Light and life

It is nice to see the buds and leaves opening.

And the longer hours of daylight. Light... lightning... this is a peculiar view of the Lightning-Struck Oak.

Tyson Yunkaporta says in Sand Talk:

There is a spark of creation like lightning when true learning takes place, with a genetic reward of chemical pleasure released in the brain. This is the moment that teachers love—described by educators universally as ‘the light coming on in their eyes’. You can see the same light when you gut a fish—for a few minutes there is a shine like rainbows in its intestines, but as the life and spirit leave those organs the light dies. This living spirit of creation, sparked by opposite fields colliding and separating, is what brings fire and light into the universe. This is the sacred nature of knowledge. A knowledge-keeper must share knowledge because she or he is a custodian of miniature creation events that must continually take place in the minds of people coming into knowledge. The chemical burst of pleasure we feel when genuine knowledge transmission takes place occurs from the creation of new neural pathways. These are connections between two points that were previously unconnected.

[...]

There needs to be an interaction between abstract (spirit) and concrete (physical) worlds of knowledge for this kind of complexity to develop fully. Without closing the loop between abstract knowledge and reality, and without making connections between different ideas and areas of knowledge, true learning cannot occur.

It strikes me (!) that I experience that flash of lightning when I sit with trees and feel that something has been communicated. That experience of neuronal connection, and the joy of it, is what alerts me to the authenticity of the interaction.

This time, Kairos told me, in answer to my question about if he feels afraid, that he doesn’t feel fear, but then, he doesn’t feel anything except life and that the feeling of life is the doing of life, which is embodied, world-making. Then he reminds me that every process of world-making undertaken by one being forecloses certain avenues for other beings, so as he creates a canopy that’s a world for some, he shades the ground beneath which prevents others from growing.

Life is part negotiation, part collaboration... but there's competition in the mix too.

And pain. And death.

Think about it... because there is something important in appreciating this. Take predation: the nutrition of lion forecloses the growing up of impala fawn; and, looked at the other way, it’s like starvation, the dying of many herbivores, opens up world-making for plants. I think we really struggle with this. We want sweetness and light. But the natural world isn't just a fragile sweetie-pie, made of sugar and spice; it's also strong and resilient, and retaining strength, ensuring resilience, sometimes demands toughness as much as tenderness.