Tag: random thoughts

Trees and Shrooms and the World is Awesome

Pavowski2 Comments

I listened to a brilliant podcast the other day. This one: the most recent offering from RadioLab, a podcast I don’t always listen to, but which never fails to fascinate when I do.

In short, it’s about trees, and you read that and you think, wow, trees? Really? Instant snore, and you’d be right, except the podcast isn’t really about trees, it’s about the magic behind trees. About how we (meaning you and me and the rest of the undereducated public) don’t actually know sharknado about trees.

So, with trees, there’s literal magic going on at the microscopic level, which should come as no surprise at all but it surprised the hell out of me. Turns out that trees are only able to become trees because they get a crazy amount of help. In fact, a tree on its own would never grow into a tree at all — it would only grow about knee high. But there’s this fungus that isn’t really what you think of when you think of fungus at all, and that fungus lives basically in all the dirt everywhere, and that fungus synthesizes and assimilates itself into the roots of a tree and turn it into a fargoing superhero.

But that’s not all: this fungus is not content just to piggyback on one tree like a remora swimming beneath a shark for a bit of mutual fin-scratching. This fungus is a hive-mind governmental distribution system. It can literally take excess nutrients from one tree and transfer them to another malnourished tree. It can detect distress signals from one tree and divert resources to other trees in the area. In some cases, it can even decide which trees get to live or die when resources become scarce.

And hearing about that, of course my brain kicked into overdrive a little bit, because the world is one big metaphor, right? Everything is connected, things always mean things. And if trees can only become trees by standing on the figurative shoulders of a literal fungus, then maybe there’s something in that about how everything in my life feeds my writing one way or another, or about how running is the glue that somehow drains me and energizes me all at once.

And those connections could be drawn, probably.

But sometimes it’s better to just let a thing be what it is.

I learned about a nearly miraculous situation which is happening literally underneath everybody’s feet, every second of every day. And I think today, that will be enough.

Are you listening to RadioLab? You should be!

May the Fourth Be With You (And Also With You)

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Know what I like best about the “religion” of the force in Star Wars? It doesn’t take sides.

I mean, let’s be honest, the Force is religion. This guy or that girl or some other dude or your long-lost father is strong in the force for reasons never stated and certainly not comprehensible (and you can GTFO with that midichlorians sharknado). If the Force is on your side, you can perform straight-up miracles, like levitating your Orange Crush across the room because you’re too lazy to go get it during the commercial break in Coruscant’s Next Top Jedi, or force-choking your idiot friend who won’t shut up about how Han shot first.

The miracles are cool and awesome and super. But what I actually like best is that the Force is an equal-opportunity personal savior. The Force is perfectly happy serving Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker or Kylo Ren or Rey WhoTheHellKnows. Everybody and anybody can call on the Force to bless themselves or anybody else.

Maythe4th

“May the Force be with you.”

Ben Kenobi says it. Anakin Skywalker says it. Emperor Palpatine says it. Princess Leia says it. Yoda says it. Darth Vader says it. Even Han Solo says it, and he is an explicit non-believer on the subject.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a tree-hugging freedom fighter, a power-crazed space slumlord, a half-insane cave monkey or a floppy-haired debonair space ace, you can call on the Force to help you out, and if you’re lucky, it just might save your ass.

What does this mean?

Well, if the Force is an explicit metaphor for religion, I think it shows that religion, faith, belief, are much like a lightsaber. Be it red, yellow, green or fantastic purple, it’s just a tool. It isn’t intrinsically good or bad. It just is, and whether it’s a symbol of good or bad depends entirely upon the person wielding it.

And if the Force isn’t religion, well, that’s okay too, because it’s still just a tool. Like the hammer collecting dust in your garage, it doesn’t have a stake in whether your house stays in good repair or if it crumbles to dust. It’s there to bang on some nails if you want to, or to go smashing up some drywall if that’s your thing, or, hell, it’s even happy just hanging there watching dust motes swirl in the stale air.

*makes the jump to lightspeed without plotting coordinates first because that’s the way we do it in the new era of Star Wars*

 

The Menagerie of Bad Ideas

Pavowski6 Comments

 

The mind is like a zoo.

A panoply of animals separated by a profusion of cages. Noisy kids running here and there. Somebody’s vomit there, just right there, next to a trashcan. (How they managed to get so close and miss the trashcan will forever baffle.) A series of footpaths connecting the lot. Maybe a little train to let you take it all in while you kick back and relax.

Our brains compartmentalize just like a zoo. Can’t have the dark thoughts of your latest antagonist kicking around your head while you’re pushing your little ones on the swings. Can’t have lions sharing the cage with the cockatiels. (Is that how you spell cockatiel?) Rather, you keep it all separate. Go visit the dark part of your brain when you need the antagonist. Stick to the flamingo exhibits when you’re with the kids. And so on.

Confined, Monkey, Cage, Animal, Prison, Captivity

But zoos aren’t perfect. Neither are caretakers or cages. Look at the octopus that just recently escaped to the ocean, or at any number of stories of people falling into wild animal enclosures and being mauled (or rescued!) by the inhabitants. Every once in a while, the externally-imposed order breaks down, and things get messy.

And in a zoo, that’s maybe not such a good thing. But in the mind, that’s a necessity.

If you’re like me, you’ve got maybe a dozen different story ideas swirling around in your head at any given time. And those ideas are in their cages, sure, but you can’t help noticing them as your consciousness strolls by. They rattle the bars. They chew on the locks. And occasionally, they break out. Cross-pollinate. Pollute each other.

And for the writer, that’s a very good thing.

The sci-fi idea that you had might just be awesome with a bit of that romantic comedy thrown in. The alternate-history period piece could crackle to life with a dash of the thriller you thought of last week over a plate of meatballs.

Or maybe those ideas will breed and collapse from genetic deformity.

That’s okay, too. Ideas are as numerous as grains of sand, if we’re only open to seeing them.

We can’t keep our ideas in their cages.

We’ve got to let them out once in a while.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.