Mutualism

My happy bean plant. 

Even in organic gardening and permaculture circles, typically the only thing you will hear about is the benefits of these methods for human beings. For US. Better food for US human beings and less damage to the ecosphere that WE all need to be living in. And those things are great, don't get me wrong. However, what you don't hear is what plants get out of the deal. Even in these circles, there is the tacit assumption that plants are insensible carbon machines. That we shouldn't take THEIR interests into account, though of course their interests are generally served better by such natural approaches rather than conventional agriculture. One would think though that people who spend so much time thinking about plants, would hold them in higher regard. 

Plants are not mere photosynthesis machines. They are beings, and they are the beings that every animal on this planet depends on for their continued existence.

Of course, we historically have a hard time dealing with food organisms as BEINGS under any circumstances, even in the case of animals very similar to us such as pigs. We encourage pigs for instance to regard us with trust, and then we kill them. One of the most traumatic things I ever saw was an episode of a reality TV series on public television where several families agree to live like pioneer families in the 1800's. The child of one of the families gets attached to the pig, and of course the pig has to be slaughtered. Many tears. So the dad of the family calls the pig over, and the pig comes over wagging its tail and happy, completely trusting, and BANG. Shot, writhing in its death throes, just like that.

To me, any scenario like that would be morally wrong. That dad did a morally wrong thing in my opinion and gave an abysmal example to his son, unless a negative example was what was intended.

Betrayal, of any life form that has been given reason to place trust in you, is one of the highest evils in my worldview. If you gave them reason to trust you, you are BOUND by that trust. You are OBLIGATED to take their interests into account in a serious manner. Even if they are non-human.

Even cold blooded murder is less evil than betrayal, because the one you kill has no reason to suspect anything but evil from you. You could make an argument that hunting people (assuming that they have no reason to trust you) is morally acceptable as long as you eat them. ;) Certainly you would be sparing the ecosystem all the destruction that this one human life would bring, though I would not recommend human beings as a healthy food source. ;)

Bear in mind, I do not believe in rights. I don't believe in animal rights or plant rights because I don't believe in human rights. If you are in a situation where you absolutely have to kill and eat an innocent person to live, I would say you are justified to do it, because biological necessity trumps just about everything. What I do believe in, is respect for all beings. That you kill any organism only because of need, not desire. I also believe that you never, ever betray any life form. If you gave them reasonable cause to regard you as a friend rather than an enemy or neutral, you don't use that trust to betray them. I believe that in some cases this should even overrule biological necessity. 

These two principles, respect and non-betrayal, inform my views on ethical relationships with plants and animals that are used for food. In this view, it is far more acceptable to hunt for food than to raise animals for food, because the animals you hunt have no reason to view you as anything but a predator. Also, until their deaths wild animals live free and not in cages. In the same way, foraging wild plants is relatively ethically uncomplicated (as long as you do it in a sustainable manner). You need to eat.

Lets get back to plants, which even ethical vegetarians (those that are vegetarians for ethical/animal cruelty reasons) tend to disregard as beings of ethical importance. Every animal on this planet is ultimately a parasite on plants, since only plants can use sunlight to create food energy. Every animal on this planet would cease to be without them. I think that is something worthy of our respect. In the case of some animals, their benefit to the plants is at least equal to if not greater than their cost to the plants, such as in the case of honeybees and earthworms. In the case of earthworms, it is practically all a benefit to them, since they take already decayed plant matter and turn it into more accessible forms of plant food. Predators of all sorts, from predatory wasps to tigers, are also beneficial to them since they kill herbivorous life forms and the energy they take has already been stolen away from plants anyway. Some animals benefit some plants and hurt others, cows and sheep for instance promote grasses and discourage other plants, since grasses are better suited to surviving grazing than other plants.

Creatures like bees and earthworms who provide equal or greater value to plants than they take away, are the only animals on Earth that don't deserve to be called parasites. We humans fully deserve to be called parasites, a virus not only on plant life but the entire planet.

Ironically, we are also the one animal that has the capacity, seldom used, to build up diverse and robust ecosystems that give the maximum benefit to all the plants and animals that live in them. Typically wild unmanaged ecosystems have always been taken as the most complete, sustainable and diverse ecological systems possible, with the greatest possible biomass for that particular place. I genuinely don't believe that this is always the case. I think that in many cases, a human-managed ecosystem can be more diverse, more tolerant to adverse conditions and with greater overall biomass than wild ecosystems, but to do this requires knowledge and skills and attention spans that most people don't have. It's not an undertaking for stupid people, it's an undertaking for smart perceptive people who pay attention to what an ecosystem is doing and how it responds to what you do. A sensitive, perceptive human intelligence is perfectly equipped to undertake this goal.

We have the ability to learn and apply knowledge to our actions, and we have generally used that power to become the most mercenary, piratical and parasitic creature that ever existed. As Agent Smith said in the first Matrix movie, we are like a virus. Humans control, humans destroy, humans enslave. But we could, if we wished to, use our intelligence to build up ecosystems for the benefit of all who live in them. Including but not limited to us. To increase the overall energy flowing through the system and all the beings in it, and to encourage the increase of diversity which builds resistance to adverse conditions. To do so would be an honest occupation for human beings, really the only honest occupation open to us. To give as much or more value to the overall biological system as we get. Not only for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all the life forms which depend on the local ecosystem under our influence.

Part of this, to me, is to embrace true mutualism with plants. The respect of plants as beings, which our culture has a hard time with but many tribal cultures understand. To be a true steward of an ecosystem means stepping out of a human-centric worldview into a multipolar worldview in which all the organisms that live in a place have their interests which should be respected to varying degrees. Even garden pests should be allocated a certain amount of respect in their proper place. The most respect should be given to those which we depend on the most, the plants that provide us with food and which we have entered into a relationship with. This to me is not an interaction between a person and a photosynthesis machine, or between a master and a slave, it is an interaction that should be mutually beneficial between one being and another. For this reason, although I like to eat them, I won't grow radishes or beets because the utilization of those plants for food entails the death of the plants before they are able to reproduce. Foods like tomatoes, squash, eggplants, berries and so on can be eaten without any serious harm to the plant, even lettuces and other greens can be picked without pulling up the entire plant. Some plants, like peanuts or potatoes, are harvested when the plant is at the end of its life and has started to die. I don't think prolonging their lives in such a case is doing them any special favors.

For plants whose seeds we eat, like corn or wheat or legumes, many of these plants produce hundreds or even thousands of seeds and the survival of all of those seeds is not a physical possibility. Therefore as long as the perpetuation of that plant is assured by saving some seeds and planting and tending them to further their survival, the rest can be eaten. You are not hurting the interests of the parent plant by doing so, in fact you are promoting their interests in reproduction. And that is another aspect: plants like people have a biological imperative to reproduce, so to me seed-saving is part of the mutually beneficial relationship between myself and food plants. If a plant produced well for me and was healthy, I help their genetics to continue to the next generation. This also tends to produce plants that are more adapted to the local environment, which furthers the plant's survival and our food supply. They win, I win. They get offspring that are well cared for, I get food. Everybody gets a reasonably fair shake out of the deal. That's the way it should be. That is the only way that humans can rightly shake the title they have thus far eminently deserved, that of a useless parasite on this ecosystem Earth. 

To do so would be an honest occupation and an honest way of life, really the only honest way of life open to us as humans. To stop being Homo Raptor, plundering man, pillaging man, and become Homo Curator. Man the steward. Man the caretaker. 

Plants are beings and should be respected. When we grow plants to produce food,
the interests of the plant should always be taken into fair account along with
our own interests.

Three Sisters

My hopi blue corn and haricot tarbais beans making happy music together

There is so much plant knowledge and so many plant varieties that were lost in our headlong dash towards uniformity, marketability and "scientific agriculture" that we no longer know how much was lost. Many of the varieties were lost in the last hundred years, about 93 percent of all vegetable varieties (not species but variations within that species) that existed at the turn of the century are gone. Most of them not because they weren't good, but because they didn't fit in with the new industrialized food schema, which required fruits and vegetables that shipped well, ripened all at the same time, were adaptable to the new chemical and mechanical agriculture and were uniform in shape and size. Flavors we now will never know. And we never paid a lick of attention to the fact that it was happening.

The knowledge eroded even more readily. Native American farmers used companion planting and fertilization techniques that were completely ignored when European farmers came to this land and made their straight rows of monocultural grains and vegetables. The knowledge that the European farmers once had about the importance of such things as growing hedgerows to promote pollinators was not regarded as terribly important by the intellectual elites who would later invent chemical agriculture in complete obliviousness to the reality of soil as a living thing itself. They created a form of agriculture made in the image of the era of Big Oil and Big Chem, but when the oil is gone we will find that we can't eat gasoline any more and will need the knowledge and diversity which we so casually cast aside.

The good news is that new varieties can arise from a new agricultural culture that embraces natural processes, local adaptation, local consumption and genetic diversity. All we really have to do is invent a new farm reality and those new varieties and that diversity will follow on its own, in time. The knowledge will arise too, only awaiting those who seek it and seek to put it into practice. Plants are very good teachers, they will quickly tell you that you are messing up if you actually take care to watch and listen. 

I have a garden plot that I wanted to plant with the traditional Three Sisters companion planting of corn, beans and squash. Except I didn't really see the point to the squash much. The corn and beans I understood, the beans climb up the corn and beans don't take nitrogen out of the soil that the corn needs (and over the long haul adds nitrogen to the soil too). I already have a container with acorn squash in it and another with lemon squash which I companion-planted (experimentally) with sunflowers. In the Three Sisters plan the squash is supposed to act sort of like a living mulch and the corn and beans are supposed to shade the squash. Well I figured, I already have mulch on my corn and beans, and I have enough squash planted already. 

Well it turned out that I should have planted the beans about a month after the corn because these beans grow faster than the corn. I wound up having to put up poles and strings for the beans to climb up, to distract them from clinging to the corn. Next time I might hold off a month before planting the beans. They were both flourishing however, and if I am allowed to speak unscientifically I think they like being together. They certainly seem very happy. 

And then I got to thinking about the varmits. ;) I have already had problems with squirrels digging up the melon patch looking for their nuts, and we have raccoons in this area. And I hear tell that raccoons love to eat corn. So I started hacking down some prickly vines (pricking myself many times in the process) to act as a sort of organic barbed wire to protect my corn. Raccoon feet are very sensitive. So sensitive in fact that they don't even like walking on the more subtle prickles of... squash vines. ;)

And so I came full circle to what undoubtedly the Native Americans figured out long ago. Even though the prickles of squash aren't that intimidating to humans, they suffice as a pest deterrent especially to the sensitive raccoons. And so I hurried out to the yard to get some squash in on the sides of my corn and bean patch, a bit later than I would normally do for planting squash, and I didn't plant the more suitable lemon squash (big leaves and vines, more sprawling) but the slightly less suitable but more useful for me acorn squash. I really like winter squashes better. Still, I hope that by the time the corn becomes raccoon-enticing, the leaves and stems and vines of the acorn squash will act as a deterrent to them setting their sensitive little tootsies on my corn bed. And so now through practice and thinking ahead to future problems, I understand why all three were always planted together. ;)

And, completely "unscientifically" of course, I believe that they feel the familiarity of long centuries of being planted together. I think they know, that their fates were intertwined a couple thousand years before Columbus ever set foot on these shores. I am glad I could bring them back together again as it should be.

Medicine of the World

Consider this an open diary entry, or poetry. People might not get it, in which case, don't worry about it. Perhaps it wasn't written for you. Perhaps in the final analysis it was written for me.



THE MEDICINE OF THE WORLD

There was a rift in the heart of the World. Now when I say world, you don't get worlds without solar systems, and you don't get solar systems without galaxies, and you don't get galaxies without universes, and you don't get universes without a Multiverse, but the World is what we know, so I shall say World.

Now some folks say it is a rift in us, that our hearts are bad, but we would not be riven were the World not riven, and we were riven because the World was riven. We are not a separate thing from the World.

There was a rift in the heart of the World. Now animals can find medicine for themselves in the fields and woods in the form of different plants, but how can a World find medicine for itself? Nevertheless, this is what the World set out to do, to make medicine for the World's heart. With all medicines, not enough can't heal you and too much can harm you, and even more so with this medicine because the World could not say for certain that any dose was a safe dose. It might heal the World's heart, or might wound it worse, and no being in the universe could say for sure.

The World made its medicine in the form of a child, and that child became many children; and as long as they were children, they neither did any great good nor any great harm.

And then the medicine became an adolescent, and the World began to see that a very small number of the adolescents were in fact medicine, but most were poison and made the rift in the World's heart worse every year. At first the World was poisoned very very slowly, but the rate of poisoning increased very slightly every year, and century by century the rate of change increased. And the World could see that things would become very bad, and that it would get very sick with fever for a long while until the poison was finally burned out of its body. It appeared that the intended medicine would fail, because for the most part it was not medicine but poison.

The few who were in fact medicine were at best disregarded by the other adolescents. These were the lucky ones. To be medicine in a world of poison was a dangerous fate. They had only a little power to turn the poison to medicine, or to heal the increasing injuries to the World. The medicine worked slowly, and the poison worked increasingly fast; the medicine was little and the poison was great, and the World's fever rose.

Now I cannot tell you the end of the story because it hasn't ended yet. There are many stories about what will ultimately happen, and I can tell you some of them, and some of them are for others to tell.

The simplest story of the end is, the World has a great fever and all the adolescents die from it. Good and bad, poison and medicine alike. In the end the rift in the World's heart is even greater, and who knows what medicine will ever heal it.

There is another story told by people who live in dry places. Now the dry places of the Earth give birth to both great prophets and great narrow-mindedness, and who can say from what place in the heart this story comes. The story says that the World will call on it's own dark side to destroy the bad medicine from the World, and leave only the good medicine behind, though perhaps the good medicine will be reduced to only two people by that time. The World starts again, it heals back to where it once was, but no one can say whether the rift in the World's heart is finally healed or whether the World is only back where it began.

There is another story told by people who live in forests. This story is that there were eventually very few of the adolescents who were strong in the good medicine, and one of those took the World's divided heart into his own heart, knowing it would kill him. His heart exploded from the burden and he died, but this act ensured that there would be at least one more generation of medicine left in the world, and perhaps one of those would find how to heal the World's heart and bleed out the poison. Whether they ever will, no one can say because it hasn't happened yet.

But know this: we are of the World and if our hearts are sick it is because the World has a sick heart too. It knows this and is trying to heal itself. But the medicines are few and the poison is great, and no one knows how many future generations of medicine there will be in the world. Perhaps one day all the medicine will be gone. All that will be left then, is for the World to purge itself and try again, and we will be gone.

Fair Deal Food?

When people talk about such things as "Fair Trade" coffee, we mean we are giving the coffee farmers a relatively more fair part of the total coffee dollar. The interests of the coffee plants of course don't enter into it. Typical of the usual human preoccupation with self, while some nice folks might be concerned about the conditions of humans in places where coffee or bananas or other commodities are grown, almost none of them think about the lives of the plants without which there would be no commodity at all.

I am going to put forth the scandalous idea that the interests of the plants should be our concern. That fundamental to the relationship we have with the plants that provide our food should be equity. They get a fair deal: we get a fair deal. In other words, I am suggesting treating plants as beings of ethical significance.

Now you may be thinking, "How is that possible, we have to eat plants (and animals) to live?" Firstly I have to say that if you need to eat anything to survive, you can certainly be excused for doing it. If you are in a situation where you need to eat people to survive, you should eat people. Preferably already dead, but if your choice is between starving to death and bonking your neighbor on the head and eating his liver, I am not going to judge. The key idea here is avoiding getting into such a situation to begin with. We can arrange our relationships with food plants so as to treat them properly as partners, not just prey.

And in fact there are a great many plants where we don't have to kill the plants to eat from them. Pluck a leaf off a spinach plant, the plant will probably manage to keep going just fine. The same with loose lettuces and many other vegetables. We don't eat tomato plants for instance, we eat tomatoes, their fruit. We don't eat squash plants, we eat squash. We don't generally eat corn stalks, we eat corn. Potatoes can be harvested long after the plants themselves are dead. In some cases, we might be killing them at the end of their lives when they are dying anyway, such as would be the case with peanut plants, where the sign that they are ready for harvest is that the plants start dying. I certainly don't think that prolonging their death is doing the plant any particular favors.

However, plants live by very different rules than ours, and one of those rules is that they almost always spam tons of seeds into the environment in order to reproduce, and the survival of all those seeds under most circumstances is a physical impossibility. It is as if we had to birth a million babies to get one human adult. It is not important, or possible, for all those seeds to survive but only that the plants reproduce into the next generation somehow, by those few seeds that either by random chance or human care survive to reproduce. Eating seeds then is fair game as long as some are planted to continue their parents' genetics, because the vast majority of seeds would never turn into adult plants.

What are the interests of plants? They want a rich soil, enough sun, assistance when they are under attack from bugs or herbivores or other environmental hazards, and to have a chance to reproduce. In return for our assistance in both nurturing the plants and ensuring a future for their progeny, we eat parts of the plant or the seeds or fruit. This mutual assistance is in fact what we were evolved to do: whether you accept it or not, we were in a sense designed to service plants. Why do we have color vision and opposable thumbs? So that we can see the color change when fruit is ripe and grasp it, and so spread the seeds of the fruit trees in our dung. Why do we have bipedal stance? So we can see over the grass to hunt herbivores which eat grass. Our move from a fruit-eating way of life to a hunting way of life meant a move to the grasslands, and we tamed fire and intentionally used fires to expand the realms of our grassy friends at the expense of trees. This was the beginning of a long and intimate relationship between humans and the grasses which has resulted in the reality that today the vast majority of all human calories consumed comes from grasses or the seeds of grasses. You evolved to work for the plants, and they evolved to help you do it. Plants formed us even more than we formed them. And they are not insensate beings, just very different beings from us.

There are some plants that we probably can't grow if we want to treat them ethically in this sense. Radishes and beets come to mind, since they involve harvesting the whole healthy plant, killing the plant at a time when it would not otherwise be dying. Most vegetables where the leaves are harvested can be harvested ethically if you do not harvest the whole plant but only a few leaves from each plant at a time. I know this is an alien viewpoint in a lot of ways, to take plants seriously as living things, but as far as I am aware there is no reason why one would ever have to kill healthy plants in order to have a full and nutritionally varied diet. My own belief is that the plants will understand your benevolence and respond accordingly.

So this is the essence of what I am saying, and I will grant you that it is an approach informed by my own particular spiritual beliefs. Treat the plants in your garden, and the beneficial insects that patrol them, as partners with you in a fair and mutually beneficial relationship. One in which you are not putting yourself above the plants but serving them just as much as you expect to be served yourself. I am growing my first garden this year so we will see if this approach bears fruit, but I believe it is the right approach ethically and also practically in many ways. 

Now one might think that it is impossible to have this sort of relationship with animals, the raising of any of which entails the deaths of some of them in order for us to benefit. I think that for the most part this is the case. There are however other considerations involving the larger ecosystem of which we are all a part. Some wild animals wreak great destruction in the environment, such as feral pigs and perhaps to a lesser extent deer, so I would say that hunting those animals where they are overpopulated is entirely fair game. Moreover, by hunting wild animals we are not adversely impacting their lives prior to their deaths: while they live they live entirely free. If rabbits start nomming on your garden vegetables, they are totally fair game and in fact if you depend on farming or gardening for some part of your food or income, eliminating them might be the only way to actually stop them from destroying your livelihood. Thus hunting can not only be helpful to the environment, but might actually be the only way you can keep the critters from eating you out of house and home. 

Feral Hogs: Almost As Bad As Humans

According to this rationale though, we should all be hunting humans, since they are the most damaging creature that exists. The personal consequences of that can be pretty harsh however, so I can't recommend it. ;)

Am I living completely in accordance with this Fair Deal Food viewpoint? Nope, because I don't have enough land to provide for my own food needs directly. This is however something I do wish to do as soon as I am able. As far as my limited garden goes however, I am attempting to abide by it. My spinach plants will not be inhibited from going to seed, they will only have leaves harvested from them, not the whole plant.  Same with my herbs. I am also growing corn, beans, squash, melons, cucumbers, sunflowers, various herbs, tomatoes and strawberries, none of which should require me to kill the plant in order to eat. I realize that to many people what I am saying sounds insane, but I would say that a sane man often sounds insane to an insane world. 

I also realize that almost no one will hear what I am saying here, but that ought not to keep me from saying it. I feel almost obligated by the kinship I feel with plants to say it. Plants are my teachers and my friends, as well as the means of continued existence for all animal life on this planet. They could get along fine without us. We would all die without them.

Rainwater as sacrament

Mother Water, Friend of Life

Wash away the unthoughtful

May all the plants and animals I love

always have the benefit of your presence.

May your streams and lakes and rivers and oceans

everywhere run clean and whole

Thank you for your gifts

Our love always to you

Mother Water

**********************
DISCLAIMER
Obviously, drinking rainwater from a bowl you set out in your back yard is a 
potentially hazardous activity, and I am not recommending anyone do it and am
not responsible if you get sick. Equally obviously, this is part of my spiritual life and
might have no beneficial effect on you whatsoever
(and most likely won't.)
**********************

For the first time ever in my life, aside from the odd drop caught on my tongue, I drank rainwater. Why?

It's a potentially risky business, even subversive, this drinking of unlicensed, unregulated, unchlorinated, unfluorinated water. Even the air has bacteria in it, not to mention a few other things, and although I placed my rain-gathering bowl carefully away from all overhanging branches and such, there were still a few mystery particles in the bowl when I came to drink a rainy day's worth of rainwater. Might I get sick? I might. Will it have been worth it if I do get sick? Yes. Why? For 8 ounces of water? 8 ounces that I could have more easily gotten from the nice safe chlorinated fluoridated water that comes from the tap?

This is the sort of thing that is impossible to explain to someone who regards water as merely stuff, who regards the physical world as just a random assemblage of dead matter of little consequence. What conversation can there be, between one person who regards water as merely an atom of oxygen and two of hydrogen, and another who regards it as the very stuff of life? Sacred? A goddess? There is no connection between the two worldviews. They don't coexist whatsoever. 

It all began with me noticing the effect of rainwater on my garden. Now, some folks might just use water from the tap to water their garden, but I take a certain care to get the chlorine out of the water I use for the plants, as best I can anyway. Even so, the difference in growth between the results of a watering day and the results of a rainy day are striking. If the plants could jump after a rain, they would jump. There is a visible growth spurt. Some people observe this same phenomena and rationalize it as the result of dissolved nitrogen and oxygen in the water. I have not done the science myself so who knows, perhaps they are right. To me, it is water from heaven, water from the gods. How could it not be good for the plants?

Anyway, I figured, it does plants wonders, why not see what it does to me? So I set out my bowl in the morning and embarked on my slightly risky and definitely subversive endeavor. It rained all day and was a little cool (in contrast to last week when it was like a sweat bath), and towards evening I went out to see how much rain I had caught in the bowl. There was a small amount of unidentifiable brownish-black well decomposed organic matter in it. The first shock to my senses was that this water had a flavor. It had a considerable flavor: weedy, pollen-y, piney, with perhaps a tiny aroma of diesel fume in the background. I live in the city, after all. It tasted like this place, like the land. I drank carefully, meditatively, avoiding stirring up the organic matter at the bottom.

What did I experience? What I experienced was powerful and moving, though untranslatable in words. Feeling the presence of the gods with me, sustaining me. Gratitude. Timelessness, or a different sort of time. Even now, sitting at my desk drinking a decidedly unspiritual Dr. Pepper, I feel different than I did before.

This bowl contained a sacrament, the sacrament of the way I follow. Not an inebriant, like Christian wine. Not an entheogen like peyote or ayahuasca. Not food, like the other Christian sacrament. Simultaneously the simplest thing and most profound determinant of life. Rain. I drink from the same sky as my plants, we live as part of the same life. Mother Water, carried aloft by the Sky Fathers and sent to Earth as the fertilizing combination of the powers of both of them. Sky and Water, and even a little Earth in the form of the mystery organic stuff. This is my religion, and I see my gods every day. It does not require faith, it requires a different way of living and seeing, and a different morality. To strive for total reverence and respect for all things, to desire to be at peace with all things, and to listen to the gods and spirits.

This is my sacrament. Rain.

Non-Symbolic Divination

Tea leaves. The most basic method of tasseography is non-symbolic in the sense that it does not make use of pre-determined symbols or meanings, though of course the interpretation is symbolic.

Non-symbolic divination using chia seeds.

Just a heads-up, this topic is probably only of interest to me and hardly anyone else, and in fact if you do find this interesting you are probably very weird and people should be mildly scared of you. ;) I am only putting it here because I don't have anywhere else to put it. 

I think it was Julian Jaynes who said that divination only came about as people lost their vital connection to the gods, and so became genuinely confused as to what their wisdom in a particular situation might be. In other words, people who hear from gods directly don't need divination. Gods are awfully busy these days and so you can be excused if you don't hear from them on a regular basis. ;) But divination does (and many other forms of religious practice do) represent a sort of fall from grace, from the state described in the Daodejing as "everything following its natural course." You only need divination if things are pointedly not following their natural course. This "not following nature" is unfortunately the normal state of modern Man. In case you don't know what divination is, it is a means of attempting to gain insight into a question or situation using a wide variety of occult means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divination

Symbolic divination for the purposes of this post means divination using tools whose meanings are relatively set. A classic example would be tarot cards, the meaning of each card being relatively unambiguous even if slightly modifiable in context. The use of the I Ching would be another type of symbolic divination, as would the casting of runes and many other methods. While tea reading in its most essential form is non-symbolic in this sense, there also exists methods of dividing the cup up into sectors with their own significance, and even specialized tea reading cups. Most newcomers to divination are going to be using symbolic methods of divination in this sense, as the interpretations are (to varying degrees) relatively simple to come by. 

Non-symbolic divination for the purposes of this post means divination using tools which do not have set meanings of their own. For instance, assuming you are not using one of the tea reading methods that involve assigning significance to different parts of the cup, tea reading would be one of these. You are just grokking out the patterns of the leaves in their bare arrangements. The ancient Roman method of examining the flights of particular flocks of birds would be another such example. The most bare and sparse form of non-symbolic divination would be scrying, gazing into a crystal or a body of water or a black mirror, not to make sense of patterns in the objects themselves but to enter into an altered state of consciousness which may shed light on the circumstances surrounding the situation. Non-symbolic methods of divination are typically much more difficult, not very accessible to the layman unless they are a very gifted layman. There are some people though that can pick it up right away. 

My great-grandmother was a fortune teller so perhaps I get it from her, though she herself took an extremely cynical approach to the whole thing. It was the Great Depression, she needed dough, she didn't believe any of it for a second. ;) Perhaps it was the Universe having a good chuckle when she gave my hard-headed, ultra-practical, money-loving, fortune-telling-for-profit great grandmother an impractical, mystical great-grandson. ;) I still remember first encountering the cards she used to tell fortunes with and being fascinated by them. 

Anyway, getting back to topic, these matters came up in my head as a result of me picking up rocks. Sort of aimlessly, I would pick up rocks and pebbles that caught my eye and stick them in my pocket. To me, looking at pebbles is way more interesting than looking at television, they're like little worlds. I wondered if perhaps I should write runes on them and use them as a runic method of divination but it occurred to me that this was contrary to the very reason I picked them up to begin with. I picked them up because they were individual and different, whereas runes and in a sense tarot cards and the sticks or coins you use for the I Ching are all the same. So I thought I would use them for non-symbolic divination. Just throw them down on a mat, not the kind of mat you use for tarot cards with their different meanings based on location on the mat but just a plain mat, and see what comes up. Granted it is a lot harder to do it that way, but the problem with symbolic types of divination is that they are too full of the sorts of concepts that exist in human heads. They already form the world in a human way. If divination is a symptom of separation from the gods, or separation from the state of Nature if you will, then pushing divination back towards the 'gods' means pushing it further away from human thought, human preconceived notions and human judgments. The use of human tools like cards, coins, runes and so on, is a kind of separation from nature. 

This is akin to the difference between more ritualized forms of paganism which use tools like the athame and pentagram and robes and precisely formalized rituals and so on, and more of a hedge-witch or shamanic form which uses whatever comes to hand from nature and doesn't emphasize human craft as much. However, what you don't get from non-symbolic forms of divination is the certainty of getting a reasonably intelligible answer. If you do an I Ching reading, you are going to get an answer of some sort. If you do a raw tea leaf reading (not using any set method of interpretation), you might not. In a manner of speaking, you might be asking, "should I have more bonds in my investment portfolio?" and the answer might be like a crow calling. "Caw-caw! Caw-caw!" Which to me would be an awesome answer, but might not be for everyone. ;)

I tried it out just with somewhat mixed results. I did feel like I got an answer of sorts, it is just that I am not sure how it relates to the question. It wasn't a very serious question however, almost a sort of test question, so it might not be a good trial. The question was what would be the outcome if I shared this post to my facebook page, which I normally do but didn't really initially consider doing with this post because of its subject matter. That was the question. I got two different interpretations from the stones, the first being "some gathering some scattering." The stones are all either tight up against another stone or else completely separated, and while the mass of the gathered stones is greater, the number of each kind is the same. 5 separated stones, 5 gathered stones. One of the stones did not leave the bag so it was left out. The second interpretation was "airy bird woman" or "spacey woman." The relevance of these answers seems questionable, though the stones might be calling me a spacey female for wasting time with such a trivial question. ;) Here's the stones as they were thrown, see what you think. 

Despite the mixed results (I might try the chia seeds next time), I do want to experiment with this further because there is a vibe involved very different from using the I Ching or Tarot and I quite like it. With the I Ching, you feel like you are having a conversation with the I Ching itself: like having a conversation with a specific intelligent book. This felt much more raw, more primitive, more out of my comfort zone, which I quite liked.

If the assemblage of weirdness that constitutes this blog post interests you and you try divination yourself, I need to tell you a couple things. First, divination is sort of a "second opinion," a way of gathering more information before making a decision. It does not replace the decision itself, you are still responsible for everything you do and whether you listen to the second opinions offered or not. Even if the I Ching or whatever gives you a result that is clear as a bell and cannot be mistaken, you are the decision maker. You should also not practice divination very often, the general idea is actually to not need it. As I mentioned before, if everything is "following nature," if your life is following a pattern that is sensible and natural, divination is not required or desirable. The second thing is, I would encourage complete skeptics to try divination when they feel they need a second opinion and they don't have access to one. Even if you don't believe in such things whatsoever, it is still a second opinion of a sort and might encourage you to reflect deeper on your decisions. Which almost has to be a good thing, right?

Third thing is though, that if you want to try divination you should definitely start out with the I Ching or Tarot and not non-symbolic divination. It is going to be too difficult for the average person to start with, and the I Ching is a great way to get introduced to divination and is relatively easy to use.

Should you take divination seriously? You should take everything with a grain of salt, everything. However, divination is a great inroad to visionary experiences of various sorts if you incline that direction.

Entreaty to Danu

O Danu, Mother of the Sidhe,

deliver me from this Age.

I do not belong here.

The love of men has turned to decay.

They rip up the bodies of their mothers and fathers,

the soil. They have shaved their locks, the trees.

Your blood, the waters

Their breath, the skies.

The Age has been lost and me with it.

The time has come for me

to enter into your hollow hills.

To enter the mounds that lead underneath the Earth

Elysium is my homeland.

Danu, I am sidhe not man.

I renounce humanhood.

Do not leave me here pining,

for the blue skies, your eyes.

For the blue cool breath of the Western Lands.

For the bluebell forests of Elysium.

Danu, a sheachadadh dom thar do uiscí.

Danu, deliver me across your waters.