Don’t just touch grass. Befriend some.

The first time a tree talked to me, it nearly knocked me over. I was walking in my neighborhood when I felt a pull toward a Chinese elm I’d seen countless times, and stopped to put my hand on its trunk. I closed my eyes. Instantly, everything that tree had ever felt, known, relished, and endured rushed through me. I saw flashes of images of the people and animals and plants that had lived and died there before us; at once flooded with energy and sense memories that predated the tree itself. When I opened my eyes, I was woozy.

If you had told me this story several years ago—that I’d one day believe I’d conversed with a tree—I would’ve laughed in your face. Like many people raised in a white Western settler culture, I was a self-righteous skeptic who’d been taught that plants, animals, and any other other-than-human entities were barely sentient and less than; meant to be used or dominated, not befriended, let alone viewed as equals. (Even the domesticated animals we consider family in most Western cultures are treated, to some extent, as objects we “own.”) I was human, elevated, civilized; everything else was nature, base, uncivilized. This was the inviolable order of things—until, of course, I put my hand on that tree, and definitively learned that it wasn’t.

There was nothing original about my “discovery.” The idea that everyone and every “thing” is alive, has inherent worth, and is interconnected is integral to communities and cosmologies across space and time. In many indigenous languages, there isn’t even a word for “nature” as some discrete, static entity. Quite the opposite: Aboriginal Australians’ conception of Country comprises a “sentient landscape” of waterways, air, land, humans, other-than-humans, ancestors, and their relationships—a way of being and relating so complex and antithetical to dualistic thinking that it threatens to blow the White Western mind.

It would take an ego death and a spiritual rebirth for me to allow it to change mine, and a healthy dose of decolonization to see just how profoundly lonely my anthropocentric individualism had made me. Luckily, a whole world of friends awaited me on the other side.

~

I wasn’t always so isolated. Like all of us, I was born with an innate capacity for connection. As a kid, I remember desperately trying to save ants from the eager shoes of the other kids who delighted in stomping on them. I would cry as I tried to steer them to safety; feeling deeply for the ants in my body; each stomp chipping away at a greater whole I didn’t yet understand. As I got older, I’d feel this same connection to the squirrels searching for food in our yard, and the quahogs my family would dig up from the salt marsh to cook and eat. In high school I was swept away by transcendentalism and did my senior project on the benefits of being in nature. I knew there was something sacred going on there—that nature was sacred. But into my 20s, jaded and weighed down by the expectations of a certain kind of adulthood, I found myself communing with non-humans less and less.

The severing of this connection wasn’t conscious, but it wasn’t accidental, either. A capitalist, colonialist society relies on separation and hierarchy to maintain power. We’re indoctrinated with dualisms of human/animal, society/nature, us/them—all of which teach us to fear and loathe the “other.” We become beholden to violent state apparatuses under the guise of safety, and comfort at the expense of our neighbors. We learn to believe that our heartache is not a craving for community and reciprocity, but for more things to buy and other perceived measures of status and power; for the newest iPhone, or more followers. The cult of individualism continues to do its job of isolating us from one another at the expense of the whole, eroding our relationships to other humans and rendering relationships with non-humans almost unimaginable.

In 2020, we were offered a portal into a new world—one that slowed us down, showed us the flowers on our block, and recalled the visceral truth that what happens on another continent, even to those we’ll never meet, still changes us. For a lot of people, this spaciousness was also painful, allowing old wounds to surface and new versions of self to grow. In my corner of the universe, alongside the blooming jasmine and bottlebrush, I was blooming, too: confronting unearthed trauma in a process that scrubbed me clean and made me new. When I came back up from the underworld, I found myself attuned to another frequency. It must have been what Persephone’s first return felt like: I was vibrating on a cellular level with awareness of the animacy, importance, and interconnectedness of every leaf, root, rock, and worm around me.

Surrounded by divine love, I was eager to reciprocate, to let these new friends know I was interested in them, too. In introducing myself, I tried to learn the names of those I’d once passed without a thought. This meant holding up my phone between me and a tree to take photos for iNaturalist then looking at my screen to memorize the results. It didn’t take long to realize that this logocentric, colonized approach was actually impeding our relationship: I wasn’t spending meaningful time with my potential friends, I was acquiring information. I realized they probably didn’t even care what I called them, anyway. It’s not like they chose those names for themselves; we imposed them. As the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr writes, “The divine has never seemed very worried about us getting [their] exact name right.” So neither would I.

In these early, experimental days, I also took to heart what the scientist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, says about speaking of “the living world as our relatives.” She offers the pronouns “ki” and “kin” as replacements for “it” when referring to plants and the like; with this as a guide, I settled on they/them/their. To me, this shift is an expression of the philosopher Martin Buber’s “I-Thou” relationship, which recognizes someone’s individual subjecthood, as opposed to “I-It,” which reduces them to an object, an other. By practicing this basic respect, we begin to dismantle our imbalanced relationship to the world around us, instead entering a new one as equals.

After these shifts in consciousness, friendship came easily. Each time I stepped outside, I opened myself up to whoever was around, extending an invitation to engage. Sometimes I’d feel a tree or bird call for my attention and I’d meet them with curiosity and an offering of my heart. One morning it was a hummingbird, floating and feeding at the bottlebrush. Instead of glancing and moving on, I stopped and attuned all my energy to them, and they stopped to look at me, too, holding my gaze for probably five seconds but what felt like lifetimes. A few weeks ago, I sat with the eucalyptus tree up the hill behind my house. Our bodies touching, we soaked up the sun and I sensed a mutual ease and tenderness. On a recent hike through a gorge, I met granite and moss that wanted to tell me what they knew, and I returned their gifts with a gratitude that vibrated through me and sung out in a silent echo.

These friends and I didn’t share a spoken word, but we did share a mother tongue, and the more I practiced listening and speaking to them with body and spirit, the more fluent I became. In my efforts to communicate, I thought of Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics,” in which a scientist wonders whether humans will ever understand plant language: “Let another century pass, and we may seem… laughable. ‘Do you realise,’ the phytolinguist will say…, ‘that they couldn’t even read Eggplant?’” I was trying to learn.

We also don’t need to fully understand one another to build radical affinities across scientific kingdoms. To survive ecocide and genocide; to imagine lives beyond a fascist, imperialist death cult; we have to liberate ourselves from dichotomy and practice interdependence with all of our neighbors. This looks like mutual aid, kinship, care, fluidity—wisdom that rings revolutionary against the values of neoliberal empire but has always been embedded in indigenous practices and political affiliations. Despite what colonial capitalism sells us, the only option is collective vitality. We either all survive together, or perish.

This is notably different from the (white) saviorism of mainstream environmental movements. It’s what Kimmerer calls reciprocity over sustainability; I consider it empathy over pity. I used to see the environment as a flat thing humans acted upon, something we extracted from and damaged and were thus morally obligated to save. I’d failed to consider that the environment, in all their agency, was also acting upon me—that, if anything, they were the ones doing the saving. (Insert tree bumper sticker: “Who rescued who?”) My belief that humans were a scourge upon the earth was rooted in shame, a state of being that prevents us from taking accountability and building connection. Plants helped me understand my value, both to them and to myself. The anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose articulated this experience well:

“Westerners… find ourselves embarrassed at the thought that country might really be addressing us… I have from time to time encountered real discomfort around the idea that any nonhuman being really gives a darn about me and my projects, outside of the obvious contexts of, say, hunting—as predator and as prey. However, the corollary to the idea of nobody giving a darn would be that what I do doesn’t matter, and that is clearly not true.”

It’s a reminder that it’s not all about us, but it’s also not not about us. My relationships with the Chinese elm on my block, and with the ocean, and with the crows that congregate in front of my house, are an antidote to toxic individualism and its shadow, loneliness. They’re a font of political power, a rooting into the past, and an orientation toward the future. Other-than-human entities showed me I was part of an ecosystem, already and always loved. Now, when I need community, I reach for the leaves of the pepper tree in the front yard. Sometimes I ask how they’re doing in English, but usually it’s a wordless greeting, an exchange of energy. We meet in reception and response and in affirmation of our shared aliveness. We both know neither of us could ever be lonely when surrounded by so much life.

Old Friends