Impressions
This morning I wanted to identify some of the wildflowers in my yard.
In college, I took a course over the summer called Plant Taxonomy. My instructor was the Chair of the Biology Department at the time. Because the course was adjusted from a full semester to a summer session, she referred to it as “Plant Tax on Crack”. It was the best summer I’ve ever had, following her with my classmates as she waved a stick in front of her to catch spider webs, whilst repeating the Latin names of plants as she saw them. Much of our classroom time was spent in the woods, the mountains, or the sand hills of Georgia. We learned, collected, and because it was such a small group, it felt much more intimate than our regular courses.
The professor’s overall aura is a zephyr, her voice is powerful but also gentle, it doesn’t boom but it projects. Her hair, thick, strawberry-blondish-brown, and shoulder length with lots of volume. She wore glasses and her clothes always appeared to be a natural fabric (I have vivid memories of her rocking a pair of cargo pants on multiple occaisions). I remember sitting in admiration every lecture I had with her. She had funny quips and mneumonics for memorizing plants. She always remembered the scientific names but would sometimes blank on common names. I’ve carried that wisdom with me but I haven’t really been using it, so its withering away. Which is why I decided this morning to go out and ID some plants. I went looking for Early Violets (Viola palmata), as to not overwhelm myself by trying to identify everything I walked by.
My intention is to get back in to pressing plants, which is an art and also a very useful way of cataloguing a plant collection. Plants that have gone extinct are preserved in herbariums around the world thanks to pressed plant specimens. All you have to do is take a specimen and press between two pieces of cardboard (preferably lined with parchment paper), which is cinched down by straps around a rectangular frame made of wood. It basically looks like wood lasagna. Theres a trick to getting the plant arranged properly so that you can see the leaves and the petals. You usually have to curve the stem and open the flower back up before you can press. Sometimes you’ve got one hand still in the press as you close it and almost every time you feel unsure about how it will turn out.
This morning, I crouched down into a squat to take a closer look at the ground. I noticed two ants following a caterpillar of some kind, or maybe it was just some sort of worm. Whatever it was, the situation did not look good for it. I watched as these two big black ants used their mandibles to take turns pinching the juicy grub. Finally it coiled into a ball in what appeared to be its final move.
Biologists observe; its one of the things we do best. In order to ever form a hypothesis, you must observe. Its the first step of the scientific method, after all. We usually don’t intervene, even when it seems like there’s something we could do to help, and especially in a scenario of predator versus prey. Predators need to eat too, otherwise they starve to death and, to me, that is just as bad as being eaten alive. Finding an injured animal alone is perhaps a different thing all together, but you can’t spell ‘survival of the fittest’ without the word ‘test’.
Even severely dismembered animals are able to survive if the will is there. Its interesting, that. How do some animals seem to have the will power to fight through the most atrocious looking injuries? Is it will power? Is it doing it consciously or is it merely running the programming until hardware completely breaks down? Some of the most inauspicious looking prey animals are able to fight off their attackers. Peculiar.
So lets say I saved the worm. Does it go on to be more capable or less? That’s tough. If we assist the prey animals by eliminating predators, the human population is inundated by ‘pests’. Yet, most people have a hard time with the cruelty that nature sometimes exhibits. We often personify the animals and project our emotions on to them. We do this with just about everything in nature. Even people. Earlier, as I was writing about my professor, I was describing me. The things I notice about her are things for which I have developed a pattern in my mind. The things I like, the things I dislike, that’s all a reflection of me.
Extrapolating further, everything around me is me. I see my reflection in this outer landscape. I see decisions I’ve made that have led me to where I am. I see things I like and things I don’t like, but I only know to look for those things because I have attuned my consciousness to that frequency. Similar to the way I can spot and name plants, I can spot and name emotions, energies, and feelings.
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
