I spend a lot of time with plants here on the farm. Some days, I am with them for ten or twelve hours or more. Day after day. Deeply, deeply intimate. I typically spend more time with plants than I do with people. It’s not that I don’t like people. I love them. But this is a farm of plants, set on a planet of plants. The plant planet.

Now and then I hear of plants being called “sentient beings.” Sentient here suggests that plants have some sort of consciousness. That they are like us. Would “being like us” be a good thing? Would it be an indication of some sort of advanced nature? Would it put plants on our level? Would being like us be something a plant would aspire to?

Maybe the question might be, “Are we like plants?” Or, better yet, “How can we be more like plants?” As I was sitting in the BRC in my old rusty metal chair this evening, surrounded by the deer flies and the apple trees, nettles, comfrey, the long blackberry canes, the bracken fern and so many others including the indigo plant that Cammy gave me this spring, I was thinking about how little I know. I wondered, “Will the plants forgive me?”