asakiyume | fishing, centipede perfume, roots, book recommendation

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
--From "Song of Wandering Aengus," W.B. Yeats

I went out with my tutor, her dad, and her older brother through the flooded forest so they could show me fishing, and it was exactly like in "The Song of Wandering Aengus." My tutor's brother had a piece of line tied to a stick, with a little hook attached. "Over here, look at all the berries here; the fish will love this spot, they love these berries," their dad said excitedly.

And her brother put a berry on his hook, threw it in the water, and came up with a fish. One, two, three times he did it, one, two, three times he caught a little fish.

So many berries for the fish, so many fish for people fishing.

Centipede Perfume
So much everything all the time, pressing on your senses all the time--this is what I love here.

I divided my time between my tutor and her family and my friends the guide couple and their family. With them I visited a nature reserve on the island of Santa Rosa, in Peru. At one point we were walking a forest path, and the wife, L, was showing me all the centipedes on the ground, quite large. She could sex them!

"This one's a male," she said. "See? Here's its member." Sure enough, there it was!

"Do you want to hold it?" she asked.

"Sure!" So I held out my hand. It crawled near my hand ... then veered away. We tried again. It approached... then moved away, back to her hand.

Then I remembered I had bug spray on. The centipede must not have liked the bug spray. That's what you get for wandering around an environment doused in poison! Smart centipede.

Most of the centipedes we saw she determined were males, but finally she found a female one. "They have a nice smell," she said, after setting it down. She held out her hand, and sure enough, it had a beautiful citrusy smell to it!

I tried to find what species of centipede this was, afterward, but there are something like 700 species of centipede in the area, and the internet is eager to recommend to me the giant Amazonian centipede, but these guys were big but not THAT big, and the color wasn't quite right. And then I looked for fragrant centipedes, and instead found some American millipedes who have a scent like almonds because they're poisonous. So... similar but not the same.

Roots
There were some beautiful, largish, red-brown seeds on the ground. I picked one up, and underneath it had split and a root was pushing out. I picked up another: same. And another: same. These seeds were wasting no time getting started.

Where I live in western Massachusetts, in fall, you get acorns and hickory nuts. But they don't put out roots until the following spring ... Things that move slow in my cool zone move fast in the Amazon.

I only have a drawing, no photo
drawing from my journal

This reminds me of a story I heard the other day about soil forming high in the canopy in temperate rainforests in the Pacific Northwest. Up to a foot of soil, from mosses and things growing on the branches, decaying, new stuff growing, decaying, building up. A soil scientist was looking at what was growing up in that aerial soil, and found some roots that... connected back to the hosting tree. It turns out that that new soil is very rich in nitrogen and phosphorus, and especially in spring, when all the terrestrial plants are competing for the nutrients in the ground, this extra soil, high up in the canopy, is a good vitamin boost for the tree. Marvelous. (Link to the transcript.)

Book Recommendation
And that reminds me of a book I recently finished that I really loved, Usurpation by Sue Burke. It's the third in her series about interactions between humans and an alien species of intelligent bamboo from a distant planet. The first two books, Semiosis and Interference, take place on the distant planet; this one takes place here on earth. I really LOVED this one. It was right up my alley in many, many ways. "With abundance and nourishment, all living things reciprocate," a character declares, and another, speaking of interaction between sentient beings of all sorts, says "We are not secret to each other, and mutual compassion commands our common growth. Love and empathy are not luxuries but necessities for survival."

It's not a story with a plot that advances from beginning to end. Instead, it's different characters over time (a few span the whole novel, but some not) dealing with different problems (crime, war, disease) and gradually coming into a better understanding of one another on both a personal and species level while asking all the big questions about what it all means and how it feels. If that sounds like your jam, give it a try. You could start with the first one and read all three, or you could just read this one. This one feels different because it's Earth focused. This can be a detraction for people who really liked the alien focus of the first two, but for me, it was a draw.