Like gazing through a stained-glass window at a vibrantly coloured, snow-covered landscape, intelligence isn’t just what we’re looking for, it’s what we are looking through. Humans value intelligence, and that is not about to change. What may change is our capacity to appreciate other kinds of life on their own terms, divorced from anthropocentric box-checking. What we hope our suggestion does is prevent any one limited metric from skewing or obscuring the diverse kinds of success that exist in our world, including those we have yet to discover. We won’t just see more clearly, we’ll see more than we did before. If intelligence is no longer a default metric for species’ worthiness, how might our value judgments shift? Would we be more inclined toward wonder, and might this wonder impel us to conserve the other wondrous creatures with whom we share this planet, and the environments in which they evolved their own flavours of success? We think that would be the smart thing to do.
Aeon article, "What is intelligent life?" by Abigail Desmond and Michael Haslam.
I read this piece before heading to the Reserve to visit Kairos. On the way I saw this little oak.
Like Aeolus, though more so, the oak had ceded up for out, with no leading stem growing vertically! In fact, I think the leader is that branch heading off first and then the other branch goes up only to a T-junction. Very unusual.
I wanted to climb but the first limb was too high for me to pull myself onto, until my body realised it could hang from one of the upper branches, climb the stem with my feet and hook my legs over. Then I stood up on the T, supported by the smaller branches going upwards. My form, as it were, understood - or interstood! - the form of the tree! My body did this without thought and there I was, again, IN the oak.
What this gave me was a visceral, bodily awareness of the intelligence of form. The tree's form finds light and balance and nutrients and stability. My form finds ways to be IN the world.
From the track, the tree was hidden by the branches, and what had led me to stop and look was the new growth. The term "Lammas growth". This is the second or summer flush of new leaves in temperate zones.
After this, I went to Kairos, which you will learn about in a later post. But I want to recount an experience inspired by one of the leaders of the Sentient Forest Project. It was to meditate on a dead tree. I did not know a dead tree well enough to imagine one, apart from the fallen Grove Oak at home - which is not dead as the east half of the tree flushed out this summer despite that whole stem being, like the west side, on the ground.
Still, I imagined this tree and the tree took me down into the ground. I saw roots, but not roots as we know them, but a whole thick network of great white seeking things entwined and entangled going all the way to the hot core of the earth. The Grove Oak said, "We grow between two suns." I had this sense of the tree as a green volcano, if you like, drawing energy from the heart of the planet and exploding this viriditas into the nonpareil blue of the sky.
I think of Asia Suler's Vein of Gold archetype, seeking in the underground and the hollow places (yes, really, that's what it's about) and the golden molten core of the Earth. I think about trees drawing minerals from the depths (with the help of fungi and micro-organisms). I see trees as exemplars of a concept of bringing the unseen into the light. And I realise the importance of valuing the "heart" of the matter, of exploring the depths and the interior spaces.
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