windthread

there are more of these droplets today.  Smaller than that first one.   And there was an ant,  the smallest ant i have ever seen,  just well,  smaller than any ant imaginable,  busy.  Maybe the droplets  are to attract the ants?,  as with Peonies????  but there was just one,  but then,  it is late in the day.  The bloom remains very silent.  Closed.  Still.   I sit next to it.  Still.

 

Reading the book i understood that these drawn Eyes i am drawn to represent to me the Entity of the Whole that we are here…the Consciousness,  the Awareness,  the well,  Entity of the Whole that we are.  Earth, sand, insects, plants, animals, attending microbes and deep earth creatures, birds, lizards, snakes,  that which is called Air,  that which is called Weather,  water both from under and over this Space,  the Consciousness that responds to Moon and Sun,  to Season.   i am included in animals because that is what i am.   i accept this as the truth.  it is the truth.  And stones.  Rocks.  which are Earth too,  but changed Earth.  There is great great comfort  in these words.  A quiet.

 

And from the book.

"As with all self-organized systems, plants continually monitor their internal and external worlds for informational/functional shifts in the relevant fields.  If they are focusing externally, once they note a shift, they work to identify its nature and meaning, and its likely impact on their functioning.  Then they craft a response.

Plants continually monitor every aspect of their environment:  spatial orientation; presence, absence, and identity of neighbors;  disturbance: competition; predation, whether microbial, insect , or animal;  composition of atmosphere; composition of soil; water presence, location, and amount;  degree of incoming light; propagation, protection, and support of offspring  (yes, they recognize kin); communications from other plants in their ecorange;  biological oscillations, including circadian;  and not only their own health but the health of the ecorange in which they live.  As Anthony Trewavas comments,  this "continually and specifically changes the information spectrum" to which plants are attending.

That's a brilliant phrase, "information spectrum, " and its deeper meanings deserve to be teased out a bit.  It reflects the truth that every living organism is immersed in a bath of sensory inflows every moment of their lives.  Every part of those sensory inflows contain depth information about what is going on around that organism;  the sensory inflows are in fact encodings of meanings, communications from the complexity of the scenario in which the organism is embedded.  And the use of the word "spectrum" is, well, brilliant.  Just as light can be separated into a spectrum of colors,  each with different impacts,  so too the bath of sensory inflows is a spectrum of simultaneously occuring informational inputs, each of which can be teased apart and focused upon should the part of the organism that gates sensory data indicate it is important enough to do so.  In one of his most insightful statements, Trewavas comments that, in general,  "There is no unique speparate response to each signal in this complex  [of informational inflows] but merely a response issued from an integration of all environmental and internal information. "  In other words,  unless there is an informational inflow that the plant's sensory gating mechanisms identify as crucial to respond to.

such as extensive leaf damage from spider mites which will stimulate the plant to focus more specifically

the plant normally does not use any form of linear cause and effect processing of data.  It integrates the entire informational inflow that surrounds it into one holistic gestalt at each and every moment in time and generates a response that comes out of a unique,  and very important , state of being.

~and the next is in italics

It is actually a kind of dreaming                                                                                                                                            And not the kind of dreaming you are thinking about either                                                                                   But a different kind of dreaming entirely                                                                                                                         (It's like the dreaming you do when you are reading this book)                                                                              That dreaming is the central core of what this book is about.                                                                                 It is the kind of dreaming that Goethe was engaged in.                                                                                               When he learned about plant metamorphosis                                                                                                                 And Luther Burbank when he looked deep into the plant                                                                                        and saw every environment its ancestors had ever lived in                                                                                      And the same kind that Barbara McClintock did                                                                                                           when she watched individual chromosomes in corn shift their structure                                                           It is the same state of mind that writers enter when they create worlds                                                              It is also how Gaia dreams the world into being                                                                                                            And it is the kind of dreaming you can do, too, if you wish,                                                                                     If you decide to walk through the doors of perception                                                                                               And find out what is on the other side "