Waiting for the plum to drop.

Apparently there is now a whole new, doing nothing, movement.

Having been told to make the most of every second to maximise our potentiality, having been told to reach for the stars, push the envelope, count every step , declutter our souls, curate our on line lives to reshape the paradigm and monetise our influencer profiles, it seems we should now do nothing at all and actually relax.

What a novel idea! What a surprise to find out that spending your time bombarded by social media, bad news stories and trivia doesn’t make you as happy as staring at the sky or watching the fruit ripen!

I admit to fretting about being unable to reach all the plums on the tree. Fretted about them going to waste, fretted about the  falling fruit annoying my neighbours. Then it rained, the wind blew and the plums fell onto the grass of their own volition. They were perfectly ripe and deliciously mealy . I picked them up, put them in a cup and on Sunday I will turn them into a crumble .

All I needed to do was relax and wait, as all good things come to she who waits, even if they have to drop directly onto my head!

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Thanks to Edge of Humanity wordpress

 

Pavlov’s plants.

I like listening to the radio in French because I cant really understand it. I like reading in Spanish for the same reason. I like living surrounded by marvellous unfathomable bugs and silent fungi because I can just look and admire and cannot communicate with them.

Scientists have recently found that a plant which turns each day to a regularly timed source of bright light, which is also accompanied by the gentle blowing of a fan, will also turn to the blowing of the fan when there is no reward of light. Pavlov first proved that a dog rewarded with food when a bell rang would, salivate for food as soon as the bell rang, whether there was food or not, thus proving dogs could learn. This new research shows that plants can do the same thing.

Pavlov’s name has gone down in history for his work with dogs. The researcher who found this extraordinary evidence is Monica Gagliano . I think we will have to work on a catchy link for her second name, any idea?   https://www.monicagagliano.com.

The intelligence of plants is just beginning to be appreciated and is an amazing field.

It is just possible that in fact  I speak plant and the reason that all the other languages dont make sense is that I am tuned into a very different wave length. What do you think?

 

Sky lace.

The swallows and martins are almost gone.

Over the garden they have poured in their hundreds, companionably calling as they weave their way to far away Africa.

Ted Hughes  wrote that they were stitching the sky and so I have always thought of them, but there were such thick clouds of them last week that I thought maybe they were lace making against the clouds, pulling delicate nets of fine worked lace  behind them.

Our house in on a migration route from Europe to Africa and every year the birds pour over us. Swallows and martins, chasing hobbies, red kites, honey busards, even the odd osprey and flock of blue, blue bee eaters stream over, sometimes high and sometimes low enough to feed from the insects rising from our garden.

The image of the fine lace woven by  the flight  patterns of wings for an instant and then rewoven, reassembled and pulled delicately across the whole world amuses me, something so much lighter and freer than a net : starting in the barns and eves of Europe and then being pulled by the interlacing wings all the way to Africa, a world unified  and beautified by birds!

Touch

Being alive is a complicated thing.

Our understanding of existence comes from the senses, and our communication of it comes through language. Language can be read, all safely and quietly separate: writer and reader apart; or it can be spoken, speaker and listener together, so dangerously prone to misunderstanding, mishearing and misspeaking.

We understand by seeing. We can capture wonderful images with technology and can share the experience. Just as with the printed word, the image and the viewer are safely separated . When there is no technology between us, we try to understand each other by looking at one another, by reading faces and posture and just like with language we often misread one another.

Touch is a sense so fraught with potential misunderstanding that we restrict it to pets, petals and the smooth, smooth coolness of a stripped stump: smoke grey and strong, a tactile brush that cannot possibly be misunderstood.