Active attention is freedom

Automatic attention is servitude. You walk into a garden looking for mint. You believe you are awake and present, but you are actually asleep. … Continue

You cannot read your way into it

As I’ve grown older, I’ve become deeply suspicious of people touting intellectual knowledge that isn’t complimented with direct lived experience. Don’t get me wrong, … Continue

Where do you end?

Plants do not sit inside their environment in the way that a chair sits inside a room. Instead, the plant is formed by its … Continue

The world is not a machine

Anima mundi is Latin for the soul of the world. Its origins trace back to Plato’s Timaeus. He describes the universe as a rational … Continue

Your breath began in a leaf

Let’s start with breath. The oxygen you inhaled is the direct result of photosynthesis, the continuous work of every green thing around you. Just … Continue

You live inside the Earth

In the 1970s, James Lovelock, the English scientist and environmentalist, proposed something that the scientific establishment found deeply uncomfortable. The Earth, he argued, is … Continue

Your way of seeing is lonely

The way our upbringing teaches us to pay attention keeps us safely outside what we are looking at. We observe, we record, we analyse, … Continue

Outsmarted by plants

In our culture, we see intelligence as needing a brain or a central processing system. With this brain, there is also the ability to … Continue

The intelligence we keep ignoring

Aristotle placed plants at the bottom of a hierarchy of living things. He outlined this in his treatise De Anima – Latin for ‘On … Continue