Crack Flowers #2 🌼
Crack Flowers #2 🌼
Unexpected stories to Rewild our Minds, Hearts & Cultures
Here are three stories to rewild your mind, shift horizons and help you regenerate life on earth. With crack flowers I am seeking to bring new perspectives, ways of thinking, seeing and being into your life’s. The stories that make you question your worldview, knowledge and beliefs.
#1 📦 English, the language of objectification
The way we word the world is shaping how we see and care for her. English is a deeply objectifying language. It is no surprise that this language plays an influential role in hyper capitalism, overconsumption and imperialism. All but humans, are things. Once you have objectified another being it is just a small step to justifying controlling and using this ‘thing. As a thing is all it is. The English language is normalizing not caring for trees, rocks and rivers. WHAT IF, we rewrote all objectifying languages to open our minds and deepen our compassion for all living BEINGS?
“In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.
To whom does our language extend the grammar of animacy? Naturally, plants and animals are animate, but as I learn, I am discovering that the Potawatomi understanding of what it means to be animate diverges from the list of attributes of living beings we all learned in Biology 101. In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate. The list of the inanimate seems to be smaller, filled with objects that are made by people. Of an inanimate being, like a table, we say, “What is it?” And we answer Dopwen yewe. Table it is. But of apple, we must say, “Who is that being?” And reply Mshimin yawe. Apple that being is.”
» Extend The Grammar Of Animacy by Robin Wall Kimmerer
#2 💦 The wet illusion
Bear with me, this one takes a moment to accept. You can’t feel wetness. Humans don’t actually have receptors in our skin that can detect wetness. When we tip our toes in the ocean we belief we can feel wetness but it is simply the temperature differences in combination with what our brain is telling us.
It seems like a no-brainer that people can feel the rain during a storm or seawater the second they jump into the ocean. But can our bodies actually "sense" the water on our skin?
It turns out, the answer is no — at least not technically because our bodies don't have sensors specifically for detecting liquids. Rather, we rely on a conglomeration of other sensors to inform us when we're wet.
» Can humans sense wetness? by Kiley Price
#3 😎 Work Less to Safe Life On Earth
Working less can help us to dezombify ourselves, take better care of ourselves and the rest of life on earth and prioritize slow sustainable practices over fast over consumption. According to a state of the global workplace report 85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work. Combine that with long work weeks, stress full lives, 24/7 active social media platforms and an overall obsession with productivity and it’s no wonder we are walking around numb and disconnected from life on earth.
Green growth, green progress, the clean energy transition, they are all born out of a mechanistic, productivity, makers mindset. The represent the widespread belief that technology, innovations and more progress will help us ‘solve’ the meta crisis. They are absolute lullaby’s standing in the way of the collective realization that we need to explore other ways of living, being, relating. If you are going in the wrong direction, rapid progress is not the solution. So why are we working so hard for progress? Can slowing down safe the planet?
‘Households with longer work hours have significantly larger carbon footprints’, demonstrating a worrying correlation between increasingly unsustainable consumption and high workload lifestyles.
This study is consonant with anecdotal everyday experience, where early starts mean plastic wrapped breakfasts and late finishes bequeath takeaway meals delivered by moped or ready meals thrown into the microwave because we’re too tired to cook.
» Making time: working less to save the planet by Kyle Lewis and Will Strong
By searching for and sharing crack flowers with all of you, I am seeking ways to nourish my own, and hopefully your sanity. But I can’t do it alone. When you find a crack flower and you want to share its story with the world, please send me a message.
Let’s amplify stories that rewild our minds and hearts together. Support this newsletter by sharing it with your friends, family and colleagues. 😊
🖋️ Articles that Shift Horizons
The Radical Plan to Save the Planet by Working Less by Shaya Love [Vice]
Can slowing down save the planet? [New Yorker]
Magic Kills Industry by RŪTA ŽEMČUGOVAITĖ [Regenerative Transmissions]
📚 Books I am reading
The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet by Matthieu Ricard, Trịnh Xuân Thuận
All art is ecological by Timothy Morton