Becoming Plant by Sara Wright

“I did not know to recognize you as individuals when I bought you, but I know to recognize you as individuals now…”
Xochitl Alvizo

This morning, I read an excellent essay by Xochitl Alvizo about ‘extending compassion’ by choosing to become vegan. Her personal story touched me deeply because it was a tale of awakening to the sanctity of animal life.

My story was different, but perhaps just as compelling. I include my partial response to her article here:

I grew up as a meat eater, and ANIMAL lover… by my mid – twenties I started to feel very uncomfortable about eating meat, so gradually I ate less and less… I took a philosophy course. The professor shocked me. Was becoming vegetarian the answer? Wasn’t I still eating living things? By then I had already developed deep personal relationships with plants both inside and out – I already knew they responded to being loved and cared about. If I really wanted to get away from killing things, then would I be willing to take a pill to get the nutrients I needed instead of eating any more food he asked? I loved to cook. I loved food. I loved plants and animals. No, I thought.

 For me answering this question honestly was the source of a harsh awakening. No matter what I ate I was killing living beings.

I finished that class with a burning question – how do I make peace with being an omnivore? I held that question in my heart. By then I had lost my taste for meat. It was ten years before I  received an answer. 

My study of Indigenous peoples taught me that what I ate was less important than how I ate.

The critical thing was to express my GRATITUDE to the beings whose lives were sacrificed for me to live… to be mindful… to stay aware.

And so, I have tried to live this way ever since. Staying aware is hard. I have a trickster who often owns my mind. I say ‘try’ because often I forget. I rarely eat meat, but my dogs do because they are carnivores and I buy it. I also eat fish.

 I see myself as a participant in the Circle of Life where we must kill living beings be they fungi, plants, or animals to live regardless of who we are. 

I am also aware that most non- Indigenous people don’t have the kind of relationship I do with plants.

I did not know how to recognize you as individuals when I first knew you, but I know how to recognize you as individuals now…
(Paraphrasing Xochitl)

When I was a toddler, I helped my grandmother in her vegetable garden. This was when I planted my first seed, a summer squash. When it came time to harvest the vegetables, the little person picked the squash and put the vegetable to sleep in her wooden doll’s bed. When the squash finally shrunk into an unrecognizable shape the story ended. For the child eating the squash was never an option, though no doubt I ate the ones my grandmother cooked.

Clearly, the toddler sensed something about the sanctity of plants that I later ‘forgot’.

As a young adult and mother, I had a houseful of plants that flourished but also seemed to be responding to my touch and care in uncanny ways. Sometimes I sensed something –   an invisible current running between us. Plants have feelings, I concluded, not quite believing myself.

 As soon as my children were older, I planted  vegetable and  flower gardens that also flourished. I possessed a green thumb, some said.

By mid -life I began to have strange experiences with individual plants and trees that spoke to me without words. I dreamed I was a vine with eyes in her leaves that crawled over the ground.

I began to make tinctures from plants I gathered after sensing that a particular plant would help me.

I went to Amazon to study medicine plants and learned that each healer had his own garden, that all plants spoke and healed various illnesses directly or through dreams.

The roots of orchids lit up a luminous green whenever I repotted them. Sometimes the roots pulsed, heating up in my hands.

I moved to the mountains from the coast because I was compelled to live in a wilder place. As soon as I did, I had frightening dreams about the death of thousands of trees. Trees were warning me of their collective demise, and I didn’t want to believe them. Strip logging began. Today almost every mountain is at least partially bare and all, but those on protected lands carry ugly scars. We have less than 100 acres of old tree growth left in Maine.

I began to grow passionflowers, developing an eerie relationship with this species. Could this be the vine of my repetitive dream? Whenever I gave a rooted cutting to someone who would turn out to be an unworthy person the plant would die. I stopped giving my plants away.

I went to New Mexico and stayed with a man I shouldn’t have, even though we had no romantic relationship. Within two months one of my passionflowers died. I was being warned, I knew. (Thank goodness I had left one plant home in the care of a friend).I was living in hell. When I became ill and was forced to leave this man’s house, I mourned the loss of that plant like a grieving mother.

I spent a few years in New Mexico elsewhere. Suzanne Simard’s work with trees who communicated with one another through mycelial networks took on a new dimension. This fungal net of underground life that stretched across the earth became increasingly important to me.  Fascinated by a world I knew nothing about and couldn’t see, I did a lot of research during this period. Some days when I walked along the river before dawn, I could feel sparks of light coming up from my feet.

 Returning home a few years later I took to what was left of protected forests to research the relationships between fungi plants and trees on a more sophisticated level surrendering gardening in the process.

In one sheltered woodland the hemlocks began to sing. Look closer they said, pay attention to our ground. I heard these words rise out of my body as I sat beneath them staring up into magnificent canopies above.

 Some days in hemlock hollow I felt those same sparks of light shooting up from under my feet. The mycelial network was calling me deeper into a new relationship with the earth. Time to pay attention to what’s underground.  And I did.

Plants are like dreams. They never tell you what you already know.

What I continue to learn about mycelial networks astonishes me. These fungal networks have survived five extinctions. Without this living net that stretches across the earth life could not exist. All living beings on the planet have their origin here. Unless the planet is blown up, or humans destroy the network, no matter what happens with climate change Life in some form will survive.

Today my dreams tell me that we are moving into the sixth extinction and these networks may be our only hope for Life to continue long term, with or without humans.

 The terrifying reality is that we are destroying the fragile fungal connections that stretch beneath the sea, roam through deserts, grasslands, and forests before they have even been studied.

I have become somewhat obsessed about getting the word out. As a lifetime naturalist approaching 80 this may be the most important contribution I will make on behalf of the earth before I die.

In closing I recommend two books to anyone that wants to learn more. Suzanne Simard’s memoir Finding the Mother Tree and Merlin Sheldrake’s “Entangled Life”.

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 Postscript:

Many people mistakenly believe fungi are plants. However, fungi are neither plants nor animals but rather organisms that form their own kingdom of life.

The way they feed themselves is different from other organisms: they do not photosynthesize like plants and neither do they ingest their food like animals. Fungi actually live inside their food dissolving and absorbing nutrients from the inside out. Fungi live in water, in deserts, just about anywhere that remains intact. We think of them as mushrooms or molds but these plant- animal beings (we don’t know where one ends and the other begins) are incredibly complex. Most fungi live beneath the ground. Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungal (mycelial) networks.