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Good Day, Everyone!
I’ve just looked on the calendar of publication dates for Staying Awake, and the next edition will be in your mail box July 8th. I thought to give myself a breather somewhere mid-year. Lo and behold, it’s already here! Many good wishes to all subscribers who are staying awake!Since you’ve not been by my place to visit lately, trees in the back yard drape the creek with rich greens for nearly a quarter acre. Summer breezes sway the trees’ leafy laden arms, and when you listen closely enough, you hear a happy, ‘Hello! We’re here!’ riding on breezes from the other side of the sun.
Okay, I confess, I’ve befriended squirrels that now dine by two’s on the table and chairs set on a shaded patio. Early some mornings, bird chatters and duets are so loud, I grin imagining they’re singing their own outdoor opera. Could nature’s music be more fascinating?
See Things Differently
TED DOT COM hosts a talk given by Janine Benyus, a science writer, who leads us into exploring the discoveries that life in nature, over millennia, has already solved challenges, the solutions of which too many humans have paid little attention.
In recent years, biologists have been asked to sit at design tables with architects, designers, engineers, and others who make our world, to inspire them to see things differently. Some engineers even asked Janine to take them on a nature trip with their design challenge in mind, probing for nature’s champion adapters that have already solved what some engineers had researched for years.
Off to Galapagos went Janine and a group of waste water treatment engineers, some of whom were openly resistant to seeing things differently. At first, the engineers said they already use biomimicry (pronounced ‘by oh mem eh cree’) by applying bacteria to processes for cleaning waste water. But, Janine reminded them that that idea isn’t biomimicry, which is applications inspired from the genius of a living organism; instead, their reference was bio-assisted technology. That’s an old technology called domestication that uses an organism to clean waste water, but leaves toxins behind in the process.
Well, some engineers still weren’t showing much interest until they took a stroll with Janine on the beach. What was the design challenge the engineers had in mind? Scaling. You know that mineral build up that clogs pipes in your home?
Janine asked the engineers what mineral is inside those scales. Calcium carbonate? Yes, they all agreed. So, she picked up a handful of shells from the sandy beach, and said that shells are created with the very same calcium carbonate.
A fascinating tip about shells. A likeness of a shell exudes proteins that create a template over the surface; ions from ocean water cascade upon the template; the elements then crystallize into a shell. Voila! The shell has formed.
One engineer then wondered why shells weren’t huge. How did the process halt before making a shell infinitely large? Because proteins and other elements combined during crystallization create a built in timer. ‘a-Ha!’ Embedded in the evolutionary process is a response that halts the gathering of crystallizing elements.
Not for lack of information, but for lack of integration had the engineers overlooked a shell’s creation, which is very much like scaling in pipes. The engineers had switched lenses to see things differently: getting trained about nature is different than getting trained from nature. Obviously, for some engineers, the switch was profound.
Champion adapters in nature are organisms surviving without ruining environments that sustain them. Biomimicry copies those organisms’ processes, which do not make residues that devastate environments where Earthlings and their offspring live. ¹‚²
Waves of Possibilities
Imagining everything is possible, the future for humans’ offspring is hardly comprehendible. As laudable collaborations and remorseful disruptions quicken and stack closer together, waves of possibilities may swiftly multiply as this era’s global citizenries are coerced to see things differently.
Imagine one country’s foreign policies are another country’s domestic policies. Consider females who intervene before combats begin; who stop wars once they’ve begun; who help rebuild policies for sustainable peace. Further, some women demand release of political prisoners, and keep them out of trouble by putting them into women’s custody.
Imagine nature’s cycles of overlapping one species’ creation with another species’ extinction over centuries and millennia. Consider waves of possibilities when imagining cycles of feminine perspectives eventually balancing cycles of the masculine.Imagine waves of possibilities from which massive groups of single-minded males might remember our gender is not the only one, nor is it the only one that matters.
Three Extraordinary Films
After watching Bill Moyers’ NOW production on Public Broadcasting System in September, 2004, I sensed a nudge to leave the TV on loudly enough to hear any program blurbs during my studies. I had little idea my curiosities about stealthy behaviors in sinister systems of masculine hierarchy were about to converge in themes of three extraordinary films.
Moments later, I knew I had been prepared for a “Surprise!” instance when PBS announced the showing of the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate. I hadn’t viewed the film, and had only a vague sense of the intrigue starring Lawrence Harvey, Janet Leigh, Angela Lansbury, and Frank Sinatra.Almost instantly, I remembered the “Surprise!” moment with a quiet jubilance spreading inside my chest. I halted—I could not have been more surprised!—and closed my eyes, relishing gentle shimmers until they faded.
The Manchurian Candidate alerts us to the 1969 film The Mad Woman of Chaillot starring Katharine Hepburn (among other brilliant actors) as well as the 1941 film Citizen Kane starring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotton.
The messages in those films reveal menacing mind control methods; viperous greed for oil from the highest levels of global masculine hierarchy; and subtle but massive propaganda embedded generation to generation in education, religions and in global media, each systemically generating Earthlings’ convictions—without our knowing—about which I’ve been not so quietly curious.
Gaining information from three extraordinary films stunned me so that I paced the floor many nights not wanting to feel the burst of the bubble I had lived in before September 11, 2001: it was a nauseous burst into healthy skepticism I hadn’t expected to manifest. Then I asked…
What Do You Plan To Do?
There’s a startling line spoken by Hepburn in the movie The Mad Woman of Chaillot. About half-way through the film, her character is asked, ‘What do you plan to do?’ Katharine replies, ‘Don’t anticipate the past.’
Her meaning for not anticipating the past becomes apparent when you know Katharine’s role is that of a woman who had paid no attention to subtle and whelming corruptions in society. However, once she’s been informed of the cruel and greedy men of power, her bubble bursts with tears flowing in remorse. After a moment of composure, she alerts her friends to forthcoming actions they couldn’t have anticipated from her revelation: ‘If they’re greedy, they’re lost!’
I’ll say! And these days, how can we not stay awake to the loud shushing of generational greed underpinning lacks of ethics? If Earthlings aren’t too busy, nor too mongered by fear, nor too poor and hungry, we observe warlords’ échelons lost in their cruelties in religious deceptions on citizenries’ behalf.
Meanwhile, the Sun rotates, giving life to nature while we Earthlings are disparaged and accused as causes of climate changes: erroneous accusations by too many journalists and reporters. Rather, we could be hearing reserved climatologists and astronomers modestly reveal the Sun’s changing energy patterns inducing alterations in natural cycles—the results of which humans haven’t an ounce of hope for stopping. ³
So, as always, I refer again to keeping in mind your presence, the unseen Universal whorl swirling energies all together creating the physical one. Below are some exercises by this author, (a mere trainee who keeps presuming Earthlings’ consciousness), that can be as enlivening as religious fundamentalists are frazzling. You may experiment with this ‘to do’ list, if you wish.
· As you move through your day, intend feeling the barely noticeable bodily sensations as they roll one into the next.
· Exercise being true to yourself by depending on your sensibilities and psychical impressions as easily as you trust the air every moment you breathe.
· Imagine your range of choices at any given moment is already orchestrating a broad context sensed by you.
· Have a ready willingness to express your sensibilities and experiences to those you’ve chosen to surround you.
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