Dear learners,
I am inspired. Thanks Leo.
I am going to write indirectly on the subject of water.
This should appeal to us.
If anyone wants to apply what I write to their concept, theory and
practice of LO that would be nice.
First an essential anecdote.
Mike was a 'genius'. I am recounting one simple moment from about thirteen
years ago, Mike was just lighting the fifth cigarette in an hour.
To watch someone smoke themselves to death is a painful experience, but
that is what Mike was doing.
' Andrew, one day we will learn how to work like plants, my experiments
with the energy production of plants via photosynthesis makes me think
that one day whole cities may be able to run on pure and abundant energy
sources provided by the principles of photosynthesis.'
As I watched Mike inhale the side effects of 'burning leaves' I thought,
how strange people are that they can work and dream of a world free of
pollution yet fill their very own lungs with the stuff of poison. My! how
complex people are, but how adaptive too.
I have been reading Leo's thoughts on rivers. I have also been reading
Lewis Carrol, but in his role as fluid mathematician and not as the author
of weird and 'irrelevant to the real world' fairy tales like Alice in
Wonderland. (He was both a student and later lecturer of mathematics at
Christ Church, Oxford) But then as he himself once said to me, 'Is not
life itself a paradox?' September 1890.
I want first to perform a historico-scientifico-literary 'shake, shake,
shake.'
On February 20, 1835, Darwin had one of those experiences that change the
character of one's whole life work. While exploring the mountains near
Valparaiso, his imagination was drawn to the solid masses of granite
rising up out of the forests "-as if they had been coeval with the very
beginning of the world. The granite fascinated him because it seemed to be
the most basic and fundamental building block in the earth's solid crust.
Penetrating to this basic, geological bedrock seemed to bring one close to
the "classic ground" of creation.
Intercepting citation from Dr. Peter Senge.
"What was background is becoming foreground."
Decode...fasten your seatbelts!
-"However, as he lay peacefully in a forest near Valdivia speculating
about such impressions of nature, he felt the shock waves of a major
earthquake. In the forest the drama of the earthquake was shocking enough,
but when he returned to the port at Talcuhano he was horrified to find
that every dwelling place had been demolished. The earth itself had been
rent by deep crevasses, and the granite rock formations, which formerly
appeared so solid and unshakeable, had been shattered into fragments. -An
earthquake like this at once destroys the oldest associations; the world,
the very emblem of all that is solid, moves beneath our feet like a crust
over a fluid; one second of time conveys to the mind a strange idea of
insecurity, which hours of reflection would never create."
Wow. MATERIA n'est pas?
But I do not want to take you through the meandering streams of rocks of
ages, however long cherished, for all things pass away.
I want to speak of trees.
I want to talk of 'strange attractors'.
I want to talk about a differing form of 'free energy'.
Recall if you will the efficiency of the labouring peasant farmer of South
east Asia. Give him some 'respect please'.
Andrew, I have here 40 gallons of water and I need you to take that water
to the people living on the sixth floor of the apartment building.
But that would kill me!
(leadership task?)
Indeed.
Learn from a birch tree.
A birch lifts this amount of water - 40 gallons to sixty feet- on a summer
day with no expenditure of energy at all...
- On a summer day with relative humidity of 45% the evaporation suction of
the stomata corresponds to the pull exerted on a 3mm rope by an eleven
stone man. 1,000 atmospheres. Thus the sun lifts upward and outward the
water and it is replaced by pulling and so cyclically renewed. Suns free
energy for water haulage. Simple, direct. Must be a LO lesson in that
somewhere?
Insight.
There is also great apparent frictional waste ( like all those words
deemed not required ? ) since, to accomplish this feat of miraculous
natural engineering the organism utilises the finest conduits such that
only approx. only 2% of the 1,000 atmospheres of pull is measured as pull
at the roots. But nature knows that only by dividing the 'river of flow'
(one to many mappings) can it accomplish what we cannot.
WHACK.
Goethe said that it is ordained that trees may not grow to heaven.
But Goethe was not paradoxically speaking about trees but about you and
me. Trees are already in heaven. They do not aspire so much as transpire
and inspire.
The physics of HEAT is such that temperature fluctuation during the day
cause the great trees of North America for example, to rhythmically
'vibrate' as they swell and contract.
There are many more amazing things to understand about the rivers and
streams that constitute trees.
But here is the most fascinating one for me tonight. The average tree is
80% water. The average water storing plant, the beloved 'succulents' of At
de Lange's deserts, nice paradox, or is it, are over 95% water....about
the same as a human. Is that right At?
Water has memory. Fish know this.
Well, stupid me!
I have lost my thread-
We have no pulling Sun, no evaporation, no capillaries we cannot lift such
a weight so high.
' He who, dwelling in all things,
yet is other than all things,
Whom all things do not know,
Whose body all things are,
Who controls all things from within -
He is your Soul, the Inner Controller,
The Immortal.
Brihad-aranyaka Upanishad, 3.7.15.
All your science and cleverness is nought but a refinement of a much older
wisdom.
Go listen with trees.
Lift the water of your soul - burn it to your heaven.
Do not wait until the rocks melt beneath your very feet.
Thank you for listening if you did.
Best wishes,
Andrew Campbell
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