[ o 1,1 ] (Q1) In indigenous ways of thinking, plants are understood, not as objects, certainly as beings, and, indeed, as persons. In our stories, in our language, and our practices, plants are understood as persons. And I don’t mean persons like Ents….
What does it mean to be a person? What do we mean when we say that these plants are persons?It’s not anthropomorphic at all. It honors, in fact, the great differentness. We’re not saying that plants are like humans. They are like plants. They are like sovereign beings with their own abilities, their own intelligence, their own stories, gifts responsibilities, and roles. And that’s what we mean by them as persons. Indeed it’s so exciting these emerging fields of plant neurobiology, right? Where we’re discovering that plants communicate, frequently, all kinds of different media, sense the world, that plants make choices. That plants can learn. Some of the most exciting research that I was recently reading, documenting that plants can hear, and make decisions about their behavior, based on what they hear. These emerging science of plant neurobiology is really confirming much of what our native traditions always said, about plants as teachers, as persons, as wise beings with something to teach us. (What Plants Teach Us ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer – December 5th, 2017 – New York Botanical Garden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDQ5WDLQb9M)
[ o 1,2] (Q2)Whoever, in action, replaces its reason for being as totality for a particular determined purpose, in the less important cases, the majesty of a State, a party’s triumph. All action specializes, as there is no unlimited action. A plant does not usually act, nor is specialized: if gobbling down flies, then specializes! (Bataille, G.(1945) – Sur Nietzsche, II, P1)
[ o 2,1] (Q3) Solitude is seized when the silence of things is being heard and every object’s partial breathing being comprehended, the dead secret in a stone but awake in the plant, the whole nature’s whether hidden or manifested rhythm. The spirit sleeps and dreams of nature. How could plant dreams be played out. Also shades have their lives still untranslated. (Cioran, E. (1937) – Tears and saints)
[ o 2,2] (Q4) “Plants tell their stories not by what they say, but by what they do. What if you were a teacher but had no voice to speak your knowledge? What if you had no language at all and yet there was something you needed to say? Wouldn’t you dance it? Wouldn’t you act it out? Wouldn’t your every movement tell the story? In time you would become so eloquent that just to gaze upon you would reveal it all. And so it is with these silent green lives. A sculpture is just a piece of rock with topography hammered out and chiseled in, but that piece of rock can open your heart in a way that makes you different for having seen it. It brings its message without a single word. Not everyone will get it, though; the language of stone is difficult. Rock mumbles. But plants speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food.” (Robin Kimmerer. “Braiding Sweetgrass.” )
[ o 2,3] (Q5) A tour over the other’s mindset. May some hormones be balancers of displacement and interaction amongst groups. And their sympathetic fellowship (Saint Sebastian Study Group, 2020)
You are a symptom of nature. You, as a human being, grow out of this physical universe in just exactly the same way that an apple grows off an apple tree. (-Alan Watts ) [ o 3, 1]