I’m currently reading Raven Biology of Plants and Always Coming Home (Le Guin). I’m also committing myself to (tree) walks and activities even when no one joins. I’m also taking a mushroom course and going on walks trying to find mushrooms. And also looking for a job that’s fulfilling and purposeful. There are like a million things I can learn and read and do, and then I also have to do the dishes.
Stedano Mancuso, botanist and author of books such as The Nation of Plants. Working on plant intelligence.
Joanna Macy, “a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learnings from six decades of activism.” She also passed away this year.
I was near the Schoorlse Duinen last weekend with a beach moment on Saturday (despite my Anakin feelings about sand). Jellyfish were washed up on the beach and I poked one on the bell (the bells don’t sting - Finding Nemo). I also picked up and inspected a few hermit crabs that were getting pushed around by the waves, then put them back into the waves to be pushed around some more.
One thing I learnt about nature in the past few years is that you can touch most things without harming it or yourself. I’ve been touching and stroking and poking and feeling a bunch more stuff. It’s a good time!
I also finally figured out how pine cones work and found (and ate) a couple pine nuts. I’ve been nibbling on more random things recently. A rose petal here, a dandelion leaf there. We’ve bred a lot of the “adult flavours” out of our crops I think. So far the pine nuts and a mulberry have been my favourite finds. Singular mulberry because I wasn’t tall enough to reach any others.
Closed tabs
I’m a bit of a tab hoarder. Ever so often I go and close a bunch of them. Here is a collection of closed tabs from today.
Reimagined futures ReImagined Futures is a systems change consultancy dedicated to enabling systemic impact and bioregional transformation through deep collaboration.
Go Green Routes Its multidisciplinary consortium of 40 organisations is pairing participatory approaches and citizen science with Big Data analyses and digital innovation to co-create “Urban Well-being Labs” in six “Cultivating Cities”: Burgas (Bulgaria), Lahti (Finland), Limerick (Ireland), Tallinn (Estonia), Umeå (Sweden) and Versailles (France).
To Read
The life of Leaf Book by Steven Vogel. This Steven worked on biomechanics. I found him through googling the function of lobed leaves > heat dissipation and perhaps to allow light to pass through to lower branches.
I’ve also been doing these monthly posts of Instagram since 2019 that I think I’ll migrate here too? Still figuring out the details and formatting.
H is for Hawk
Lastly, I’ve been reading H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald. It is intense and I cannot read many chapters in one sitting. I’m about a third in, and I’m hoping it’s a hopeful book. I’m in a period of my life where I feel unmoored, and I’m hoping 2025 is a hopeful year. I’m more able to articulate what my media taste is. I like stories that are hopeful, where the world is mostly filled with kindness. Where characters are figuring out how they feel about the world and who they are and where they belong.
This book is part of the Alveus Book Club. Since December I have been consuming content from Alveus Sanctuary and forming some sort of parasocial relationship with their founder Maya 😅 A third inspirational, a third self-doubt, a third cute animals.
