Examining Natural Functions in the Local Environment

As I sat quietly, eyes closed, experiencing nature in my backyard, I had a sense of distraction. It was hard to focus on my circumstances because of the thoughts running through my head, mostly associated with problems I’m facing personally, conversations I’ve had recently, concepts I’ve been playing with, and over it all the social, economic and political situation in the country and world. So it took some effort to really focus on the present, but at the same time I had to recognize that this is a new sense that we’ve developed, a sense of connection, mainly electronically, to this pervasive force known as the internet, a kind of collective hive-mind of humanity, cast as it is through its various lenses, narratives, and devices. However, as I let go of that more and more, I felt a sense of calm and collected pervasive awareness, not just my own of my surroundings, but weirdly my surroundings of me. I had a sense of the scene noticing me noticing it noticing me, at the edges of perception, although not by any means the clearest – as in, if you weren’t paying attention or you hadn’t had such experiences before, you might not notice it. In addition to that, I had a sense of gravity, but I realized that feeling it was only possible through my body’s interaction with my chair, and the ground beneath me, and I recalled that the surfaces we live on are pushing back on us with an equal and opposite force to that which is pulling us down, that in fact our body is in a kind of negotiation between opposing forces, and it’s only through the process of metabolism and life itself that we are able to resist becoming ground ourselves as the Universe seeks to maximize entropy, smearing the collective of atoms we currently identify as ourselves into the flat plane that separates the air above from the rest of the planet beneath.

When I opened my eyes, noticing functions, among other things, I could see my kale plants, covered in snow now, still resisting the freezing cold and carrying on. I knew that they were just as good as always, if not better, than in the spring and summer, were I to pick and cook a leaf, and that is because of the function of developing and storing sugar in the stems as an anti-freeze. Looking at some of the trees and shrubs around, I saw and recalled that what would seem barren and lifeless (the leafless maple tree for example) was actually full of life, and you could tell because of the redness near the tips of what would be next year’s leafs – I’ve been told this is where lots of sugars are stored in trees. So even as winter is gripping the land all around, the trees are performing the function of holding over, conserving energy and gathering strength for next year’s bloom – that is how nature not only survives the winter, with each passing year it grows, ideally speaking, were it not for some disruption regime (natural or artificial) interfering with its development. I’ve been told that anti-freeze in cars is very closely related to sugar, yet toxic, including to dogs who are known to lap it up for its sweetness and poison themselves. It makes me think that perhaps we could develop a vehicle coolant fluid that uses the same principles but is biodegradable and non-toxic, so as to reduce the negative effects that existing radiator fluid has on the environment. The storage of photosynthetic energy in sugars that both help the plant persist and also resist freezing in its most critical areas also make me think of new energy storage technologies, that work like batteries but perhaps chemically, such as bacteria or fungi who could be encouraged, bred or engineered to gather photovoltaic energy electrically and somehow mimic part of the latter aspects of photosynthesis in order to store sugars (or some other adjacent equivalent molecule) in a way that both maintained the structure of our technology against the elements and made that energy available on demand.

I also took notice of the hills of mole-dirt that had been piled around, some topped with fresh powder, but some which were obviously new, meaning even as the top-world is freezing, below the ground, there was lots of movement. The moles were performing the function of clearing tunnels of some of the rich subsoil in order to build their network whereby in the spring, when the earthworms are active again near the surface, they can easily access their food sources from beneath. This piling of mineral-rich soil at the surface as well seems to perform a kind of recycling service for the plants above, ensuring the delivery of fresh materials enriching the top so that it can be cycled through again. This made me think of society, including the economy and policy, where occasionally we must re-evaluate and ‘tunnel into’ the subsoil of our mythological and social structures, our programs and various constructs, in order to “conceptually aerate” them, delivering fresh materials to the surface which allows the various infrastructure (companies, governments, nonprofits, etc) to proliferate. It seems like a lack of that happening in an organic way seems to have stagnated the growth and development of our social structures, and this explains somewhat why the market has a hard time adjusting to the ecological and economic needs of humanity and the environment that we are facing at the moment. Perhaps if we were more willing to truly re-examine and refresh our calcified belief systems, we would be able to reinvigorate our society and face our challenges collectively, and this would also be a kind of technology though not a hard physical one.

I appreciated this opportunity to explore these thoughts and their implications, and I’m looking forward to further sessions.