You cannot have deep knowledge of a landscape if your encounter with it is only occasional and superficial. It takes many years to gather the kind of deep knowledge I speak of here.

The plant world wants to communicate with us just as much as we want to communicate with them. But because we’ve forgotten their language, we’ve become deaf to their gentle greetings.

​It is becoming clear that our path beyond the pandemic, climate change, social inequality and much else will require some serious social and political transformations. But to navigate a reliable path forward, we must learn how to protect forms of value that cannot be expressed through price or created through markets.

Let us consider Earth and the community of planets as seeds broadcast into a field – in this case, a solar field. Just as plant seeds can find themselves in locations that are too dry or too hot or too cold for sprouting, so most of the planets in the solar field landed in conditions unfavorable for growth. Only Earth was in a promising situation for germination.

The central lesson of many Earth wisdom traditions is about alignment with life as a process, living in right relationship and letting life’s regenerative patterns flow through us. In this way of being we understand ourselves not as owners but rather as expressions of place.