The Golden Thread

In the evenings we usually go for a big ride. Sometimes only for a mile or less, and sometimes up to five miles. Lately, while on the ride, I have been finding myself identifying wildflowers along the roadside. The beauty of the flowers is hard to resist. I bet you I've learned well over fifteen plant names in the past two weeks. Plants that I've walked and driven by hundreds of times but paid no attention to.

When this first started I was surprised, but then I decided to just go with it. And throughout this process there has been this voice inside my head saying: you've got to check out The Lost Language of Plants, you've got to check out the The Lost Language of Plants. I let it be. I'm reading another book anyway. Then this interview with the author made its way into my email inbox.

This paragraph out of the interview caught my attention:

I never have been happy in a box. Life is not a box (nor a box of cherries either). Life is some living thing that all of us are involved in. So, I dive in to whatever captures my attention. I immerse myself in it, learn to think through that field of knowledge. I have a sense of the book that is calling to me to be written. There is a feel to truth and I follow that feeling, what the poet William Stafford called the golden thread that all writers must follow for their work to be real. That thread, that feeling, leads to everything I study, often through processes that are not linear and that defy rational explanation. I just happen to stop to get gas at this gas station rather than that one and someone there just happens to drop a book in front of me that just happens to be related to what I am immersed in at that moment. I always know something about the topic I am going into but what I know and what is ultimately true are often different. I always learn as I go. Following golden threads is the most interesting kind of education I am aware of. There are no discipline boundaries with golden threads, interrelated data streams from diverse fields are the norm.

I will be checking out the The Lost Language of Plants soon

Reading This Morning

I usually wake up around 5:00 AM in the morning. What I usually do before everyone gets up is read, journal for the Kamana program, and sometimes go sit quiely in the woods to listen to the birds greet the sunrise with their songs.

This morning I ran across a few interesting things that I know I'll eventually use. So I want to write them out here for future use.

Right now I'm reading Animal Tracking Basics , by Jon Young and Tiffany Morgan. This is really an amazing book for anyone that wants to get started in tracking and naturalist skills. It's full of exercises, stories, quotes by experienced naturalists and trackers, and neat facts like the one I'm going to post below.

Here is the fact by Daniel Gray: "Did you know that kestrels can spot voles while flying over a field by using an infrared scope mechanism in their eyes to pick up the lines of the animals' urine along their most used tunnels."

And also this quote by Tom Brown Jr. out of Animal Tracking Basics: "Not only is an animal a instrument played by the landscape, but the landscape is an instrument played by the animal. Thus the spheres of animal, plant, and land come together to form a whole."

While journaling the Nightshade plant family for the Kamana program I ran across this little tid bit of information out of Tom Elpel's book, Botany in a Day: "Our European heritage of witches flying on broomsticks comes from these hallucinogenic plants. An ointment containing Atropa and Hyosyamus was rubbed on the broomstick then absorbed through the vaginal tissues by 'riding' the broom"(Emboden)