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We can see the ripples that life caused when it fell into the land in the upthrust jagged peaks that we call mountains. But upon what distant shore do those ripples end? Do they end on the sandy beach of the ocean? However tiny they are, however unseen they are to the linear mind, are those ripples not present still? And just as the shade of the oak tree is present in the seed, is not the eagle present in the mountain? And if the eagle flies to the field, is not the mountain now in the field? The waters begin in the mountain snows, but when they flow to the sea, does not part of the mountain reside now in the ocean?

⚘ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

Looking out from our tiny and limited life span, we continually miss the fact that life is still flowing through physical space. It has never stopped. The mountain lives much slower than we do, but its shape is never static, never unchanging. It is always flowing along and between dimensions, in constantly fluctuating, never predictable ways.

⚘ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

When we allowed science to convince us that there is no soul or intelligence in matter, the Earth’s physical forms became only cemetery markers showing where spirits once moved through the world. The autopsy of the material world then began in earnest. Its dissected parts now litter the landscape and we walk, depressed, among lifeless statuary, only accidental lifeforms on the surface of a ball of rock hurtling around the sun. The metal gate is unlocked. Other kinds of flowers nod in sunlight outside that wrought-iron fence.

⚘ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

Describing Nature, naming a thing, is a wonderful yet perilous act. Once people have a name for something, their tendency is to think they understand it and once they think they understand it, they quit experiencing it fresh and new each time they encounter it. Should the name itself be inaccurate it starts a chain of cultural and individual events that lead to outcomes that are not predictable in the initial act of naming.

⚘ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

In the human spirit, as in the universe, nothing is higher or lower; everything has equal rights to a common center which manifests its hidden existence precisely through this harmonic relationship between every part and itself.

⚘ Goethe

Western man firmly believed nature to be an entity with an objective reality independent of human consciousness, an entity that man can know through observation, reductive analysis, and reconstruction. . . In his efforts to learn about nature, man has cut it up in little pieces. He has certainly learned many things in this way, but what he has examined has not been nature itself.

⚘ Masanobu Fukuoka

The harder the linear mind tries to grasp this reality, the more slippery it becomes. A self-organized system is a living, ever changing identity that comes into being of its own accord in a gesture of acquiescence and cooperation that is never static.

⚘ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

But these attempts at division also produce many adverse effects when carried to an extreme. To be sure, what is alive can be dissected into its component parts, but from these parts it will be impossible to restore it and bring it to life again.

⚘ Goethe

Biological processes are the consequence of a dynamic, interactive, nonlinear network in which all parts play an equally important role. The system itself cannot exist, could not have come into being, without the subunits that self-organized. And the removal of too many of the subunits from a mistaken belief that they are unimportant will result in the loss of self-organization and emergent behaviors. In ecosystem studies, this is known as a trophic cascade. It occurs when too many parts of the ecosystem are destroyed and the nonlinear, self-organized ecosystem begins to collapse.

⚘ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature

The fractal nature of living organisms allows a near infinite surface area, with resulting near infinite points of interaction, allowing maximum flexibility in response to environmental flux.

⚘ Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature