Ep.57 Co-Authorship with Plants with Sydney Kale

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Welcome to ReConnect with Plant Wisdom. I am your host, Tigrilla Gardenia, Nature-Inspired Mentor and Leadership Coach. In this podcast, I share ancient and modern knowledge, from biology to spirituality, about the wondrous ways plants can help you lead a Naturally Conscious Life.

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Hello! Hello! Hello! Everyone! Welcome back to another episode of reconnect with plant wisdom. It’s me Tigrilla Gardenia.

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and this is Episode 57. We have a really great conversation for you. I am bringing to you, Sidney Kale, who is working on co-authorship with plants. Seriously. An amazing.

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It was just such a good conversation. I am very much looking forward to you getting to know Sydney and her work, and all the work she’s doing with various plants. So, without further ado, here’s my interview with Sydney Kale

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alright.

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I am

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so happy to be here really happy for this conversation, because this is a person that I found actually in another community, right? Just posting about the work that you’re doing. So I’m really happy to introduce you all to Sidney Kale, and Sydney is here to talk about her latest area of research and study and work, and probably a lot of passion.

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But before we get there I’d love for Sidney to tell us a little bit more about who Sidney is Hi. Sydney, and welcome to reconnect with plant wisdom.

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Hi! Thank you so much for having me my name is Sydney.

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I recently finished a master’s program at Schumacher College, a really lovely ecological school in England, on movement, mind, and ecology.

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and that really started my plant path. I wrote my dissertation with a plant, Damiana on the love language of plants, and I am now earning my Phd. At ubiquity in wisdom studies.

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and I am focused on plant intelligence, phenomenology, co-authorship with plants which is bleeding a lot into my personal endeavors of writing with plants

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and learning how to listen to them and build relationships with them, and I’m excited to talk about it.

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Cindy. I’m so curious as to how you even got into this area like, how how did you? I? I can see the writing part. But how did you get into the plans? Yeah. Plans didn’t used to be as big of a part of my life as they are now. When I started my master’s program at Schumacher I was coming out of an activist job at a nonprofit that was killing me.

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It was working me to death, and I felt like there was something really human missing in that political activist work.

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And so I went searching for it somewhere else. I ended up finding it in plants, which is really ironic.

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But when I started my master’s program that was the angle that I was coming from, and

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I remember I was watering plants in my apartment because I have a lot of house plants, so I suppose they’ve they’ve been a part of my life. And I was listening to a conference presentation by Sarah Abbott, and she did her Ph. D. Dissertation on an ethnography of trees, and that was the first time that I’d ever heard that you could communicate with plants.

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and I had a little panic moment, because I had about 200 plants in my house, and I thought, Oh, no!

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Am I supposed to be talking to all of these plans every day? Did they like me? Did they resent me. Are they having happy life? And that’s kind of where it all started for me.

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I became super obsessed with plants. I was really intrigued by the connection part. And so I started exploring that.

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and I would say it then really kicked off. The second milestone, was preparing for a field trip out in the desert in Texas, and I was listening to a lecture series by Steven Buoner.

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and it was called The Living Touch of Wild Gaia. He did it at Schumacher College, and he was talking about

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different ways of knowing, for feeling an experience, and I have always

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focused on objectivity and science and rationality as my ways of knowing. I think like a lot of us have.

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And I suppose during that lecture something in me opened up, and a plant spoke to me

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in the desert, which I ended up meeting the next week when I was out there.

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But it was a really profound experience, and I just couldn’t really go back

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after that. And so yeah, here I am now, focusing on plant connection and plant intelligence

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and my academic work, which is not at all where I thought this was going to be going. But when you start following the plants and the threads that they start leading you to you go to very unexpected places

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is so true. And it’s amazing to us how I mean, I I obviously get to meet a lot of people, and it’s very rare. I do get the occasional people who are like I grew up, you know, really, in connection with plants. And I grew up with law. And all these types of things, it definitely happens. But for so many others.

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it’s actually that moment of awareness, that moment where you realize that these beings that have been living with you all along, and that you have cared for so underlyingly. There has been some really deep connection, but that connection was never. It hadn’t come to your consciousness it hadn’t come to your awareness. And then all of a sudden, it hits you and you, you literally backwards in. Did I do anything to wrong.

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I hurt them. Oh, my goodness, what has happened? So it makes makes perfect sense. Oh, yeah.

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When I first started my my relationship with plants in this world that was more than just keeping them as house plants.

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I felt so much guilt, especially that first year, because I didn’t feel like I really knew how to be in a relationship with them.

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And I was so concerned about

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what the expectations were for me in these relationships. And was I showing up enough? And was I showing up in the right way because it wasn’t something that came naturally to me? I was learning this in my twenties which I’m still young. But at that point in my life I thought I knew who I was, and I thought I knew the way that the world worked. And so this was a new skill that

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it did not feel like something that was inherent inside of me, like like it is. But I had to unlock it.

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and I spent a lot of time apologizing to them and feeling really sad because I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. And that’s

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we’ve come to a much healthier place. But I was definitely, very conflicted in the beginning, because I’m also an introvert, and this kind of work can be very draining for me. Energy wise, and I don’t show up for my human relationships. Every single day, every minute of every day. So why would the plants expect that of me as well. So navigating. That has been really interesting.

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And it’s taken a lot of forgiveness and also listening to them. Of what do you actually want for me rather than imposing these impossible expectations on myself that they’re not asking me for?

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That’s so important. Cause. I think that that’s exactly what happens to many of us, and I often talk about how, as our awareness with plants, you know, starts to grow at first it it is the physical. You know the physical plants around us. Right? Then, of course, there’s the entire Earth perspective of what’s happening in the climate, what’s happening in the environment and all those 2 aspects, and already there.

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there’s such a lot of processing to get out of expectations. And you know, all of a sudden. It’s like as if you had a dog in the house for years that you were ignoring. You fed the dog. But you, that’s all you did, and then you start to realize oh, my goodness, there’s so much more out there than that!

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And and, like you said you go through that those times of apologizing.

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But then there comes to be this other piece of it that’s like connected to everything else, like the more realization of Oh, my goodness! Plants are my furniture. Plants are my clothing. Plants are all these other things, and then they go through a whole other level of apologizing until you reach the point where you realize. Wait a minute.

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Plants are beings, too, that are on this evolution journey with us, and therefore.

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you know they can sense what my, what my true intention is now, and they’re not gonna go and like shame me into the past. But it’s more of so then then opens up, which I think comes into your studies right now is.

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how do I learn to do better for the future? And it sounds like for you, because you’re a writer. A lot of this has come through the writing realm and that co-authorship that you’ve been doing with plans. Can you tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah. Co-authorship with plans that’s become such a a big word for me, because it goes so much farther than just words on a page

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but it felt really important to me to explore

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co-authorship with plants in my academic work, because I wanted to acknowledge their expertise, because at the end of the day I was apprenticing, and I am apprenticing to plants as an academic and as a researcher and as a human.

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Because I was asking these really big questions that

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I had no idea how to even go about

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finding the answers to them, like, what is the love language of plants? And I realized that

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in order for me to even

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figure out where to begin, I had to ask the plans directly.

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And so I wanted to acknowledge their voice, and this co-becoming with them as a researcher, and the co-becoming of the words on the page, whether it was academic

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or personal.

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And so that’s been a very interesting space to navigate, because plants don’t necessarily follow the scientific method and the values that science lays down for us like rigor and objectivity and and rationality, and and all of these different values. They don’t hold themselves to that, and they don’t present themselves to me in a way that necessarily aligns with those values.

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And so it’s really interesting to try to fit

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a non-human voice into a human system that was not built for it, that was not built to hear it and disseminate what they’re trying to say.

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So it’s been a very interesting practice in language, and I think in also restoring for me.

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what?

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What I’m learning in science and through research, and what I’m learning from the plants. I think science has always been a really big part of my life, and a really big part of this journey for me. I

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I love learning about plant intelligence and plant consciousness from the perspective of physics and biology and plant cognitive ecology?

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But that can never replicate

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what I learned from the plans, what it feels like to stop and ask a plan. What do you know? What do you have to say about this? And whether or not you get the answer that you were expecting? There’s something really powerful, I think one, in just asking the question and yielding your expectations, and actually asking

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a question to a plant whether or not you’re prepared to hear the answer.

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and then, when you do hear an answer, you’re getting to hear it from the plant itself. You’re getting to hear it

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from their voice, from their perspective on their own terms. And

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I think that’s a really a really beautiful thing, even though sometimes the answers are not conceivable by the human

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experience. Sometimes they’re just they’re too big for me. And I’m not going to understand, because at the end of the day a plant and only a plant knows what it likes, what it is like to be a plant

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but I also think that in needing that knowability you’re meeting an essence of that being as well, which is an idea that I’m still trying to figure out how to articulate. But I will throw it out there.

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No, and I love this. And it’s I have like 3 or 4 different directions that I wanna ask you about some like frigidiously making notes to make sure that I I remember, because one aspect is what you’re saying. We talk about a lot in the naturally conscious community. Many of our activities, whether it’s a course or our master classes, or even our weekly activities that we have, we. We introduce the aspect of art

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as it is

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one of the best tools we have found to be able to capture the plant mind in the sense of, without having to humanize the plant mind without anthropomorphizing everything. So allowing the plant to be a a part of the conversation, or the lesson, or the discussion, or the exploration in

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Key’s own voice, right in a voice that is, that is purely plant that

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makes it something quote, unquote, useful for humans in this particular case, when we’re trying to study something, but at the same time doesn’t take away nature, you know of that aspect, and I can imagine that in the co-authorship process that has to be one of the biggest difficulties is like, how do I make something that uses words that are somewhat comprehensible?

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And I guess what I’m curious is, do you find that it’s more important that the words are comprehensible, or that the words

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more accurately convey the feelings that are elicited through the words, I don’t even know if the question makes sense. But yeah, no, that totally makes sense. When I am writing with plants, I am very much more focused on the feeling. And what feeling words are going to

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evoke. One of the projects that I’m working on right now is a collection of essays that’s written with plans, and it’s a bit of a divergence from my academic work, and

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I think that’s because I wanted something to produce with the plans that couldn’t be contested

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if I’m writing an academic article. Part of the point of academic, I think, is to argue and you can argue with me all day about plan, intelligence, and about whether they’re actually speaking and whether they’re actually conscious. But when you’re producing art with them, you can’t argue with me about that. Art is what I want it to be. And so that is what it is. You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to read it or look at it. I don’t care, but

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is what that is for me, and it is the co-authored collection of essays with plans. And so that was really important for me to realize moving forward that project

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and so that also gives me a lot more wiggle room in the way that I write and what we write about together.

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and I’ve played a little bit with different mediums, like colors and art and sounds. But I always feel very drawn to words because I love to talk. I’m a big talker. I love words. I’m human. That’s a very big part of me. And so it felt like

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one of the most authentic ways to merge our 2 ways of being, and to produce this co-authorship.

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but it’s obviously with words. It’s very difficult to

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choose the words that are going to represent the plant and their voice on their own terms, because it’s a human language. And all of the words in the human language are embedded within a human context. They’re not embedded in a plant context. And so they’re never really going to do justice to what the plants are saying and the experiences that we’re having

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but I do think it’s it’s worth a try, and it still feels like

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one of the most authentic representations of our encounters together. But of course our encounters are pretty wordless. When you’re connecting with a plant, it’s very somatic. It’s about feeling and the things that I my imagination, and the things that I’m smelling, and my emotions.

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and what I’m feeling in my body. And sometimes there are words tied to that. But

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when there are words tied to that, they’re coming from me. It’s my intuition system translating these messages into something that I can understand.

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So when I sit down to write with a plant

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I have. I always have a thesaurus nearby, because when I’m choosing my words I’ll I’ll pick a word that it makes sense. It’s the correct word

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for

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whatever meeting I’m trying to produce, but it doesn’t have the feeling that I want. So I’ll go through a lot of different words and try to find the one that makes me feel something and so when I go back and reread it, I’m like, Oh, that that is how I felt in that moment whenever I was writing that sentence.

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And I think that’s that’s what I want to produce more than anything. And I do think that in that practice plant thinking and vegetable being does

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come to the forefront a little bit. I can see the plant thinking in the words, because there is a bit of an open-endedness.

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There’s an openness to interpretation. There’s a meaning that we both produced, and we knew what that meaning was in the moment.

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But plants present themselves in a very

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in concrete way. I would say, I can meet a plant and receive the same message in so many different ways, and that will change the way that I feel the message and what I get from the message, and I want that to come through in the words as well. And so I think sometimes in my writing, I’m teetering on the edge of it, not making sense

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because it it can’t fully make sense in words. And so yeah, sometimes I read a sentence, I’m like, I think I know what that means. It means something. And I’m just gonna let it be there and live there as it is, and

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whoever reads it will find the meaning that they want

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in it, and the way that the plant presents itself in that writing. I hope that made sense

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We have a writing group in Ncc. The Sprouts writing and and Creativity group, and one of the things I love about it. It’s actually expanded now, because so we have several. So we meet every week, and 2 times in the month we do writing one time we do art in general, whatever kind which could be writing, but it can also be anything else. And then another time we do co-working.

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and then we’re playing around with a few other different aspects, because what we’re finding is exactly what you’re saying is like.

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we want to bring that writing, and that writing has always got a vegetable mind connected to it. Sometimes we’ll pull a plant in specifically to work with us. Sometimes each writer has a plant that that is a plant partner, that oftentimes

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works with with them. And then other times we might work on concepts of how do we

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push the envelope of human experiences, to better understand the vegetable world, and to not look at it from that perspective of human humanness, let’s say

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which then, of course, always has to be translated like you said, because language is, you know, the the spoken word.

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the written word is a human construct. It is the way that we present ourselves. And so, therefore they’re always doing a little bit of interpretation in that. And where you go with that just changes. You and I do love that you, said the Thesaurus, because I also find myself doing the exact same thing

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like I find myself more and more writing with a thesaurus. We recently read in the Plant Wisdom Book Club, Robert Mcfarland, who has probably one of the most extensive vocabularies, and I found that he was so able to convey the nuances of the more than human world

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through the going back to the origin of certain words, and it makes me really sad that I gave away my Oxford English dictionary, like the big one with the little magnifying glass, because now I totally could use it in this perspective, and and that being said, there are these

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humongous challenges, and so many different ways of doing it. I mean, when we read, and in the plant was a book club, the the mind of plants, which is all these different stories. You really got an idea of the relationship, at least for probably for us inside of Ncc, because we’re so

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we’re so in in it.

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We had this. It was interesting to almost feel the level of relationship the person had with the plant that they were writing about through those words like you could feel where it was still more academic, and

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I’m still observing you could see which one instead was. I’m putting myself in the plant’s place

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versus the plan and I are now reaching equals in the sense of. We’re both present

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but different, or which one was saying, we’re present, and I’m trying to bring, you know the the plants into my world, you know, and all these different small nuances I find I find absolutely fascinating in that perspective on that realm do you find for yourself

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and this it probably it could flow. So it doesn’t mean that it’s always like this? Do you find yourself

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more

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a channel, an interpreter, a trying to transcribe a conversation?

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Where do you find? What do you find? Is the relationship that you’re currently having with the plants you’re working with. I love that question. Because it changes all of the time. And I think it also brings to light, really interesting discussions like you were saying about humanness, and how much human should be

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in these vegetal representations.

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And I think it also

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plays a little bit with the definition of co-authorship which I’ve been exploring a lot, because, like I said, it’s not just the words on the page. Coauthorship

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means that I am also an author, and so there is going to be humanness in it. There is going to be a part of me that’s represented in it. I can’t produce something that’s purely vegetal, because I’m not purely vegetal. And so whatever we produce, it’s going to be human. But it’s also going to be more than human. There’s going to be something in there that is.

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that’s not human, and in a perfect world that would be conveyed to the reader.

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And so I think it depends plan to plan, I suppose, and what

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they are wanting to convey to me, and what state I’m in, I I guess, in in our meeting. Sometimes I do very much feel like an interpreter. I wrote with Perry Winkle recently, which has covered my yard and periwinkle where I live in North Carolina is considered

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what we would call an invasive plant.

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and it felt like Perry Winkle had so much to say about their experience in North Carolina, and it was a moment of like, Shut up and listen because I want someone to hear me. I need you to hear this, and I I want you to hear these words, and I don’t want you to talk. I just want you to listen. And the writing was very much a reflection of that

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but other times, when I meet with a plant.

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it becomes like

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I am the plant and the plant is me, and

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it’s almost like an integration of the senses. And we we kind of unite. And it’s sometimes a very synesthetic experience, like, I’m seeing sounds. And I’m hearing colors. And it’s a different way of experiencing. And I think

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in that sense co-authorship becomes a co-becoming, and we become an entirely new context where I’m not just Sydney anymore. But I’m Sydney, that is.

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being consumed and is consuming this plant voice and this plant being. And there’s something that’s being produced

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out of that

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And so yeah, I think there’s always gonna be a little bit of humanness in it. And I think relationships with plants differ. And so they’re going to look different. And the role that you play in that coauthorship practice is sometimes going to change but I have found in these practices.

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It seems to always come back to to being human. I wasn’t expecting, whenever I was building relationships with plants, that I was going to learn so much about what it means to be human and what it means to be an ecological participant in a very inevitably entangled planet.

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But plans have this really beautiful power to become, who they are, and to be who they are, and they also have this really incredible power to be who they are, in the place that they are, which is something that I am not very good at.

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And so when I sit down to write with the plants, I feel like first and foremost, they’re telling me, be who you are in the place that you are right now, and that’s including me, and that’s including the bees and the sunshine and

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the glass of water sitting next to you and all of these things, and and what is coming out of this union of self and place and being? And how are you going to express all of those things?

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So even though I’m connecting with plants at the end of the day I have to go back to connecting with being a human and what it feels like to be a human

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connecting to a plant.

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And that’s what that’s what we write about. And that’s

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and that’s it. And I think that that’s it’s so much

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I I that see now I’m I’m tapping into that piece of me. And so therefore I struggle with the words which happens to me often when I feel like I’m tapping into my plantness, and I’m really understanding my plantness, because, like you said your plantness or plantness in general, that vegetality is really that presence right? A plant can’t afford to sort of live in an in another place than where they actually are, because, if not, they can’t survive. Right can require a truly

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deep connection to place in order to be able to be aware of what’s happening, and know where to grab nourishment. And all these things because they can’t run away right as as opposed to us humans that can just modify ourselves and modify our environment in a in a pretty quick way, in order to get to whatever it is. So we spend most of our times in modification instead of in presence and in in location. And I feel like when you start to work really deeply with a plant.

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That’s one of the first things that comes online for you. It’s like your plantness. Is your human ability to be present

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and to be present, not with a preconceived notion, not with a desire for a future outcome or a replay of a past.

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but present in whatever presence, is in observation, in in acceptance. Almost. I keep saying that I’ve through this journey have reached the most corny of Cornyus of locations which is unconditional love like that trust in myself and in the place that I’m in and in everything around me that just allows me to be in that that piece. So it makes sense that as your

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in order for you to author as partners, in whatever way that that is. For the moment

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you have to be also be able to match that frequency of the plants. You have to be able to be in that space with the plants, and then allow the plants to almost

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show you a different way of experiencing something that. Then you take into yourself.

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and I can see that there might be moments where you’re almost like you said with Periwinkle, like I’m writing

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on behalf of periwinkle, because nobody’s listening to what’s going on in periwinkle in this particular face and in other aspects where you might have a different type of relationship, where it’s more like

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you’re taking in whatever that plant is bringing into you. And then it’s like, I don’t want to say you’re because it’s not a translation. It’s more like

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it’s becoming a part of you. And therefore what is outputted is

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sure human.

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sure plants, and also so much more because we are so many more other pieces. And because plants have that rich relationship with so many different kinds of beings, it’s almost like a safe space, and and a permission to to for you to have that type of relationship with these other aspects of yourself and with the beings that live with you.

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Hopefully, that’s like the best way I can explain. Yeah, it’s so hard to explain. Stuff is this this piece of these experiences that we have and these relationships that we have with plants that

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that live somewhere inside us and are wordless. And we’re trying to pull them out and

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give them words and make them make sense to someone else that make them be significant to someone else. And at the end of the day that’s always going to fail

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in some in some way.

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But I have to say, and I speak to a lot of people about this topic, and I read a lot of papers like you said a lot of academic papers and such.

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I think you can really feel

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how I’m about to. I’m going to step on very thin ice right now, but I’m going to say it, anyway, I think you could feel

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the difference

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between the person that is

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becoming with plants.

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And therefore, again, even in my desire to share the plant voice.

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It is

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not a desire to make it a human voice that captures what a plant said or did or is.

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But more of how do I give just the right amount of human intelligibility?

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Just a teeny, tiny bit for you to

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allow yourself to listen beyond

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and and and it’s it’s a skill. I can hear it in the way that you speak, that it comes from

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that amount of time in the presence of plants in that way that that you’re not trying to. Well, a plant said this, and in this way and in this, and it’s like this, and and you’re not even fully trying to make it comprehensible. You’re trying to give just the right amount of comprehension to the, to the author, to the reader that they

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they don’t feel stupid that they don’t feel lost.

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It’s like just enough to let you know, hey? Even if you don’t get it all

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that’s okay.

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That’s part. Yeah.

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let yourself

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feel into it. Let the words kind of run over you. And I think that this is why we often use in Ncc. We use the medium of poetry, sometimes because it’s probably one of the the only.

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not the only, but like one of the the sort of forms of human speech that also allow us to go, that you’re not supposed to fully comprehend poetry. Sometimes it’ll trigger imagery, sometimes it’ll trigger sensation, sometimes it’ll trigger movement, and so it gives us that. And I think that in some ways the vegetable mind also operates in that same way, like. So you’re allowed to take liberties with the language you’re allowed to throw in

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grammar that doesn’t make sense, and words that

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seem like they’re not the right words, but they really are. And and

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and so in all these different aspects, which reminds me of another question that I had for you is.

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how do you feel about

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the languaging itself? I know you were talking about the Thesaurus, but, for example, we have big debates inside of the community about, and in a good way, like really interesting kind of discussions about things like

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pronouns. Kind of Robin wall, kimmere’s key ken, but also little subtle things, names of plants like. When a plant gives you a name versus periwinkle, or, you know, calling the plant by the species. When do you say the plants?

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And when is it plants kind of like we’re trying to move away from the earth and just to earth, so that we don’t objectify like how much of that kind of

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thinking comes into it? And have you had a chance to dialogue specifically with the plants around that? Yeah, a little bit. And it’s definitely something that I’m still exploring. And I’m still getting comfortable with. But

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I think the key to that exploration is being curious and being playful almost like a child. Again, the plants want me to be like a child all of the time.

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And yeah, letting go of the

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the constraints that we put on language and thinking about rather what is

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not what is correct, but what is possible.

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and language

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and something else that I get brought back to is the idea of ritual, which I think feeds in a lot to the language and the words that I choose, because it does feel a bit like a ritual and a ceremony when we’re choosing names, and we’re choosing pronouns, and we’re choosing the words that are going on the page.

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And ritual is something that

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I’ve been revisiting recently. Because I there are a lot of rituals that I love, that come from religions and cultures and different belief practices. But they don’t all resonate with me because they’re not coming from me. I think a really good example is

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As a budding herbalist. One of the first things that I learned from indigenous reciprocity practices was offering tobacco to a plant before you harvest them. And I think that that’s a really beautiful practice. But I don’t have that relationship

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with tobacco. And so it didn’t feel authentic for me to adopt that practice.

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And so it’s the same with language. I think ritual and language for it to be authentic. It has to come from you, for you, for the world, or whoever you’re offering it to.

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And so there is a bit of fluidity. I think, when we’re choosing these words and the language based on the plant that we’re commuting with and what they want from you.

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So you mentioned pronouns.

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I do use. They them, he, he, him, and she her pronouns.

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But

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the pronouns are often very fluid with the plants, and it’s not. I would not say that the plants necessarily subscribe to gender pronouns, and I also wouldn’t say that masculine and feminine energies subscribe to predict

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particular pronouns either, but the pronouns that I choose to represent a plant are representation of our relationship and the energy and the way that I am perceiving them. And sometimes it’ll change. Sometimes a plant will be a she, and then turn into a he, and then turn into a they, and it shifts a lot, and a plant that might feel like a she to me might feel like a he or they to someone else.

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And so I think in that sense you do have to let go a little bit about what those pronouns represent, and instead, for me, they’re more of just a representation of their being and their personhood and their agency in a way that’s moving away from it. There might be a better way to do it like robin wall, camre suggestion which I also love. It’s not something that I’ve adopted, because again, it doesn’t feel super authentic to me.

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But yeah, I think you just have to play around with what

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what feels right to you, and the same with naming plants. There’s so many different names for plants, Latin, indigenous nicknames.

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and you can also come up with your own name for a plant which is a practice that I’ve really enjoyed.

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So that whenever I say a plant’s name

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I can feel that plant, and it means something to me rather than just

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Perry Winkle, which might not mean something to me. But maybe chaser of sunlight or

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something like that that name is going to feel. Make me feel something when I say, and I’m going to know who that plant is, and it might only mean something to me. And that’s fine.

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Yeah, universalizing names and language. I understand why it’s important. But I think in this work you have to be willing to be playful and

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play with definitions, and be curious about the way that the plants want to represent themselves.

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Yeah, the way you described it sounds very close to how I am. I started with they them mainly when I got out of it.

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and I stayed there for a very long time. It’s still a default when I’m talking about certain certain kinds of encounters.

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And then I I really do love the key kin from the perspective that Robin Wallimer shares, and that’s kind of

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moved into being my default, especially when I write. So when I find myself that I write, if I’m writing generically, if I’m writing around concepts and I’m writing about something very generic. Then then Pekin tends to be. You know where I go with

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for possession. I might still go back to, you know, they, or something like that when it comes instead to that relationship. Then everything like there are no rules like you said there’s no rules, because there isn’t the same kind of understanding that we have with humans, and and pronou and pronouns and proper names and stuff like that. For example, my business partner

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is a spider plant who has told me my name is Spider Plant, like capital S. Spider, lowercase P. Plant, and that’s my name. And and it’s hysterical because

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it’s not that I call spider plan spider plant, because spider plan is a spider plant. It just happens to be that every time I attempt to go in any other direction. Spider plant. Yeah. Spider plant and I have.

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There are 2 other spider plants in this house that come from spider plants, but those aren’t called spider plant, like, even though they are off, you know, offshoots their children of. They have other names and other experiences. And it’s like, okay as opposed to. There are 2.

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There are 2 allows, actually, multiple Allos all over the place. But 2 in particular, that are the biggest. They’re the first 2 that came into the house from an aloe tree, that we that I know whose name is Vera. And then there’s been Vera and Berissima and La Vera, and like all kinds of things. And they were like, Nope, we’re Zan and Jaina. I was like.

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Okay, that’s that’s it.

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And then there’s lots of other plants that when I am, you know, working with them directly, might just choose the the species name, or might choose something else like tomato or grass instead. Outside I have Gary the silver fur who’s a giant silver fur, but named Gary the Silver. Why, I have no idea where Gary the spelled in a very particular way. It’s like what?

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Okay? And so there is a lot of fluidity both in the pronouns. I think the most important aspect that I have learned as I as I talk to people, and I listen, and such is whatever gets it out of being an object. Whatever gets

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your plant experience out of being an object. Everything else is between you and the plant and the other thing that we have in Ncc. Inside of Ncc. We have kind of moved towards is, we had a big discussion about the word kingdom.

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which was fascinating because we were like, is it a kingdom? You know? Then it’s not a queen, Dum, it’s not a kingdom. And then we got we believe it or not. We ended up going a deep dive into the word dumb. Where does that come from? Dominion? And all this? And there was like so much possession, and we ended up with kin home.

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and I have to say that that’s stuck kin home, and it feels right because kinship

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ken is in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s definition as a pronounce for nature, but also just as the relationship, just the same as instead of more than human, which I hate. I’ve been using other kin. It’s not perfect, either, but other ken feels

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better than like more than human, which puts me again as a human being back in the center of it. And I do think that this it’s not so much as where you land. It’s the fact that you’re having this exploration. I think that that’s the most exciting part about it. Yeah, I when I started this work. I was not expecting language to be such a big part of it, cause I kept hitting so many roadblocks of like. Wait! What does this word mean? And what does this word mean? Especially when we’re talking about vegetal being

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and manifestations of their behaviors and their inner subjective world, like intelligence and consciousness, and speaking and remembering and learning, we often use the the human benchmark of those behaviors to test whether another being also

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holds those phenomenon.

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and

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people often say that we’re anthropomorphizing plants, and that’s not the right word. They’re not speaking because they don’t have mouths, and they’re not conscious because they don’t have a central nervous system, and they’re not learning. It’s just habituation, and on and on and on. But I think if these are the words that make sense to us, and if they’re the closest things that we have to describing

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these manifestations in plant life, then they’re certainly the words that we should use.

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but I do think that we should. Still.

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I don’t know if cautious is the right word, but be be playful, and loosen up a little bit with the way that we use language, because at the end of the day we we don’t have the words, the perfect words to describe

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all of these things that we’re talking about.

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and if we ask the plans for the words, maybe we’ll understand them, and maybe they’ll be translatable, and maybe they won’t, and we just

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have to be okay with that.

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But I think that there’s so many different ways that we can use language to represent things in in ways that we understand, and that hopefully pay homage, at least in some way to what the plan is experiencing.

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Like remembering is a word that I’ve been playing with a lot lately, and remembering is is a word that’s so much deeper than just me, recalling memories. But

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seas hold wild memories, and landscapes hold memories of droughts or a wolf that pass through and the earth hold memories. And it’s it goes so much deeper than the way that I hold memories, and I probably hold memories in different ways, too. Than just what I I understand that word to be. But you have to loosen up a little bit. Otherwise you’re gonna lose your mind because it’s never gonna be right. It’s never gonna be perfect.

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But, like you said it is a journey, and I think the

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the journey is, and the intentions

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are probably more important than the destination. Even if the destination you find out one day it’s wrong or it doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t fit.

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You just have to keep keep going

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well. And and that might not even mean that it was wrong. It means that it might. You know it’s it might be wrong right now, but that doesn’t mean that. Where how you got there or anything was even wrong. It’s just that evolution. I mean, we’re all evolving simultaneously. And we’re co-evolving as we do this. So today, plants might have a certain vocabulary or certain ability even to touch us humans in certain ways. But the more we reach out

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to ken in this, in this ever evolving, moving journey, then they also acquire an ability to

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connect with us more easily. So it’s this two-way street. And I think that’s the other thing that we forget. So we can’t have a real destination. It’s more of

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on unfolding a constant unfolding that’s happening. And sure, we’re trying to understand who they are today. But by the time we figure out who they are today. They’re already in the tomorrow. And so then we just wanna move, we wanna keep. And we wanna get to the place where we’re unfolding together rather than us, continuously, feeling like we’re trying to catch up. There is no catching up. Yeah, we are where we are. We’re beings that we are where we are, and we’re both developing

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because we also have to remember. Not not all plants know how to speak human. I often tell this to people that it’s like. Don’t expect that every single plant that lives with you, even, or every plant you encounter is going to open up and be chatty caddy about everything, and it’s not a reflection of how good you know how well you can communicate with plants.

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Not all plants want to communicate with you

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right? It’s like, just just be okay with that, too. Nothing to do with you. Just just be okay. Yeah, if you’re gonna acknowledge that plans are persons and they have agency as well. Then

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it’s just like human people. Sometimes they don’t wanna chat. Sometimes you might not mesh the way that you thought you’re going to. Maybe the vibe isn’t there? I certainly met plans that I was expecting to connect with, and we just didn’t connect, or plans that maybe I didn’t connect with initially. But down the road we developed a relationship.

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And I do. I do like what you said about plants evolving as well, because I’ve certainly been learning a lot from plants, but I know that they’ve been learning a lot about me, and our relationships have evolved together in the way that

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we relate together, and how I can best hear their voice, and how they can best hear mine.

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And that’s something that’s going to continue

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for a really long time. And who knows down the road what it’s going to look like? Maybe we’re going to invent

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new words and new languages that aren’t word based like sound or movement, something else that that makes more sense. So I think, yeah, going back to just being playful and open and and curious, and

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not being afraid to be a little bit silly sometimes letting that go to plans of having to do some very silly things.

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You just have to do it

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fantastic. I have a feeling that we could probably sit here and talk

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forever. And I’m definitely going to be following your research. And as you continue to post. Where where can people follow you? Where can people find out more and read your your co-authored writing? So right now you can find me on sub stack. I believe it’s Sydney Kale dot sub stack.com and that’s and I’ll put it all in the show notes so that people.

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I also, I love getting emails. So feel free to email me, Sydney and Cale at Gmail Com.

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I’m working on a landing page like a website, and that will be to come, and I’ll certainly share when that happens. But right now, sub stack and email are

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my jam

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beautiful. And I look forward to reading. I’ve already read some of your stuff on sub stack, and it’s amazing. And and I’m so happy that we had an opportunity to have this conversation. Thank you so much for your presence, any last words, any last things that you want to share with everybody. I’m just super grateful that we were able to have the conversation, and I’m super grateful to the plants that I know were sitting here with us, talking through us and with us too.

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So if you have, yeah. And I have Damiana right here sitting with me. So if you have a plan that you felt was sitting with you during this. Then say thank you, and say, Hi! And have a little debrief with them.

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I love it. Perfect words. Thank you so much, Sydney. Thank you for this conversation, and I wanna thank everybody who’s listening. Please reach out to Sydney, send her an email, tell her about your encounters, and also go and check out what she has on sub stack. And of course you can come back to the naturally conscious community and share this. I also have shared her information there so that we can all read and listen. And also you can meet other people who are doing

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co-authorship. We have several people inside of the naturally conscious community who are doing co-authorship with plants. Some are actually just

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listening and receiving from the plant. Some are actually doing full co-authorship like Sydney is doing so, I look forward to seeing more and more of this type of work coming out, because it’s an amazing way to really embrace and enhance your plantness. So thank you.

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Thanks for listening to this episode of reconnect with plant wisdom, Intro and Outro Music by Steve Shuli and poinsettia from the singing Life of Plants. So join me to give you like our Dania and my plant collaborators next time on reconnect with plant wisdom.