Good Rulers: The Beauty of Our Dominion Over This Enchanted World
Photo Credit: Candiix on Pixabay
Talking to the flowers,” Kaki tells me, “helps them grow.” My mother-in-law and I are talking together in her garden. Hidden within the concrete labyrinth of Addis Ababa, hemmed in by stone walls, this small patch of green is a haven. Pure sunlight anoints our heads, heat prickling down the backs of our necks. We gaze at beauty: rue blossoms tilting yellow throats skyward. Blush roses eyeing the confetti of color with demure gravity. Marigolds frocked in garnet ruffles awaiting the wind’s invitation to dance.
I wonder: what is it about the sound of the human voice that could galvanize roots sinking deep, petals unfurling, the miraculous alchemy that transforms light and air into life-sustaining sugar? And not just the human voice; according to Kaki, it is voice ordered in conversation that encourages plants to grow. It is engaging plantkind, intentionally, in relationship. As if flowers could feel. As if flowers, like Kaki and I, could receive kind words and return them in beauty. As if the world was enchanted with an animacy beyond our ken.
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Since childhood, I’ve believed animals could feel. I remember lying in bed and listening to the cries of our sprawling puppy Jack, imprisoned each night in his wire cage. He spoke in a language as clear as my own: Get me out of here! I felt his groans and sobs in the pit of my stomach, his consternation tying us together. But once he was freed in the morning, joy shook his unbound limbs.
Perhaps ascribing human characteristics to my beloved pet was merely wishful thinking. But since Darwin (the first scientist credited with serious studies of animal emotions), many would disagree. According to the research, tickled rats laugh. Elephants stroke the bones of dead kin. Birds coo lullabies when cuddling their nestlings. The idea that animals experience and express far more than humans generally give them credit for is humbling.
But what, to me, is even more astounding is the recent research uncovering the sensate nature of plants, too. In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes that her elders were right in saying trees talked. Not in words, but in pheromones. When attacked, let’s say by a gorging Gypsy moth, trees will release certain compounds into the air, a kind of distress call. Downwind trees then have time to arm themselves with defensive chemicals. Could this warning be rooted in a sense of arboreal community? Could it be that trees caution their neighbors out of concern, or even altruism?
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This essay is part of a series called “Dwell,” which meditates on the spaces where God dwells with us.
