Broadening our notion of personhood—repeopling the myriad elements of the world around us.
My father saw two things in lawns: grass and not grass. Botanists have labeled this “plant blindness”; as fewer people farm or learn botany in school, fewer people can identify plants or even notice them. Society has come to see plants as the backdrop, the setting, rather than the actors. But plants are alchemists, really, converting sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen, the energy and breath that constitute and sustain life on Earth. They are dazzlingly diverse, with some 2,800 species in Vermont and more than 350,000 worldwide.
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Our global biodiversity crisis, a crisis of being, is at its core a crisis of seeing. As species disappear unseen, a direct driver of this crisis goes unseen, too. Biocides are poisons designed to destroy biodiversity. Biocidal compounds are largely invisible — literally, in that many are transparent compounds, and metaphorically, in that petrochemical companies have successfully shielded biocides from public scrutiny for decades.1
We typically speak of life inhabiting the planet or residing on its surface. As complex, dynamic, and social animals, we tend to see ourselves and other similarly active creatures as the main actors in the saga of life—and our environment as the mere backdrop to our theatrics, the stage on which we perform. Countless books and articles have been written about “the evolution of life on Earth.” Yet life and environment cannot be separated in this way. Life emerged from Earth, is made of Earth, and returns to Earth. What we call life is not simply something that resides on the planet—it is a literal, physical extension of the planet.2
Terminology
deities - lha vs yidam
dön vs. namshey? came up in Tibetan
Readings
- Unseen Beings by Erik Jampa Andersson
- Healing with Form, Energy and Light by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
- chapter on relating to non-physical beings