{"id":402,"date":"2014-02-23T15:02:40","date_gmt":"2014-02-23T23:02:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=402"},"modified":"2014-02-23T15:02:40","modified_gmt":"2014-02-23T23:02:40","slug":"the-standing-still-beings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/?p=402","title":{"rendered":"The Standing Still Beings"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_405\" style=\"width: 235px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/redwood-stump-face_5x71.jpg\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-405\" decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-405\" title=\"redwood stump face_5x7\" src=\"http:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/redwood-stump-face_5x71-225x300.jpg\" alt=\"Redwood stump\" width=\"225\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/redwood-stump-face_5x71-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/redwood-stump-face_5x71-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/redwood-stump-face_5x71.jpg 1575w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-405\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Redwood stumps, Jack Peters Gulch, Mendocino, CA<\/p><\/div>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">With enough imagination, any group of two or three lines or dots can become a face. Sunlight filtering through the forest one afternoon this week made me see faces in an old redwood stump I passed as I strolled down the service road to our neighborhood\u2019s pump house in Jack Peters Creek. The \u201ceyes\u201d and \u201cmouth\u201d are actually slots hacked by long ago lumberjacks to cantilever the boards on which they would have stood to saw down the giant tree.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\u00a0I was drawn to these \u201cfaces\u201d because of a recent <em>New Yorker<\/em> article, <a title=\"Pollan article\" href=\" http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2013\/12\/23\/131223fa_fact_pollan?printable=true&amp;currentPage=all\" target=\"_blank\">\u201cThe Intelligent Plant\u201d<\/a> by <a title=\"Michael Pollan website\" href=\"michaelpollan.com\/? \" target=\"_blank\">Michael Pollan<\/a>.\u00a0 In it, Pollan notes how wary many scientists are of any hint of parallels between animal senses and plant senses, or of suggestions that plants have intelligence, which he defines as \u201ccapable of cognition, communication, information processing, computation, learning, and memory.\u201d Pollan goes on to describe a number of plant studies that do indeed demonstrate such capabilities.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\u00a0The problem is language. The words we have for intelligence in the animal world (brain, neural networks, etc.) and for the tools of sensory information (ears, eyes, nose, etc.) don\u2019t work for beings whose mode of communication is complex biochemicals: pheromones transmitted by leaves through the air, and electrochemical signals sent by root tips through a network of mycorrhizal fungi. It\u2019s as if we were trying to comprehend and describe the lives of beings on an alien planet.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\u00a0What I took away from Pollan\u2019s article was a renewed respect for the beauty and complexity of our natural world, and a renewed awareness of how much we humans don\u2019t yet understand. I know the \u201cfaces\u201d are just human-made gashes in the trees. But they serve to remind me that I, who have legs to move around, live among the standing still beings, of whose lives I am ignorant.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>With enough imagination, any group of two or three lines or dots can become a face. Sunlight filtering through the forest one afternoon this week made me see faces in an old redwood stump I passed as I strolled down the service road to our neighborhood\u2019s pump house in Jack Peters Creek. The \u201ceyes\u201d and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,184],"tags":[185,186,187,425],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=402"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402\/revisions\/408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.maureeneppstein.com\/mve_journal\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}