Hidden Connections

 I remember when Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote the book The Secret Life of Plants decades ago. It was revolutionary. I read it with excitement. Yes, I thought! This is the aspect of plants that we've been missing! The authors were able to hook plants up to polygragh gadgets and measure their response to different events. One plant always knew when it's caretaker left work and began to ride home. Another plant reacted immediately with what looked like panic to the suggestion that it be burned. The book documented something that we humans had often sensed, but which did not fit into our worldview: there is consciousness in the natural world. How would this change our perception of our planet? How might it make us more cooperative, more respectful of non-human residents?

Certainly my own view of my plant friends changed after reading this book. I began to relate to them as if there were a two-way communication link. I talked to them. I congratulated them for their growth and beauty. I apologized to them when I pulled them up as "weeds" in my garden, explaining that too much of their growth would interfere with the plants I wanted to harvest as food. Thinking of them as sentient beings enriched my relationship to plants. Yet there were few instances when I actually felt communication coming from them to me, purposeful communication. 

Once, however, this happened in a startling way. I was attending an auction after someone had recently died. This was in a country church, and people were sitting on benches viewing many items. The family members sitting next to me kept nudging me to buy a large houseplant. It was healthy-looking, and usually I would have jumped at the chance to adopt it. But every time I started to think about buying it, I felt this plant yelling "No!".  Clearly it did not want me (or perhaps anyone) to take it. Clearly it was full of anger and resistance. As I remember this experience, I can still feel the blaring communication from this member of the plant kingdom. It was disturbing on a deep level, and there was no way that I was going to buy that plant! I do wonder what finally happened to it. 

I said I was going to focus on one individual plant with each blog post, and this preface is leading up to a recent experience with one of the plants sitting on my south windowsill that I see each time I am sitting at my laptop (which is more time than usual during the pandemic). It is a jalapeno pepper plant that I dug up from my garden before frost, and potted in rich soil to bring inside. It is actually doing much better now that is in the house, loving the sunlight and the relative warmth of this protected space. I do like to look at it, as I do all the plants I've brought in. But I can't say I've really communicated with it at any significant level. 

Then, a couple of Sundays ago, I was sitting at my laptop in a Zoom Friends Meeting, looking south with the pepper plant in front of me. The pandemic has forced us all to find ways to connect without actually being with each other, and Friends Meeting on Zoom works pretty well. We all sit quietly in our own homes, with the Zoom screen in front of us.  So we are seen by, and can see, the other people attending Meeting. We sit in meditation or expectant thought, mostly quietly.  Occasionally someone will speak out of the silence to share an insight or experience. I was sitting, looking toward the pepper plant and beyond it, when something different started happening. It was not initiated by me. I was not even focused on the plant. But then I began to realize there was something coming from the plant. It got my attention finally, and I silently asked something like "what?". And then I seemed to get an invitation to open up to a wider place. That's the best way I can describe it. It felt like my mind expanded, my sight expanded, and I entered a sort of vibrant space that connected the plant and me. It made me smile, breathe deeply, sit up straight. It was actually rivitting, an intensely personal exchange, as if this green pepper plant was inviting me into the bigger picture. 

What did it have to say to me? If there was some sort of exchange of information, I can't remember it. What I remember is being in a space that was vastly more alive than what I usually experience in day to day life. And it was clearly the plant who was inviting me into that space. Wow. Right now I am sitting in the same place at my laptop as I write this, with the pepper plant still in front of me, and it looks just like it usually does. I am not connected to it like I was in that extraordinary experience in Friends Meeting. But I have the feeling that it is probably always open to that deep connection.  It is my own busyness of mind and preoccupation with everyday tasks that keeps it from happening. I only have to be quiet enough and open enough to allow it.