. . . or: humans in the feedback loop.
Sorting through papers to file them (the family motto being something like debeo ordinare), I came across what was intended as an introduction for an article for the Canadian Journal of Herbalism. The article has yet to be completed, life having interjected its complexities as it tends to, nor can I put my hands on two of the books I refer to in order to amplify on a couple of points, but by setting it down in its fledgling form, I hope to revive it and develop it.
There is a passage in Tree: A Life Story (Suzuki & Grady -- one of the books that is eluding me at the moment) that more than anything I've read about trees, brings home to me a sense of kinship with them in an intimate physical sense. Walking in old-growth hardwood forests, or in Toronto's densely treed ravines, or in arboreta, or in a sacred grove I know where a religious hermit once lived near a stream northeast of the city, I have many times felt the life of the particular community of trees in a powerful way that has always left me wordless.
Our human penchant for abstraction leads us often into dealing with the natural world through metaphor, an attempt to connect with a rich and complex world with a well-chosen and memorable word or phrase. For it's not just our opposable thumbs and the way they handle tools that set us apart (we like to think) from other species, it's our peculiar use of language. Thanks to language, we can make distinctions between tree and fern, city and country, mind and body, us and them, right and wrong, nature and civilization, health and illness. We find it much more difficult to see -- and articulate -- layers, overlaps, interconnectedness, synchronicity, symbiosis, as our language-inflected brains sort and sift. If we struggle persistently with words and their limitations, we might end up becoming poets or mystics or philosophers, but still the way that language shapes our consciousness dominates our lives.
What struck me when reading John Redden's "Letter" from the editor's desk in the Canadian Journal of Herbalism XXV (2) with its eloquent description of the import of the fairly recent field of psychoneuroimmunology was his opening of the door beyond the linguistic compartments into which we categorize aspects of our human orgnaism. At least now, Western models of medicine can comfortably conceptualize linkages between organs and "systems" (cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, limbic, digestive, and so on) usually treated as discrete entities. We now feel more in tune with talking about feedback loops between our conveniently labeled systems and their interactions with our psychological and emotional states. Candace Pert's book, Molecules of Emotion, was a groundbreaking account of her work in what became the new field of "PIN". Six years ago, a wizardly cybernetician friend by the name of Stafford Beer recommended that I read her book, and a quick search for "psychoneuroimmunology" on Google at one point recently yielded 28,300 sites. Doubtless these included a lot of duplications and dead-end references, not to mention hosts of book-floggers, but there was still enough verbiage incorporoating the new paradigm floating around to consume the most dedicated air-ware fanatic.
The site that led the list when I searched was for "The PsychoNeuroImmunology
Research Society" at http://www.pnirs.org/is, calling itself "an international organization for researchers in a number of scientific and medical disciplines, including pyschology, neurosciences, immunology, pharmacology, psychiatry, behavioral medicine, infectious diseases, and rheumatology, who are interested in interactions between the nervous system and the immune system, and the relationship between behavior and health." Rather a self-reflexicve feedback loop with more a splintering of categories than an actual breaking down of the tradional -ologies.
John's editorial in CJH took the paradigm even further by suggesting that herbalists have an important part to play by helping people to "weave people, science, nature and life into a tapestry that is evolving and sustaining."
I feel a need to push it further by saying: the tapestry is already there. Our species is -- has always been -- part of what gets called the feedback loop. It is still our human pattern of behaviour to say: WE will weave the tapestry. WE will take care of the forests. In other words: WE still see ourselves as separate, as caretakers, as stewards, as users, as researchers -- whatever the noun might be that we use to designate ourselves as the supreme beings, the experts, the fixers, when what might be needed more urgently is to begin to see how we as creatures fit into what we call the tapestry, how all the parts are already woven together, and then learn how to act or better yet "not act" in ways that do not rupture and ruin the whole.
The passage in the Suzuki/Grady book that struck me with awe, is a description of Donald Culross Peattie's work in the lab (more than a half-century ago now) to understand chlorophyll -- the life-blood of so much of the plant world -- and to synthesize it. What he discovered was that the resulting green substance was not only in feel and appearance the very replica albeit differently coloured of human blood, but that its chemical composition differed from human blood by one crucial element particular to each. This may be old hat to a biochemist, but for a reader with a sense of kinship with non-human life forms, the implications are resounding and far more concrete than metaphor. When I locate my copy of the book, I'll revisit the passage, try to recapture the impact it had on first reading, and just let the image sink in all over again.
2 comments:
Dear Atalanta -
This turns out to be more closely related to your own post than I had imagined ... responding to your musings on our interconnectedness. Thank you for this site!
Thank you for telling me about Nancy J. Turner’s recent book The Earth’s Blanket! How wonderfully ironic that you, in Ontario, should be the first to find the most current writings of a university teacher in my home town, a person whose writings about native plants in this region I have known for some time and respect greatly . In The Earth’s Blanket Nancy Turner pays fitting tribute to the many First Nations elders and wisdom keepers who have been her teachers. She writes about the greater meanings their lessons and, particularly, stories have given her. I can imagine your continuing delight at the way this book weaves storytelling with plant wisdom, cosmic truths with language and history.
So in return I wanted to share with you my most recent Tree Wisdom-related reading: Vedic Ecology: Practical Wisdom for Surviving the 21st Century by Ranchor Prime. I think I read an intriguing excerpt from this book in a yoga magazine because I went so far as to request an interlibrary loan which finally - nearly one year later - all the way from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. It turns out that this book was originally published in 1992 as Hinduism and Ecology. Except for a new chapter based on an interview with Vandana Shiva, the “new” book seems very similar to the original, so you could have a good browse yourself at www.fov.org.uk (link = Hinduism & Ecology).
But what made me want to tell you about this book is the sophisticated Tree Consciousness Ranchor Prime and his subjects describe. They clearly say that people, trees and water resources were integrally interrelated in traditional India, and they praise Gandhi’s great efforts to reinvent “village economics” in this context . Here’s an inspiring quotation from Banwari, “editor of Jansata, a Hindi daily newspaper published in Delhi”:
The Hindu idea is that this whole world is a forest. To keep this world as it is we have to keep the world forest intact .... the forest symbolizes the divine attribute of Totality, which combines all life forms together in a single, interdependent whole.
Banwari also says
Hindu tradition describes three basic categories of forest. One is shirvan, the forest that provides your prosperity. Then there is tapovan, where you can contemplate as the sages did and seek after truth. The third is mahavan – the great natural forest where all species of life find shelter. Each of these categories must be preserved.
Ranchor Prime describes the work of Sevak Sharan, a retired elecrical engineer and naturalist who is restoring the forests of Krishna’s legendary home territory around the town of Vrindavan. Varied forests were essential to the vital villages of traditional India, according to Sevak, as was rainwater harvest using tanks and gullies.
Between the villages there would be three types of forest patches: forest sanctuaries, dense woodland and sacred groves. The first type was called raksha, “sanctuary”. This would be left entirely to itself – no human would enter it – as a sanctuary for wildlife. ... Dense forest was called ghana. In this forest the natural arrangement of trees and plants would not be unnecessarily disturbed, but people could go there to collect dry wood, leaves, forest produce and a limited amount of green timber. As care for this woodland was the responsibility of the village communities, and as their livelihood depended on it, they naturally conserved it from generation to generation. ...The grove, called vankhandi, is often of one particular species, for example mango, specially planted by the villagers. These groves were usully composed of fruit trees and maintained by the villages as places for religious observances, festivals and recreation.
Don’t these words describe a refreshing reverence for Tree Beings as well as practical visions of how we humans can and have successfully co-existed with them?
i page 23
ii page 24
iii pages 32-33
It has been weeks now since your most insightful response, Duende, and although I immediately checked out the web site you referred to (and probably also printed from it, though now I'd have to hunt even for that)I have -- obviously -- been away from this site and am only now considering what next to post. I have also just located a copy of Ranchor Prime's book on abebooks.com (the public library system here does not have a copy, not even at the Reference Library) and ordered it, along with two other excellent books. One of these was highly recommended to me by a new friend who is a retired forester, tree advocate, and promoter of community forestry: "Seeing the Forest among the Trees: the Case for Wholistic Forest Use", by Herb Hammond (another of your amazing West Coast friend-of-trees), published by Polestar (Vancouver) in 1991. The other book now on order is "Make Prayers to the Raven: a Koyukon View of the Northern Forest", by Richard K. Nelson, published by University of Chicago Press in 1983 (pbk. 1986). Both of these I currently have on loan from the public library, but each of them seems well worth having on hand, the former for its wealth of information on caring for forests, the latter for the richness of the sensibility of the Koyukon people themselves, for whom forest is a world that incorporates all those living in it and with it.
Living in the city, on one hand, and immersing myself in "forest matters" on the other, creates a certain tension or maybe "dynamic" is the better word. The temptation to escape from the city and find another place to live among the trees somewhere (my forester friend lives on the edge of the Hockley Valley, at the western tip of the Oak Ridges Moraine, where the view of distant hills gives the illusion of the natural world virtually unmolested) is constantly vying with a sense of duty. Remaining in the smoggy environs of concrete, glass, and pressured people, where almost daily, trees are toppled to make way for another mega-house or condo-blight, seems the only way to work towards the city as a more forested place where people might be able to live and work more happily. I honestly don't know if I have the energy, and right now I'm experiencing profound resistance to anything to do with city life even while recognizing that it's the place where I live, that there is really no escape for me except to the shelter of the tall Norway spruce in the wild space behind my house. Maybe all the reading will lead to an answer, or an inspiration, but for now, I'm just listening to the rain.
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