We’ve been sold the story that we’re separate from the world around us.
That consciousness ends at our skin, and that thinking happens only between our ears.
It’s a strange story, really.
It is as if the carbon in our bodies didn’t once cycle through leaves and soil.
It was as if our breath wasn’t shared, moment by moment, with every green thing within miles.
Step into any woodland, and this story starts to fray.
Moments before, the air moving through your lungs was moving through the leaves above your head.
The oxygen you draw in is the gift of photosynthesis happening all around you.
The carbon dioxide you release is being welcomed by the very trees that shelter you.
There is no separation. Only conversation.
The story of separation runs deep in our culture.
We speak of managing landscapes and using resources.
We build walls between inside and outside, human and nature, mind and world.
We’ve become convinced that intelligence is something we possess rather than something we participate in.
But sit quietly in any green space for ten minutes and watch what happens.
Notice how attention softens and spreads.
How breathing slows to match the rhythm of the place.
How thoughts arise not from some isolated command centre in the skull but from the meeting between awareness and the world around us.
The plants are thinking, too, in their own way.
They respond to light, moisture, and their neighbours’ chemical messages, making decisions about where to send resources, when to flower, and how to defend themselves.
Intelligence isn’t contained within individual organisms.
It’s distributed through the whole system, flowing between roots and leaves, soil and air, in an ongoing conversation we’re only beginning to understand.
Indigenous peoples have known this for millennia.
Their languages often don’t separate the mind from the land like ours.
They speak of thinking with the landscape, of being considered by the forest.
They understand what we’ve forgotten…
…that consciousness isn’t a possession but a participation.
This isn’t magical thinking, it’s practical reality.
The microbes in our guts influence our moods and decisions.
The quality of air we breathe affects our ability to concentrate.
The landscapes we inhabit shape our nervous systems in ways that last for generations.
We are not separate selves bumping against an external world.
We are having ongoing conversations between the inner and outer, the self and the other, and the human and the more-than-human.
The story of separation has made us lonely and destructive.
It’s convinced us that we can damage the living world without damaging ourselves and think out of ecological crises while remaining disconnected from the systems that sustain us.
But step outside.
Feel your feet on the ground.
Notice your breath moving with the breath of the world around you.
The real story is simpler and more beautiful.
We are nature becoming conscious of itself.
We are the earth learning to think, feel, and wonder.
We are not separate from the web of life.
We are the web of life becoming aware of its own connectivity.
This changes everything, or rather, it changes nothing except our willingness to remember what has always been true.