locked so instead we admire the Lych gate, a covered over a double gate with a lychstone to rest the coffin before entering (‘Lych’ or ‘lich’ meaning corpse in Old English). At the time I did not notice the foliate skull carving above the main door, only a little while later when we sat for lunch under a massive oak tree, which we reckoned to be near on 500 years old given the size of its girth, do I undertake a little online searching and read to Jen a short history of the church and its whereabouts.

So intrigued by what I find that I go back a couple days later, this time with my dog and younger children in tow. In particular I wanted to see the foliate skull above the porch. In recent years there has been a growing interest in Pagan symbology such as the ‘Green Man’ and the ‘Three Hares’, several examples of which can be found in churches across Dartmoor. The ‘Green Man’ is usually represented as a carved face with foliage growing from the head, mouth, nose, ears and eyes. It is presumed to be a pre-christian Pagan symbol representing renewal and life—from death comes life—that has been absorbed into Christian ideas of resurrection and life after death. Often found in churches and cathedrals across Europe, its more macabre cousin, the foliate skull, is said to have appeared after the Black Death in the 14th century. The skull at St Leonards church is carved with ears of wheat sprouting from the eye sockets above an hourglass. The suggested date of its making is given as 1640 and it is suspected to have originally been part of a sundial. Now it sits behind glass in a small recess above the porch, and on this particular day was partially obscured by condensation so I could not see the inscription incorporated into the sculpture: ‘UT HORA SIC VITA’ (As the hour so life passes), ’MORS JANUA VITA’ - (Death is the door of life) and ‘ANIMA REVERTET’ (the soul will return).

As a motif representing vegetation, rebirth and resurrection, the ‘Green Man’ archetype is found in many cultures across the world, including the ancient Egyptian God Osiris, the god of fertility, agriculture, death and resurrection, who is often depicted as green skinned, alongside several green figures found in Nepal, India, Iraq and Lebanon, the latter dated to the 2nd century. I wonder how far the Green Man story goes back? As a cross cultural archetype it suggests a commonality of belief about the life cycle that is interconnected with the land. Whilst its incorporation into ecclesiastical architecture alongside other apparent Pagan motifs, points to the fluidity and evolution of belief systems, which subsume and build on pre-existing ideas, even when the incoming authority seems most rigid and contained. Most of the what we know about the ‘Green Man’ is based on speculation and supposition, as we have no historical evidence as to why and for what reason they were made. Instead the ‘Green Man’ motif has been reclaimed and remoulded at various points in history from Romanticism to Neo-Paganism and most recently as a symbol for the environmental movement.

A little village church under the shadow of the looming granite tor on the southern edge of Dartmoor, connected through culture and shared beliefs with a much wider world and history. If the Green Man does not provide enough evidence of these interconnections, then the large sarcophagus, protected by iron railings in the churchyard, and housing the remains of James Brooke, First Rajah of Sarawak (29 April 1803 – 11 June 1868) alongside two other White Rajahs should affirm the connections without doubt. It was whilst peeling the shell off hard-boiled eggs, freshly laid by my chickens that morning, at the foot of the big oak tree that Jennie realised that she had previously encountered the story of James Brooke whilst travelling through Borneo with her son. A sultry jungle, 7,000 miles away on the other side of the world tied by empire and colonialism, violence, power and trade to this peaceable village. I find out a little more about James, the questions concerning his sexuality and love for men stick with me more than the dates, titles, skirmishes and conquests. I go back again to the church on new years day and with fresh snow on the ground, sipping steaming hot chocolate on the bench overlooking Brooke’s slab of a tombstone, I retell the story of what I know to my children. They hang off the iron railings and argue over the remains of the Christmas chocolate, I don’t think they were listening.

SC

Reading: Lyon, N., (2016) Uprooted: On the trail of the green man (London, Faber & Faber).

https://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/sheepstor_church

[eloarei]

Thank goodness for self-indulgent slapdash babbling fics about your OCs, eh? Here, have an “Alien Anthem” story from Snake’s point of view. It might not make a lot of sense, but it let me achieve my word count for the day.  2000 words (of an alien stalking the ship’s new human inhabitant) under the cut: 

It had never seen anything like this creature. Well, except for the hundreds of others of its species that the crew was slowly watching die out, killed off by various environmental hazards or eaten by their mutated brethren.  But it'd never seen one up close or in person. The creature was so beautiful, so unique, and so full of energy. It was so creative too, and so intelligent. It knew so many things, not just about itself, but about others. The creature liked to be called 'Bren', or 'he'; 'it' was wrong. He, Bren, also told the crew that they were supposed to be called 'he's and 'she's and names like 'Ant' and 'Ling', things none of them had known before. Bren didn't know if he should call it a 'he' or a 'she' or even a 'they' like the Greys sometimes used, but he did know that its name was Snake. Snake (who didn't know it was called Snake at the time) stayed back when the Greys went to go collect Bren from the Earth, and then watched from one of the video screens as the human was taken to his new home. It waited a little while for the Greys to leave the human alone and go back to their jobs, and then it invited itself in. Bren's home was very nice! Not a lot of rock, and almost no water at all, but it had a good amount of nice, dry dirt, and quite a lot of trees. And the trees were very dry as well, with rough bark and flat green leaves. The structure in the middle was very enclosed, but there were multiple entry points. Inside the 'house', it was rather dark. No plants, no phosphorescent moss. It did have several soft pieces of furniture-- very odd, but luxuriously comfortable. The first was in the bigger center room, the one with the flat stone-pile in the wall, and the second was in the room where the Greys had put Bren; the human was sleeping upon it. Snake approached him. Furtively, it touched his face. Soft, a little moss-like-- malleable and strong, Snake thought. As it had intuited, the human would likely make very hardy babies. It could feel its inside adjusting to the new information already, feel the first speckles of pale brown-pink begin to prick at its skin-- though it would take a lot more contact than that to erase the red it was born with or the bits of Grey silver it had picked up since joining the crew. But that was okay. Snake was not in a hurry to breed. Yes, it could feel the time was looming, but not significantly faster or closer than it had over the past year. It could probably hold off until it had had the chance to assimilate enough of the human's DNA to produce a viable batch of children. And if the process took too long, perhaps they could speed it up by engaging in the reproductive methods of the Earth creatures; to the best of Snake's understanding, that provided quite a lot of extended contact between the soft absorbent parts of both parties. It was something to think about later, though. Bren was moving around a bit now, apparently just shy of waking. Snake withdrew its hands from Bren's soft face and left to go observe the human from a safer distance; as much as it was fairly sure it liked the human, it thought he was prefer to have some time by himself. Besides, it needed to get outside the habitat in order to unlock the doors. (The access tunnels were unlocked, but they were supposed to be a secret, and it didn't assume Bren would find then-- not right away, at least.) Snake watched from outside, through any of the numerous observation screens it could hack into, as Bren woke and made a fuss about the situation, and when Bren approached the door to the outside, Snake unlocked it for him, and retreated to continue watching as Bren ran down the halls. What a fast creature, with his strong, steady footsteps! Snake imagined its babies having such a stride. Would they have hair, too? Or those funny protrusions the humans had coming from their faces? It could only guess. The Greys apprehended Bren rather quickly and chattered at him in their garbled version of his language until he seemed to understand the situation he'd found himself in and allowed them to lead him back to his new home. He and the Greys talked for a while, and Snake thought maybe it would invite itself in, now that it knew Bren had become accustomed to non-humans. But before it could finish unlocking the door, it was stopped by the angry Grey-- the 'doctor'. “So you're the cause of the trouble, hmm? I should have known. You should stay in your habitat when we have a new member, or you are putting yourself at risk of catching whatever diseases it has brought on board with it. And don't even think about going in there just yet! Go. Go home. I'll be monitoring you!” Snake huffed at the Grey but did as told. It wasn't as if the Greys could (or would, at least) do anything to harm or even inconvenience it, but it didn't like to be on the receiving end of those glares that this particular one liked to give out. So for the time being, it went home to its damp, rocky habitat. The place was only the second home Snake had ever known, and it liked it well enough. It was a far cry from the tall and deep volcano innards it had lived in before; the pool the Greys had given it was only three times as deep as Snake was long-- quite small! But it was comfortable, with its ferns and its soft mud, and it didn't resent having to stay there for a while. Better, probably, to give Bren some time to adjust to the ship and the Greys. (They were, after all, very strange.) It was the next day that it finally got to meet Bren. The human seemed very apprehensive of it, when they came across each other during his tour of the ship's control room. “What's with the Snake?” he asked, eyeing it warily. “Survivor from before planet!” they Grey which Bren had taken to calling Ling said. 'She' (as appointed by Bren) gestured at it, moderately fond. “Just like you, the only of its kind! Unique and rare specimen we save. As I say before, that is purpose of this vessel. Save last, study planet when empty.” Bren seemed skeptical. “And what did you find on this thing's planet?” “Oh, plant. Mineral. Not much. All life slowly dying from poisons. Naturally occurring! But not compatible with animals. This reptilian would have starved.” “Uh huh,” Bren said, not very impressed, apparently. “Yeah, you guys are real magnanimous people, aren't you?” That was a word Ling had clearly not yet heard (and maybe Bren had used it on purpose for that reason), so it shut down their conversation rather quickly. It wasn't much of an introduction, but Snake figured it would do. At least now Bren was familiar with it, and maybe wouldn't be frightened if it came to visit him in his home. That, as a guess, was only half correct. Bren was, in fact, quite frightened when Snake appeared “out of nowhere”, but only for a short moment. He quickly calmed and then became curious how it had gotten into his house to begin with. “This,” Snake said, and demonstrated its skill in picking locks, on the front door which Bren had kept locked apparently out of habit. Instead of being impressed by its skill, Bren was again momentarily frightened-- surprised or shocked were the words he would use-- when Snake's thin arms emerged from under its smooth plating. “You have hands!” Bren said, staring at them. “Okay. I wasn't expecting that. And you can talk too? Geez. Well, I guess you are an alien. I don't know what I was expecting.” Glad to have impressed Bren in some way or another, Snake opened its lower set of plates as well, and revealing its second pair of limbs-- identical to the top two, just lower. “More hands,” it said, wiggling them at him. “Huh. So I guess you're really more of a Lizard than a Snake,” Bren suggested, but Snake didn't like that. “I Snake,” it told him. “You say.” Bren bit his lip as he stared at Snake. “Yeah, I guess I did say that.” Ultimately, Bren was impressed with Snake's lock picking and hacking skills, and they decided to go on an adventure together-- not because either of them were trying to get out (the ship was orbiting Earth, far too high in the sky to land safely if you jumped out, Snake was sure) but because Bren was feeling restless and wanted to press his boundaries-- which was one of Snake's very favorite hobbies. The Greys, who watched everything they did, talked to them over the ship's speakers when they realized the two of them were bypassing door locks instead of just asking for the doors to be opened. “You are not prison, Bren!” Ling said, when they finally managed to get her to come find and talk to him. “We open doors for you! Any door, any time! You not need reptilian for open doors.” She narrowed her eyes at Snake. “How even you do, reptilian?” (Snake didn't bother answering. It usually didn't.) Neither of them were in any trouble, but since they'd been found out they decided to head back to Bren's home, done with adventuring for the day. “Those are some pretty clever fingers you have there,” Bren said, by way of compliment. Snake didn't know quite what he meant by that, but it was pretty sure that meant Bren approved of its hands (that was what 'fingers' meant, right? The little wiggly bits on hands?), so it reached out and laced their hands together-- one of its, and one of Bren's. Bren seemed surprised and a little uneasy, but he didn't pull back. “Uh, okay,” he said, and then proceeded to go about his business (which mostly consisted of grabbing one of the Earth books the Greys had stocked his house with, and then sitting on the couch to browse through it) with Snake's hand twined up in his own. He loosened his fingers at odd intervals to see if maybe Snake was ready to let go, but didn't force it. A few hours passed, with Snake mostly peering over Bren's shoulder as he read (it didn't have a clue what the book was for, but Bren seemed to enjoy staring at it, so Snake did the same, figuring it couldn't understand something it wasn't familiar with), and Bren mostly reading. By the time Bren finally did break away from Snake and excuse himself to go find something to eat in his weirdly clean kitchen, Snake felt full and warm and different on the inside. Satisfied, it went back home to get some food itself and take a nap. In a little nest of mud, dozing, it stretched its plates and looked down at the soft skin under the middle-most plating-- and there it was. Among the red and the plentiful silver freckles, its very first splotch of pale brown-pink. Not enough for babies, but a good first step. Maybe tomorrow it would get another one. xXx (More about these characters in my Alien Anthem tag.) 

[sciencespies]

This weirdly smart, creeping slime is redefining our understanding of intelligence

https://sciencespies.com/nature/this-weirdly-smart-creeping-slime-is-redefining-our-understanding-of-intelligence/

This weirdly smart, creeping slime is redefining our understanding of intelligence

Imagine you’re walking into a forest, and you roll over a fallen log with your foot. Fanning out on the underside, there is something moist and yellow – a bit like something you may have sneezed out, if that something was banana-yellow and spread itself out into elegant fractal branches.

What you’re looking at is the plasmodium form of Physarum polycephalum, the many-headed slime mold. Like other slime molds found in nature, it fills an important ecological role, aiding in the decay of organic matter to recycle it into the food web.

This bizarre little organism doesn’t have a brain, or a nervous system – its blobby, bright-yellow body is just one cell. This slime mold species has thrived, more or less unchanged, for a billion years in its damp, decaying habitats.

And, in the last decade, it’s been changing how we think about cognition and problem-solving.

“I think it’s the same kind of revolution that occurred when people realized that plants could communicate with each other,” says biologist Audrey Dussutour of the French National Center for Scientific Research.

“Even these tiny little microbes can learn. It gives you a bit of humility.”

P. polycephalum in its natural habitat. (Kay Dee/iNaturalist, CC BY-NC)

P. polycephalum – adorably nicknamed “The Blob” by Dussutour – isn’t exactly rare. It can be found in dark, humid, cool environments like the leaf litter on a forest floor. It’s also really peculiar; although we call it a ‘mold’, it is not actually fungus. Nor is it animal or plant, but a member of the protist kingdom – a sort of catch-all group for anything that can’t be neatly categorized in the other three kingdoms.

It starts its life as many individual cells, each with a single nucleus. Then, they merge to form the plasmodium, the vegetative life stage in which the organism feeds and grows.

In this form, fanning out in veins to search for food and explore its environment, it’s still a single cell, but containing millions or even billions of nuclei swimming in the cytoplasmic fluid confined within the bright-yellow membrane.

Cognition without a brain

Like all organisms, P. polycephalum needs to be able to make decisions about its environment. It needs to seek food and avoid danger. It needs to find the ideal conditions for its reproductive cycle. And this is where our little yellow friend gets really interesting. P. polycephalum doesn’t have a central nervous system. It doesn’t even have specialized tissues.

Yet it can solve complex puzzles, like labyrinth mazes, and remember novel substances. The kind of tasks we used to think only animals could perform.

“We’re talking about cognition without a brain, obviously, but also without any neurons at all. So the underlying mechanisms, the whole architectural framework of how it deals with information is totally different to the way your brain works,” biologist Chris Reid of Macquarie University in Australia tells ScienceAlert.

“By providing it with the same problem-solving challenges that we’ve traditionally given to animals with brains, we can start to see how this fundamentally different system might arrive at the same outcome. It’s where it becomes clear that for a lot of these things – that we’ve always thought required a brain or some kind of higher information processing system – that’s not always necessary.”

(David Villa/ScienceImage/CBI/CNRS)

P. polycephalum is well known to science. Decades ago, it was, as physicist Hans-Günther Döbereiner of the University of Bremen in Germany explains, the “workhorse of cell biology”. It was easy to clone, and keep, and study.

However, as our genetic analysis toolkits evolved, organisms such as mice or cell lines such as HeLa took over, and P. polycephalum fell by the wayside.

In 2000, biologist Toshiyuki Nakagaki of RIKEN in Japan brought the little beastie out of retirement – and not for cell biology. His paper, published in Nature, bore the title “Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism” – and that’s exactly what P. polycephalum had done. Nakagaki and his team had put a piece of plasmodium at one end of a maze, a food reward (oats, because P. polycephalum loves oat bacteria) at the other, and watched what happened.

The results were stunning. This weird little acellular organism managed to find the fastest route through every maze thrown at it.

“That triggered a wave of research into what other kinds of more difficult scenarios we can test the slime mold with,” Reid says.

“Virtually all of those have been surprising in some way or another, and surprised the researchers in how the slime mold actually performed. It revealed some limitations as well. But mostly, it’s been a voyage of revelation on how this simple creature can do tasks that have always been given to and thought to be the domain of higher organisms.”

Full of surprises

Nakagaki recreated the Tokyo subway, with the station nodes marked out with oats; P. polycephalum recreated it almost exactly – except the slime mold version was more robust to damage, wherein if a link got severed, the rest of the network could carry on.

Yet another team of researchers found that the protist could efficiently solve the traveling salesman problem, an exponentially complex mathematical task that programmers routinely use to test algorithms.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers found that P. polycephalum can “remember” where it has previously found food based on the structure of the veins in that area. This followed previous research from Dussutour and her colleagues, who discovered that blobs of slime mold could learn and remember substances that they didn’t like, and communicate that information to other blobs of slime mold once they fused.

“I’m still amazed by how, in a way, complex they are because they always surprise you in an experiment, they would never do exactly what you choose to do,” Dussutour says.

In one instance, her team was testing a growth medium used for mammal cells, and wanted to see if the slime would like it.

“It hated it. It started to build this weird three-dimensional structure so it could go on the lead and escape. And I’m like, ‘oh my gosh, this organism’.”

A processing network

Although it’s technically a single-celled organism, P. polycephalum is considered a network, exhibiting collective behavior. Each part of the slime mold is operating independently and sharing information with its neighboring sections, with no centralized processing.

“I guess the analogy would be neurons in a brain,” Reid says. “You have this one brain that’s composed of lots of neurons – it’s the same for the slime mold.”

>

Physarym polycephalum, “The blob” Network emergence Oscillation waves#blob pic.twitter.com/kJUhH0w05a

— Audrey Dussutour (@Docteur_Drey) April 3, 2021

That brain analogy is a really intriguing one, and it wouldn’t be the first time P. polycephalum has been compared to a network of neurons. The topology and structure of brain networks and slime mold blobs are very similar, and both systems exhibit oscillations.

It’s not entirely clear how information is propagated and shared in the slime mold, but we do know that P. polycephalum‘s veins contract to act as a peristaltic pump, pushing cytoplasmic fluid from section to section. And oscillations in this fluid seem to coincide with encounters with external stimuli.

“It’s thought that these oscillations convey information, process information, by the way they interact and actually produce the behavior at the same time,” Döbereiner tells ScienceAlert.

“If you have a network of Physarum go to a certain food, it changes oscillation pattern when it encounters sugar: it starts to oscillate quicker. Because of these quicker oscillations, the whole organism starts changing its oscillation pattern and starts to flow into the direction where the food was found.”

He and colleagues recently published a paper demonstrating that these oscillations are extraordinarily similar to the oscillations seen in a brain, only a hydrodynamic system rather than electrical signals.

“What’s relevant is not so much what oscillates and how the information is transported,” he explains, “but that it oscillates and that a topology is relevant – is one neuron connected to 100 neurons or just to two; is a neuron connected just to its neighbors or is it connected to another neuron very far away.”

P. polycephalum growing on a life-sized model of a human skull. (Andrew Adamatzky, Artifical Life, 2015)

Defining cognition

As exciting as its escapades may seem, any researcher working with it will tell you that P. polycephalum is not, in itself, a brain. It’s not capable of higher-level processing or abstract reasoning, as far as we can tell.

Nor is it, as intriguing as the notion may seem, likely to evolve into something like a brain. The organism has had a billion years to do so and shows no sign of going in that direction (although if any science fiction writers out there like the idea, feel free to run with it).

In terms of overall biology, slime mold is extremely simple. And by that very fact, it’s changing how we understand problem-solving.

Just like other organisms, it needs food, it needs to navigate its environment, and it needs a safe place to grow and reproduce. These problems can be complex, and yet P. polycephalum can solve them with its extremely limited cognitive architecture. It does so in its own simple way and with its own limitations, says Reid, “but that in itself is one of the beautiful things about the system”. 

In a sense, it leaves us with an organism – a wet, slimy, damp-loving blob – whose cognition is fundamentally different from our own. And, just like the Tokyo subway, that can teach us new ways to solve our own problems.

“It’s teaching us about the nature of intelligence, really, challenging certain views, and basically widening the concept,” Reid says.

“It does force us to challenge these long-held anthropocentric beliefs that we are unique and capable of so much more than other creatures.”

#Nature

[biofunmy]

Netflix’s “Our Planet” And Our Personal Responsibility To Combat Climate Change

A couple weeks ago, I made the mistake of watching Netflix’s new documentary series Our Planet after hitting a friend’s weed pen. Even though I knew that famed naturalist David Attenborough’s latest project aimed to explicitly address the effects of climate change, I was still expecting to (mostly) enjoy a big, splashy nature doc, letting myself become fully immersed in the overwhelming beauty and vastness of life on Earth — especially since, someday all too soon, many of these glorious scenes will be lost to us.

What I didn’t expect were the horrors awaiting me at the (now-infamous) end of Episode 2. A huge group of walruses congregate on a tiny stretch of land because they can’t gather on swaths of Arctic sea ice that no longer exist. Forced to find space from the crowd, some of the poorly sighted animals climb up steep cliffs — then, sensing other walruses below, fling their bodies off the edge. Somehow I’d missed all the coverage of Netflix’s warnings to animal lovers about this particular moment. Even if I had, I don’t think anything could have prepared me to see these gentle, gigantic animals tumble to their deaths. I started to weep; I think being stoned could only partially account for my spiral.

Piles of walrus bodies, smashed and bloody, will now join the morbid climate change gallery I keep on shuffle in my brain when I’m, say, trying to go to sleep or otherwise enjoy my life: the endangered orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer and save its home, or the polar bear mother and cubs crowding onto a tiny block of ice in the environmental advocacy commercials that used to play, over and over again, in my childhood. Even worse: I picture the growing number of human climate refugees, driven from their homes by droughts, flash floods, and fires, a tableau of mounting apocalypse on a near-biblical scale.

Walruses aside, some critics don’t think that Our Planet goes far enough. Yes, we see a fair bit of animal death, in addition to ghostly forests of dead coral and crumbling glaciers; but “the camera still captures life on a grand scale: Wildebeest herds are enormous, penguin colonies stretch as far as the eye can see, millions upon millions of ants inhabit jungle floors,” writes Brian Resnick at Vox. He wishes that Our Planet had fewer Planet Earth– and Blue Planet–style scenes of grandeur and more moments that convey “a visceral sense of loss.”

I appreciate that criticism. But there was also a part of me (maybe a horribly naive one) that was glad Our Planet took the time to capture the world’s still-thriving habitats — especially since it focuses on a number of areas and species that have been recently rehabilitated by human efforts to curb deforestation, overfishing, and the effects of climate change. Siberian tigers are slowly crawling back from the brink; blue and humpback whales have seen dramatic recoveries thanks to international efforts to save them. Maybe, if we act in time, not all of this will be lost. Do we dare to dream?

Like the producers of Our Planet, who had to balance making an entertaining program with warning its hundreds of thousands of viewers about oncoming global peril, I struggle in my daily life to juggle my hopefulness and my despair — and my culpability. How am I supposed to weigh my overwhelming fear and guilt and anger and sense of powerlessness about climate change against the hope that, through aggressive collective action, we can demand a better future for ourselves, for future generations, and for a planet’s worth of precious species?

As the world continues to burn, I think a lot about a Supreme Court case that made a big impact on me when I first learned about it in a constitutional law class in college. Before their case made it to the Supreme Court in 1992, the Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental organizations rallied against new regulations applied to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which required federal agencies to consult with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure their actions aren’t likely to threaten imperiled species and their habitats in the US or at sea. Organizations committed to conservation filed an action against the secretary of the interior, hoping that the new regulations could be discarded in favor of the original interpretation of the ESA, which hadn’t involved such a limited geographic scope.

The main question the court would be answering in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife: Did environmental organizations, made up of people with a vested interest in keeping endangered species outside the US alive, have standing to sue for the right to protect them? Put differently — do we, everyday American citizens, have the right to some legal assurance that, somewhere very far away, endangered animals and their precious habitats aren’t being annihilated with the support of taxpayer dollars?

Turns out, we don’t.

The plaintiffs tried to propose that anyone part of a “contiguous ecosystem” who would be adversely affected by a federal agency’s actions has standing to sue, a theory the court rejected. Even if the court assumed that federal agency–funded projects might pose a threat to an endangered species, the justices saw no proof that those projects would produce a “factual showing of perceptible harm” to the members of environmental groups, who might wish to one day visit other parts of the world and find the wildlife there unsullied by the tireless and maniacal reach of American industry.

I’ve always found this question to be a philosophically fascinating one, almost poetic. Do I have the right to the knowledge that the incredible biodiversity of our planet is going to keep existing out there in the big wide world — particularly without being fucked over by the people representing me in our federal government? It’s a different question than whether these endangered species deserve to survive on a habitable planet in the first place, one that’s intertwined with the other most pressing questions of our time: whether Americans have the right to prevent our government from furthering climate catastrophe for the globe’s most impoverished communities, who have contributed the least to climate change but most keenly feel its effects; or whether we have the right to demand our government take action to ensure that we Americans too might survive current and forthcoming climate catastrophes.

Still, it’s a question I keep finding myself coming back to: Do I have the right to feel comforted by the existence of a natural world that, however indirectly, I’ve helped to destroy?

For the past few years, I’ve seesawed between feeling compelled to drastically reduce my carbon footprint and throwing up my hands in defeat. What does it matter anyway? I eat meat, though lately less of it. Jury’s still out on children. I fly too often — sometimes for work, but most of the time to escape my urban environment and vacation in the great outdoors, grimly and guiltily aware that, to enjoy the natural world, I’m contributing to its demise.

Last winter, my partner and I took our most ambitious trip yet: a week to visit family in South Africa, then another week of game drives and boat rides in the national parks of Botswana and Zambia. It’s been a dream of ours, to see elephants and other incredible creatures in the wild.

One evening, during golden hour, we were bobbing with our guide on the banks of the Zambezi river while a herd of elephants swam-stepped across the water in front of us — using their trunks as snorkels — before they clambered onto the shore, rising mud-slicked behemoths. A crocodile lazed in a sunny spot a few feet away from us, its mouth disconcertingly open to regulate its body heat. And in the distance, on a stretch of grasslands only revealed during the low season, hippos and their babies lumbered lazily in the setting sun while a gust of birds in every color streamed by overhead. I’d probably never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Perhaps I never will again.

But our moment of rapture came at a cost. We’d taken jumbo jets for nearly 24 hours to reach the continent, then a car, a ferry, and a terrifying little biplane to bury ourselves this deep in the wild. Our massive carbon footprints trailed along behind us like a shameful veil.

That night, sleeping in a tent on a raised platform in the woods, we woke to the sound of something inconceivably huge moving just beyond our tented walls in the darkness. Tree boughs snapped; the platform beneath our bed shifted. We went still and held each other while my heart rattled around in my ribcage. At the time, I was petrified, but in the morning, when we poked around outside for evidence of what turned out to be an elephant or a rhinoceros getting comfortable for its few hours of sleep right beside us, I felt humbled and awed. Nothing else has better reminded me that I share the earth with giants.

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife was on my mind again when I was watching Our Planet. Nature documentaries in general bestow a precious knowledge, which is that all around the world, every single day, remarkable things are happening. And documentaries give us these reminders without actually having to go and see for ourselves. I love to travel, but I also have to come to terms with the fact that my lifestyle isn’t compatible with sustaining life on earth. In a future where (hopefully) carbon taxes make air travel more costly and difficult, I’ll be grateful for the existence of programs that can give me a decent, high-definition dose of reverence without the high environmental price tag attached.

I remember being particularly tickled by the flamingos in 2016’s Planet Earth II, which (like Our Planet) was narrated by Attenborough, whose soothing British accent has accompanied many of the most stunning nature documentaries ever made. Thousands of feet high in the Andes mountains, a huge flock of flamingos takes shelter in a remote lake that freezes overnight, trapping them there by their long legs. In the morning, warmed by the sun, the birds slowly defrost and break themselves free of the melting ice, after which they march in a giant goofy group back and forth across the water, in a mating march intended to get them all “in the mood.”

It fascinates and delights me to think that as I’m puttering around New York City, each day filled with the small joys and dumb frustrations of my ordinary life, there’s this wild group of flamingos being constantly frozen and unfrozen in a remote corner of the planet, surviving in a comically inhospitable climate. I find it soothing, these windows into the goings-on of a diverse range of extraordinary animals, all of them ignorant and uncaring of our silly human foibles.

Of course, the natural world isn’t all sunshine and roses, and hasn’t been for a long time. Nature documentaries in particular have allowed us access to our planet’s natural wonders without forcing us to reckon with the fact that human actions — particularly the actions of humans in the industrialized world — are contributing to the quickening death and destruction of these wonders. (You wouldn’t know it from Planet Earth II, but those Andean flamingos are currently listed as a vulnerable species.) Our Planet, finally, aims to correct that legacy.

“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril,” the 92-year-old Attenborough recently said. “This is the new extinction and we are halfway through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”

But what’s one little human on this giant earth supposed to do? Even scientists are divided on questions about personal responsibility in the face of climate change. Having fewer children, cutting down on car and air travel, and abstaining from meat won’t really change all that much on a global scale — but making these choices can also be a way to cope, to inspire hopefulness, to feel like you’re making the world the tiniest bit of a better place. I can’t say I’m going to stop traveling to visit some of the earth’s most beautiful places while there’s still time — how much, really, would that help? — but I can say I’ll vote to make those trips as difficult and costly as possible, so that they’ll become as rare and as precious as they should be.

In an excellent recent story for the New Yorker about “the other kind of climate denialism,” Rachel Riederer spoke with a number of environmental scientists, psychologists, and reporters about how to inspire action in a public that has generally moved from one unhelpful extreme to the other: “uncertainty and denial” about climate change to “similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.” Some experts, like the conservation psychologist John Fraser, believes in going beyond terrorizing people with tales of disaster: “What we need to promote is hope,” he says. “The first step to a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.” Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of a climate advocacy organization, believes the opposite — that fear can help inspire people to take action. “It’s important to feel afraid of things that will kill us — that is healthy and good,” she says.

Lately I’ve been energized by the prospect of the 2020 primaries; incredibly early as we still are in the process, I believe that political and community action, not just at the federal level but all the way down to the local level, are our best chance at survival. I send long, rambling emails and texts to my relatives who, I worry, aren’t quite freaked out enough yet. I write and share articles like this one.

I’ve also been trying to hold competing stories in my head at once. I refuse to look away from scenes of climate destruction and terror. But I’ve not yet allowed myself to let go of the overwhelming feelings of peace and calm that can wash over me when I experience or even just think about the pockets of the earth still bursting, against humanity’s best efforts, with liveliness and splendor.

I think, often, of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese,” in which she assures us that we don’t have to be good: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” It’s a lovely comfort, despite everything that has happened, everything that will happen: to be but a speck in a teeming ecosystem, just one among many in the family of things, all of us just doing our best. All of us just trying to survive. ●

Sahred From Source link Science

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[biofunmy]

Netflix’s “Our Planet” And Our Personal Responsibility To Combat Climate Change

A couple weeks ago, I made the mistake of watching Netflix’s new documentary series Our Planet after hitting a friend’s weed pen. Even though I knew that famed naturalist David Attenborough’s latest project aimed to explicitly address the effects of climate change, I was still expecting to (mostly) enjoy a big, splashy nature doc, letting myself become fully immersed in the overwhelming beauty and vastness of life on Earth — especially since, someday all too soon, many of these glorious scenes will be lost to us.

What I didn’t expect were the horrors awaiting me at the (now-infamous) end of Episode 2. A huge group of walruses congregate on a tiny stretch of land because they can’t gather on swaths of Arctic sea ice that no longer exist. Forced to find space from the crowd, some of the poorly sighted animals climb up steep cliffs — then, sensing other walruses below, fling their bodies off the edge. Somehow I’d missed all the coverage of Netflix’s warnings to animal lovers about this particular moment. Even if I had, I don’t think anything could have prepared me to see these gentle, gigantic animals tumble to their deaths. I started to weep; I think being stoned could only partially account for my spiral.

Piles of walrus bodies, smashed and bloody, will now join the morbid climate change gallery I keep on shuffle in my brain when I’m, say, trying to go to sleep or otherwise enjoy my life: the endangered orangutan trying to stop a bulldozer and save its home, or the polar bear mother and cubs crowding onto a tiny block of ice in the environmental advocacy commercials that used to play, over and over again, in my childhood. Even worse: I picture the growing number of human climate refugees, driven from their homes by droughts, flash floods, and fires, a tableau of mounting apocalypse on a near-biblical scale.

Walruses aside, some critics don’t think that Our Planet goes far enough. Yes, we see a fair bit of animal death, in addition to ghostly forests of dead coral and crumbling glaciers; but “the camera still captures life on a grand scale: Wildebeest herds are enormous, penguin colonies stretch as far as the eye can see, millions upon millions of ants inhabit jungle floors,” writes Brian Resnick at Vox. He wishes that Our Planet had fewer Planet Earth– and Blue Planet–style scenes of grandeur and more moments that convey “a visceral sense of loss.”

I appreciate that criticism. But there was also a part of me (maybe a horribly naive one) that was glad Our Planet took the time to capture the world’s still-thriving habitats — especially since it focuses on a number of areas and species that have been recently rehabilitated by human efforts to curb deforestation, overfishing, and the effects of climate change. Siberian tigers are slowly crawling back from the brink; blue and humpback whales have seen dramatic recoveries thanks to international efforts to save them. Maybe, if we act in time, not all of this will be lost. Do we dare to dream?

Like the producers of Our Planet, who had to balance making an entertaining program with warning its hundreds of thousands of viewers about oncoming global peril, I struggle in my daily life to juggle my hopefulness and my despair — and my culpability. How am I supposed to weigh my overwhelming fear and guilt and anger and sense of powerlessness about climate change against the hope that, through aggressive collective action, we can demand a better future for ourselves, for future generations, and for a planet’s worth of precious species?

As the world continues to burn, I think a lot about a Supreme Court case that made a big impact on me when I first learned about it in a constitutional law class in college. Before their case made it to the Supreme Court in 1992, the Defenders of Wildlife and other environmental organizations rallied against new regulations applied to the Endangered Species Act of 1973, which required federal agencies to consult with the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to ensure their actions aren’t likely to threaten imperiled species and their habitats in the US or at sea. Organizations committed to conservation filed an action against the secretary of the interior, hoping that the new regulations could be discarded in favor of the original interpretation of the ESA, which hadn’t involved such a limited geographic scope.

The main question the court would be answering in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife: Did environmental organizations, made up of people with a vested interest in keeping endangered species outside the US alive, have standing to sue for the right to protect them? Put differently — do we, everyday American citizens, have the right to some legal assurance that, somewhere very far away, endangered animals and their precious habitats aren’t being annihilated with the support of taxpayer dollars?

Turns out, we don’t.

The plaintiffs tried to propose that anyone part of a “contiguous ecosystem” who would be adversely affected by a federal agency’s actions has standing to sue, a theory the court rejected. Even if the court assumed that federal agency–funded projects might pose a threat to an endangered species, the justices saw no proof that those projects would produce a “factual showing of perceptible harm” to the members of environmental groups, who might wish to one day visit other parts of the world and find the wildlife there unsullied by the tireless and maniacal reach of American industry.

I’ve always found this question to be a philosophically fascinating one, almost poetic. Do I have the right to the knowledge that the incredible biodiversity of our planet is going to keep existing out there in the big wide world — particularly without being fucked over by the people representing me in our federal government? It’s a different question than whether these endangered species deserve to survive on a habitable planet in the first place, one that’s intertwined with the other most pressing questions of our time: whether Americans have the right to prevent our government from furthering climate catastrophe for the globe’s most impoverished communities, who have contributed the least to climate change but most keenly feel its effects; or whether we have the right to demand our government take action to ensure that we Americans too might survive current and forthcoming climate catastrophes.

Still, it’s a question I keep finding myself coming back to: Do I have the right to feel comforted by the existence of a natural world that, however indirectly, I’ve helped to destroy?

For the past few years, I’ve seesawed between feeling compelled to drastically reduce my carbon footprint and throwing up my hands in defeat. What does it matter anyway? I eat meat, though lately less of it. Jury’s still out on children. I fly too often — sometimes for work, but most of the time to escape my urban environment and vacation in the great outdoors, grimly and guiltily aware that, to enjoy the natural world, I’m contributing to its demise.

Last winter, my partner and I took our most ambitious trip yet: a week to visit family in South Africa, then another week of game drives and boat rides in the national parks of Botswana and Zambia. It’s been a dream of ours, to see elephants and other incredible creatures in the wild.

One evening, during golden hour, we were bobbing with our guide on the banks of the Zambezi river while a herd of elephants swam-stepped across the water in front of us — using their trunks as snorkels — before they clambered onto the shore, rising mud-slicked behemoths. A crocodile lazed in a sunny spot a few feet away from us, its mouth disconcertingly open to regulate its body heat. And in the distance, on a stretch of grasslands only revealed during the low season, hippos and their babies lumbered lazily in the setting sun while a gust of birds in every color streamed by overhead. I’d probably never seen anything so beautiful in my life. Perhaps I never will again.

But our moment of rapture came at a cost. We’d taken jumbo jets for nearly 24 hours to reach the continent, then a car, a ferry, and a terrifying little biplane to bury ourselves this deep in the wild. Our massive carbon footprints trailed along behind us like a shameful veil.

That night, sleeping in a tent on a raised platform in the woods, we woke to the sound of something inconceivably huge moving just beyond our tented walls in the darkness. Tree boughs snapped; the platform beneath our bed shifted. We went still and held each other while my heart rattled around in my ribcage. At the time, I was petrified, but in the morning, when we poked around outside for evidence of what turned out to be an elephant or a rhinoceros getting comfortable for its few hours of sleep right beside us, I felt humbled and awed. Nothing else has better reminded me that I share the earth with giants.

Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife was on my mind again when I was watching Our Planet. Nature documentaries in general bestow a precious knowledge, which is that all around the world, every single day, remarkable things are happening. And documentaries give us these reminders without actually having to go and see for ourselves. I love to travel, but I also have to come to terms with the fact that my lifestyle isn’t compatible with sustaining life on earth. In a future where (hopefully) carbon taxes make air travel more costly and difficult, I’ll be grateful for the existence of programs that can give me a decent, high-definition dose of reverence without the high environmental price tag attached.

I remember being particularly tickled by the flamingos in 2016’s Planet Earth II, which (like Our Planet) was narrated by Attenborough, whose soothing British accent has accompanied many of the most stunning nature documentaries ever made. Thousands of feet high in the Andes mountains, a huge flock of flamingos takes shelter in a remote lake that freezes overnight, trapping them there by their long legs. In the morning, warmed by the sun, the birds slowly defrost and break themselves free of the melting ice, after which they march in a giant goofy group back and forth across the water, in a mating march intended to get them all “in the mood.”

It fascinates and delights me to think that as I’m puttering around New York City, each day filled with the small joys and dumb frustrations of my ordinary life, there’s this wild group of flamingos being constantly frozen and unfrozen in a remote corner of the planet, surviving in a comically inhospitable climate. I find it soothing, these windows into the goings-on of a diverse range of extraordinary animals, all of them ignorant and uncaring of our silly human foibles.

Of course, the natural world isn’t all sunshine and roses, and hasn’t been for a long time. Nature documentaries in particular have allowed us access to our planet’s natural wonders without forcing us to reckon with the fact that human actions — particularly the actions of humans in the industrialized world — are contributing to the quickening death and destruction of these wonders. (You wouldn’t know it from Planet Earth II, but those Andean flamingos are currently listed as a vulnerable species.) Our Planet, finally, aims to correct that legacy.

“I find it hard to exaggerate the peril,” the 92-year-old Attenborough recently said. “This is the new extinction and we are halfway through it. We are in terrible, terrible trouble and the longer we wait to do something about it the worse it is going to get.”

But what’s one little human on this giant earth supposed to do? Even scientists are divided on questions about personal responsibility in the face of climate change. Having fewer children, cutting down on car and air travel, and abstaining from meat won’t really change all that much on a global scale — but making these choices can also be a way to cope, to inspire hopefulness, to feel like you’re making the world the tiniest bit of a better place. I can’t say I’m going to stop traveling to visit some of the earth’s most beautiful places while there’s still time — how much, really, would that help? — but I can say I’ll vote to make those trips as difficult and costly as possible, so that they’ll become as rare and as precious as they should be.

In an excellent recent story for the New Yorker about “the other kind of climate denialism,” Rachel Riederer spoke with a number of environmental scientists, psychologists, and reporters about how to inspire action in a public that has generally moved from one unhelpful extreme to the other: “uncertainty and denial” about climate change to “similarly paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation.” Some experts, like the conservation psychologist John Fraser, believes in going beyond terrorizing people with tales of disaster: “What we need to promote is hope,” he says. “The first step to a healthy response is feeling that the problem is solvable.” Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist and founder of a climate advocacy organization, believes the opposite — that fear can help inspire people to take action. “It’s important to feel afraid of things that will kill us — that is healthy and good,” she says.

Lately I’ve been energized by the prospect of the 2020 primaries; incredibly early as we still are in the process, I believe that political and community action, not just at the federal level but all the way down to the local level, are our best chance at survival. I send long, rambling emails and texts to my relatives who, I worry, aren’t quite freaked out enough yet. I write and share articles like this one.

I’ve also been trying to hold competing stories in my head at once. I refuse to look away from scenes of climate destruction and terror. But I’ve not yet allowed myself to let go of the overwhelming feelings of peace and calm that can wash over me when I experience or even just think about the pockets of the earth still bursting, against humanity’s best efforts, with liveliness and splendor.

I think, often, of Mary Oliver’s famous poem “Wild Geese,” in which she assures us that we don’t have to be good: “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” It’s a lovely comfort, despite everything that has happened, everything that will happen: to be but a speck in a teeming ecosystem, just one among many in the family of things, all of us just doing our best. All of us just trying to survive. ●

Sahred From Source link Science

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