Shandali

I love watching my peas reach and climb and grapple... as if they are mountain climbers summitting a cliff.

Am I being to anthropomorphic? Maybe. And yet I can't help but see some intelligence there!

Monica Gagliano, a research associate professor at the University of Western Australia , has recently been replicating the famous "Pavlov's Dog" experiments of the early 19th century. Ivan Pavlov, as you may recall, would ring a bell before feeding his dog. Over time, the ring of the bell became enough to cause his dog to salivate.

Galliano repeated the experiment, with one small twist: she used pea plants instead of dogs. She put a pea plant at one end of a Y shaped tube. To the left was a light. To the right, no light. As you would expect, the pea made a left at the junction in the tube and grew towards the light.

Now, Galliano added a sound to the light, just as Pavlov did. Instead of a bell, she used a small computer fan.

Just as with Pavlov's dogs, the plants, having been habituated to associate the sound with their food-giving-light, started to grow towards the sound of the fan even when there was no light.

"If the plant is imagining its dinner arriving, based on a simple fan," Galliano writes, " then WHO is doing the imagining? WHO is thinking here?"

How we deal with these mysteries is how we deal with our humanity. Do we simply dismiss them as ridiculous sentimental blatherings? Is our certainty so cemented that we lose our sense of wonder?

To be a fragile creature always on the precipice of pricarity does not seem to reconcile with our grandiose sense of surety.

At every turn, nature seems to be telling us to approach existence humbly. Its almost like it has a mind of its own! Maybe the poets weren't being as figurative as we thought...

In the 19th century, the average workweek was 60 hours long. Over time it grew shorter as efficiencies grew bigger. Mechanization helped. So did labor unions. Alfred Maynard Keynes wondered if the trend would continue until, in a hundred years, people would be working 15 hour work weeks.

That never came to pass. Efficiencies grew anyway. We now have machines to wash our clothes and our dishes. Life isn't lived at the speed of horse. Electricity extends time by lighting our dark nights. Heat doesn't require long days of wood chopping. Cooking doesn't include hours of harvesting or walking to market.

So what are we doing with all that time?

Keynes worried that "there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy…"

And so we do the washing daily instead of weekly. Where we spent 30 minutes to walk to work we now spend an hour driving. We spend our lighted nights recovering from our striving days so we can strive in the morning.

If ever there was a reason to jump in a puddle it's to confuse the algorithm. To impose our humanity on an apathetic world. While the brains of the world debate whether joy is an illusion, I'll splash away confoundingly.

Not because it looks good on a college resume.
Or it helps me unwind after a long day.
Or recharge for Monday.

It's just ... fun.

Let's see A.I. figure that one out....

Only the strongest survive! Survival of the fittest seems so obvious we often wonder why it took Darwin so long to come up with it.

Then we come across a little flower on the forest floor; The ephemeral violet. So tiny and dainty it couldn't hope to compete against the giants of the forest.

So it doesn't.

Instead, it's found a little corner of the world to call its own. The violet blooms in the winter, when the trees are dormant. Without leaf shade, the sun filters down through the branches to the blooming violet.

This mana from the heavens only lasts a short time. The trees will notice the longer days and soon enough, the violet must make way. Until next year.

But for a time, this ephemeral little flower lived like a queen among titans. All by finding the perfect niche in which to fit itself for survival.

Strength reimagined.

In an interview with Bill Moyers, philosopher Martha Nussbaum said:

"The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility."

To be human is to love and be loved. To form connections. To be open to the uncertainties our adventurous curiosity create.

But to love is to lose. Connections birth painful vulnerability. Adventurous can get lost.

To avoid suffering, one would have to avoid love and connection and curiosity . We would have to harden into something less fragile and beautiful than a flower, and more like a stone.

Many people do.

I'm going to be dead
A lot longer than I'll be
Alive.
What a thought!

How to make all these days add
Up to something
That counts?

To live a life worth
Living
You have to ask
The questions worth
Asking.

Can it be that simple?
Good question....

"Once in his life," N. Scott Momday wrote, "a man ought to concentrate his mind on the remembered earth, I believe. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it."

Security
Is
An
Illusion.

You
Need
Courage.
Kindness.
Love.

Busy busy bees making blueberries possible.

Do you think bees have quotas? Or strategic planning meetings? Do they hang around the water cooler saying things like "working hard or hardly working!"

"I do not particularly like the word 'work,'" Masanobu Fukuoka writes in The One-Straw Revolution . "Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy..."

What would it look like to take the advice Mary Poppins gave us all as kids: "Enough is as good as a feast."

Instead of working for excess we could just do what needs doing and .... bee.

Look close enough, this time of year, and one will notice the beginnings of leaves budding on trees.

How does a tree know its time to leaf?

Does it sense the temperature change of the coming spring?

Does it have a circadian rhythm that counts the days till bloom?

As it turns out, these little leaf buds can see light. When the days get long enough to support photosynthesis, the tree leafs out.

Who knew?! A tree that can see!

But, so can we - and thats a surprise too. We get as busy as squirrels preparing for winter that we sometimes forget to stop and take a look around. To notice all the light peeking through winter's gloom.

"in this moment there is life and food for future years," Wordsworth wrote.

But we've got to see it first.

If a tree can do it.... so can you.

Some good advice from Howard Thurman on making your New Year Resolution...

Sure, we may not always fulfill our resolutions. That's no excuse not to try. Intention matters.