The Light Eaters - Open our Eyes to Endless Possibilities
- Affan Kermani
- Oct 20
- 3 min read
“The drabness has already overtaken the Berlin Botanic Garden, but a few hardy plants are still in bloom, their flowers angled, too, toward the waning rays. My walking companion, Tilo Henning, is a researcher here. He is telling me about Nasa poissoniana, a plant in the flowering Loasaceae family that grows in the Peruvian Andes, and that he is saying has me captivated.
What do you mean, the flower remembers? I ask. Where does it store the memory?
Henning shakes his head and laughs, his black hair tied in a low ponytail, draped over the collar of his sweatshirt. He doesn’t know. No one does. But yes, he and his colleague Max Weigend, the president of the botanical garden a few hours away in Bonn, have observed Nasa poissoniana’s ability to store and recall information. They discovered that these multicolor starburst-shaped flowers were able to remember the time intervals between bumblebee visits, and anticipate the next time their pollinator was likely to arrive.” Pg 119/120 Hardcover
I am left in awe reading chapter 6, to the human eye, a plant or tree appears rather non-complex thing. The fact that memory exists without a brain, wow, how does that even happen?
A tree or plant, rooted in stillness, requires memory, perhaps to compensate for that lack of mobility, or is it lack of mobility, just because we as humans see it so? The point here to me is that there is more to what meets the human eye, even for ourselves.
We humans limit ourselves by subscribing to what we grew up with; we are like plants and trees, but our stillness is rooted in our brains with endless potential that is unique to us, yet we need culture and religion to guardrail this life.
Our memory, in my opinion, is like the rear view mirror in a car, there for reference and the dashboard in front to move forward with vision of our unique self. The life of plants and trees opens our thoughts to the hidden world potential we do not stumble across in our day-to-day life.
Please consider joining the 6D book club of The Light Eaters this November, I and other members of the community would love to hear what you learn from life of plant and trees and how you live by “me do me” and “you do you” in this very complex earth. Fall & Winter make a cozy and cuddly time to read and share with our community from the comfort of one's home.
"Zoë Schlanger delivers a groundbreaking work of popular science that probes the hidden world of the plant kingdom, destabilizing not just how we see the green things of the world but also our place in the hierarchy of beings, and maybe the notion of that hierarchy itself."
Affan is a US tax professional within the financial services industry. He survived Polio as an infant of twenty-eight days in the early seventies. As a person with disabilities, Affan has been on a lifelong journey seeking ways to manage muscle weaknesses, bone loss, and contain progressive disability that comes with Post Polio Syndrome. He discovered the ‘Whole Foods Plant’ lifestyle during the thick of COVID-19 and adopted the lifestyle evidencing a positive shift in energy and mobility.
Affan moderates book clubs with a focus on books that will lead minds to contemplate the human ability of ‘mind over matter’ and the influence of modern-day technology and environment, on how each of us can best navigate life for our individual needs of health and wellbeing. Affan is also an administrator on our 6D Facebook Page - and the writer of these posts, of course!
Be well
Stop.Breathe.Focus.Move.Flow.
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