As connection, as awareness, as becoming acquainted with
Sometimes, what I try to get people to do is to disconnect for a moment from that absolute need to list and name, and just see the bird. Just see that bird. And you begin to absorb it, in a way, in a part of your brain that I don’t know the name of, but I think it’s a part of your brain that’s also got some heart in it. And then, guess what? The name, when you do learn it, it sticks in a different way.
On Being episode with Drew Lanham
Being with the bird (or the tree or the river or whatever else is beside you) is another way of knowing that slowly sinks in and involves “a part of your brain that’s also got some heart in it.” It’s a shift away from the drive to know (to conquer, to possess) and towards a desire to feel and connect. Knowing not as mastering, but becoming acquainted with, getting to know.
Once we become familiar/acquainted with something, we can realize our connections to it (our entanglements), and we can begin to care for and about it.
a collection of astonishing things
Having knowledge is necessary and important, yet sometimes knowing leads to a loss of wonder. When we know, we often don’t question, we’re not curious, we don’t want to find answers because we think we already have them.
Knowing not as wielding facts or showing off and establishing superior intelligence, but finding and gathering and sharing wonder and delight.
What Big Eyes You Have/ Heather Christle
Only today did I notice the abyss
in abysmal and only because my mind
was generating rhymes for dismal,
and it made of the two a pair,
to which much later it joined
baptismal, as—I think—a joke.
I decided to do nothing with
the rhymes, treating them as one does
the unfortunately frequent appearance
of the “crafts” adults require children
to fashion from pipe cleaners
and plastic beads. One is not permitted
to simply throw them away,
but can designate a drawer
that serves as a kind of trash can
never emptied. I suppose one day
it will be full, and then I will know
it is time to set my child free.
The difficulty is my mind leaks
and so it will never fill, despite
the clumps of language I drop in,
and this means my mind can never
be abandoned in the woods
with a kiss and a wave
and a little red kerchief
tied under its chin.
These “useless” bits of wonder, such as charming rhymes, that get relegated to the “crafts”/junk drawer, are what I want to gather and what I want to devote my attention to.
And that’s what I kind of care about putting into poems. I want to learn things and I want to learn little snippets of facts and then I want to be able to share those facts with people. Or, if I see something, I want someone around so I can be like look at that thing that’s happening right now. It’s still happening, you have to look. Look what that fish is doing. Look what that flower is doing. I just want to be pointing. Like I just want to be, look at this thing. Look at this thing. Look at this thing. Which is why I’m really bad at writing essays because I’m just like look at what this guy is doing. And then look at this. And they’re like, why does it matter? I’m like, I don’t know, but look at it.
Just like look at these beautiful tiny things and what we can take from them is maybe sometimes just enjoyment and I don’t know that I have anything more intelligent to say about that thing and what it’s doing and what it reflects about anything about us as humans. But like just look at it.
Paige Lewis in Paige Lewis Vs. Tiny Things
as wisdom: using practical wisdom in impractical ways
Impractical = useless, not aimed at progress or making things bigger! or better! or more successful!, doing “nothing” with that knowledge (when something = feeding capitalism and exploitation of land, people)
If practical wisdom is intended to contribute to our flourishing, what happens when our model for doing (being the best in the world, having a successful career, earning more money, acquiring more things) is preventing that flourishing? Then we need to redefine what practical wisdom is and align it with a different set of goals and values.
Epistemology/ Catherine Barnett
Mostly I’d like to feel a little less, know a little more.
Knots are on the top of my list of what I want to know.
Who was it who taught me to burn the end of the cord
to keep it from fraying?
Not the man who called my life a debacle,
a word whose sound I love.
In a debacle things are unleashed.
Roots of words are like knots I think when I read the dictionary.
I read other books, sure. Recently I learned how trees communicate,
the way they send sugar through their roots to the trees that are ailing.
They don’t use words, but they can be said to love.
They might lean in one direction to leave a little extra light for another tree.
And I admire the way they grow right through fences, nothing
stops them, it’s called inosculation: to unite by openings, to connect
or join so as to become or make continuous, from osculare,
to provide with a mouth, from osculum, little mouth.
Sometimes when I’m alone I go outside with my big little mouth
and speak to the trees as if I were a birch among birches.
Learning the Trees/ HOWARD NEMEROV
Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn
The language of the trees. That’s done indoors,
Out of a book, which now you think of it
Is one of the transformations of a tree.
The words themselves are a delight to learn,
You might be in a foreign land of terms
Like samara, capsule, drupe, legume and pome,
Where bark is papery, plated, warty or smooth.
But best of all are the words that shape the leaves—
Orbicular, cordate, cleft and reniform—
And their venation—palmate and parallel—
And tips—acute, truncate, auriculate.
Sufficiently provided, you may now
Go forth to the forests and the shady streets
To see how the chaos of experience
Answers to catalogue and category.
Confusedly. The leaves of a single tree
May differ among themselves more than they do
From other species, so you have to find,
All blandly says the book, “an average leaf.”
Example, the catalpa in the book
Sprays out its leaves in whorls of three
Around the stem; the one in front of you
But rarely does, or somewhat, or almost;
Maybe it’s not catalpa? Dreadful doubt.
It may be weeks before you see an elm
Fanlike in form, a spruce that pyramids,
A sweetgum spiring up in steeple shape.
Still, pedetemtim as Lucretius says,
Little by little, you do start to learn;
And learn as well, maybe, what language does
And how it does it, cutting across the world
Not always at the joints, competing with
Experience while cooperating with
Experience, and keeping an obstinate
Intransigence, uncanny, of its own.
Think finally about the secret will
Pretending obedience to Nature, but
Invidiously distinguishing everywhere,
Dividing up the world to conquer it,
And think also how funny knowledge is:
You may succeed in learning many trees
And calling off their names as you go by,
But their comprehensive silence stays the same.
Indigenous Knowledge as 4 Ways of Knowing
Native scholar Greg Cajete has written that in indigenous ways of knowing, we understand a thing only when we understand it with all four aspects of our being mind, body, emotion, and spirit. I came to understand quite sharply when I began my training as a scientist that science privileges only one, possibly two, of those ways of knowing: mind and body.
“Asters and Goldenrod” in Braiding Sweetgrass/ Robin Wall Kimmerer
Physical Labor and Knowing
Raking, like any outdoor work, is a more mobile, more many-sided way of knowing a place than looking. When you rake leaves for a couple of hours, you can hear right into the non-human world, it’s as if you and the trees had found a meeting point in the sound of the rake. (ix)
The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for the Planet
Intuitive, Partial, More Beautiful
Pushing away the anxious need to be right, or smart, or consistent, or accurate, in favor of more intuitive and partial and therefore potentially a more beautiful type of knowledge.
Why Poetry?/ Matthew Zapruder