What’s it like to be a rose bush?

If a maple tree is attacked by bugs, it releases a pheromone into the air that is picked up by the neighboring trees. This induces the receiving trees to start making chemicals that will help it fight off the impending bug attack...Plants also communicate through signals passed from root to root. In this case the “talking” plant had been stressed by drought, and it “told” its neighboring plants to prepare for a lack of water. Desert plants claim a territory by emitting warning signals through their roots.

— read an interview with Daniel Chamovitz in Scientific American

Triumph!

This is the opening of the Mass for Life
by my Dad’s personal favorite composer, Frederick Delius. 

The text is from Also Sprach Zarathustra of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Already at birth
I was parted,
not just from mother –
but body from mind,
mind from its source –
that’s why I take up
this soft blade
of breath
to cut me back into one.

— Peter Levitt, from One Hundred Butterflies

Those who prepare for all the emergencies of life beforehand may equip themselves at the expense of joy.
— E. M. Forster

Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation? Foolish preparation!
— Jane Austen

Sonnet XXXIV

Eres hija del mar y prima del orégano,
nadadora, tu cuerpo es de agua pura,
cocinera, tu sangre es tierra viva
y tus costumbres son floridas y terrestres.

Al agua van tus ojos y levantan las olas,
a la tierra tus manos y saltan las semillas,
en agua y tierra tienes propiedades profundas
que en ti se juntan como las leyes de la greda.

Náyade, corta tu cuerpo la turquesa
y luego resurrecto florece en la cocina
de tal modo que asumes cuanto existe

y al fin duermes rodeada por mis brazos que apartan
de la sormbra sombría, para que tú descanses,
legumbres, algas, hierbas: la espuma de tus sueños.

— Pablo Neruda, born this day in 1904

You’re the daughter of the sea and oregano’s cousin.
My swimmer, your body is pure water,
and when you cook, your blood is living soil.
All your habits are earthly in their flowering.

Your eyes turn to the waters, and the waves come up.
Your hands turn to the earth, and the seeds burst.
Of the water and the earth, you are the profound proprietor.
They gather in you like the very make-up of the clay.

Naiad, the turquoise slashes you,
and then, resurrected, you flower in the kitchen,
so that you become whatever is,

and at last you sleep, surrounded by my arms, which part
the darkness from the dark, so that you may rest . . .
legumes, seaweed, grasses: the spume of your dreams.

— tr Terence Clarke

Peace goes into the making of a poem as flour goes into the making of bread.

“It is only our absurd ‘scientific’ prejudice that reality must be physical and rational that blinds us to the truth...The imagination is not a faculty for the creation of illusion; it is the faculty by which alone man apprehends reality. The ‘illusion’ turns out to be truth.”

—  Harold Goddard

Do we need one more reason to be kind to ourselves?

Remorse is not among the eternal verities. The Greeks were right to dethrone her. Her action is too capricious, as though the Erinyes selected for punishment only certain men and certain sins. And of all means to regeneration, Remorse is surely the most wasteful. It cuts away healthy tissues with the poisoned. It is a knife that probes far deeper than the evil. Leonard was driven straight through its torments and emerged pure, but enfeebled—a better man, who would never lose control of himself again, but also a smaller, who had less to control. Nor did purity mean peace. The use of the knife can become a habit as hard to shake off as passion itself, and Leonard continued to start with a cry out of dreams.

— E M Forster (fr Howard’s End)

How the world works: solid matter and Type 1a Supernovae
(...continued from yesterday)

No slouches, the electrons that give matter its solidity are zipping around at about 1,000 miles per second. Still their speed is less than 1% of the speed of light, so they can be understood pretty well without invoking Relativity.  But there are some stars in which electron speeds can go much higher. Called white dwarf stars, they have reached a kind of purgatory after they have burned up all their hydrogen, so they are not generating enough heat and gas pressure to hold themselves up. The gaseous star then collapses inward until it is stopped by something hard, and that happens when its core becomes so dense that it is no longer gaseous but liquid.

The hydrogen has burned to helium, and the helium burned to carbon. Here’s what makes white dwarves so noteworthy: because of the high temperature, their carbon cores remain gaseous way beyond their ordinary density. They don’t become liquid until they have a density a million times as high as ordinary matter. Liquid diamond – one ton per teaspoon. An entire star collapsed until it is the size of the earth. And the electrons are whizzing around much faster than in atoms at low temperature. The electrons are approaching the speed of light.

In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that the electrons would behave differently as their speed approached the speed of light. They would be less like particles of matter and more like particles of light. Softer. Less solid. The star’s core would not be hard, and the star could continue collapsing until it disappeared as a black hole. Chandrasekhar calculated that there was a critical threshold mass for the star: if the star is lighter than the threshold, then its core has enough solidity to keep it from collapsing; if the star is heavier, then its electrons approach too close to the speed of light, and the star keeps collapsing to a black hole. Boom. 

The threshold mass is called the Chandrasekhar limit, and it is about 40% heavier than our sun.  Most stars are smaller than this, and they become white dwarves when they run out of fuel.  But some are larger, and they collapse with a bigger bang, forming a black hole.

All white dwarf stars have to be smaller than 1.4 times the mass of the sun.  But sometimes a white dwarf star finds itself next to another, uncollapsed star, circling in orbit close enough that some of the atmosphere of the other star can be sucked in by the dwarf’s gravity. Slowly the white dwarf accretes mass.  Heavier and heavier, then suddenly they reach the Chandrasekhar limit and – boom! A supernova of type 1a.

Here is the dilemma, constantly faced by cosmologists seeking to map out the universe: How can we tell whether an object that we see in the sky is very bright but far away, or very dim and rather close to us? When Type 1a supernovas were discovered, they helped resolve this issue because they are all the same. They all go off just when they cross the threshold of the Chandrasekhar mass. They have the same intrinsic brightness, and by comparing their apparent brightness we can tell how far away they are. It also helps that when they go off, they are temporarily about as bright as a whole galaxy, so they are visible from all over the universe, and they each time we spot one, there is a galaxy for which we can say, ‘now we know just where that one sits’.

Precept #11 of Thich Nhat Hahn

Do not live with a vocation that is harmful to humans and nature. Do not invest in companies that deprive others of their chance to live. Select a vocation that helps realise your ideal of compassion.

— #11 from the 14 Precepts of Thich Nhat Hahn

This has been a challenge for me ever since I entered the world of work. I feel that capitalism is ‘harmful to humans’. It is difficult to participate in the American economy without feeling myself either an oppressor or a victim.  Most employment entails some of each.

I have felt best about myself as a teacher, placing appropriate challenges in front of students and encouraging them to think for themselves.  I have thought it right to devote some portion of my public life to work that furthers a more human economy.  I have reminded myself to be gentle, to forgive myself for making compromises in order to live comfortably and conveniently. 

I am open to friendly counsel and new perspectives in the area of right livelihood.

The quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning.  Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers.

– Erich Fromm

Confidence, like art, never comes from having all the answers; it comes from being open to all the questions.

– Earl Gray Stevens

‘Bright faith’ is the faith that we are given when our hearts are opened by encountering somebody or something that moves us. Whether it is someone we know or a historical figure like the Buddha, we can begin to sense the possibility of another, better way to live.

‘Mature faith’ is anchored in our own experience of truth, centered in the deeper understanding of the mind and bdody that we come to know in practice. This deeper level of faith is also called ‘verified faith,’ meaning it is grounded in our own experience, rather than coming from outside.

– Sharon Salzberg

Smarter than we gave them credit for

Just days after a poacher's snare had killed one of their own, two young mountain gorillas worked together Tuesday to find and destroy traps in their Rwandan forest home, according to conservationists on the scene.  ‘This is absolutely the first time that we've seen juveniles doing that ... I don't know of any other reports in the world of juveniles destroying snares,’

Read more from National Geographic

Unsung

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

— ending of Middlemarch, by George Eliot