☀️🌕🕸️ Beamspun 25: Beaver Moon

November 21, 2021

☀️🌕🕸️ Beamspun 25: Beaver Moon

Welcome to Beamspun, a regular roundup about narrative, tech and magic for an old-future world. Published on a Sunday around the full moon. Bring your own tea.

Beaver Moon and the longest partial eclipse in over 500 years
Local sunrise / publish time: 0729 UTC (+12m)

Solnotes

It has been the season of seedheads.

They float of their own accord, but are seeds separate to the flower that grows them? Are the flowers separate to the seeds?

The seeds travel on the wind, and we travel past them, carried by our own senses. But at the core of us - pausing to put one hand on my navel while the other rests on the keyboard - this where we were attached before, so many years ago. Generation to generation. A rate, a rationing and a rationale of genes.

Parentage and ideas flow through underground wires, all our symbols hooked up to bellies, our greatest feats fed by the land, nourished by the sea, blessed by the sun.

An email to organise a rocket launch skims through copper, feet away from a predatory shark. A movie about love slides without caution though the gaps between the leaves of a nearby tree. Smiles and tears trickle down into clothing, get sucked into the warm air, find their way back to the rivers.

Stopping to think where it comes from, feeling the invisible links, everything becomes overwhelming. The beauty and simplicity of it all is too overwhelming, trained as we are to make a challenge out of everything. Accepting the everythingness of everything feels like cheating. Yet, there it is.

As easy as that. Seeds, floating in the breeze.

Supporting Beamspun: If you're enjoying Beamspun and would like to support me a little, you can become a premium subscriber on Buttondown. Pay monthly whatever you like and I'll send you out a little extra digital postcard to mark the equinoxes and solstices. (Maybe something like this one from March)

Regular readers may have noticed a lack of letter last month. Sometimes you have to know when not to push things too far.

Links

narratives: Phoebe Tickell on the "Great Unflattening"
"But the important task for the 21st Century is to re-inhabit a full body of feeling, the capacities of intuition, imagination, warmth, creativity and a sense of what is important to us — perhaps even sacred."
ambience: Sounds of the Forest
A freely-reusable library of recordings from woodlands and forests all over the world

Screenshot showing forest sounds mapped across Europe

online art: Capture the Future(s): Our Bio-Tech Planet
Some rich and varied virtual art here, and a great wander exploring the links between people, technology, and nature through photography and interactive pieces. Background to the project and guided tour video in case you can't see it below.

A large photo of stuffed birds in a museum is surrounded by trees inside a large wood

Abstract graphic taken from the Bio-Tech Planet exhibition

dreaming: Paul Watson on "Acid Communism"
Counterculture, goths, The Left, and "the creative freedom to imagine" all in here.
offline art: Enormous Sculptures Rooted in Nature Take Over Arboretum
"Here, a woman's face is split into two pieces as leaves fluttering across her body. People are encouraged to pass through the middle, where one side shows a human fingerprint and the other side a tree's heartwood."

A large wooden sculpture of a lady's head and shoulders looks out across a park full of trees

alternatives: Jacob Olupona on the Spirituality of Africa
A reminder that we don't need to all believe the same thing. "this type of binary thinking is simplistic. Again, it doesn’t reflect the multiplicity of ways that traditional African spirituality has conceived of deities, gods, and spirit beings. While some African cosmologies have a clear idea of a supreme being, other cosmologies do not."
books: Penguin's "Green Ideas" series has some beautifully simple cover designs
Something specially sacred about a book cover - on the one hand it invites you in and promises you ideas. On the other, it binds and hides the concepts inside, preventing them from escaping when nobody is looking.

Cover of the book 'The World We Once Lived In' showing a simple outline of a branch against a green background

Footer

If you enjoyed this, then please spread the word and tell someone else that you think might like it - the official website is at https://beamspun.exmosis.net/, and the email sign-up is at https://buttondown.email/beamspun. Subscribe as a premium member to receive a quarterly bonus post. You can also support the newsletter more directly.

Mastodon: @scribe@mastodon.sdf.org | Twitter: @6loss | Email: beamspun (at) exmosis.net

And if you're interested, I'm also documenting my own 'everyday solarpunk adventures' over at the 6suns blog. Albeit slowly. Slow is good though.

Beamspun