A Guide to Being (‘Green-Wise’)
or ‘How to Draw Energy from a Deeper Understanding of Nature (by joining the Nature-Aware, or Green-Enlightened)’
‘Are you one of the ‘green-wise’? This is a short guidebook of ‘green insight’ to enhance a deeper awareness of ‘what you are’ to Nature on a less spiritual and more scientific level. Featuring original artwork and inspiring quotes from popular science writers on evolution, life and death, prepare your ‘self’ to be changed…
Update your mind to a new, positive perspective, free from what society expects, and learn about permaculture and the power of truly ‘owning’ your life… It’s about time.’
Alternative titles:
‘How to Find and ‘Own’ Your Treasure, buried within Nature’
or
‘How to Play the Game of Being Alive (in Nature)’
Or, even…
‘How to Sleep the (Real) Sleep of Billionaires’
(A Guide to the Path of Being and Belonging for Everyone!)
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CONTENTS
Intro (Why I’m Writing this Guide…)
More Time in Nature, for our own Health (and Sanity!)
Being Greenwise (1: A Simple, Flexible, Evolving ‘Code’ of Being)
Being Greenwise (2. Helping you to own your Reality)
Permaculture Gardens and a Tribal-Global, Collaborative Species
Control without Controlling
More on ‘Ownership’ (of YOUR reality)
To Sleep The Sleep of Billionaires
The Trends…..
Energy
Insight or Awareness of Power
The Weight of Stones in the River of Life and Time
Your Home and Environment
Work and Tools
Treasures in the Fountain
The Fountain and the Balance
Real Treasure Found?
We are Going to Die
The End, and A Beginning
Now You Have Joined ‘the Green-wise’…
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Tyrell : She’s beginning to suspect, I think.
Deckard : Suspect? How can it not know what it is?
- from ‘Blade Runner’ (1982) movie
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Intro (Why I’m Writing this Guide…)
This isn’t a practical guide, it’s more of a spiritual one, but by imparting some ‘green wisdom’, it may open a window in some of you to becoming more practical, helping clear your view, look through or beyond, much of the modern fog and distractions we (all of us) can at times feel lost in, or bewitched by. Distractions and social media can also make people self-obsessed and ‘locked in’ to their own views, and that’s not forgetting the dreams, workloads and projects we take on, some of them invented for ourselves, which we then carry around like weights.
A heightened awareness of ‘Nature’ (that force moving inside and outside) can help to reconcile us with our ‘selves’ within its greater system. For starters, a lot of people think of themselves as being greater than nature, as if it’s something to conquer or overcome. Or else they’re anxious or turned off by its ‘machinations’ when they watch one type of nature documentary on TV, or a shocking Youtube video.
Maybe you think you already know about Nature and your place in it? Maybe you have some ideas about Darwinism and the quiet war — the struggle for Life — busy all around us, in this great Game of Nature? Perhaps you have no idea at all? Well, at least try to give this guide a quick read. Maybe it can unlock some new (and some positive and reassuring) insights and sense of perspective.
Nature is not all beauty, but nor is it all harshness. It is something to respect. Much of what could be called ‘good’ evolves in nature. It survives. We can be more reassured about the nature of Nature! I know that naturalists are probably already wincing because I’ve used human words already, in my third paragraph; projected human language in describing something which just… is. Words like ‘war’, ‘struggle’, ‘busy’, ‘game’ and ‘good’: these are projections — assumptions — onto something which only seems like these things, to us, but only when you know a small part about it, and not the entire view, or the deeper view.
We use the word ‘violent’ to describe a lion bringing down an zebra when the killing technique is in fact a very ‘economical’ process in terms of energy. Nature is much bigger than these words and phrases: this process of energy and time, which doesn’t care much for any words really, and doesn’t care for methods or ideas or memories too much either. It’s quite reassuring: to know we can all keep moving on. We’ll focus more on energy later on.
Charles Darwin would often check himself in his writing when trying to describe both its alarming, or enchanting, manifestations. Nature and evolution are certainly not all about butterfly wings and unsettlingly large dinosaur teeth and bones. It’s more about environment, and this remains the ruling factor, and why shouldn’t it? It explains why creatures evolve, and why they devolve, and why doing either really has no consequence, if it means they survive and have the traits they need to live in an environment, not what they desire…
‘In reality, vanishingly few animals on Earth have bothered with much of either intelligence or dexterity. No animal has acquired remotely as much of either as have we… and the only other species to acquire a little of both (common and pygmy chimpanzees) have been rather unsuccessful.’
From ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee’ by Jared Diamond
What things are evolving now? You can say: everything. It’s just very slow so you can’t easily detect it. Our language is evolving, religion is evolving (although it might never admit it), your coffee machine is evolving (the next model is out next week!), until the design is overtaken by a new, dominant technology. Or, it isn’t replaced, it just diversifies or branches off. One day, we may all stop using paper and ink. However, you can always ‘devolve’, and go back to it (especially in a power cut). It doesn’t matter as long as it does the job. Nothing matters to Nature. Environment is the main, deciding factor shaping the incessant adaptation and change. We also have code (our DNA) helping us grow and remember experience, in our bodies, and in our culture too, with all its signs, symbols and songs.
With such a rich legacy recorded in culture, and so much technology and options widely available, it can be confusing to know how ‘best’ to live. Perhaps we no longer need to worry? Perhaps we’re the only species to have broken free from our environment and can now adapt to anything?
But hang on… we still possess this legacy inside, growing and burning to stretch itself and feel alive, every day. And why should any creature want to live beyond its own environment, in its humble lifetime? Where does it think it’s going? The only reason might be to make the act of living, or ‘a life’, easier for itself. It is probably trying to streamline something, make itself more efficient. But this, you billionaires out there, is also a dangerous trend. Who wants to have everything easy? There are still gardeners out there using ancient methods of gardening, just because they might want to grow something their own way, and in their own time.
It may not always seem like it, but we have a wide array of options for how we can live and survive in our environments, or — and if you so choose to focus just on this — the attempt to make money only. The trouble with this latter strategy is it can lead people down very abstract paths, which take a toll, or completely ignore their physical — and mental — evolutionary history. But people adapt, go through phases, and, perhaps, ultimately manage to find a healthy balance.
As our infrastructure and systems go through turbulent times, people turn to more robust, even older technology, or local systems and techniques of living to help them survive more independently and take the strain off power grids, water mains etc. Starting up a permaculture garden can be beneficial for everyone. This is one practical window I’d personally promote, and it’s not too hard for anyone to do. More of this later.
First let me turn back to the quotation before this introduction, taken from a film called ‘Blade Runner’, which concerns an artificial consciousness (Rachel, a human-disguised android) that has never been told it’s artificial. You may have seen Ridley Scott’s cult, dystopian science-fiction movie. It’s an alternative reality where there’s hardly any sign of nature.
A lot of the modern world is artificial, and yet we’re fully in love with it. We’re in love with how it’s supposed to make our lives easier, work-free and be able to ‘own’ more time for ourselves.
The irony of the small extract of dialogue is that by the end of the movie, the bounty hunter tasked with tracking down these escaped, sentient androids, might in fact be one of them, meaning he — also — never knew, or was never told, about his fabricated, inner nature. We realise we might have been watching an android sent to catch an android.
By the end, reality itself is in question, along with questions about life and death’s meaning. The film implicates everyone stuck within a technologically-saturated, isolating, postmodern world to the extent that even the importance of truth is fading — and our fear (or absence of fear), and our paranoia surrounding this — has become the new reality.
If anything, those characters are searching for more life, more reality.
The last scene of the movie (the Director’s Cut edition) sees both Deckard and Rachel now ‘on the run’ together, hoping perhaps to just live out the remainder of their ‘lives’ free from the dystopian environment they’ve come from.
This new, mental reality, or its threat, is something many people are still running from. (It’s a theme present in many of Philip K Dick’s sci-fi books, where double-agents or cops frequently get lost in a fog of confusion, not knowing what or who they’re actually working for, and then start behaving erratically.)
What also strikes one about this dystopian movie Blade Runner, is also the sheer absence of physical nature, plants, green trees etc. A few animals do appear, but even they, we’re told, are fake.
I’m not suggesting we’re all androids, but I’d say that technology and many aspects of modern life are trying to turn us that way, by removing contact with the earth, with green nature and natural, hands-on work, even the picking of fruit or nuts from trees. Automation seeks to make life easier sure, but it removes the ‘being’ within nature. Lines get blurred.
Well, you know, there is evidence of what we are, and it’s in Nature. Let’s not behave erratically, if possible. Let’s know what we are, and the world we’ve evolved from.
More Time in Nature, for our own Health (and Sanity!)
Our planet is changing. We need to change. But it’s not all bad. We just need to wake up, and get back — closer — to the earth again.
And this is what is happening, if you watch the many gardening videos appearing these days on Youtube etc. In fact, never before have solutions like permaculture (gardening with the land, understanding energy, plants, relationships between plants, and respecting biodiversity) been reaffirmed, re-deployed and expanded upon.
This trend is how we’ll save as many as we can. Not spaceships or technological wonders to deliver us from having over-stimulated minds, by over-stimulating them even more. We need bottom-up priorities and not top-down tinkering.
We are so interconnected with the natural world, we are still learning just how much. Most people have no idea. This is the real story and the ultimate movie. ‘Seeing Nature’, and how it works, will blow your mind and leave you seeing through all the flimsy, human-made structures surrounding you.
And it’s not just about ‘magical’ documentaries with slow-mo, dramatic music to depict the natural world either. It goes a lot deeper than this, to your hidden behaviors and tendencies….
READ ON!…. read the full text on PARAGRAPH.XYZ
Note: This guide is also available on Amazon as paperback and kindle.
More…
‘Take the Green Pill’ NFT collectible art available via Opensea (‘Art by Ade M. Campbell’ collection)
- ‘Know Nature, Know Thyself’ : The Greenwise Amazon Reading List……
- Chat to Greenwise the Guardian (an AI chatbot)
- ‘Through Fountellion’ (a story of the first VR ‘green game’.) — search Amazon or online.
If you like some of the artwork…
- ‘Greenwise’ illustrations and artwork as NFT by Ade’s Press (Makersplace Gallery)
- ‘Art by Ade M. Campbell’ (an NFT collection via Opensea etc.)
- Search ‘Avatars of Nature’ (an NFT collection via Opensea etc.)
- Search ‘Organic Metaverse’ (Nature photography as visual video ‘game’)
- Ade’s website: search Ade’s Press ! :)
