I suspect that it would have been possible to share my experience and learnings with my children in a gentle and coherent manner were I more gentle and coherent.
A mixed bag
All posts in the A mixed bag category
How Lucky Can You Get?
Published July 6, 2016 by Nan MykelMany mature adults who walk slowly, possibly with the aid of a cane, must wonder how others see them. Not me! I know!
This weekend as I was hobbling across Court Street on my way to the “cool” Casa Nueva bar, a little girl about eight stopped me and proffered a quarter in her hand. She asked if I wanted it. I asked if she’d found it and she said no. I asked if it was hers and she said yes, and I thanked her profusely for the offer but suggested she keep it. Did I do right? Isn’t it grand that I don’t have to wonder any more how I’m perceived? Even my best friends won’t tell me…
SO SORRY —
Published June 28, 2016 by Nan MykelI’ve been having insurmountable problems revising “Switch” and then working on it in Word. Maybe when my helper returns from vacation she can help me get the knack but for now I’m just wiping out what I’ve done on Switch and just writing it on Word.
Loren Eiseley Quote
Published June 25, 2016 by Nan Mykel
Creative Commons
It is not because I am filled with obscure guilt that I step gently over, and not upon, an autumn cricket. It is not because of guilt that I refuse to shoot the last osprey from her nest in the tide marsh. I posses empathy; I have grown with man in his mind’s growing. I share that sympathy and compassion which extends beyond the barriers of class and race and form until it partakes of the universal whole. I am not ashamed to profess this emotion, nor will I call it a pathology. Only through this experience many times repeated and enhanced does man become truly human. Only then will his gun arm be forever lowered–“The Lost Notebooks.”
Are Plants Intelligent?
Published June 24, 2016 by Nan MykelAre plants intelligent? New book says yes | Environment | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com › Environment › Conservation
Aug 4, 2015 – A new book, Brilliant Green: the Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, was pubished by a plant neurobiologist (yes, plant neurobiologist), ( …Are plants intelligent? Can they solve problems, communicate, and navigate their surroundings? Or are they passive, incapable of independent action or social behavior?) Philosophers and scientists have pondered these questions since ancient Greece, most often concluding that plants are unthinking and inert: they are too silent, too sedentary — just too different from us. Yet discoveries over the past fifty years have challenged these ideas, shedding new light on the extraordinary capabilities and complex interior lives of plants. (Amazon posting).
Stefano Marcuso, author of Brilliant Green, joined with Elizabeth Van Volkenburgh, an American plant biologist, Rainer Stahlberg, a German plant photobiologist, Eric D. Brenner, an American plant molecular biologist and František Baluška, a Slovak cell biologist to publish an article in 2006, Trends in Plant Science.
The authors contended that ‘the behaviour that plants exhibit is coordinated across the whole organism by some form of integrated signalling, communication and response system … [which] includes long-distance electrical signals, vesicle-mediated transport of auxin in specialised vascular tissues, and the production of chemicals known to be neuronal in animals’.
Michael Pollan, who wrote an article in the New Yorker in Dec. 23, 2013, says for the longest time, even mentioning the idea that plants could be intelligent was a quick way to being labeled “a whacko.” But no more, which might be comforting to people who have long talked to their plants or played music for them.
The new research, he says, is in a field called plant neurobiology — which is something of a misnomer, because even scientists in the field don’t argue that plants have neurons or brains.
“They have analagous structures,” Pollan explains. “They have ways of taking all the sensory data they gather in their everyday lives … integrate it and then behave in an appropriate way in response. And they do this without brains, which, in a way, is what’s incredible about it, because we automatically assume you need a brain to process information.”
And we assume you need ears to hear. But researchers, says Pollan, have played a recording of a caterpillar munching on a leaf to plants — and the plants react. They begin to secrete defensive chemicals — even though the plant isn’t really threatened, Pollan says. “It is somehow hearing what is, to it, a terrifying sound of a caterpillar munching on its leaves.”
Pollan says plants have all the same senses as humans, and then some. In addition to hearing, taste, for example, they can sense gravity, the presence of water, or even feel that an obstruction is in the way of its roots, before coming into contact with it. Plant roots will shift direction, he says, to avoid obstacles.
So what about pain? Do plants feel? Pollan says they do respond to anesthetics. “You can put a plant out with a human anesthetic. … And not only that, plants produce their own compounds that are anesthetic to us.” But scientists are reluctant to go as far as to say they are responding to pain.
How plants sense and react is still somewhat unknown. They don’t have nerve cells like humans, but they do have a system for sending electrical signals and even produce neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin and other chemicals the human brain uses to send signals.
“We don’t know why they have them, whether this was just conserved through evolution or if it performs some sort of information processing function. We don’t know. There’s a lot we don’t know,” Pollan says.
And chalk up another human-like ability — memory….
Pollan describes an experiment done by animal biologist Monica Gagliano. She presented research that suggests the mimosa pudica plant can learn from experience. And, Pollan says, merely suggesting a plant could learn was so controversial that her paper was rejected by 10 scientific journals before it was finally published.
Some of these plant neurobiologists believe that plants are conscious — not self-conscious, but conscious in the sense they know where they are in space … and react appropriately to their position in space.” www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plan
Me and Robert Louis Stevenson
Published June 20, 2016 by Nan Mykel
I guess I was feeling kind of depressed as a senior in high school, because the main lines I recall from Robert Louis Stevenson on RAIN are not those scattered over Google, but the following:
I am like one who has sat alone
all day on a level plain
with drooping head and trailing arms
in a ceaseless pour of rain.
I discovered that, unlike me, he didn’t stay depressed, but went on to his last verse:
And the purple fringes of the rain
Rose o’er the scarlet west,
And the birds sang in the soddened furze,
And my heart sang in my breast.
The Door — Ha Ha on Me!
Published June 16, 2016 by Nan MykelI could write a short book about my foray into blogland! I was dutifully reading my followings today and saw a bunch of doors labeled photo challenge or some such thing. Having just come from entries on statues, I chose a door and wrote something about it (see below). I had been told that on the “Home Page” of Dverse is a calendar of topics for the month. I couldn’t find anything called home page but did find that tonight was something called “poetics,” without explanation on that page that I could see. I don’t know how–maybe it was talk of us writing on “moods” that alerted me I had goofed again. Will return after the July vacation (f I read correctly). (signed with love, Nan the Nerd).
Bi-paneled, it can be opened wide
to let the right ones come inside.
Does not the grandeur of this gate
make you pause, even hesitate?
I want in, but do I dare face
this sacred, special holy place?
A heathen, I would be shut out
even if I should knock and shout.
A great archetype, it stands sedate
against my wisdom come too late.
Denizens From the Past
Published June 14, 2016 by Nan Mykel
We are here, never fear, as close
as our breath, manning the pumping
of our heart, actors on the stage
inside, always present, dragging
our mutual lives behind us
until…until…
Written for Dverse 6/14/2016
Be Very Careful – For Dverse Monday
Published June 13, 2016 by Nan MykelYou can only give from a cup
that is overflowing, so
for Pete’s sake don’t spill it!
If you spilled it we’d both be needy
and thirsty and pitiful. So if you have
a cup that is overflowing, hold onto it
with both hands!
Fathers Day
Published June 13, 2016 by Nan MykelWe can soon anticipate more new fathers than ever, what with the limitations 
on birth control in different states and religions and varying limits on abortions.
Fathers Day is coming up on the calendar and a multitude of new fathers may celebrate that day for the first time. Or not.
An article on the front page of the Athens Ohio Messenger last week
announced the arrest of a young father for physically assaulting his newborn son.
naturalparentsnetwork.com
AFTER FIVE DAYS no one has wanted to read “Fathers Day.” Does that say something about fathers?
NANMYKEL.COM 