This intelligent, spiritual, philosophical, upbeat, VERY INSPIRATIONAL music video and MANIFESTO came to me yesterday via Paul Hoffman.

My body chemistry changed – in a good WAY – when I saw it. I had to stand up straighter, breath more deeply the sacred breath of life, remember how rare and precious it is to be human. And remember that something bigger is coming through us that we might not understand but that we must trust in and ride, like a wave.

WaySeerManifesto.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPR3GlpQQJA

 

Communion

Take and eat.
This is my body:

Light
turned green in tongues of grass,
turned flesh in grazing herds,
turned love in human hearts.

Take and drink.
This is my blood:
Life
rising in springs, flowing in rivers,
swelling the seas, salting your tears,
your veins full of me.

Take and eat
this sun and soil.
Take and drink
this wind and rain.

Re member me–
Light’s long journey out of Night,
Light’s long journey into Life.

Re member me–
Love’s dawn journey into Day.

The Great Communion of Being By Diane Pendola, from EarthLight Magazine #53, Spring 2005 — Vol. 14, No. 4

https://www.earthlight.org/2005/essay53_pendola.html

Diane Pendola is a spiritual guide and co-founder, with Teresa Hahn, of Skyline Harvest, an eco-contemplative center in Camptonville, California. https://www.ecocontemplative.org/

Meganne Forbes is a watercolor artist living in Carpinteria, California. "Life touches me, and that vision is what I paint." https://www.meganneforbes.com

Tree: sagole baobab #0707-00505 (2,000 years old; limpopo province, south africa) Rachael Sussman https://rachelsussman.com/portfolios/OLTW/main.html

Bacteria: siberian actinobacteria #tv-26 (400,000 – 600,000 years old; neils bohr institute, copenhagen)

Rachael Sussman recently presented at The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, Calif. Here is Stewart Brand's summary of her photographic presentation of Earth's oldest living beings.

Creative photographer Sussman showed beautiful slides of very elderly organisms. The captions were as crucial as the images—naming the species, the place, and the approximate age. You can see many of them here: https://rachelsussman.com/portfolios/OLTW/main.html

The series began with the only animal—an eighteen-foot brain coral in the waters of Tobago, thought to be 2,000 years old. An enormous baobob in South Africa might be 2,000 years old. Then there is the astounding welwitschia mirabilis of the Namibian desert, a conifer that feeds on mist, with the longest leaves in the plant kingdom.

Of course there was a redwood in our Sequoia National Park dated precisely to 2,150 years in age. On a remote Japan island, a two-day hike was needed to track down a gorgeous cedar somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000 years old. In Perthshire, Scotland, a churchyard was long ago build around huge yew tree that now is between 2,000 and 5,000 years old. In Chile the Patagonian cypress gets up to 2,200 years old, and a chestnut tree on the island of Sicily has been there for 3,000 years. On Crete there's an olive tree that might be the oldest in the world—3,000 years. It still bears olives. It may well have been preserved because its hollow trunk served for generations as a chicken coop.

Lichen in Greenland grows 1 centimeter every 100 years. So a large specimen could be dated to 3,000 years. In the Atacama Desert at
15,000 feet in Chile, a shrub called La Llareta grows only 1.5 centimeters a year and is so dense you can stand on its leaf structure. They get to 3,000 years old. The bristlecone pines much beloved at Long Now have been dated up to 5,000 years old.

Send in the clones. Cloned forests are basically one individual that sends up a multitude of stems from a single extensive, very long-lived root system. Sussman found a clonal forest of spruce in Sweden that is 9,550 years old; box huckleberry in Pennsylvania 13,000 years old; aspens in Utah 80,000 years old; and clonal sea grass off of Spain that is 100,000 years old.

So far the age champion is an actinobacteria that lives in Siberian permafrost—alive for 400 to 600,000 years—half a million years.

Sussman found all these creatures with the guidance of remarkable field biologists who have never met each other, because biological
longevity is not yet a science. Artist Sussman is startled to be its first practitioner. She has two more years to go on this project. Long Now would love to see a conference mustered at the end of her project to bring together all the scientists she's gotten to know, to see what aggregating their knowledge might conjure up. If sponsors are interested, Long Now would be glad to organize the event.

–Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand — sb@gbn.org
The Long Now Foundation – https://www.longnow.org
Seminars & downloads: https://www.longnow.org/seminars/

Scientists at Harvard have harnessed their fascination of the molecular world with 21st-century digital animation to visually tell the story of the inner life of a cell. The results rival anything in Hollywood. Now that's entertainment! Now playing in a living cell near you.

from the New York Times via M.P. November 15, 2010 (short advertisement precedes the video)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VXCIU89pGs (5:45)

Other work by the same folks:

https://www.xvivo.net/the-inner-life-of-the-cell/