Sy Montgomery | Soul Deep Sameness

Sy Montgomery shares her love for all creatures and calls for us to reach into our limitless compassion to care for them.

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I listened to just the first bit of the podcast. I stopped since I get that it was going to dove heavily into the book ā€œ soul of the octopus ā€œ and I was already thinking of listening to it. I think like 6+ of her books are on Hoopla.

Is it easier to think about the personhood of octopuses and turtles vs a pigā€¦ā€¦ā€¦

Anyways. The book is wonderful so far. I have about 40 minutes left of the octopus book. I saw one wild octopus once. Same time I saw some starfish. I see why Lovecraft was inspired by these animals with their tentacles and suckers as a backbone for the cosmic terrors. They do seem otherworldly. Like something that ended up here because of some comet crashing into earth. But they are also very cool looking. Iā€™m not sure of what species I saw.

I was riding a fat tire tricycle in Oregon at Cannon Beach. Same place where recently they found an octopus that was potentially stranded on shore. By the Hay Stack rock. Where Goonies and some of Twilight was filmed.

So I was riding the trike down the coast in the wet shiny sand as the tide was going out really far, leaving behind lots of tide pools. I just decided to go up and look at one and saw starfish in them. I felt like they were pretty big and pinkish purple looking. But I could be remembering it wrong. I started looking into several of them and in one was an octopus. I felt like it was like 2-3 feet long but that its mass seemed less than the starfish. Like these starfish was way bigger than I thought starfish got. Though not as big as the alien star thing in ā€œmultiverse of madnessā€.

I know some people have snapping turtles as pets. Ice send videos of them following a man around like a puppy wanting to even be lifted up into his lap. I would not mind having one as an outside pet. Build a nice large garden pond thatā€™s very naturalistic and have a turtle in it. Iā€™ll probably finish the podcast today.

This podcast was too visual without the visual. Is there some way to see the pictures they are talking about?

She talks about all Godā€™s creatures having souls.

I donā€™t believe in soulsā€¦ at least I donā€™t use that word. But I do believe in spirit and I do think all living things have spirit. What they donā€™t have is the linguistic mind as we humans do. Though of course we have many commonalities in the workings of our nervous systems (brains?). It was interesting to hear how octopi (yes, this is a valid plural, though it originated from an error) have a less centralized nervous system and might be said to have 9 brains. It is interesting to wonder about the intelligence it gains from this (parallel computing?). Our own multiple brain components are not the same since they are mostly not parallelā€¦ the closest we have is right and left hemispheres, yet these are known to be rather different in functionality.

(It depends who you listen to, I guess. I like ā€˜octopiā€™ myself, as well as the ā€˜octopodesā€™ suggestion. ; - )

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May God bless and keep the snapping turtles ā€¦ but far away from my lap!

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I think Iā€™ll get one eventually. But I am worried for my cats and so Iā€™ll wait until I have a nice outdoor space for it. But like with all my pets Iā€™ll spend time with them. Iā€™ll make a shallow spot with dark stones in the pond and in fall it will be a nice warm spot to relax and listen to some audiobooks while playing with them lol. But itā€™s all down the road. Also depends on several other things.

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