Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p.143-144:

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic—that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside, they would have been spared this division with themselves. I am speaking of those who can not tolerate the loss of myth and who can neither find a way to a merely exterior world, to the world as seen by science, nor rest satisfied with an intellectual juggling with words, which has nothing whatsoever to do with wisdom.

Lisa M. Rose, Midwest Foraging:

The end goal of foraging actually isn’t gathering delicious wild edibles for a meal to grace your table, although it is certainly a great benefit. By adding wild edibles to the table, we start to value the wildness in our city neighborhoods and make space for the wild in our yards, gardens, play areas, parks, and open spaces.

Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition., When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost a sense of something that lives and endures underneath the eternal flux. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.

William Anderson, Green Man:

The image of the tree that speaks, prophesies or warns seems to express a recurrent need of the soul—something that we can all experience. When we stand beneath a copse of beeches roaring in a high wind, we seem to hear one of the voices of Nature only our innermost being can comprehend. It sends a message that indicates that nothing we claim for ourselves is ours, that the life force that sustains us is as beyond our power to control as the wind is beyond the power of the trees to resist its lashings, and that we are rooted only for a short time in history, far shorter than the lives of the beeches singing and chanting above us. When we surrender our hearts and minds to their sounds, we undergo a purification which is tinged with the feeling of sacrifice and of making holy everything we have been given - a feeling echoed by many of the tinest representations of the Green Man we will come to consider.

The Green Man is the guardian and revealer of mysteries. In his mask form he is linked to the universal significances of the mask which are those of a part in a drama to be taken up and dropped again and of the world of spirits and of what lies behind death. As the disgorger or devourer of vegetation he speaks of the mysteries of creation in time, of the hidden sources of inspiration, and of the dark nothingness out of which we come and to which we return. As the fruit of vegetation, he signifies the mystery of law and intelligence in natural forms and expresses our own instinctive desire to anthropomorphize everything that is beautiful, touching or powerful in the world about us. In all his forms he is the Poet who in revealing mysteries opens up even more wonderful and enticing mysteries beyond the words he speaks.

Martin Shaw, Bardskull:

Because for the sore awfulness of this century we need more fur, not less.

That’s the root of the trouble: a hairless mind. Hairless mind has us far distant from cormorant and eaglet, from birch bark and anaconda.

Understand me, there’s a great deal about people I like. There’s a vigorous gleam of the unique in a few. Danger lurks in the observation, but it’s undeniable. But humanness seems truest and most vivid when smeared into the petri dish of the mad-bad-and-beautiful expressions of a wider earth.

To have a bald mind is to have black-magicked yourself away from those wider nerve endings.

A pox on the house that brewed that up.

Jay Owens

More-than-human thinking isn’t just about recognising the near-to-human cleverness of certain animals, but recognising agency and interdependent relations across every kingdom of life, from the single-celled extremophiles known as archaeans, to fungi, animals and plants.

The article mentions several books that have been on my reading list for some time now. This needs to be the year I finally read them.

Alan Jacobs:

The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist; it is, rather, the key means by which we emancipate ourselves from the tyranny of passions that the people who make our smartphone apps would like to see dominate us.

Excellent post by Caroline Ross on the value of small talk:

As a form of simple hospitality, a few words about the weather cannot be beaten, they show interest, friendliness, openness to conversation. They put people at their ease. They show we are not above everybody else.