This is, more or less, what I understand to have happened in prehistory:
The squirrel gnaws through the liana
and the giant ceiba tree falls
as it kthunks
its leaves turn into fish and scatter in the rivers
flat lands rise and fall – into valleys and mountains
and the jaguar goes a walkin’
Then, we arrive at present day…
Turns out dreaming is not where its at. Its research and knowledge at your finger tips!
In this 2021 article in Botany, I learned a lot more about the Ceiba and its significance as a world tree:
Ceiba pentandra (Malvaceae) and associated species: Spiritual Keystone Species of the Neotropics
Having spent time with the Huaorani, Professor Rival of the University of Oxford is the story teller:
Rival, L. 1999. Trees and the symbolism of life in indigenous cosmologies. In Cultural and spiritual values of biodiversity. Edited by D. Posey. UNEP, Nairobi. pp. 358–362.
Hence, in the olden times
the ceiba sheltered all of life
it connected the heavens and the earth
and was mother, father, and sanctuary
outside of its zone of protection
the terrain was all flat, there was no water
the angry sun scorched and burned the earth
and evil eagles preyed on humans and other animals
encircling the tree was fear, death, and doom
it was a difficult time in evolution
There is a diagram, in the Ethnobotany of the Seri Indians book by Richard Stephen Felgar and Mary Beck Moser, of the near shore ecosystem at the Infiernillo Channel, between mainland Mexico and Tiburon Island. Figure 2.3, page 23:
What a fantastic world of mangroves, eelgrass, and mullets in the Sea of Cortez! This is my interpretation of the same diagram as above. I am in love with the estero and intertidal sands – tiny biting flies on the beach included:
Aside from the sun depicted in the sky, the lunar months of November and December are represented by the two stars of jack rabbit and turkey vulture. And that is a pack rat playing a violin at the bow of the balsa reed boat.
This painting was inspired by our entomology class field trip to a desert research station located in the Mojave desert at Zzyzx, about a hundred miles south of Las Vegas. It is dedicated to my teacher and advisor Dr John Hafernik of San Francisco State University. He is depicted as a buckeye butterfly wearing a baseball cap, surrounded by screw bean mesquite. My fellow graduate student is at the lower left, Dr Gene Hannon (aka Gene the dancing machine) who studied damselflies.
The overall image is that of a glass collecting jar we use to gas the insects that we captured. The jar has a plaster and cyanide base that kills/asphyxiates our prey after a bit. Then, we identify and pin them for our studies. You can see a tiger moth, a short horned grasshopper, a backswimmer, a velvet ant and others all laid up, upside down at the bottom of the jar.
There is also the landscape that we traversed. There was Kelso dunes with primroses and stink beetles walking casually across scorching sands. Plus spiny flat horned lizards who specialized in eating ants. There was clustered spreading mounds of pungent creosote bush, and white tissue paper like fragrant datura on the sides of the road. We drove on a highway crossed by thousands of sphinx moths on their ancient migration paths; some larvae were smeared, others made it out alive. We paused at a dried up, white, alkaline soda lake, where tiger moths were at the edge, emerging from holes with buzzing speed. At the research station itself, there were California fan palms with full voluminous skirts of dried up leaves, and sandy washes with blazing stars.
Last but not least in the picture, there is an odd bug looking dude staring back at you. Its got a pair of cactus eyes – comprised of a round hedgehog cactus and an opuntia flat pad of a nopale. The appendages hanging off the eyes are the handles of insect nets, held on the left by a blister beetle that does not fly, and on the right by an ichneumonid wasp with a long egg laying device coming out of its abdomen called an ovipositor. At the tip top of the bug dude’s head, between the two eyes, near the bipinnate leaves of the mesquite, is a tiny third eye common in insects. It is a simple eye called an ocelli; it is useful in sensing light and dark, and in the function of daily rhythms.
I forget the source of this story. Perhaps it was posted in Amazon Frontlines? The part I do remember is that the squirrel gnaws on the liana that holds the world tree, breaks the vine, then the tree falls down. What happens to the people after that? Where do the birds, butterflies, and cicadas go? And the jaguars running loose everywhere?! There is a huge evil harpy eagle on patrol also…
Sorry folks, I’ll take an incomplete. Better go back to sleep, and dream about this one a little bit more for a followup sometime in the future.
Mission Azul 