Recently, I saw a strikingly handsome building set in a grove of old-growth trees. It was not a natural landscape, but when the building was constructed, the developer had left some ancient Douglas fir and ponderosa pine and created the impression of a long solidity in the landscape for his construction. It is rare for a builder to go to such trouble because it is more straightforward and economical to clear a lot and build than to build around trees and other natural landscape elements. I studied the property with its balance of trees, the stone, and the woodwork of the building. I wondered how the trees had experienced this construction and the loss of so many other trees on that particular stand.

Two years ago, I witnessed a tree doing something I suspected I was not meant to see. My partner had just placed a planter full of new young plants on a deck rail under the canopy of a very ancient willow. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement and turned just in time to see the willow purposely lift a frond and stroke the young plants. The action was like an arm lifting and then stroking the plants, and the movement occurred twice, lifting and returning, lifting and returning like a parent might stroke the head of a much-loved child. I laughed and told the willow, "Caught ya'," and later, while eating dinner at the café table, we had on the deck and under the willow, my partner witnessed the tree lift a frond and lovingly place it over my shoulders, and when I removed it, placed it there again.

I have had the privilege of many odd and spiritual experiences — especially after I moved to New Mexico. Still, this particular moment in the Pacific Northwest haunts me, and it may be my life's most significant spiritual moment. I feel as though I saw a moment we are not privileged to see. If we do, it is usually under the influence of a mind-altering chemical like LSD, a moment when our ego is de-potentiated and no longer in control of our perceptions. I have had such experiences using LSD, but that was 50 years ago, and I doubt that I was having a flashback at this late date.

Humanity suffers incredible hubris. We speak of looking to space to find intelligent life when we are looking for life like us. I suspect if we ever do find life like us, it will be terrifying — it will be a life driven by insularism and an attitude that cannot see us as equals and will more than likely only see us in terms of our utility, much like we see trees, wolves and everything else on this planet.

We now scientifically know that trees and plants in forests have a massive communication network of mutually sustainable interactions.

In the 1960s, CIA interrogation expert Cleve Backster experimented with polygraph machines when he stumbled onto something novel. He noticed what appeared to be a change in electrical resistance with one of the plants, to which he connected the polygraph equipment whenever he removed a leaf or even "threatened" to harm the plant by intent alone. He likened this sudden electrical pulse to a "scream" emitted by the plant in response to endangerment.

While Backster's theory was considered a crackpot idea, many would follow similar, unusual observations about the behavior of plants, seemingly representing a sort of "communication" they might be capable of. For instance, a 1989 AP article discussed what one physicist named Ed Wagner believed was evidence he found of plant communication via what he called "W-waves." Wagner stated he found evidence that trees communicate with each other in a language he calls W-waves. "If you chop into a tree, you can see that adjacent trees put out an electrical pulse," said Wagner. This indicates that they communicated directly." The article states that Wagner pointed to a blip on a strip chart recording the electrical pulse to explain the phenomenon. "It put out a tremendous cry of alarm," he said. "The adjacent trees put out smaller ones…. People have known there was communication between trees for several years, but they've explained it by the chemicals trees produce," Wagner said. "But I think the real communication is much quicker and more dramatic than that," he said. "These trees know what is happening within a few seconds. This is an automatic response." Wagner has measured W-waves' speed at about 3 feet per second through the air. "They travel much too slowly for electrical waves," he said. "They seem to be an altogether different entity, and that's what makes them so intriguing. They don't seem to be electromagnetic waves at all." "Orvin Ed Wagner: W-Waves — Biocommunication via standing waves."

Another physicist, William Corliss, also took an interest in Wagner's discovery, noting that "The voltage measured by electrodes implanted in trees goes up and down as one goes higher and higher up the trees… incidentally, electricity does seem to affect plant growth."

In recent years, the idea of plants capable of forms of "communication" has been considered more thoughtfully and is not outright shunned by the scientific community. One leading modern researcher and advocate for the varieties of ways plants communicate is Suzanne Simard, whose work with plants has helped set new precedents for how interactions between various species of flora occur. Simard's research began to coalesce around what became a doctoral thesis two decades ago, in which she argued that trees used various communication methods to achieve everything from expressing their needs to sharing nutrients "via a network of latticed fungi buried in the soil." She further studied the varieties of ways that trees exploited fungal filigrees in ways that allowed them to send signals to other plants nearby about changes in the environment and even "help" endangered plants by transferring and sharing nutrients with them.

Speaking with "Yale Environment 360" last year, she talked about how, as she puts it, a forest "is a cooperative system," saying:

"To me, using the language of 'communication' made more sense because we were looking at not just resource transfers but also defense signaling and kin recognition signaling. We, as human beings, can relate to this better. If we can relate to it, we'll care about it more. If we care about it more, then we'll do a better job of stewarding our landscapes." ("Exploring How and Why Trees 'Talk' to Each Other — Yale E360")

A 2016 TED talk given by Simard can also be seen here.

Despite having communicative abilities, plants generally aren't deemed to have any intelligence. However, some scientific community members still argue this is not necessarily true. Author and researcher Michael Pollan, who studies the field of plant neurobiology, argues that plants are more perceptive than many would think:

"They have analogous structures… They have ways of taking all the sensory data they gather in their everyday lives … integrating it, and then behaving appropriately in response. ("10 Startling Discoveries About Plants And Their Habits") And they do this without brains, which, in a way, is what's incredible about it because we automatically assume you need a brain to process information." ("New research on plant intelligence may forever change how you think …")

Understanding how various life forms communicate and cooperate gives us a broader sense of what "life on Earth" is truly about. It also challenges us to consider whether more complex interaction systems exist between organisms, including those that aren't deemed intelligent or even responsive by humans.

"In the case of plants, it seems unusual that these organisms, while deemed very much alive, have long been relegated to being unresponsive and "vegetative," in the most literal sense. Maybe it's time we start paying closer attention to our floral kindred and the subtleties of their interactions with each other and their environment." Trees That Talk: The Bizarre World of Plant Communication Micah HanksJuly 2, 2017

In The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, the conservationist and nature writer Robert Macfarlane describes it this way: "Single trees are extraordinary; trees in number more remarkable still. To walk in a wood is to find fault with Socrates's declaration that 'Trees and open country cannot teach me anything, whereas men in town do.' Time is kept and curated and in different ways by trees, and so it is experienced in different ways when one is among them. This discretion of trees, and their patience, are both affecting. It is beyond our capacity to comprehend that the American hardwood forest waited seventy million years for people to come and live in it, though the effort of comprehension is itself worthwhile. It is valuable and disturbing to know that grand oak trees can take three hundred years to grow, three hundred years to live, and three hundred years to die. Such knowledge, thoughtfully considered, changes the grain of the mind."

As I approach the end of my years on this earth, I have become more acutely aware of the commonality I have with all life. Fear and suffering appear to be the same across all species, and I am beginning to wonder if love is also — not romantic love, but the deep logos love spiritual people have written about for millennia. I understand there are reasons we avoid seeing these connections and being aware of the "intelligence," love, and fear of life around us.

The Danish/Inuit Arctic explorer Kund Rassmussen once wrote, "The greatest peril of life lies in the fact that human food consists entirely of souls. All the creatures that we kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, souls that do not perish with the body and which must, therefore, be pacified lest they revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies."

That is seen as a very primitive view, yet I wonder if we are the primitives and the barbarians in our confusion of scientific methods for technological growth and exploitation. I suspect our blindness to the intelligence of life here on earth, intelligence other than ourselves, is summed up in that statement. Maybe all intelligence is the knowledge that everything is connected, and what we call intelligence is a form of narcissistic blindness. Perhaps the natural intelligence is in the willow, lifting a frond to stroke young plants that came under his/her/its protection and scope. Maybe the only innate intelligence is displayed in how we honor, respect, and care for everything. In addition to slowing my interaction with the world, this view brings me a sense of greater peace and a change in focus about what is and is not essential and how to express that "essentialness."

I also have greater clarity about what the ancients meant when writing about a fear of God. It is not a fear full of the pain of punishment they wrote about — it is an awe that is hard to express and is likely to bring tears and an awareness of the pity of things and our oneness with everything.