They Tell Us...

...that plants are perishable, soulless creatures, that only man is immortal, etc.: but this, I think, is something that we know nearly nothing about.

- John Muir, A Thousand Mile Walk To The Gulf, 1867

Do trees have souls? Certainly if any plant does, trees do. If so, then how about shrubs, or bushes, or grasses? We understand now that plants are conscious, communicate, can respond to their environment, and are able to selectively nurture their own.

My first course in agronomy in university started with an experiment: cut a corn seed in half, place it cut side down on ager in a covered petri dish and check on it in a day. The ager contained a substance that discoloured in the presence of oxygen. The next day it was discoloured. I knew that seeds were alive before this, but this experiment brought it home in a powerful way. This seed was actually respiring - breathing - even though for all practical appearances it appeared inert. I walked out of the lab and sat on a bench for a very long time on campus. All wheat ground to make my bread, all rice cooked for my supper, all popcorn in the popper was indeed alive. This produced an even deeper sense of connectedness between myself and the natural world. A simultaneous sense of wonder and tragedy, thankfulness and injustice, connectedness and difference.

Yesterday I stood for a long time in my woods. Winter-bare tree arms stretched to the sky. Looking. Listening. Loving. There are perhaps ten thousand trees in nineteen acres: birch, spruce, aspen, black poplar, chokecherry, pin cherry. A community of cooperative neighbours who never fight. Hard to believe. Do the count for yourself. You will be surprised. Plus the brush underneath: hazel brush, red dossier dogwood, rose hips, high bush cranberries. And the even lesser ones, too.

And I asked them in a quiet voice if they had a souls?

And I swear that they came very, very close

to audibly

answering.