And So It Comes Around Full Circle,

over high garden walls, this sweet echo falls, as a soldier boy whispers goodbye.

Raymond B. Egan

Norah Jones and Tracy Chapman

Echo the walls of a house I once lived.

Pizza in the oven,

Silverware laid out,

Mama singing out of tune.

Memories used to be comforting

Now there’s nobody home..

:')

You don't notice

The everlasting sorrow

That's drowning out

The life in my eyes.

I'm weeping inside,

But you're only seeing

Soft flesh

Carrying a fabric

That lays loosely over my body.

I am but merely an item,

That had been claimed

The moment you rest your body

Against mine.

All my self worth plummeted

In a matter of seconds,

And I have never felt so ashamed.

~ceramic-feelings

I snuck out last night and made frog bread

This is so cool

is it possible that plants have consciousness?

this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014. 

the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):

this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up. 

but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop. 

they remembered that no harm was coming from this action and decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop. 

she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.

they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered. 

it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after 28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!

how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this??? 

well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen. 

so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????

plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???) 

national geographic wrote an awesome article visualizing the experiment here if you want to read more!

<3

You have a nice chest. You should show it off more in your photo posts here.

My chest?

You mean like this?

Looking through old photo albums, feels like reading the life’s story of a familiar stranger.

Someone who once was my person of comfort— memories lost and disconnected in the back of my mind.

If she stood here before me I don’t know if tears would flood my eyes, if I would run for a hug, or if I would feel anything at all.

I don’t remember much about her character— I don’t remember her mannerisms, her fears, or really anything personal about her. All that I have left of her is her favorite flower and her favorite songs.

And I’m sure we would’ve been best friends, but I lost her too soon.

I miss my mom.

What is missed is the lifetime of growing old with her that was taken from me. And I will never have that back.

I will never have my mom.

haiku

the act to conjure

a haiku may take patience

and finger counting.

me n rob