I’ve got a bunch of inky caps mushrooms deliquescing in a jar. And a new to me mushroom that’s all over our yard makes a great yellow stain. I’ve been boiling it on a fire out side. So I bought Make Ink the book by Jason Logan that I was resisting buying because I couldn’t find a second hand copy. Omg I love this book. I want to marry this book.
Make Ink is about foraging for color in the city. Its beautiful and printed on lovely paper and the descriptions and stories and histories are dreamy. The book keeps repeating that there are no rules! Try everything!
Jason Logan publishes a free newsletter every Friday about color and ink making that is the only newsletter or blog I read regularly and I look forward to it every week. He is also working on a documentary called The Color of Ink.
Lab Girl is a terrific book. It’s about a woman’s life as a research scientist and about plants. Her analogies between botanical physiology and the scientific world are insightful and entertaining. I’ve learned so much about how seeds and leaves and roots work and about what a plant is. It’s beautifully written and I’ve read it far too fast.
I always recommend Biocentrism by Robert Lanza. I should reread it so I remember exactly why I think it’s so important that you read it. It’s about the nature of consciousness and it uses the classic sexy physics demonstration, the double slit theory (that proves that matter behaves differently when it is observed) with entangled particles to illustrate that all matter in the universe existed only in a state of possibility until it snapped into existence when consciousness became aware of it. Maybe that was a spoiler.
I enjoy reading physics that’s just beyond my understanding. This book consistently stayed on the edge of what I already understood and what I’d never dreamed of. Except the part about Einstein’s theories of time, that was pretty challenging, but it was explained clearly enough that I was able to use the concept in conversation with an astrophysicist a year after reading. I don’t remember the concept now. Something like: since light moves like this, then time must all happen at once. Yes I will put it on my reread pile… there are a lot of good books on that pile.
I was very happy to find Beyond Biocentrism, the second book in the series about the physics of consciousness, or rather, the effects of consciousness on physics. When I read their first, Biocentrism, I thought it was the best book ever, but it was possibly the first non mycology non-fiction book I’d read. Now that I’ve read a lot if science books I was excited to find out how the writing would compare, and excited that this one would include a chapter on plant perception and a chapter on the illusion of death!
Beyond Biocentrism stood up as a very good read. It was only slowish because I had to stop a few times on each page to ponder and re-evaluate my understanding of reality. I enjoyed following the book’s logic. The first book in the series convinced me that all mater snapped into existence retroactively after consciousness observed it. This time around I disagreed with a lot of the logic, but disagreeing lead me to develop my own materialist beliefs and fleshing out what I think time and perspective is.
I was entertained by the constant anthropomorphic language and metaphor that you’d think a scientist who is talking about the relationship between consciousness and matter would cut out rather than repeatedly, euphemistically and unnecessarily saying that mater knows this and understands that. I enjoy marking up a book with pencil to correct the metaphoric intention that English can leave in science writing, but this time my copy was a library book.
The chapter on plant intelligence was not as fascinating as it could have been. They began by discrediting it, then referenced some science fiction films and then declared it real. I wish they’d talked more about the experiments that have studied plant perception and plant intelligence by the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology and the adversity faced by the Plant Signaling and Behavior Society. If you want to know more read Brilliant Green by Stefano Mancuso and Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano.
I don’t think they offered a great argument against the existence of death, but they set the stage and invited us in to manifest our own. Most memorably by asking when consciousness entered our body. To me it seems like it didn’t, it was just already there when our brains grew around it and created the illusion of a separation between self and everything else and the illusion of time and space, which leads us to think that when our brains stop working that our consciousness will go back to being one with the universe. But on the other hand I believe that emotions are chemical and produced by the material of living bodies and that when we die all that get’s mixed back up into the world in an unconscious way.
The appendix at the end was a bit contradictory, that all matter and time exists only in our minds and that our minds exist not in our brains but where ever we direct our attention. I wish that page had been included in the main text rather than an aside on the last page as it was unsatisfying, but all in all I will recommend this book to anyone curious about physics and consciousness and I’m looking forward to reading the next one.
I enjoyed reading David Sibley’s What it’s like to be a Bird while drinking my morning coffee over a couple of weeks. It ‘s a beautifully illustrated book about bird behavior and physiology. It’s designed to be flipped through, each paragraph stands alone and directs you to a similar concept on a different page. It is an illustrated choose your own adventure book about birds. I tried to read it all in order cover to cover but keep getting whisked away to learn more about how feathers grow or that chimney swifts stay airborne for 10 months of the year! This meant that I reread my favorite parts when I caught up to them chronologically. He does a very good job at articulating ideas and has made a fun read. If you don’t like to read about biology it’s worth it for the paintings.
The Wildcrafting Brewer by Pascal Bauder is enriching my foraging life. He uses foraging for brewing as a way to study, interpret and appreciate the local wildlife. He talks about the magic that is lost in contemporary mass produced products that replace the biologic ingredients that had medicinal and symbolic importance with synthetic flavors- that replace wild fermentation, a living process with mechanical carbonation- and sweeten them with mass produced, subsidized corn syrup. Grocery store soda pop is dead but wild fermented sodas and beers and wines are living brews, one of a kind nuanced experiences that strengthen and celebrate the local wildlife an our relationship with in.
His writing style is easy to read, exciting and repeats the parts that you need to read over again. The text works just the way a foraging obsession works. And he’s all about figuring out how to express the non monetary value of a plant or place. He explains the magic of knowing the wildlife around you so well.
I’ve been foraging for 4 big medicinal tea projects since spring. I loved drinking my forest tea every Sunday last winter and wished I could make it a daily practice. I quit fermenting Kombucha, because I didn’t need the large quantity of sugar in my diet and didn’t love the commercial products I was using but I miss the process…. Duh. The answer is simple. Ferment the medicinal teas I’ve been working so hard to collect. Use wild yeasts. Throw my own fermenting pots. Taste everything!
I’m very happy that my Underworld Tea is now Root Beer from the Rhyzosphere! My Forest Tea is now Marlborough Mead. I’ve got Monalulu Scrumpy and Blue Finger Fox Wine fermenting. And Sumac and Rosehip Pop. And my Moon Tea will be medicinal menstrual beer! It’s taken no time to get all this going. The book is beautifully illustrated and makes me feel like I’ve found a kindred spirit.
The Biophilium 