A really beautiful and meditative piece. The author, bedridden by a mysterious disease that has taken all of her strength and energy, finds companionship in a wild snail brought by a friend. The tiny snail’s determination and curiosity become a source of fascination for the author, who mixes facts and observations on the snail with her own reflections on illness and isolation.
Tag: genre-science
Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer
The subtitle of this book is Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, which pretty much sums it up. I really loved reading this book, which married the nerdy enthusiasm of a trained botanist with the quiet wonder of one who was raised from childhood to regard plants as teachers. Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and throughout the book tries to harmonize the surviving wisdom passed down from tribal elders with the strict scientific discipline that she was taught in her Western education. She also ties plants into the threads of her life, finding in them reflections of her experience as a mother. Beautiful and thoughtful writing.
The Oracle of Night, by Sidarta Ribeiro
The first half of this book was pretty awful, full of vague generalizations, tales of historical dreams that turned out to have been prophetic, and long paragraphs about the origins of life and consciousness that felt more like a high school research project than a published book. Towards the end it got much more interesting, turning abruptly to synaptic pathways, brain activity during sleep, and actual neuroscience, and that’s when I really got into it. Pity about the rest of the book.
Entangled Life, by Merlin Sheldrake
This book probably wins this month’s award for “book that I immediately needed to share a fact from;” the family got many earfuls of fascinating mycological trivia. Fungi are not only ubiquitous, an invisible network reaching throughout our world, they are also constantly affecting things, feeding nutrients to plants, changing the brain chemistry of insects and animals (including humans), bubbling and fermenting in our food, digesting things that we’d never think possible, and surviving in incredibly challenging environments. Biologist Sheldrake throws himself entirely into learning more about fungi, not just through research and experimentation, but also by literally inserting himself into his subject (or consuming it). Despite their ubiquity fungi are not entirely understood; clearly some internal communication is at work within the fungus to allow it to reach in the direction of resources, while pruning back spread branches that did not find food; however, as Sheldrake acknowledges, any effort to understand it is limited by our human modes of understanding (Can fungi hunting for resources be said to be “reaching” out? Is it “deciding” which direction to move? Is it “playing favorites” by supplying some plants with nutrients while neglecting others? Have we just stumbled upon fungal properties (yeast!) beneficial to us, or did we evolve into mutual benefit?) Also I had no idea that plants were so bound up with fungi to exist; entire mycelial networks of resource-harvesting and -sharing underlay the ecological landscape that we see outside. My house plants, struggling in their little pots, look so lonely now.