I have just described the anthropocentric universe. / Was it the Walnut that gave creator the idea / Of creating the human brain?

::::::::

Walnuts are good for the brain
They help our brains fire up for problem-solving
Stimulating higher brain activity in the gamma range
But they also look like our marvelous brains.


And the large-jointed Japanese Knotweed
Is good medicine for inflamed joints.


By the same token Bloodroot,
With its red root and red extract,
Has been used for hundreds of years
As a blood purifier.


Saxifrage, which breaks apart rocks as it grows,
Has been used to relieve kidney stones.
Alkanet, with its viper-shaped seeds
Was used to treat snake bites,
And the coiled shoots of the herb Scorpius
Will help with a scorpion sting. . .


I have just described the anthropocentric universe.
Was it the Walnut that gave creator the idea
Of creating the human brain?


Or is nature just trying to make us feel welcome?


One time when my friend and I were on a walk
He saw the face of an old man in a tree.
He pointed it out
And got angry
When I didn't respond.
I saw the old man's face in the bark.
It was hard to miss,
But the reason I didn't respond was because
I am tired of focusing on all the signatures in nature
That seem to be there
To help us feel at home
By accommodating our projections
Of the familiar?


Why should we eat Walnuts to fire up our brains?
Why shouldn't we just take care of our brains
And eat Walnuts just because we like them
And be grateful?
And why shouldn't we tolerant those invasive knotweeds
Just because they seem so happy with their lives
Growing by the road
And not because they heal our arthritis.


(They are actually quite beautiful.)


Why should we tolerate or like things
Because anything?
We should just like and respect things in nature,
Period.

Next time you pass an old person's face
Try to see a tree in that person.
And next time you are under an old tree
Just be with it.
It is an old being to be sure
But I promise you
It does not have a face.

Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com

Authors Bio:

Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.


He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.