This week, I listened to the first two podcast episodes in The Long Time Academy, which won awards in 2022 for its work. The podcast is a short series with the intent of giving the listener a transformative spark away from short-term thinking — of thinking instead as ourselves as descendants and ancestors in a web of many people and many stories. It was a beautiful episode, and I highly recommend the series and the companion exercises. Many of the concepts under discussion will be familiar to people who have explored ancestor veneration or who have integrated deep-geologic-and-evolutionary-scale practices into their polytheist reverence.
The narrative skillfully builds an argument for “polytemporality” as a virtue practice, where we get out of our own heads and build empathy for the past and future through mindfulness practices. For polytheists, I could also see this series as helpful for anyone feeling burned out by extreme polarization online. It would likely also help anyone in a position of religious prominence (Influencer, officiant, &c.) who is looking for mental hygiene practices to check their ego.
At about the same time I encountered that series, I found a book called Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany by Matthew Hall. I’ve skimmed the table of contents and a few of the pages in the chapter about paganisms, and I’m excited about the book, especially the sections critical of Plato because how he reads Plato is very common — it’s good food for thought for what I’ve said about the Platonic “hierarchy” of animals being more about what we can know about other embodied lives (humans are more understandable than non-humans and animals moreso than plants) in an environment where our partiality prevents us from truly seeing them as individual agents most of the time. Here’s the book’s blurb:
Plants are people too? No, but in this work of philosophical botany Matthew Hall challenges readers to reconsider the moral standing of plants, arguing that they are other-than-human persons. Plants constitute the bulk of our visible biomass, underpin all natural ecosystems, and make life on Earth possible. Yet plants are considered passive and insensitive beings rightly placed outside moral consideration. As the human assault on nature continues, more ethical behavior toward plants is needed. Hall surveys Western, Eastern, Pagan, and Indigenous thought as well as modern science for attitudes toward plants, noting the particular resources for plant personhood and those modes of thought which most exclude plants. The most hierarchical systems typically put plants at the bottom, but Hall finds much to support a more positive view of plants. Indeed, some indigenous animisms actually recognize plants as relational, intelligent beings who are the appropriate recipeints of care and respect. New scientific findings encourage this perspective, revealing that plants possess many of the capacities of sentience and mentality traditionally denied them.
Next up, I watched this interesting asceticism initiation video. Apparently, a lot of people in Jainism are taking vows quite young now, in part because the Internet has helped people learn more about what the ascetic lifestyle requires.
Also, it turns out that “ascetic” is a common autocorrect typo for “aesthetic,” so you’ll get all kinds of weird haul videos come up in YouTube Shorts when looking for something very … not that.
Μία ἠ ὄλη ζωὴ καὶ εἷς βίος, τῇδε κἀκεισε μεταβαλλὀμενος.
All of life is one, and the life you live is one, alternating between here and there.Simplicius, On Epictetus volume 2, 135,30
KALLISTI 