'The Flow-er'
Our failure to see plants as living creatures, and to appreciate ourselves as some kind of sped-up plant, is the result of limited human perception, a sign of the boundaries of our senses or the degree to which we have allowed them to atrophy, or the fact that we have become too speedy to perceive the slower rhythms of other life forms.
The Walling of Awareness, 4 Arguments for the Elimination of Television, Jerry Mander
After abandoning the car some ten years ago (like the television some years before that), I feel as if I have become more plant-like as a result, altogether more epiphytic, and actively drawing sustenance from the larger plant upon which I am growing (as non-parasitically as possible).
This fresh plant-like perspective has enabled a more profound understanding of the subtle movements - the slower rhythms of other life forms - that exist within nature as a whole, and how they interact, cultivate and exploit.
Two of the most exploitative inventions of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine and the cathode ray tube, have with their indulgence of speed transformed this plant-like perspective to one which is polluted to the extreme. The result being that we become too 'speedy'!
No wonder we live in an increasingly anti-religious society. Speed and 'god' are like chalk and cheese. The ultimate ground of being can only be reached through stillness and contemplation. The question of religion is not pertinent to plants because they are religion. This (!) is what religion is. Spontaneousness. Absence of artifice. Total loss of self.
Moving under one's own steam (work done in gratitude) might thus be described as some sort of 'prayer' through which the sacramental act of energising one's self is performed; not for any particular purpose other than perhaps to celebrate one's capacity to do so; a spontaneous prayer, absent of artifice, one which, to paraphrase Berry's verse below, illuminates the place where you are as everywhere.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Wendell Berry
After abandoning the car some ten years ago (like the television some years before that), I feel as if I have become more plant-like as a result, altogether more epiphytic, and actively drawing sustenance from the larger plant upon which I am growing (as non-parasitically as possible).
This fresh plant-like perspective has enabled a more profound understanding of the subtle movements - the slower rhythms of other life forms - that exist within nature as a whole, and how they interact, cultivate and exploit.
Two of the most exploitative inventions of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine and the cathode ray tube, have with their indulgence of speed transformed this plant-like perspective to one which is polluted to the extreme. The result being that we become too 'speedy'!
No wonder we live in an increasingly anti-religious society. Speed and 'god' are like chalk and cheese. The ultimate ground of being can only be reached through stillness and contemplation. The question of religion is not pertinent to plants because they are religion. This (!) is what religion is. Spontaneousness. Absence of artifice. Total loss of self.
Moving under one's own steam (work done in gratitude) might thus be described as some sort of 'prayer' through which the sacramental act of energising one's self is performed; not for any particular purpose other than perhaps to celebrate one's capacity to do so; a spontaneous prayer, absent of artifice, one which, to paraphrase Berry's verse below, illuminates the place where you are as everywhere.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.
Wendell Berry
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