Nietzsche on Walking

There is Nietzsche in the Air…

I would walk for six or eight hours a day, composing thoughts that I would later jot down on paper.

That summer, he composed The Wanderer and His Shadow — the third and final installment in his aphoristic roadmap to becoming oneself — almost entirely on foot, filling six small notebooks with penciled-in peripatetic thoughts. In it, he considered “the wanderings of the reason and the imagination” by which one becomes a truly free spirit — wanderings that, for him, took place with the mind afoot across mountains and meadows. Long before modern science shed light on the role of the hippocampus in how landscapes shape us, Nietzsche became himself in his wanderings.
Nietzsche on Walking and Creativity – The Marginalian

Kids Walk to Dunkin

Connecticut Parents Arrested for Letting Kids, Ages 7 and 9, Walk to Dunkin’ Donuts.
Kids Walk to Dunkin

My parents would surely have been arrested by those cops on the many, many occasions that they let me roam unsupervised at a young age. And I am so glad my parental units allowed me that space. The funny thing is that, by many metrics, today is a safer environment.

Social Club

In the evenings I sometimes pass a hotel, located on the corner of an intersection. Large trees line the street and three of them stand in front of the hotel. Birds congregate in those particular trees, as one can hear because they are the only ones from which their chatter spills. There are lights mounted on the hotel that shine against the warm yellow walls, creating a pleasant indirect light. Birds pick those three trees to meet in, nightly, as if they were a public house for birds. And why wouldn’t city birds pick three pleasantly lit trees to meet in, after a long day of searching for food. The Three Tree Social Club for Birds.

The Wood Wide Web

Still reading Ways of Being, by James Bridle. My copy of the book is already full of sentences and paragraphs I highlighted. Sometimes I am only able to read a single page because I need to reflect on the information I just received. I need to let it ferment a little before I can go on. Those are my favorite books. :-)

I learned that The Wood Wide Web was the headline on the cover of the August, 1997, issue of Nature magazine.

Network Theory, which followed right on the heals of the invention of the World Wide Web, enabled us to SEE such networks in nature. We humans use a model through which we view the world. If our model doesn’t acknowledge something we will not see that thing. It will remain in our blind spot. Once we had the World Wide Web and Network Theory, we were able to see similar networks all around us, such as forests and the fungal strands, the mycelium, that connect the trees in a symbiotic relationship.

Remarkable, but not surprising, that we needed to invent a technology in order to see and understand the same principle at work in nature.

Ways of Being is a great book for anyone who enjoyed The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate by Peter Wohlleben or The Overstory, by Richard Powers. A great trilogy.

I can get behind this.

Mimosa

The German language has the phrase empfindlich wie eine Mimose sein – to be as sensitive as a Mimosa. This plant is known by many common names including sensitive plant, humble plant, shameplant, and touch-me-not. Find out more about the Mimosa plant on Wikipedia.

James Bridle recounts an experiment, also mentioned in the above-linked Wikipedia article, by researcher Monica Gagliano.

…she devised a simple mechanism: a cup attached to a vertical rail which, when released, would drop a mimosa in its pot exactly fifteen centimetres onto a foam pad. The soft thonk of this landing was enough to surprise the plant into closing up its leaves, but not enough to damage it: a scientifically precise stimulus, with a measurable, ecologically relevant response. Mimosa leaves have small hydraulic structures at their base which, by pumping or draining water, allow them to expand and contract, forcing the leaves to curl. The curling is understood to be a response to a threat: either from animal predation, or excessive heat and evaporation.

and

She kept dropping the plants, over and over again, up to sixty times a session, over multiple sessions. Three hundred and sixty drops a day: a marathon of bumps and shocks. Thonk thonk thonk. It transpired that it only took a few drops – as few as four or five – for the plants to realize that there was no threat, and that it was safe to keep their leaves open (a side test, involving a different stimulus which still elicited the closing response, revealed that they weren’t simply exhausted by the activity). By the end of the sixty-drop sessions, the plants were entirely unbothered by the drop: they had learned to ignore it.

Here is where it becomes interesting:

Gagliano and her colleagues rested and then retested individual mimosas, demonstrating that they retained over time the memory of the drop, and their associated change in behaviour. Mimosas – and, we must now understand, all plants – are not machines. They are more than the sum of a set of pre-programmed actions and reactions. They learn, remember and change their behaviour in response to the world.

Excerpt from Ways of Being by James Bridle