User:Ssstephen/Reading/Musicking

The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies. They are to be found not only between those organized sounds which are conventionally thought of as being the stuff of musical meaning but also between the people who are taking part, in whatever capacity, in the performance; and they model, or stand as metaphor for, ideal relationships as the participants in the performance imagine them to be: relationships between person and person, between individual and society, between humanity and the natural world and even perhaps the supernatural world.

Ideal in this context meant not as utopic or even something desirable but more in the sense of being a relationship separated from its material or actual circumstances.

a way
of knowing that would unite the scientists' impersonal way of knowing the
world with the human knowledge of ethics, values and the sacred. The
purpose of this way of knowing is not to dominate the world, as is that of
scientific knowledge, but to live well in it.

anyone who cultivates
a garden must constantly be astounded by the way in which plants not only
respond to information, such as changes in the intensity and duration of
light, changes in temperature, and even the presence of other plants nearby,
in ways that are appropriate to them and to their mode of being, but also
give information, through their color, their mode of growth and their flowering,
and modify their environment in order to make it more favorable to
their growth and reproduction. Further, the seemingly infinitely complex
interaction between plants, microorganisms, insects, other animals and
human beings suggests that the biosphere, the world of living creatures, is
indeed a vast and intricate network of what by Bateson's definition we can
call mind, all giving and responding to information. The mind relates to the
environment outside the creature not by mere passive reception of what is
"out there" but by an active process of engagement with it. We could say
that creatures shape their environment as much as they are shaped by it.

Some stuff about Gaia.