How are we symbiotically connected to plants?
Perhaps one way is through interspecies respiration, it’s like a form of circular breathing. The trees exhaling the oxygen we breath in and us exhaling the carbon dioxide they breath in. An awareness of breath which embodies our interdependency.
I invite you to sit next to a tree of your choice in the garden you find yourself in. Note the definition of garden can be loosely defined. You may even be inside your apartment and looking out of the window, or with no trees available you might choose instead to meditate on a potted plant or blade of grass. But ask yourself first if you know it’s name: Oak, Cherry, Maple, Chestnut, Beech, Elm, Pine, Willow, Birch or Rowan, just some examples. See what you are drawn to. Once you have identified and located a tree or plant, find a place next to it where you are comfortable either sitting or standing.
Give yourself a moment to take in it’s full structure from any visible roots in the ground to the tips of the leaves. Now look at the picture which accompanies this text. Are there similarities between it and the structure of the tree which you see before you?
The leaves are absorbing carbon dioxide and with energy from the sun, water and minerals drawn up from the earth, the plant cells inside the leaves are photosynthesising, releasing energy for growth and respiring oxygen. The surface area of the plant is designed with maximum capacity to capture light and carbon dioxide. This is similar to the surface area of your lungs which are designed with maximum capacity to allow oxygen to flow into your blood stream and carbon dioxide to flow out.
Now look at the same picture. When it’s upside down, which organ does it remind you of?
Place the palms of your hands to your chest and sense the movement of your chest as you gently breath in and out. Air is flowing into your body, into the tubular structure called the trachea, and branching off into the bronchioles, the bronchiole and the smaller nodules called alveoli which permit the transfer of oxygen into your bloodstream. This oxygen powers the creation of energy or ATP in your cells. Through this process of cellular respiration, you exhale carbon dioxide which flows back into the atmosphere.
Can you visualise the inner chambers of your body: the lungs expanding and contracting and the oxygen continually passing across the cellular walls of the alveoli into the bloodstream? As the capillaries reach out across the organs, like root systems through the soil, the oxygen from the bloodstream moves from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration. The same is true for the carbon dioxide coming back into the bloodstream and making it’s way through the veins to the heart. This alchemic ebb and flow which transmutes across permeable boundaries is continuous and immanent. As we respire, so the sweat from our pores evaporates pervading the atmosphere around us. This ethereal yet tangible and measurable exchange is the breath of no breath. A constant state of being in mutual reciprocity. From body to airspace and to tree as entity; from entity to tree to airspace to body.
Like Bonne (Bainbridge Cohen) says, the muscles aren’t (just) flexing and extending. The cells of the muscles are condensing and expanding in a spiralling motion. A multi-dimensional experience. You exhale carbon dioxide which the stomata, the small pore-like structures on the underside of the leaves of the trees, capture.The trees respire oxygen which you inhale, without this exchange we would cease to exist. Interspecies spiralling, condensing and expansion. The mutual process of respiration of which we are symbiotically entangled does not begin with the inhalation and end with the exhalation but rather ripples in energetic, transformative waves which vibrate the watery cells in our respective animal and plant bodies.
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