“There is more accessible intelligence in a single tree than in all the machines your species will ever produce. It might seem strange to some moderns, but a forest is a mind.

This isn’t a fairy-tale or new-age trance. It’s a fact. For most of our history, we could access that mind directly and intentionally, acting as both its extension and recipient. Before we could compute, we communed with other highly evolved distributed intelligences in the form of living beings and places. We were also superstitious. These two things are not precisely the same, and many moderns conflate and dismiss both. That is a grave act of ignorance.

It is my experience that a forest can resolve questions and provide insights that are beyond the ken of humans and their machines, directly, and rapidly. It is also my experience that this kind of communion forms a crucial underpinning of our humanity, and without it, we are, at best, like ants obeying signals from robots rather than the sun or the world. That is to say we are catastrophically confused by the signals emitted by our own creations.

If we hope to have some actual experience of our humanity, what it is, can become, and means, we must together recover the ancient languages of communion that are our birthrights. We need to protect them from stories and cults, too, because these thrive on co-opting our innate yearning for the forms of learning and communication that only happen between us and Nature. Again, these matters have very little to do with the stories on sale all around you. They cannot be bought or sold. So forget everything you have read, forget the entire human culture altogether.

Go and ask the woods. Ask the birds, the insects, the animals. Ask the living places. Listen. And reply. Nothing is more powerfully intelligent than Nature, and in places like forests or oceans, this intelligence is profoundly and diversely ramified. You were made to belong in, with, and among it. Become human, read the living books once more.”

— an anonymous informant