I had embarked on a journey to talk with Mugwort because I wanted to understand plants and nature in a new way. To listen rather than destroy. To ask rather than demand. To learn to respect rather than disregard. And also, to find out why it annoyed me so much.

I longed to slip into that magical place where everything speaks the same language. I wanted to understand what the birds were saying, to know what it felt like to be the willow tree in my back yard, to grasp the society of the tiny lives that wriggled in a rain puddle.

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.