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| A spinach seedling in my back yard |
Weirdness warning: this post is pretty far out for most people and I understand that. Feel free to skip it if it is too weird for you. Which, to be honest, it probably will be. ;)
I communicate with plants. Many people would consider that to just be weirdness or a symptom of some sort of mental instability on my part, and that's okay. I care not. Plants do however have an analogue to the animal nervous system and they do have a proven ability to use pheromone-type chemicals to communicate with each other, and it is not completely inconceivable they could communicate in this way with a suitably susceptible human.
I am growing spinach in my back yard and I have been cooing and fretting over my spinach seedlings as though they were little infants. And I have found that they are reacting to this, they greet me. This "greeting" is a wordless feeling, like a smile, that I get from them. Sometimes I sit in the back yard and tell them my troubles, mentally of course. They don't seem that keen to hear my troubles however. ;) The strongest reaction I get from them is when I am coming out into the back yard and checking how they are doing, checking the moisture content of the soil and so on. Looking after them, in other words.
I communicate with plants. Many people would consider that to just be weirdness or a symptom of some sort of mental instability on my part, and that's okay. I care not. Plants do however have an analogue to the animal nervous system and they do have a proven ability to use pheromone-type chemicals to communicate with each other, and it is not completely inconceivable they could communicate in this way with a suitably susceptible human.
I am growing spinach in my back yard and I have been cooing and fretting over my spinach seedlings as though they were little infants. And I have found that they are reacting to this, they greet me. This "greeting" is a wordless feeling, like a smile, that I get from them. Sometimes I sit in the back yard and tell them my troubles, mentally of course. They don't seem that keen to hear my troubles however. ;) The strongest reaction I get from them is when I am coming out into the back yard and checking how they are doing, checking the moisture content of the soil and so on. Looking after them, in other words.
Why, however, would I be getting such a strong vibe from spinach seedlings? With trees, it is not every tree that I communicate with, it is a tiny minority of the trees I encounter, and one would assume trees individually have a greater complexity than a little spinach sprout. It's just a tiny spinach sprout. Even if plants are aware, one would think that these little things would be among the least aware because so small and undeveloped.
This leads us back to an issue in Japanese Shinto religion and some other animist ways: is it the plant I am communicating with, or a spirit in the plant? In Shinto, they have holy trees, but the tree is considered the "home" if you will of a spirit. In other words, it is not the tree that is holy per se, but the spirit (kami) dwelling in it. For the most part, I have tended to look at it the other way around, the tree is the spirit, there is no separate spirit indwelling in it like it was a mere log cabin. The spinach seedlings make me wonder however. Is it the spinach sprouts themselves that I am feeling, or has a kami or deva of some sort taken up residence in my spinach plants?
Alternately, it is possible that the plants have a sort of group or species spirit and that all the individual spinach plants in the world participate in this. So it would neither be true that the spirit is totally separate from the plant, nor would it be true that the spirit is only that individual plant. Rather, one spinach sprout is merely one extension, one instantiation, one particular body which participates in the species-entity spinach. It may be possible that some of my other interactions with plants were actually interactions with the species-entity in which that plant participates. I don't know, the question only arises in an extreme case like this where it does not seem possible that the communication is simply with the spinach sprout. And in most cases it really shouldn't matter one way or another, it's just curious. It mostly only arises because I am deeply suspicious of the idea of entirely disconnected nature spirits, pure spirits not directly participating in the being of the thing itself. That kind of idea, a disconnected ghost that just happens to associate with a particular thing or place, is a symptom of the decay of animism into the more abstract forms of polytheism. A development that I am inclined to think of as a bad thing, something leading to abstract gods in general and the abstraction from a directly experienced animism to a conceptual polytheism.
***
After I wrote this, it started sleeting hard here, a late freeze for these parts. When I braced myself to exit the house and look at the sprouts, they were looking a tad frozen but spinach is pretty hardy. I see this very frequently with the very early spring weeds that are sprouting about, they endure a frost that you would think would surely kill them and they look damaged, but the sun comes out and it warms up and they're right as rain. Hope they'll be okay, I think they will be.
This leads us back to an issue in Japanese Shinto religion and some other animist ways: is it the plant I am communicating with, or a spirit in the plant? In Shinto, they have holy trees, but the tree is considered the "home" if you will of a spirit. In other words, it is not the tree that is holy per se, but the spirit (kami) dwelling in it. For the most part, I have tended to look at it the other way around, the tree is the spirit, there is no separate spirit indwelling in it like it was a mere log cabin. The spinach seedlings make me wonder however. Is it the spinach sprouts themselves that I am feeling, or has a kami or deva of some sort taken up residence in my spinach plants?
Alternately, it is possible that the plants have a sort of group or species spirit and that all the individual spinach plants in the world participate in this. So it would neither be true that the spirit is totally separate from the plant, nor would it be true that the spirit is only that individual plant. Rather, one spinach sprout is merely one extension, one instantiation, one particular body which participates in the species-entity spinach. It may be possible that some of my other interactions with plants were actually interactions with the species-entity in which that plant participates. I don't know, the question only arises in an extreme case like this where it does not seem possible that the communication is simply with the spinach sprout. And in most cases it really shouldn't matter one way or another, it's just curious. It mostly only arises because I am deeply suspicious of the idea of entirely disconnected nature spirits, pure spirits not directly participating in the being of the thing itself. That kind of idea, a disconnected ghost that just happens to associate with a particular thing or place, is a symptom of the decay of animism into the more abstract forms of polytheism. A development that I am inclined to think of as a bad thing, something leading to abstract gods in general and the abstraction from a directly experienced animism to a conceptual polytheism.
***
After I wrote this, it started sleeting hard here, a late freeze for these parts. When I braced myself to exit the house and look at the sprouts, they were looking a tad frozen but spinach is pretty hardy. I see this very frequently with the very early spring weeds that are sprouting about, they endure a frost that you would think would surely kill them and they look damaged, but the sun comes out and it warms up and they're right as rain. Hope they'll be okay, I think they will be.
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