https://medium.com/ill-ixi-lli/messenger-at-the-window-a419a840c432#.pyovvcs8h

When I speak of nature as an extensible realm of my own intelligence, I am not speaking theoretically. I mean that I learn and acquire complex perspectives and intelligence by directly relating with organisms and ecologies. Of any scale. How one does this is unique to every person and situation.

One extremely common and perhaps indelibly human way of receiving something like rational intelligence from nature is by a peculiar process of translation that produces metaphors. Human participants metaphy their experiences of relation with nature. From this process, they derive crucial perspectival precursors and catalysts that revise, establish or enhance our conscious recognition of new ways of thinking, seeing, or relating with a problem or situation. The intelligence here is not inherently technical or abstract; it comprises a mode of truth ‘above’ symbolic representations and systems.