Green Tribe of Belonging

 Several folks have told me they liked the story about lying down in the field in my last post. Lying in the grass is something many of us have done and benefited from! I'm reminded of another time, quite different, when I was lying down in a field with a bunch of others in England. Twice before I retired, I went on Sacred Site Tours in southern England, led by a friend from North Carolina. Each lasted a couple weeks, and we stayed in thatched cottages around the English countryside, visiting Stonehenge, Avebury, and a number of other places known for their history as sacred sites. Early in the first tour, we learned that there had been crop circles appearing near us. I don't believe our leader had included anything about crop circles in our agenda, but she looked up an expert on the phenomenon and hired her to be our guide to at least one circle. What an adventure it turned out to be! The guide turned out to be wonderful. None of us had any experience with crop circles, nor re...

 I've been musing on the kinds of things that demand our attention most. If you're a human being, your attention may go to different things than if you are an animal or a plant. Or a mushroom. I do think that all life forms have awareness. Our human brains have evolved so that anything that seems like danger grabs us quickly, not so different from our animal relatives. This is because when early humans lived in a wilder, more natural place, our very survival depended upon recognizing threats and responding to them right away: a saber tooth tiger lurking at the edge of the clearing or a bad storm threatening. So we seem to be programmed to respond to negative things in our world for good reasons: safety and self-preservation. It is no accident that threats are so powerful in our minds. Fast forward to the 21st century, especially if we are hooked up at all to news of the world beyond our front door, and there are triggers everywhere. Watching the news is enough to give us nightm...

It's been too long since I've made a post here. It's probably because I needed awhile to catch up after a long stretch away. But even though I haven't sat down to write, there is one thing that has me fascinated. It's the whole phenomenon of recognition. Here we are on this planet, among thousands or millions of our own species.  And the members of a species look pretty much alike. Yet we can recognize each other easily if we have any acquaintance at all. It seems a miracle. We're just so used to it that we don't notice how remarkable it is.  Take sheep, for instance. They all look pretty much alike to us. But if we were sheep, we would recognize our family members, our neighbors, the sheep from across the barnyard, everyone! How amazing! In the case of humans, we take for granted that all of us look pretty different, and we easily recognize people with whom we've had previous contact. To a sheep, though, we probably look pretty much the same, unless our...