Hi Gavin, you offer some great info, thank you! However, I have to point out that you really shouldn't share photos from books unless you have permission from the author. Doing so is a form of copyright infringement. I am not an expert on this by any means, but I felt I needed to bring it up. I think as creators on the internet, we have to be extra vigilant. I've had my photography used without permission so this is probably where it stems from.
I totally understand that not everyone can afford the books you mention and that you want to share, but I think it's better to be safe than sorry and not share unless you have permission.
Thanks for sharing your views on "intellectual property" Kendra. I do not share your views and do not recognize the authority of the organized criminal syndicates (statist regimes and their various judicial/law enforcement rackets) that you appear to swear fealty under.
What is legal and what is moral are not the same thing. We live in an era where all sorts of duplicitous, exploitative, ecocidal and morally reprehensible behavior is completely legal. Plenty of things that were legally approved (and promoted) by the state have been unethical and/or nefarious. For instance, The Doctrine Of Discovery was written into law and made it legal to kidnap African and Indigenous peoples from South and North America and sell them as property in the United States (and elsewhere). For more info: https://substack.com/@gavinmounsey/note/c-94196148
It was also legal for people to segregate and discriminate against people that had not received mRNA injections here in Canada (and all over the world). People that did not bow down to Big Pharma and governments pushing their dangerous (and functionally useless) genetic injections were punished with punitive measures, having their ability to move freely curtailed by Fascistic mobs of masked up militarized police, they were not allowed to go into public buildings like libraries, community centers and schools and their jobs were threatened by complicit cowardly employers. That was all legal.
Your call to "remain vigilant" (when you in fact mean "remain obedient to the government") carries with it the familiar sting of the mRNA cultists that wished me dead for not drinking the Kool-Aid (calling me names like "anti-science" and "anti-vaxxer").
Each book I shared pictures from was not only listed along side the author's name, but also linked to where people can buy a copy of their book. Thus, I am actually increasing the likelihood of those authors selling books, not diminishing their capacity to sell books through articles like this.
I am a published author and photographer myself, and I have had people plagiarise my work (both my writing and photos) and put their own name to both, so I do understand your strong feelings regarding the ethics of plagiarism.
Copyright laws (and the unnatural concept of "intellectual property") on the other hand, are a completely different ball of wax.
If someone shared pictures of pages from my book (Recipes For Reciprocity : The Regenerative Way From Seed To Table https://recipesforreciprocity.com/) in their blog and provided a link to my website along side my name, I would be grateful. Would that blogger have violated some unnatural "intellectual copyright infringement" law according to the Canadian Government (because they shared it without my permission) ? No, not under the "Fair Use" laws of Canada, however, even if that were hypothetically "illegal", as I stated above, I do not recognize the authority of multi-generational criminal cartels (such as the Canadian government or the US government, or any other involuntary governance structure) as legitimate, so what they think of that action is irrelevant to me.
That said, If you know any of the authors of the books which I shared pictures of pages from in the post above, and they have told you they do not want the free advertising and feel slighted in some way by my post, I am happy to remove the pictures of their book from my post(s).
Within the broader scope of human history, the cumulative products of the human mind, including language, art, stories, music, and ideas have only recently been considered valid objects of property rights.
For most of human history, no one imagined that you could own a collection of words or a story. Words, Healing Knowledge, Botanical Knowledge and Stories were simply not conceivable objects of property, but constituted in each culture a vast commonwealth.
Think about how this pertains to technological or medical innovation. As the free use of scientific and medical discoveries is increasingly limited by legal ownership over their applications. In the realm of biomedical science, the traditional free exchange of information, strains of organisms, and so forth is crumbling because genetically engineered micro-organisms can now be patented; that is, made into property. In the past, scientific progress was based on cooperation more than competition: People shared new results in journals and through informal exchange, protected by their university salaries from the compulsion to profit financially from their work.
The same applies to herbalism, botany and regenerative agroforestry.
Now that careers depend in part on corporate research funding and now that researchers and universities have a pecuniary interest in patenting results, a new era of secrecy has dawned. It originates from the profit potential inherent in the patentability (and/or trademarking) of new pharmaceuticals and genetically modified organisms. Intellectual property stymies scientific development, because science progresses by building on the results of previous science.
When the incentive is to conceal instead of to share, this is no longer possible. What else could we expect from the conversion of scientific knowledge into property, which is nothing else than the enclosure of part of the commons into a private holding?
It is also worth noting that when it comes to many of the so called intellectual property claims people make in modern times pertaining to medicines especially, many of them are actually plagiarized and adulterated versions of ancient indigenous medicines.
The few pharmaceutical products that do have any benefit stole most of their "patented intellectual property" for the recipe from indigenous peoples.
Take Buckleys for instance: it includes ingredients like Canada balsam (Abies balsamea), pine needle oil, and a tincture of capsicum.
Balsam Fir is known as "Ingiigido’aag" to the Ojibwe peoples of the of the great lakes area, which roughly translates as “She Stands at Prayer for Us.” Balsam Fir is also sometimes referred to as "Nimisenh" (my elder sister). Pine is known by various names by the first nation peoples, one of which is "Zhingwaak". These trees were used as medicine for many centuries before Europeans came here and these trees are plentiful in many areas yet people now mostly just use them as decoration. The list of medicinal and other benefits these trees offer is extensive and I have covered that in another two posts:
Capsicum (hot peppers) are known as "chīlli" (also spelled as "xilli" in some regions) to the Nahuatl speaking people of the Triple Alliance (aka "Aztec"). Chili peppers are known as "ich" to the Ch'olan-Tzeltalan speaking Mayan people, known as "Ucho" to the Quechua speaking indigenous peoples of South America (such as a Inca) and known as "kyynha" to the Tupi people of Brazil. Chili peppers (of the genus "Capsicum") have been used as a valuable medicine and food for countless generations by the Native American people of the south west, Central America and South America. Though the fruit of Capsicum are used in some modern kitchens, the benefits are not fully accessed nor understood by many, leading to this amazing food and medicinal plant being widely dismissed and/or underutilized (when it is capable of adding much resilience, longevity and health to our lives.) I explore some of the many benefits of chili peppers in a separate post. See: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/hot-peppers-for-health to learn more.
In former times, the vast fund of stories, ideas, medicines, recipes, songs, artistic motifs, images, and technical inventions formed a commons that everyone could draw upon for pleasure and productivity, or incorporate into yet other innovations. To claim ownership over what is not rightfully yours is theft. To stake out a permanent claim in the commons of our cultural heritage is to steal from us all.
Claiming that one "invented" a combination of words and that their declaring that means that a group of armed thugs has the right to assault, kidnap and steal from another human that shares those words (which is what intellectual property law is) is just as absurd and immoral as Bayer claiming they have invented organisms, patenting seeds and suing farmers when the seeds blow into their fields and germinate.
The realm of the owned continues to expand. Corvette owns a certain shade of red, UPS a certain shade of brown. These are parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Did these companies create these colors, or just enclose them, wall them off and call them theirs? Harley-Davidson has done the same thing to the sound of its revving motorcycle engine. To the extent that music, images, and text can be digitized, intellectual property comes down to owning numbers. Thus we have extended ownership to the fundamental stuff of reality: electromagnetic waves, numbers, DNA, sound waves. That these are considered “intellectual property” again bespeaks our hubris, that we presume dominion over something far prior to human beings. We have merely taken what was there already, the substrate of reality.
Ideas do not just appear out of thin air. They coalesce from the raw materials of the cultural commonwealth, and depend on the ambient culture for their resonance and relevance.
Words that were once public and available for all to use are now the property of corporations and other institutions, unavailable to others for certain uses. “I’m lovin’ it” is the property of the McDonalds Corporation (it has the exclusive right to a certain use of that phrase). “Make every drop count” is the property of Coca-cola. “Ideas for life” is the property of Panasonic. “Always” is the property of Wal-Mart. “Making life better” is the property of Penn State. You can still use these words for most purposes, but not as a slogan for your organization. Penn State has taken them. Nike has taken “Just do it.” Donald Trump has taken “You’re fired!” These are but a few of the tens of thousands of common phrases that have been expropriated from the public language.
Even the words “Love thy neighbor,” which appear in both the Torah and the New Testament and lie at the foundation of moral philosophy, are now subject to ownership. In 2001 a Michigan jewelry merchant using “Love your neighbor” sued a Florida charity named “Love thy neighbor” for trademark infringement, claiming that the similar name confused customers and resulted in lost profits. The defendant said he was flabbergasted that it is possible to register rights to an expression that “has been around for 5,700 years.” Legalisms aside, does the plaintiff really have a right to this phrase? Did he create it and invent the concept? Or has he merely cordoned off a part of the cultural commonwealth and claimed it for his own use and profit, solely on the justification of having gotten there first? And how is that different than what The Doctrine Of Discovery did (and still does) in law?
"..each idea captured and made into intellectual property, each child who uses video games instead of creating worlds of the imagination, each human relationship turned into a paid service, depletes a bit of the natural, cultural, spiritual, and social commons and converts it into money.” - Charles Eisenstein
Also, even within the context of the laws you referenced above (which I do not recognize as legitimate) Fair Use rules apply in the context of how I shared these images, so it is not illegal, as I give credit and it is for educational purposes.
thanks, Gavin! I live amongst so many oaks, and all the white quartz that they absorb. You can see white quartz near the base of many oak trees. I know how they can be doorways to other realms and i will forever be grateful to white oaks for bringing me together with someone. You wrote:
“Oaks are struck by lightning more than any other trees. This was seen as hugely significant by our ancient Druidic ancestors gavinmounsey.substack.c… who sought ‘awen’ or inspiration and believed it came through lightning. They named this shining moment of illumination as ‘courting the flash’. Awen was thought of as a flowing spirit or spirit energy manifesting in the form of an essence of life and producing moments of artistic inspiration and flow. So, for the Druids, the oak was seen as the conductor of universal revelation and as such was highly venerated.”
So i think there’s something to all the paramagnetic energy that oaks hold b/c of the quartz crystals, silica, etc., thus getting struck by lightning more than other trees. I included some of Phil Callahan's work w/paramagnetic soil in my Invasive Species article. Silica (in quartz) is associated with Sagittarius. And Jupiter (Sag.) is the planet associated with oaks, as one of your book images shows. So lightning, fire, spark, just like our piezoelectric centers, the three eyes detecting emf radiation. This awen is fascinating, and i’ve been thinking about this spark in my third eye for a few weeks now and how it can connect with the field. You become more natural, more in tune with everything when you are imbued with the natural energies around you, like Birkeland current filaments that connect stars or galaxies. I’ve only heard Jay Weidner talk about how white quartz is absorbed by white oaks, so if you can dig up more info on this aspect of oaks, that would be awesome, along with more info about mistletoes. I'll keep searching also.
That is very intriguing regarding the connection between oak trees and silica/quarts crystal.
Thanks for inspiring me to learn more about the Oak's relationship to that mineral being in the elemental kingdom.
It makes me want to go back to a park north of where we live on Lake Huron called Killarney Provincial Park. The entire mountain range there is made out of Quartzite. They are white crystal mountains. It is at the transition point between deciduous forests and Boreal so there are predominantly White Pine, Red Pine, Fir and spruce but down by the lakes there are some northern Red Oaks. It would be interesting to study them and compare their growth habits compared to other oaks growing in areas with less silica in the soil.
thanks, brother, and looking at those mountains, yeah it makes you think trees near certain rocks will have different properties, stronger antennas maybe, and for all trees.
This is all marvelous, though I did have trouble getting it to load in the app, and stay loaded. I think that was due to the size of the images as well as the length. I used to upload my photos full size and learned to resize them down quite a bit. Just in case that helps! :)
LOL, I was wondering if you were going to mention the bristle tips as a mode of identifying oaks, and then you did! This is very comprehensive, similar to the work of @weedom also on this platform. Thanks for all the great information all in one place on oaks.
Yes! I just change the width and it auto adjusts. Good luck! It’s one of those things that seem so difficult but once you do it it’ll be easy peasy. :) I always download the photo to my desktop first and open it in Preview then adjust the size. Not to confuse you more… Good luck!
Ahh I appreciate the heads up. I personally do not use my phone (or any other "smart" device) for accessing Substack (or anything online) so I would have never realized without you commenting. I find that I already spend too much time in front of this one screen as it is, researching, writing and publishing my work, and I find that internet and apps on phones etc have a way of becoming vampires that suck up time, focus and thoughts which could be spent living in the present moment and connecting with the more than human world. Thus, I remove that temptation from my own life and I prefer to have a "dumb" phone :)
If I was to do this resizing of photos to attempt to accommodate a smoother reading experience Substack app users that have issues with bandwidth/processing power on a device, that would mean diminishing the quality of the photos for those that prefer to read these articles and look at them on a big screen (would it not?)
I suppose I could do double posts for each article with one formatted for app reading, though that would make a mess of the archive and search function. hmmm I`ll have to think on this.
Thanks again for the kind words and thoughtful comment.
Hi Gavin! Wonderful article, as always. Oak trees are magnificent. And Lisa is correct about sizing down. I size all of my photos to 1200. My web designer taught me that back when I had a website and started writing a blog. And I'm referring to doing it on my laptop. I can't write, etc. on my phone.
Hi Gavin - I’m sorry I wasnt clear. Believe me, I’m no tech expert. :) I have a Mac and I open the photo in Preview and click Tools, Adjust Size, and change the width number of pixels to 1200. That’s what my web designer told me years ago. Hope it works for you!
I envy your ability to ditch the phone. I make a living writing stories for app games, so I literally cannot give up my phone w/out giving up my income.
To answer your question, no. Your photos are SO BIG here on desktop that I think you could resize them down quite a bit and only benefit from it.
Also wanted to add that I included a Shumard oak in our landscape for all the reasons you illuminate. Take care!
Well, I have a phone, I just only use it as a phone (and not as a social media beeping, vibrating alarm that takes away from being present in the moment with those I share moments with in the physical and my own beingness in nature).
I understand the dilemma, in truth I could probably make more money if I had internet hooked into my phone (as I am the only person doing marketing for my book) and I could be promoting more and engaging with other profitable endeavors at key moments, but it all comes down to personal priorities.
I personally prioritize and value having peaceful moments to myself and to share with my beloved over always having to deal with beeping, dinging and flashing notifications from 500 apps demanding my attention and that offering the potential for more money. Each of us has to make the hard decisions regarding these technologies that are being more aggressively pushed into our lives everyday. There may even come a time when fiat currency no longer exists in a physical form (and/or so many businesses make it so difficult and/or impossible to pay with cash) so that only people with digital ID and digital currency can interact in the mainstream economy. Even in that hypothetical potential, I would still rather take the more challenging route of providing for myself via tapping into Mother Earth's more ancient living economy than folding under peer pressure (as well as corporate and government pressure) to become a slave to some digital grid. So ya, those are my thoughts on the incentives and seductive qualities of "smart devices" that are always plugged into the internet and social media.
Also, I think that the technology is creating severe psychological degenerative trends in youth and adults alike. For more info on that:
Thanks for re-iterating the picture size thing with regards to desktop viewing. I will look into what it would require to resize huge images for future posts.
I appreciate the mention of an additional oak species I am not familiar with.
Gavin, Lisa and Barbara, I have to chime in here. Gavin is already spending 8-10 hours a day, sometimes for several days just on one article (these articles are for his upcoming book). If he downsizes them he will have to go through every pic in his articles and make them higher resolution for his book. Which will be literally months more of work just for that. I get that the app might be a problem but why don’t you try going through on line instead of the app when that happens? I use my iPad and I have no issues at all. Honestly, I appreciate that you want it easier but in all seriousness if he starts changing things to make his articles fit what each reader wants, he will not have any time left for writing.
Hi Gavin, you offer some great info, thank you! However, I have to point out that you really shouldn't share photos from books unless you have permission from the author. Doing so is a form of copyright infringement. I am not an expert on this by any means, but I felt I needed to bring it up. I think as creators on the internet, we have to be extra vigilant. I've had my photography used without permission so this is probably where it stems from.
I totally understand that not everyone can afford the books you mention and that you want to share, but I think it's better to be safe than sorry and not share unless you have permission.
Thanks for sharing your views on "intellectual property" Kendra. I do not share your views and do not recognize the authority of the organized criminal syndicates (statist regimes and their various judicial/law enforcement rackets) that you appear to swear fealty under.
What is legal and what is moral are not the same thing. We live in an era where all sorts of duplicitous, exploitative, ecocidal and morally reprehensible behavior is completely legal. Plenty of things that were legally approved (and promoted) by the state have been unethical and/or nefarious. For instance, The Doctrine Of Discovery was written into law and made it legal to kidnap African and Indigenous peoples from South and North America and sell them as property in the United States (and elsewhere). For more info: https://substack.com/@gavinmounsey/note/c-94196148
It was also legal for people to segregate and discriminate against people that had not received mRNA injections here in Canada (and all over the world). People that did not bow down to Big Pharma and governments pushing their dangerous (and functionally useless) genetic injections were punished with punitive measures, having their ability to move freely curtailed by Fascistic mobs of masked up militarized police, they were not allowed to go into public buildings like libraries, community centers and schools and their jobs were threatened by complicit cowardly employers. That was all legal.
Your call to "remain vigilant" (when you in fact mean "remain obedient to the government") carries with it the familiar sting of the mRNA cultists that wished me dead for not drinking the Kool-Aid (calling me names like "anti-science" and "anti-vaxxer").
Each book I shared pictures from was not only listed along side the author's name, but also linked to where people can buy a copy of their book. Thus, I am actually increasing the likelihood of those authors selling books, not diminishing their capacity to sell books through articles like this.
I am a published author and photographer myself, and I have had people plagiarise my work (both my writing and photos) and put their own name to both, so I do understand your strong feelings regarding the ethics of plagiarism.
Copyright laws (and the unnatural concept of "intellectual property") on the other hand, are a completely different ball of wax.
If someone shared pictures of pages from my book (Recipes For Reciprocity : The Regenerative Way From Seed To Table https://recipesforreciprocity.com/) in their blog and provided a link to my website along side my name, I would be grateful. Would that blogger have violated some unnatural "intellectual copyright infringement" law according to the Canadian Government (because they shared it without my permission) ? No, not under the "Fair Use" laws of Canada, however, even if that were hypothetically "illegal", as I stated above, I do not recognize the authority of multi-generational criminal cartels (such as the Canadian government or the US government, or any other involuntary governance structure) as legitimate, so what they think of that action is irrelevant to me.
That said, If you know any of the authors of the books which I shared pictures of pages from in the post above, and they have told you they do not want the free advertising and feel slighted in some way by my post, I am happy to remove the pictures of their book from my post(s).
(For more on my thoughts regarding involuntary governance structures and their claimed authority to invent laws and impose them on other humans using violence, read: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/why-involuntary-governance-structures )
Within the broader scope of human history, the cumulative products of the human mind, including language, art, stories, music, and ideas have only recently been considered valid objects of property rights.
For most of human history, no one imagined that you could own a collection of words or a story. Words, Healing Knowledge, Botanical Knowledge and Stories were simply not conceivable objects of property, but constituted in each culture a vast commonwealth.
Think about how this pertains to technological or medical innovation. As the free use of scientific and medical discoveries is increasingly limited by legal ownership over their applications. In the realm of biomedical science, the traditional free exchange of information, strains of organisms, and so forth is crumbling because genetically engineered micro-organisms can now be patented; that is, made into property. In the past, scientific progress was based on cooperation more than competition: People shared new results in journals and through informal exchange, protected by their university salaries from the compulsion to profit financially from their work.
The same applies to herbalism, botany and regenerative agroforestry.
Now that careers depend in part on corporate research funding and now that researchers and universities have a pecuniary interest in patenting results, a new era of secrecy has dawned. It originates from the profit potential inherent in the patentability (and/or trademarking) of new pharmaceuticals and genetically modified organisms. Intellectual property stymies scientific development, because science progresses by building on the results of previous science.
When the incentive is to conceal instead of to share, this is no longer possible. What else could we expect from the conversion of scientific knowledge into property, which is nothing else than the enclosure of part of the commons into a private holding?
It is also worth noting that when it comes to many of the so called intellectual property claims people make in modern times pertaining to medicines especially, many of them are actually plagiarized and adulterated versions of ancient indigenous medicines.
(continued in another comment below..)
(..continued from comment above)
The few pharmaceutical products that do have any benefit stole most of their "patented intellectual property" for the recipe from indigenous peoples.
Take Buckleys for instance: it includes ingredients like Canada balsam (Abies balsamea), pine needle oil, and a tincture of capsicum.
Balsam Fir is known as "Ingiigido’aag" to the Ojibwe peoples of the of the great lakes area, which roughly translates as “She Stands at Prayer for Us.” Balsam Fir is also sometimes referred to as "Nimisenh" (my elder sister). Pine is known by various names by the first nation peoples, one of which is "Zhingwaak". These trees were used as medicine for many centuries before Europeans came here and these trees are plentiful in many areas yet people now mostly just use them as decoration. The list of medicinal and other benefits these trees offer is extensive and I have covered that in another two posts:
- https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/pine-nobles-of-the-global-woodlands
- https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/befriending-the-boreal-an-invitation
Capsicum (hot peppers) are known as "chīlli" (also spelled as "xilli" in some regions) to the Nahuatl speaking people of the Triple Alliance (aka "Aztec"). Chili peppers are known as "ich" to the Ch'olan-Tzeltalan speaking Mayan people, known as "Ucho" to the Quechua speaking indigenous peoples of South America (such as a Inca) and known as "kyynha" to the Tupi people of Brazil. Chili peppers (of the genus "Capsicum") have been used as a valuable medicine and food for countless generations by the Native American people of the south west, Central America and South America. Though the fruit of Capsicum are used in some modern kitchens, the benefits are not fully accessed nor understood by many, leading to this amazing food and medicinal plant being widely dismissed and/or underutilized (when it is capable of adding much resilience, longevity and health to our lives.) I explore some of the many benefits of chili peppers in a separate post. See: https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/hot-peppers-for-health to learn more.
In former times, the vast fund of stories, ideas, medicines, recipes, songs, artistic motifs, images, and technical inventions formed a commons that everyone could draw upon for pleasure and productivity, or incorporate into yet other innovations. To claim ownership over what is not rightfully yours is theft. To stake out a permanent claim in the commons of our cultural heritage is to steal from us all.
Claiming that one "invented" a combination of words and that their declaring that means that a group of armed thugs has the right to assault, kidnap and steal from another human that shares those words (which is what intellectual property law is) is just as absurd and immoral as Bayer claiming they have invented organisms, patenting seeds and suing farmers when the seeds blow into their fields and germinate.
The realm of the owned continues to expand. Corvette owns a certain shade of red, UPS a certain shade of brown. These are parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. Did these companies create these colors, or just enclose them, wall them off and call them theirs? Harley-Davidson has done the same thing to the sound of its revving motorcycle engine. To the extent that music, images, and text can be digitized, intellectual property comes down to owning numbers. Thus we have extended ownership to the fundamental stuff of reality: electromagnetic waves, numbers, DNA, sound waves. That these are considered “intellectual property” again bespeaks our hubris, that we presume dominion over something far prior to human beings. We have merely taken what was there already, the substrate of reality.
Ideas do not just appear out of thin air. They coalesce from the raw materials of the cultural commonwealth, and depend on the ambient culture for their resonance and relevance.
Words that were once public and available for all to use are now the property of corporations and other institutions, unavailable to others for certain uses. “I’m lovin’ it” is the property of the McDonalds Corporation (it has the exclusive right to a certain use of that phrase). “Make every drop count” is the property of Coca-cola. “Ideas for life” is the property of Panasonic. “Always” is the property of Wal-Mart. “Making life better” is the property of Penn State. You can still use these words for most purposes, but not as a slogan for your organization. Penn State has taken them. Nike has taken “Just do it.” Donald Trump has taken “You’re fired!” These are but a few of the tens of thousands of common phrases that have been expropriated from the public language.
Even the words “Love thy neighbor,” which appear in both the Torah and the New Testament and lie at the foundation of moral philosophy, are now subject to ownership. In 2001 a Michigan jewelry merchant using “Love your neighbor” sued a Florida charity named “Love thy neighbor” for trademark infringement, claiming that the similar name confused customers and resulted in lost profits. The defendant said he was flabbergasted that it is possible to register rights to an expression that “has been around for 5,700 years.” Legalisms aside, does the plaintiff really have a right to this phrase? Did he create it and invent the concept? Or has he merely cordoned off a part of the cultural commonwealth and claimed it for his own use and profit, solely on the justification of having gotten there first? And how is that different than what The Doctrine Of Discovery did (and still does) in law?
"..each idea captured and made into intellectual property, each child who uses video games instead of creating worlds of the imagination, each human relationship turned into a paid service, depletes a bit of the natural, cultural, spiritual, and social commons and converts it into money.” - Charles Eisenstein
Also, even within the context of the laws you referenced above (which I do not recognize as legitimate) Fair Use rules apply in the context of how I shared these images, so it is not illegal, as I give credit and it is for educational purposes.
thanks, Gavin! I live amongst so many oaks, and all the white quartz that they absorb. You can see white quartz near the base of many oak trees. I know how they can be doorways to other realms and i will forever be grateful to white oaks for bringing me together with someone. You wrote:
“Oaks are struck by lightning more than any other trees. This was seen as hugely significant by our ancient Druidic ancestors gavinmounsey.substack.c… who sought ‘awen’ or inspiration and believed it came through lightning. They named this shining moment of illumination as ‘courting the flash’. Awen was thought of as a flowing spirit or spirit energy manifesting in the form of an essence of life and producing moments of artistic inspiration and flow. So, for the Druids, the oak was seen as the conductor of universal revelation and as such was highly venerated.”
So i think there’s something to all the paramagnetic energy that oaks hold b/c of the quartz crystals, silica, etc., thus getting struck by lightning more than other trees. I included some of Phil Callahan's work w/paramagnetic soil in my Invasive Species article. Silica (in quartz) is associated with Sagittarius. And Jupiter (Sag.) is the planet associated with oaks, as one of your book images shows. So lightning, fire, spark, just like our piezoelectric centers, the three eyes detecting emf radiation. This awen is fascinating, and i’ve been thinking about this spark in my third eye for a few weeks now and how it can connect with the field. You become more natural, more in tune with everything when you are imbued with the natural energies around you, like Birkeland current filaments that connect stars or galaxies. I’ve only heard Jay Weidner talk about how white quartz is absorbed by white oaks, so if you can dig up more info on this aspect of oaks, that would be awesome, along with more info about mistletoes. I'll keep searching also.
btw, John Slattery also goes over oaks, the Ogham, balanoculture, etc. here: https://open.substack.com/pub/johnjslattery/p/ogham-pine-oak-in-north-america?r=1nnqot&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Here is a pic of that park I mentioned with the fall colors so you can see where the oak (and maples) would be and the crystal mountains.
https://www.reddit.com/r/camping/comments/5fv1fo/take_a_canoe_and_choose_a_camping_stop_in_the_la/?rdt=35341
thanks, nice!
My pleasure brother.
That is very intriguing regarding the connection between oak trees and silica/quarts crystal.
Thanks for inspiring me to learn more about the Oak's relationship to that mineral being in the elemental kingdom.
It makes me want to go back to a park north of where we live on Lake Huron called Killarney Provincial Park. The entire mountain range there is made out of Quartzite. They are white crystal mountains. It is at the transition point between deciduous forests and Boreal so there are predominantly White Pine, Red Pine, Fir and spruce but down by the lakes there are some northern Red Oaks. It would be interesting to study them and compare their growth habits compared to other oaks growing in areas with less silica in the soil.
I appreciate the link, i`ll check it out.
thanks, brother, and looking at those mountains, yeah it makes you think trees near certain rocks will have different properties, stronger antennas maybe, and for all trees.
This is all marvelous, though I did have trouble getting it to load in the app, and stay loaded. I think that was due to the size of the images as well as the length. I used to upload my photos full size and learned to resize them down quite a bit. Just in case that helps! :)
LOL, I was wondering if you were going to mention the bristle tips as a mode of identifying oaks, and then you did! This is very comprehensive, similar to the work of @weedom also on this platform. Thanks for all the great information all in one place on oaks.
Yes! I just change the width and it auto adjusts. Good luck! It’s one of those things that seem so difficult but once you do it it’ll be easy peasy. :) I always download the photo to my desktop first and open it in Preview then adjust the size. Not to confuse you more… Good luck!
Thanks Lisa :)
Ahh I appreciate the heads up. I personally do not use my phone (or any other "smart" device) for accessing Substack (or anything online) so I would have never realized without you commenting. I find that I already spend too much time in front of this one screen as it is, researching, writing and publishing my work, and I find that internet and apps on phones etc have a way of becoming vampires that suck up time, focus and thoughts which could be spent living in the present moment and connecting with the more than human world. Thus, I remove that temptation from my own life and I prefer to have a "dumb" phone :)
If I was to do this resizing of photos to attempt to accommodate a smoother reading experience Substack app users that have issues with bandwidth/processing power on a device, that would mean diminishing the quality of the photos for those that prefer to read these articles and look at them on a big screen (would it not?)
I suppose I could do double posts for each article with one formatted for app reading, though that would make a mess of the archive and search function. hmmm I`ll have to think on this.
Thanks again for the kind words and thoughtful comment.
Hi Gavin! Wonderful article, as always. Oak trees are magnificent. And Lisa is correct about sizing down. I size all of my photos to 1200. My web designer taught me that back when I had a website and started writing a blog. And I'm referring to doing it on my laptop. I can't write, etc. on my phone.
Hi Gavin - I’m sorry I wasnt clear. Believe me, I’m no tech expert. :) I have a Mac and I open the photo in Preview and click Tools, Adjust Size, and change the width number of pixels to 1200. That’s what my web designer told me years ago. Hope it works for you!
No worries, I appreciate the follow up comment.
Okay width to 1200 (and then the computer program hopefully auto-adjusts the height in a relative quantity i guess?)
I have a PC with windows not a mac but I imagine they should have similar functions.
I`ll give it a try and see if it is possible and/or if it really slows down my article writing process.
I appreciate the feedback.
Hey Barbara.
Okay thanks, I appreciate you sharing about the photo sizes as well.
So "1200" is that the dimensions in pixels? 1200 by what? (I am technologically illiterate sometimes).
I envy your ability to ditch the phone. I make a living writing stories for app games, so I literally cannot give up my phone w/out giving up my income.
To answer your question, no. Your photos are SO BIG here on desktop that I think you could resize them down quite a bit and only benefit from it.
Also wanted to add that I included a Shumard oak in our landscape for all the reasons you illuminate. Take care!
Well, I have a phone, I just only use it as a phone (and not as a social media beeping, vibrating alarm that takes away from being present in the moment with those I share moments with in the physical and my own beingness in nature).
I understand the dilemma, in truth I could probably make more money if I had internet hooked into my phone (as I am the only person doing marketing for my book) and I could be promoting more and engaging with other profitable endeavors at key moments, but it all comes down to personal priorities.
I personally prioritize and value having peaceful moments to myself and to share with my beloved over always having to deal with beeping, dinging and flashing notifications from 500 apps demanding my attention and that offering the potential for more money. Each of us has to make the hard decisions regarding these technologies that are being more aggressively pushed into our lives everyday. There may even come a time when fiat currency no longer exists in a physical form (and/or so many businesses make it so difficult and/or impossible to pay with cash) so that only people with digital ID and digital currency can interact in the mainstream economy. Even in that hypothetical potential, I would still rather take the more challenging route of providing for myself via tapping into Mother Earth's more ancient living economy than folding under peer pressure (as well as corporate and government pressure) to become a slave to some digital grid. So ya, those are my thoughts on the incentives and seductive qualities of "smart devices" that are always plugged into the internet and social media.
Also, I think that the technology is creating severe psychological degenerative trends in youth and adults alike. For more info on that:
https://theacademyofideas.substack.com/p/the-great-rewiring-of-childhood-why
Thanks for re-iterating the picture size thing with regards to desktop viewing. I will look into what it would require to resize huge images for future posts.
I appreciate the mention of an additional oak species I am not familiar with.
Cheers!
Gavin, Lisa and Barbara, I have to chime in here. Gavin is already spending 8-10 hours a day, sometimes for several days just on one article (these articles are for his upcoming book). If he downsizes them he will have to go through every pic in his articles and make them higher resolution for his book. Which will be literally months more of work just for that. I get that the app might be a problem but why don’t you try going through on line instead of the app when that happens? I use my iPad and I have no issues at all. Honestly, I appreciate that you want it easier but in all seriousness if he starts changing things to make his articles fit what each reader wants, he will not have any time left for writing.
Absolutely loved this!
Outstanding resource! Your book is going to be amazing.
Thanks my friend, I really appreciate that.
Incredible. THANK YOU!!