Flourishing in the Fossil Grove

Plants are not totally unlike us... Joseph Mortenson, Whale Songs & Wasp Maps

A child said, 'What is grass?' fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is
any more than he.    

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass


Mid-August in the Fossil Grove, the only in situ site in the world of an ancient forest whose tree stumps, some 330 million years old, have been petrified with the passage of time. In terms of 'slow flows' this is pretty much it. When these trees were alive and well, 'Scotland' was somewhere near the equator enjoying tropical temperatures and teeming jungles. 

A third of a billion years later....

Indeed, it got me thinking... this peace and serenity.... this deep time...

and all these flowers:

Maybe the Earth is one big flower - after all, it does flow and flourish (in spite of all our efforts) - which springs forth from the solar and stellar soil of our galaxy. All the other planets could be plants too, except, and in spite of their flowing too, they don't appear to have the right conditions for flowering.

Moreover, if the planet Earth is a plant (in or out of flower), humans and every other living creature on Earth would then be considered as epiphytes: plants which grow on other plants. To be sure, humans, especially the more 'modern' we become, have turned out to be more parasitic towards our host than symbiotic. This might be explained by our deluded view of ourselves as something other than plants (some of which flower and some which do not), and flow-ers. Indeed, if we were to (contemplate and) compare a human and a plant (any human, any plant) we might find that they have more in common than at first sight.

'Our failure to see plants as living creatures', writes Jerry Mander in Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 'is the result of limited human perception, a sign of the boundaries of our senses or the degree to which we allowed them to atrophy, or the fact that we have become too speedy to perceive the slower rhythms of other life forms'.

If we did slow down, and open up that organ of contemplation within us, we might understand the earth and our place within it quite differently. All flesh is grass after all, and though the flesh may wither and the flower may fall off, Earth - soil of soils - and Universe - synergy of synergies - will endure.

I think having an intimate 'love affair' with a flower is far more psychotic and riveting than having a love affair with some of the more banal creatures of the human race.

Timothy 'Speed' Levitch, The Cruise