The Intelligence of Plants
Talking to plants is like discovering a secret library filled with ancient wisdom. It's a profound experience to connect with the intelligence of a plant, and even more so to discover that others, in different cultures, different places and different times also discovered that same treasure trove of knowledge.
One day, years ago now, I walked my dog past a beautiful stand of black acacia trees. On my way past, I extended my energetic tentacles and asked the trees if they could tell me about themselves. I immediately had the sense of a door opening and caught a glimpse of a different world on the other side of the door. The world seemed like a world of dreams. It felt magical, changeable and filled with beings of all sorts. I thanked the trees for sharing their world with me and continued my walk. When I got home, I researched the trees and discovered that in the Australian Aboriginal culture, those trees are known to be a doorway to the Dreamtime. The Dreamtime is a place where all beings are inter-related, where spirit is woven into form and form returns to spirit. It is indeed magical, changeable and filled with all manner of connected, sentient beings.
Another day, a beautiful fuchsia plant called to me from across my backyard. As soon as I engaged with the spirit of fuchsia, she led me on an inner journey and showed me that I was still holding onto stagnant energy from an old emotional wound. That wounded part of myself was still impacting me in ways I hadn’t realized until fuchsia brought it to my attention. I later discovered that in some traditions, fuchsia is known to be an embodiment of a watery Venusian archetype with an affinity for shedding light on old stagnant emotional wounds so they may be healed.
Shamans and other wise elders have long cultivated the ability to talk to plant spirits and receive their medicine. Before we had libraries and laboratories, plant shamans talked to plants directly to discover which plants are edible, which plants are poisonous, and which plants are medicine for our minds, bodies and spirits.
In our modern Western world, we use plants as medicine for our physical bodies, but we do so by isolating and extracting specific compounds within the plant. In some cases, we also genetically engineer plants to maximize the pharmaceutical benefits. It’s amazing that we can do that, don’t get me wrong. But along the way we’ve lost the ability to form a direct connection to plants and receive medicine for the unseen aspects of our being, as well as our physical bodies.
We lost that connection in part because we have fallen into a habit of thinking that plants aren’t intelligent like we are. We look for a mirror of ourselves when we look for intelligent life. We tend to think that life isn’t intelligent if it doesn’t have a nervous system and a brain. So, it largely doesn’t occur to us to think that plants have the type of intelligence that we can interact with. When we think that way and allow ourselves to essentially be defined by our cognitive abilities, we end up cut off from vital parts of ourselves.
We actually have other cognitive centers and other ways of being in relation with the earth. We have a cognitive center referred to as a heart brain, which has 60,000 neurons and generates an electrical field that extends more than three feet outside our bodies. We can exchange information through our heart brains, our senses, and perhaps in ways that science doesn’t yet fully understand. Nevertheless, we rely mostly on our cognitive brains to make sense of the world around us.
I think we do so because as humans, we’re fairly uniquely individuated on this planet. Some trees for example, exist as a collective, sharing a single root system and allocating resources as a single entity. A beehive as well operates as a single entity with each bee acting as an appendage on a larger body. Humans are on the other end of the spectrum. Humans have the challenging task of arriving on this planet in individual bodies, with individual souls and individual brains. Our brains do a great job of keeping us individuated. With the help of our brains, we can identify what is self and what is other, and we can analyze and try to understand that which is other.
Our brains do such a good job for us that we tend to forget we have those other cognitive centers and other ways of being in relation with the earth. Bringing those parts of ourselves back online, engaging our senses and communicating with the fullness our ourselves, connects us to our environment rather than separating us from it. It connects us to a way of being and a way of knowing that many of our ancestors understood, and that many living traditions preserve.
It’s truly incredible to experience that connection to the living earth and realize that such a treasure trove of wisdom and healing medicine is all around us. Accessing it is as simple as engaging our senses and our curiosity. The plants are waiting for us to remember.
