Now, about that "flower"...
We're celebrating Earth Day here in southern MD. The kid & I are home from "town" (which is 30 minutes away), resting back at the homestead after helping Dad out with the Healing Center's booth at the local festival. Seems like a good moment to review the first section of The Secret Teachings of Plants, in which Stephen Buhner breaks down the science of electric waves and magnetic fields and how living things use these to communicate.
It was wonderful to fall into this chapter last week, as I was finally able to read it during our long ride home from the National Aquarium. Most especially so because Buhner uses the metaphors of listening to a weak radio signal in a car that's speeding away from the city (which we were), and he talks a lot about fish (which we'd just seen) to illustrate his points.
First a word about the annoyingly weak radio signal... he goes in to quite a lot of detail about what electrical signals are and how they are detected, eventually ending with a mental image of a woman attaching a multitude of antennae all over her car just so that she can pick up the far-off radio station that's playing her favorite song. We live in a world of electric signal noise, or stochastic resonance; and while linear, Newtonian science prefers to think that such weak signals cannot be detected because of the distractions of all this other noise, Buhner illustrates, through the lives of sharks and fishes, just how they can be by actually using the noise.
Just like the lady with all the extra radio antennae on hand, the body responds to the mud of too much electrical information by coupling cells to create a type of "net" that has a way of mimicking the waves it wants to distinguish out of the "noise", oscillating with them, and thus amplifying them so that the signal becomes stronger and clearer. He uses the lives of ocean fish to illustrate how this is so-- one fish seeking the other as prey doesn't just "sniff it out" by tasting the water around it; rather, salt water is a fine conductor of electrical waves, and the predator can interpret the signals it receives to the fine point of knowing what fish, how many, their size, age, health, and exact location. It's as much of an internal, automatic system as it is with how we breathe or see or hear-- and because of the interplay of the electrical waves and the response of the cells and eventually, the response of what is sending the signal, it's a communication that's happening.
Buhner points out that it's much the same with magnetic fields, pointing to the presence of magnetite, an ore that is sensitive to magnetic fields in living things such as bees, salmon and birds that rely on fluxes in the field to orient themselves for navigation. Humans, it turns out, also have magnetite present in the hippocampus, the part of the brain where all sensory information converges, meaning is extracted, memory is stored and spatial relationships understood. So as a bird uses information from the magnetic field to orient itself in space, humans, through the function of the hippocampus, also use it to orient themselves in meaning.
And living organisms have learned to do more than simply use these fluctuating fields as a part of their physiological functioning for tracking prey. They also use them to communicate with each other. They pick up electrical and magnetic field communications from one another, alter their functioning in response, and send back responses encoded in the fields they themselves give off. In response, the other organisms alter their functioning and respond in turn. There is an extremely sophisticated electric and magnetic communication that is going on all the time among trillions and trillions of organisms. A web of communications that is so complex and detailed that there is no way to understand it with the linear, analytical mind....
We, as human beings, are also of this Earth and possess, as all living organisms do, the ability, however atrophied, to understand these communications and respond in turn. What so many New Age practitioners call the "energy" of a thing turns out to be, in fact, the energy of a thing. It is the electric and magnetic signaling that all living organisms give off, not only as part of their physiological functioning, but as part of a complex signaling network among all life forms on Earth.
And just how do we understand these electromagnetic communications? It is through the hippocampus' close relationship to the heart, "one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators and receivers known". Far more than a "pump", Buhner calls the human heart "a highly evolved organ of perception and communication". (On to the next chapter!)
And so that brings me to the day where I found myself behaving very rudely to a sunflower.
There are lots of ways one might look at these types of things. I like Seren's word for it-- "speshul"-- to describe the negative end of the description. But I do have a knack for it, and for a long time I've been afraid of it, simply because I don't really understand it and I don't really want to be "speshul". After reading this first bit of Buhner, and so understanding it more in terms of its banal normalcy, and thus seeing it more as a birthright in the way that breathing is a birthright, I'm tending these days to be much more curious about doing it more and doing it better.
I can see now, that day, my heart was open. It was late October, and I had just left my husband (the first one, the one I don't talk about much), and in my own place and finally feeling free-at-last, I'd invited over some friends for an annual Samhain celebration. It was a women's spirituality group that I'd somehow managed to fall into, and the year previous we'd had a lovely dinner party together, where we pot-lucked the food our dead loved ones loved, and told stories and laughed and cried amid lighted candles, fresh flowers, and tender ritual.
It was much the same in this particular year, when I was finally free and eager to host this fine group of women. And after we'd eaten and the last candle extinguished on the altar and everyone had left, I sat down in a chair next to some of said fresh flowers, and I was flying with happiness.
That's when it called to me. And I sat there looking into it, and soon not just with my eyes, but my whole self; and, it struck me it was looking back at me. And after a long period of grooving with each other, it spoke. It was small and it was subtle, but inwardly it was huge and it knocked me back in my chair. What did it say, and how did it say it? It's hard to describe-- it was sort of like my whole body had become an ear, and my heart was the center of that ear. It wasn't English but I could decipher it as such. It was asking me a question. A joyous question. And it was precisely in the middle of that question that I realized, Oh my god, I am talking to a flower, that I jumped up and ran out of the room, outside where the air was cool and I could collect myself a little.
By the time I realized what an opportunity I'd passed up, it was too late. I ran back in and sat down, "OK, ya caught me off guard-- sorry-- could you repeat that again?" But it was no use. It was "just a sunflower" and I just a fool again. Mirthfully, I went to cleaning up the kitchen.
And I suppose I have been holding that half-question in my heart for nearly 10 years now, hopeful for the opportunity to find the question again so I might answer it...
And so there is the other reason for engaging in a study of herbalism. Conversation!
It was wonderful to fall into this chapter last week, as I was finally able to read it during our long ride home from the National Aquarium. Most especially so because Buhner uses the metaphors of listening to a weak radio signal in a car that's speeding away from the city (which we were), and he talks a lot about fish (which we'd just seen) to illustrate his points.
First a word about the annoyingly weak radio signal... he goes in to quite a lot of detail about what electrical signals are and how they are detected, eventually ending with a mental image of a woman attaching a multitude of antennae all over her car just so that she can pick up the far-off radio station that's playing her favorite song. We live in a world of electric signal noise, or stochastic resonance; and while linear, Newtonian science prefers to think that such weak signals cannot be detected because of the distractions of all this other noise, Buhner illustrates, through the lives of sharks and fishes, just how they can be by actually using the noise.
Just like the lady with all the extra radio antennae on hand, the body responds to the mud of too much electrical information by coupling cells to create a type of "net" that has a way of mimicking the waves it wants to distinguish out of the "noise", oscillating with them, and thus amplifying them so that the signal becomes stronger and clearer. He uses the lives of ocean fish to illustrate how this is so-- one fish seeking the other as prey doesn't just "sniff it out" by tasting the water around it; rather, salt water is a fine conductor of electrical waves, and the predator can interpret the signals it receives to the fine point of knowing what fish, how many, their size, age, health, and exact location. It's as much of an internal, automatic system as it is with how we breathe or see or hear-- and because of the interplay of the electrical waves and the response of the cells and eventually, the response of what is sending the signal, it's a communication that's happening.
Buhner points out that it's much the same with magnetic fields, pointing to the presence of magnetite, an ore that is sensitive to magnetic fields in living things such as bees, salmon and birds that rely on fluxes in the field to orient themselves for navigation. Humans, it turns out, also have magnetite present in the hippocampus, the part of the brain where all sensory information converges, meaning is extracted, memory is stored and spatial relationships understood. So as a bird uses information from the magnetic field to orient itself in space, humans, through the function of the hippocampus, also use it to orient themselves in meaning.
And living organisms have learned to do more than simply use these fluctuating fields as a part of their physiological functioning for tracking prey. They also use them to communicate with each other. They pick up electrical and magnetic field communications from one another, alter their functioning in response, and send back responses encoded in the fields they themselves give off. In response, the other organisms alter their functioning and respond in turn. There is an extremely sophisticated electric and magnetic communication that is going on all the time among trillions and trillions of organisms. A web of communications that is so complex and detailed that there is no way to understand it with the linear, analytical mind....
We, as human beings, are also of this Earth and possess, as all living organisms do, the ability, however atrophied, to understand these communications and respond in turn. What so many New Age practitioners call the "energy" of a thing turns out to be, in fact, the energy of a thing. It is the electric and magnetic signaling that all living organisms give off, not only as part of their physiological functioning, but as part of a complex signaling network among all life forms on Earth.
And just how do we understand these electromagnetic communications? It is through the hippocampus' close relationship to the heart, "one of the most powerful electromagnetic generators and receivers known". Far more than a "pump", Buhner calls the human heart "a highly evolved organ of perception and communication". (On to the next chapter!)
And so that brings me to the day where I found myself behaving very rudely to a sunflower.
There are lots of ways one might look at these types of things. I like Seren's word for it-- "speshul"-- to describe the negative end of the description. But I do have a knack for it, and for a long time I've been afraid of it, simply because I don't really understand it and I don't really want to be "speshul". After reading this first bit of Buhner, and so understanding it more in terms of its banal normalcy, and thus seeing it more as a birthright in the way that breathing is a birthright, I'm tending these days to be much more curious about doing it more and doing it better.
I can see now, that day, my heart was open. It was late October, and I had just left my husband (the first one, the one I don't talk about much), and in my own place and finally feeling free-at-last, I'd invited over some friends for an annual Samhain celebration. It was a women's spirituality group that I'd somehow managed to fall into, and the year previous we'd had a lovely dinner party together, where we pot-lucked the food our dead loved ones loved, and told stories and laughed and cried amid lighted candles, fresh flowers, and tender ritual.
It was much the same in this particular year, when I was finally free and eager to host this fine group of women. And after we'd eaten and the last candle extinguished on the altar and everyone had left, I sat down in a chair next to some of said fresh flowers, and I was flying with happiness.
That's when it called to me. And I sat there looking into it, and soon not just with my eyes, but my whole self; and, it struck me it was looking back at me. And after a long period of grooving with each other, it spoke. It was small and it was subtle, but inwardly it was huge and it knocked me back in my chair. What did it say, and how did it say it? It's hard to describe-- it was sort of like my whole body had become an ear, and my heart was the center of that ear. It wasn't English but I could decipher it as such. It was asking me a question. A joyous question. And it was precisely in the middle of that question that I realized, Oh my god, I am talking to a flower, that I jumped up and ran out of the room, outside where the air was cool and I could collect myself a little.
By the time I realized what an opportunity I'd passed up, it was too late. I ran back in and sat down, "OK, ya caught me off guard-- sorry-- could you repeat that again?" But it was no use. It was "just a sunflower" and I just a fool again. Mirthfully, I went to cleaning up the kitchen.
And I suppose I have been holding that half-question in my heart for nearly 10 years now, hopeful for the opportunity to find the question again so I might answer it...
And so there is the other reason for engaging in a study of herbalism. Conversation!