Resolutions

Good morning 2013. Resolution #1 - Send birthday cards 

Resolution #2 - Fly more

Resolution #3 - Less screen time

So, I read this morning.

Quotes from Terrance McKenna's Food of the Gods

Permaculture Permeates:

An Insight into the Male-Female Way of Thinking and Communicating OR Why Seed Saving is Sacred:

"Women, the gatherers in the Archaic hunter-gatherer equation, were under much greater pressure to develop language than were their male counterparts. Hunting, the prerogative of the larger male, placed a premium on strength, stealth, and stoic waiting. The hunter was able to function quite well on a very limited number of linguistic signals, as is still the case among hunting peoples such as the !Kung or the Maku.

For gatherers, the situation was different. Those women with the largest repertoire of communicable images of foods and their sources and secrets of preparation were unquestionably placed in a position of advantage. Language may well have arisen as a mysterious power possessed largely by women - women who spent much more of their waking time together - and, usually, talking - than did men, women who in all societies are seen as group-minded, in contrast to the lone male image, which is the romanticized version of the alpha male of the primate troop. 

The linguistic accomplishments of women were driven by a need to remember and describe to each other a variety of locations and landmarks as well as numerous taxonomic and structural details about plants to be sought or avoided. The complex morphology of the natural world propelled the evolution of language toward modeling of the world beheld. To this day a taxonomic description of a plant is a Joycean thrill to read: 'Shrub 2 to 6 feet in height, glabrous throughout. Leaves mostly opposite, some in threes or uppermost alternate, sessile, linear - lancoelate or lanceolate, acute or acuminate. Flowers solitary in axils, yellow, with aroma, pedicellate. Calyx campanulate, petals soon caducous, obovate...' and so on for many lines.

The linguistic depth women attained as gatherers eventually led to a momentous discovery: the discovery of agriculture. I call it momentous because of its consequences. Women realized that they could simply grow a restricted number of plants. As a result, they learned the needs of only those few plants, embraced a sedentary lifestyle, and began to forget the rest of nature they had once known so well. 

At that point the retreat from the natural world began, and the dualism of humanity versus nature was born. As we will soon see, one of the places where the old goddess culture died, Catar Huyuk (pronunciation emphasises not noted) in present-day Anatolian Turkey, is the very place where agriculture may have first arisen. At places like Catal Huyuk and Jericho, humans and their domesticated plants and animals became for the first time physically and psychologically separate from the life of untamed nature and the howling unknown. Use of hallucinogens can only be sanctioned in hunting and gathering societies. When agriculturists use the plants, they are unable to get up at dawn the morning after and go hoe the fields. At that point, corn and grain become gods - gods that symbolize domesticity and hard labor. These replace the old goddesses of plant-induced ecstasy.

Agriculture brings with it the potential for overproduction, which leads to excess wealth, hoarding, and trade. Trade leads to cities; cities isolate their inhabitants from the natural world. Paradoxically, more efficient utilization of plant resources through agriculture led to a breaking away from the symbiotic relationship that had bound human beings to nature. I do not mean this metaphorically. The ennui of modernity is the consequences of a disrupted quasi-symbiotic relationship between ourselves and Gaian nature. Only a restoration of this relationship in some form is capable of carrying us into a full appreciation of our birthright and sense of ourselves as complete human beings."

Why I Choose Fungi As My Key:

"I believe that a long history of shamanic usage is the first seal of approval that one must look for when selecting a substance for its possible effects on personal growth. And if a plant has been used for thousands of years, one can also be fairly confident that it does not cause tumors or miscarriages or carry other unacceptable physical risks."

Permaculture or Die:

"Go green or die"