Crack Flowers #8 🪷

Unexpected stories to Rewild our Minds, Hearts & Cultures

What is blinding you from seeing and loving the beautiful complexity of the countless perspectives on life? Can you hold and value multiple, potentially paradoxical views on death, birth, loyalty or time? Our views are shaped, distorted and limited in infinite ways. Some folks got their heads stuck in an Amazon Shipping Box, unable to see beyond the lens of consumerism. Others can see the vastness of the world but only through bars, stuck in a cage, trapped in a loop of keeping ‘others’ out and themselves in, territorially protecting a false sense of safety. And then we have billions of fishbowl people, going round and round within the fragile bubbles of disconnected disciplines and professions. They are aware of the artificiality of their world but don’t know how to jump from one fishbowl to another, or even better, gracefully leave the fishbowl altogether and jump into the vastness of the boundless ocean.

“Why just one concept of birth, marriage, death, friendship, work, economy, right, or wrong? To generate swathes of homogenized perception is not only zombie-like, it is a crisis of metaphor. It is, in fact, just the sort of metaphor that leads to the practice of mono-cropping agriculturally. The snake eats its tail. Evolution prefers diversity.”

Nora Bateson - Small Arcs of Larger Circles

#1 ➡️ How do you say “Go”?

How we communicate, give directions, sense-make and navigate are shaped by our language, worldviews and developed vital capacities. We are descendants of a species with excellent navigation skills, deep knowledge of the environment, and a multigenerational understanding of the way of the rivers, the clouds and the seasons.

Now… To know the time, we check our digital watches. For directions, there is Google Maps. Even with Google Maps, until a year or so ago, we had to, at least, place ourselves in our surroundings, and figure out where to go. Not anymore. With today’s technology, you simply point your camera and follow the arrow. Handy for sure when you are rushing to the train station in an unfamiliar city. Is this beneficial in the long term? Not so much. With every tool, the wall is drawn up higher, disconnecting us from our innate life-centric capacities. Without intentionally grounding in and connecting to the land we live on, we are not just losing our ability to navigate without artificial support, but our capacity to care with intuition and understanding.

”For example, the preferred way to say “go” in Tuvan refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current. They keep track of that information as they’re moving around the landscape. When I once hosted a Tuvan friend in Manhattan, he asked me, “Where’s the river?” So I took him to the west side of Manhattan and showed him one of the rivers. And he took note of it, so he could use the Tuvan topographic verbs properly in New York City.

If the majority of conversations happening around you are about the environment, you start caring about that. For example, Tuvans have a word, ий, pronounced “ee,” which means the short side of a hill. This is a very important concept, because you want to avoid the steep side of the hill if you’re walking, riding a horse, or herding your flock of goats. Once I learned the name for it, I began to look for it. But until the language provides you with this concept, you’re just oblivious to it. Learning these nature-centric concepts in the language makes you see the environment differently.”

Q/A with Environmental Linguist David Harrison - Interview by Katarina Zimmer

Photo by Marc Zimmer on Unsplash

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#2 ⭐️ Therapist of the Magic Things

What do you want to be when you grow up?

A common question for children in many, but definitely not all, countries. It’s driving an obsession with jobs from a young age. It introduces the belief that we are our jobs, and our usefulness and worth are defined by our jobs. The popular choices for kids’ dream jobs in my class were either of the Hero type (Superman, policeman, firefighter) or the famous type (fashion designer, popstar, actor).

Luckily, there is a movement, a strong undercurrent of people questioning our understanding of careers, work and jobs. They are embracing the slow life, opting out of the capitalistic job market, refusing the career-oriented race and nurturing the gifting economy. Others are re-imagining what jobs can look like. They are realigning their capacities with life. They no longer attempt to make a disconnection between work and life, an absurd separation to begin with. Over the last couple of years, I encountered beautiful re-imaginations and completely invented roles. They are the type of roles needed to navigate away from modernity and towards regenerative futures. Some of the ones that stuck with me are;

• Therapist of the Magic Things. I met Madeleine in an eco-village in Brazil and was fascinated to hear her describe herself as being a therapist of the magic things. She supports people in their healing journeys through play, art, dance, food, and all other things magical.

• Imagination Activist & Time Traveller (Rob Hopkins) - as a time-traveller, he invites whole crowds of policy-makers and business leaders into the future, showing them that things can be done differently.

• Artisanal Compost Chef - Composting is a craft, an art and a way of living. As a compost chef, she is creating opportunities for people to fall in love with composting and see it as more than a “waste management solution”. She invites us to recognize, compost is life.

Photo by Shot by Cerqueira on Unsplash

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#3 🌳 Tree Shyness

Since I read Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees, looking up at a tree canopy will guarantee a smile on my face. The existence of tree, or crown-shyness, struck me instantly. You might have noticed when you look up at a canapy that trees often leave gaps between them and their neighbours. Seemingly knowing when to stop growing. Perhaps they don’t want to bother their neighbours, avoid diseases or having to compete with other trees for light.

“The average tree grows its branches out until it encounters the branch tips of a neighbouring tree of the same height. It doesn’t grow any wider because the air and better light in this space are already taken.

However, it heavily reinforces the branches it has extended, so you get the impression that there’s quite a shoving match going on up there. But a pair of true friends is careful right from the outset not to grow overly thick branches in each other’s direction.

The trees don’t want to take anything away from each other, and so they develop sturdy branches only at the outer edges of their crowns, that is to say, only in the direction of “non-friends.” Such partners are often so tightly connected at the roots that sometimes they even die together.”

Photo by Taha Yasir Yöney - Pexels

• The hidden life of trees - Peter Wohlleben

• The Secret life of trees: the astonishing science of what trees feel and how they communicate - book reflection by the Marginalian

Let’s amplify stories that rewild our minds and hearts together.
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🖋️ Articles holding the potential to
Shift Horizons

• Scientists Dismissed his Desert Farming. Now They’re Studying it

• We are less intelligent and wise than we suppose - Humberto Mariotti

• How Elites Rebrand Power as Virtue - Anita Naidu

• The Craft of Reframing - Thomas Klaffke

📚 Books I am reading

• There are rivers in the sky - Elif Shafak

• The Revolt of the Masses - José Ortega y Gasset

• Combining - Nora Bateson

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