When I saw it first, it was a green and sleeping bud, raising itself toward the sun. Ants gathered aphids and sap around the unopened bloom. A few days later, it was a tender young flower with a pale green center, a troop of silver‑gray insects climbing up and down its stalk. Over the summer this sunflower became incredibly beautiful, subtly turning its face daily, always toward the sun, its black center alive with a deep blue light, as if flint had sparked an elemental fire there, in community with rain, mineral, mountain air, and sand.
As summer changed from green to yellow, new visitors came daily: lace‑winged flies, bees with legs fat with pollen, grasshoppers with clattering wings and desperate hunger, and other lives too small or hidden for me to see. This plant was a society undergoing constant change, great and diverse, depending on light and moisture.
Changes also occurred in the greater world of the plant. One day, rounding a bend in the road, I encountered the disturbing sight of a dead horse, black against a hillside, eyes rolled back. Another day I was nearly lifted by a sandstorm so fierce and hot that I had to wait for it to pass before I could return home. It swept away the faded dried petals of the sunflower. Then the birds arrived to carry the seeds to the future.
In one plant in one season a drama of need and survival was enacted. Hungers were filled; insects coupled; there was escape, exhaustion, and death. An outsider, I never learned the sunflower’s golden language. An old voice from gene or cell taught the plant to oppose the pull of gravity and find its way upward, to open. A certain knowing-instinct, intuition, necessity-directed the seed‑bearing birds to ancestral homelands they had never seen.
There are other summons, some even more mysterious than the survival journeys of birds and insects. Once a century, among their canopy of sunlit green, all bamboo plants of a certain kind flower on the same day. Not the plants’ location, in a steamy Malaysian jungle or a suburban garden in Pennsylvania, their age, nor their size matter. Some current we cannot explain passes through this primitive life. Each with a share of communal knowledge, all are somehow one plant.
Sometimes you can hear the language of the earth-in water, trees, emanating from mosses, seeping through the soil. Once, in the redwood forest, I felt something like a heartbeat, a hardly perceptible current that stirred a kinship and longing in me, a dream barely remembered. Once, on a calm beach, I heard an ocean storm booming from afar, revealing the disturbance at its center, telling about the rough water that would arrive.
Tonight I watch the sky, thinking of the people who came before me and their knowledge of the placement of stars, people who watched the sun long and carefully enough to witness the angle of light that touched a stone just once a year. Without written records, they registered the passage of the gods of night, noting fine details of the world around them and the immensity above them. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods. Behind me, my ancestors say “Be still. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
The author seems to be trying to understand: