Curious Stillness of Autumn

"The wind swept down the rows, next morning,
swaying the branches of the trees,
and the windfalls dropped to
the ground with soft thuds.
Frost was in the wind,
and between gusts the curious
stillness of autumn."

- John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

"Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man’s beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.'"

- Richard Adams (1920 - 2016)
Watership Down

Myconeurological Networks

"I believe that the mycelium operates at a level of complexity that exceeds the computational powers of our most advanced supercomputers. I see the mycelium as the Earth’s natural Internet, a consciousness with which we might be able to communicate. Through cross-species interfacing, we may one day exchange information with these sentient cellular networks. Because these externalized neurological nets sense any impression upon them, from footsteps to falling tree branches, they could relay enormous amounts of data regarding the movements of all organisms through the landscape. A new bioneering science could be born, dedicated to programming myconeurological networks to monitor and respond to threats to environments. Mycelial webs could be used as information platforms for mycoengineered ecosystems."

- Paul Stamets (1955 - )
Mycelium Running:
How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World

Unfelt Motion

"Suddenly the wind ceased. The air seemed motionless around us. We were off, going at the speed of the air-current in which we now lived and moved. Indeed, for us there was no more wind; and this is the first great fact of spherical ballooning. Infinitely gentle is this unfelt motion forward and upward. The illusion is complete: it seems not to be the balloon that moves, but the earth that sinks down and away.

…

Villages and woods, meadows and chateaux, pass across the moving scene, out of which the whistling of locomotives throws sharp notes. These faint, piercing sounds, together with the yelping and barking of dogs, are the only noises that reach one through the depths of the upper air. The human voice cannot mount up into these boundless solitudes. Human beings look like ants along the white lines that are highways; and the rows of houses look like children's playthings. "

- Alberto Santos-Dumont (1873 - 1932)
My Air-Ships

Taoist Wisdom (To Get Us Through the Day)

"There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. 'Such bad luck,' they said sympathetically. 'Maybe,' the farmer replied.

 The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. 'How wonderful,' the neighbors exclaimed. 'Maybe,' replied the old man.

 The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. 'Maybe,' answered the farmer.

 The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son's leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out.

 'Maybe,' said the farmer."

The Story of the Chinese Farmer
As interpreted by Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Acausal Order

"If you marry the ordered to the
chaos you produce the divine child,
the supreme meaning beyond
meaning and meaninglessness."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

"In 1952, through his collaboration with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung argued that there existed a principle of acausal orderedness that underlay such "meaningful coincidences," which he called synchronicity. He claimed that under certain circumstances, the constellation of an archetype led to a relativization of time and space, which explained how such events could happen. This was an attempt to expand scientific understanding to accommodate events such as his visions of 1913 and 1914."

- Sonu Shamdasani (1962 - )
The Red Book: Liber Novus

Constructs of Imagination

 

"Perception is not a
window on objective reality.
It is an interface that hides objective
reality behind a veil of helpful icons.
...

Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality and is properly described as a network of conscious agents. To earn its keep, conscious realism must do serious work ahead. It must ground a theory of quantum gravity, explain the emergence of our spacetime interface and its objects, explain the appearance of Darwinian evolution within that interface, and explain the evolutionary emergence of human psychology.

...

...
What we call ‘reality,’ consists of
an elaborate papier-mâché construction of
imagination and theory filled in between
a few iron posts of observation."

- Donald Hoffman (1955 - )

The Case Against Reality

Stones and Trees

"Believe me, for I know,
you will find something far
greater in the woods than in books.
Stones and trees will teach you
that which you cannot learn
from the masters."

- Bernard of Clairvaux (c.1090 - 1153)
The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux