What outdoor projects do you have planned for this Spring as the snow melts?
Yes, I do plan outdoor activities during the coming warm season – how could it be otherwise? Or did you think I spend all my lifetime in front of a screen? If you did, it was a false guess.
The main activities I plan are:
1) helping my parents at their dacha;
2) swimming at lakes and rivers;
3) generally wander at nature and enjoy it.
To be more precise:
1) If someone here don’t know what a Russian dacha is: essentially, it is a private house, surrounded with a garden, outside of a city. Dependent on wealth and desire of an owner, It also may include a bathhouse, a summerhouse, and so on – up to a fountain. For Russians, dachas are crucial part of a life style, the important places of closeness to nature, of rest and relaxation, of meeting with friends and relatives. Oftentimes it is a second home in the warm season. In the weekends, people are massively moving outside the city limits and in their dachas, leaving city half-empty until the working days return.
My parents have a dacha as well, with a very beautiful flower-and-tree garden surrounding the house, that my parents tender. I pay them visits there, and offer some help while I am on place.
2) While I’m not visiting my parents’ dacha, I move to some kind of a forest lake or a river to swim. Swimming is what I like most about the warm season. Swimming in natural water pools are yet another common warm season activity in Russia; yet I start swimming earlier than almost anyone, when most people consider water and / or air yet too cold, and continue later than almost anyone, when they are considered already too cold. So, it is not uncommon for me to swim alone, while everyone else is watching me, wide-eyed, from the shore, wondering how I can bear such a cold water. And, unlike most who keep close to the shore, I swim for longer distances, usually to another shore and back.
Once I shared photos of one of my most beloved swimming places here on the forum. So, you may see where I like to spend my weekends from late spring to early autumn:
http://www.skeptiko-forum.com/threads/where-is-everyone-from.3739/page-3#post-111486
3) The forest near the lakes I swim in is also important for me: sometimes I just wonder along the edge of it, enjoying silence and tranquility that I can never feel in the city. I love the beauty of nature…
…And yet I still understand that all this beauty is not real in the absolute sense. It is a shared dream, a conflation of minds, countless subjectivities merging with each other to produce the illusion of the external world that never was, and never will be.
What is important here is the nature of minds participating in the interaction: when I talk about minds, I do not mean human minds only. Animal minds are as active and creative in the world-making process as human ones; possibly, plants have minds of their own as well (one of the latter Edge Science issues is fully dedicated to the evidence suggesting plant consciousness):
https://scientificexploration.s3.am...029911&Signature=RwikZHIZrUC5ker5OSIWDyQkCiQ=
And is possibly that there are other minds in play as well… We Russians practice yet another outdoor activity that, as far as I know, is largely unknown in the West: wild mushroom gathering. This means, people go in the woods to gather edible mushrooms, and then to cook them and to eat them; but the process of wandering the forests to gather them is the one that it most desired, cookery part is just a tasty addition.
Sometimes mushroom-gatherers go really deep in the woods. And many of them told me that there are certainly something – someone – nonphysical dwelling in the forest depths. It is not seen, but felt: a tacitly sensed gaze in the back, a clear understanding that you are being watched by someone invisible. Sometimes they also feel a command to leave the forest given to them by this invisible entity; and then they do, they obey it, since it is quite clear that one wouldn’t want any conflict with this being while it is in its deep forest place of habitation and power.
So, it is quite possible that the minds forming the world include not only embodied ones; nature spirits – extraphysical yet immanent – may also play their role in maintaining our shared dream, as well as, possibly, transcendent, transphysical entities influencing, or even to an extent controlling, this collective dream from beyond. Why not?