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THIS IS A PUBLIC SCREENING OF A FREE ONLINE EVENT. Please arrive at 12:45 pm to get settled. The event begins at 1pm and lasts until 2pm. What can we learn about plants and ourselves in a vegetal microscopic world suddenly made visible?
Join plant ally Steven F. White and Microscopy Specialist Jill Pflugheber in a conversation about the enigmatic and profoundly-revealing images from the Microcosms Project with moderator Plant Initiative board member Keith Williams.
You will learn about the website Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas that Jill and Steven have created as a means of paying tribute to nearly 50 different plant species as well as to the Amerindian wisdom keepers who have preserved traditional knowledge about them, including the plant narratives that constitute shamanic tales. The site presents confocal images and additional information about Cacao, Ceiba, Coca, Corn, Sweetgrass and Tobacco, as well as the powerful psychoactive plants Huanduj, Ololiuhqui, Palqui, Peyote, San Pedro, Toloache, Virola, Yagé, and Yopo, among many others.
Do the images of sacred plants as digital art make the known suddenly, and perhaps shockingly, unfamiliar? Can the agentic beings gathered in the Microcosms electronic herbarium jolt us into a necessary space of psychological transformation, reinforcing the need to take decisive action to heal the ecosystems that support these plants and the other species that are their co-inhabitants? Can this century’s technology become a means to facilitate paying homage to the plant-teachers that are the basis of Amerindian spirituality, food and medicine?
The creators of Microcosms will discuss how each stoma, each trichome, each patterned fragment of xylem and vascular tissue, as well as each grain of pollen in these vital portraits may not only be a way into previously unseen vegetal realms, but also a potential way out of our collective ecological crisis.
There will be time for questions from the audience following the discussion. This free program will be livestreamed with a link to be sent to participants before the event and will also be recorded and available for viewing online afterwards.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
754 Pine St, Muskegon, MI, United States
