Messenger

Just back from Slow Food's Terra Madre in Torino, after the Organic World Congress in Istanbul, after the GlobE in Witzenhausen, after the Tropentag in Prague... phew! ...  All the work there is to do and all the inspiring people there are to do that work with!

Tom, Roberto, and Jim said it best "It's a sad and beautiful world".

Helping to settle back into Kleve, I listened to Wes Nisker, a teacher at the Insight Meditation Center, open his talk with this poem 'Messenger' by Mary Oliver and wanted to share it again, even if you've read it a hundred times, enjoy it slowly and may it inspire gratitude as a central theme.

--------
My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam, deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth
and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all,
over and over, how it is that we live forever.

--------

The teacher repeated that line again for emphasis "over and over, how it is that we live forever"

Hmong ethnobotany and conservation in Laos

A participatory ethnobotany study with indigenous Hmong elders on spiritual-cultural practices and livelihood uses of plants and their conservation suggests that the traditional cultural uses for plants may be a mechanism for the conservation of biodiversity in the rapidly deteriorating forests of Luang Prabang in the Lao People's Democratic Republic. Results offer an overview of traditional Hmong cultural uses and conservation of biodiversity in the rapidly deteriorating forests of Luang Prabang in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic.

Read 'Hmong ethnobotany and conservation in Laos' in Ethnobotany Research and Applications (Whitney et al. 2014; 2015)

Tshawb nrhiav nroj tsuag tau muaj kev koom tes nrog cov kws tshuaj ntsuab Hmoob nyob rau zos Long Lan, Xeev Luang prabang, Los Tsuas Teb chaws tau pib tshawb los rau ntawm lub xyoo 2012 thiab 2013. Nrhiav txog lub laj lim thiab tswv yim ntawm cov laus neeg nyob zos Long Lan thiab cov zos nyob ib puag ncig twb yog ib qhov sij hawm muaj txiaj ntsig tau paub txog txoj kev cai coj siv nroj tsuag thiab pov hwm nyob nrog lub neej. Tau paub txog ntawm 74 hom tau muaj 49 yam (nroj tsuag) twb tau muab sau zoo, qhov nov muaj 25 yam tshuaj ntsuab (17 yam yog cov muaj hnub nyooj ntev thiab 8 yam yog cov muaj hnub nyooj luv), 20 yam yog cov ua ntoo, 17 yam yog cov nroj, 10 yam yog cov hmab, thiab 2 yam yog suab. Muab xam tau pom txog nroj tsuag muaj txiaj ntsig zoo heev rau ntawm txoj kev siv yoom thiab pov hwm nyob nrog lub neej. Qhov tshawb rhiav no tau ceeb toom txog tias txoj kev siv yoom nroj tsuag raws li txoj cai Hmoob coj yog ib txoj cai zoo rau ntawm kev pov hwm hav zoov hav tsuag rau qhov hav zoov niaj hnub no raug luaj ntov nyob rau xeev Luang prabang, los Tsuas Teb. 

Check out the related iNaturalist collection (still growing).

References

Whitney, Cory, Min (Meej Vaj) Vang Sin, Giang Le Hong, Can Vu Van, Keith Barber, and Lanh Tran Thi. “Conservation and Ethnobotanical Knowledge of a Hmong Community in Long Lan, Luang Prabang, Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” Ethnobotany Research and Applications 12 (2014): 643–58. https://doi.org/10.17348/era.12.0.643-658.
———. “Hmong Conservation: Lessons in Ethnobotany from the Elders of Long Lan, Luang Prabang, Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” In 38th Annual Conference of the Society of Ethnobiology “The Many Faces of Ethnobiology,” 70–71. May 6-9: Society of Ethnobiology, 2015.

Autobiography by Nanao Sakaki

Autobiography

Born of a humble & poor family,
Received minimum education,
Learnt how to live by himself at fourteen,
Survived storms, one after another.
Bullets, starvation & concrete wastelands.

A day's fare - a cup of brown rice, vegetables,
Small fish, a little water, & a lot of wind.
Delighted by children and women,
Sharing beads of sweat with farmers,
Fishermen, carpenters & blacksmiths,
Paying no attention to soap, shampoo,
Toilet paper & newspapers.

Now & again
Loves to suck the nectar of honeysuckle,
To flutter with dragonflies & butterflies,
To chatter with winter wrens,
To sing song with coyotes,
To swim with humpback whales,
And to hug a rock in which dinosaurs sleep.

Feels at home in Alaskan glaciers,
Mexican desert, virgin forest of Tanzania,
Valley of Danube, grasslands of Mongolia,
Vulcanoes in Hokkaido & Okinawan coral reeds.

And - one sunny summer morning
He will disappear on foot.
Leaving no shadow behind.

Love is the beginning of loneliness

A poem by Shuji Tereyama.

(The original kanji is included in the translation to make the wordplay apparent)

I wrote down the word tree (木)

but it looked so pitiful all alone

so I added another tree (木)

and the trees became a forest (林)

When I look at the word lonely (淋)

I know why the trees are crying (涙)

It's just because when love begins

loneliness comes in

Slow Science

When the Slow Movement started in 1989 with the creation of the Slow Food organization — to combat the loss of traditional foods — its objectives were to promote quality over speed, to defend cultural diversity and to challenge the ever-increasing pace of our lives. Since then, the concept has spread and expanded to such fields as traveling, designing ... and science.

Worldcrunch.com / LE TEMPS

Slow science supporters criticize the pressure to publish as many studies as possible in scientific journals. Instead, they demand more time to carry out their research and publish their work says a 2010 one-page document entitled "The Slow Science Manifesto," published online by a group of anonymous Berlin-based researchers.

"We do need time to think," it reads. "We do need time to digest. We cannot continuously tell you what our science means, what it will be good for, because we simply don't know yet. Science needs time. Bear with us, while we think."

Isabelle Stengers, philosopher at the Free University of Brussels and co-author of the book Another Science is Possible! Manifesto for a Slowing Down of Sciences, explained at a recent lecture that the manifesto ideas are relatively simple. "But they offer the advantage of creating a consensus in which scientists who find their working conditions painful recognize themselves," she said. 

"The slowness demanded by supporters of slow science is also necessary to what I call 'friction' — that is to say, exchanges with other fields and, more generally, with society," Isabelle Stengers says. She says that researchers are increasingly cut off from the rest of the world, and they have become so ultra-specialized that there is now a lack of imagination.

"The golden age during which scientists could think at leisure, without worrying about anything other than their work has in fact never existed, because they always had to look for funding," sas Alain Kaufman, who leads the Science-Society Interface at the University of Lausanne. "So there's no point in being nostalgic. We must nonetheless denounce the speed pathologies and especially the tyranny of the impact factor."