Your eyes have forgotten how to see
You walk past trees
and call them timber.
You glance at rivers
and calculate flow rates.
You measure mountains
in mining rights
and mineral deposits.
This way of seeing has a name.
Object thinking.
It treats the world
as a machine
made of separate parts.
Things to be taken apart.
Understood.
Controlled.
It gives you power,
but only a certain kind.
The kind that extracts
rather than relates.
And in becoming objects,
the living world becomes distant.
Not kin,
but commodity.
Not company,
but backdrop.
You’ve learned to see plants
as background.
Decoration.
Resources waiting to be used.
But what if
that fern unfurling by the path
has its own intelligence?
What if
the oak in your garden
is responding, moment by moment,
to the light,
to the wind,
to the chemical messages
travelling underground
between root systems?
You can’t see this
because you’ve been taught
that intelligence lives only in brains like yours.
That consciousness
stops
at the edge
of human skin.
This blindness has a cost.
The world becomes
a collection of dead things
rather than a community
of living beings.
You lose your place.
You forget what it means
to belong.
The loneliness you feel
walking through a city?
The ache
when you look
at endless concrete and glass?
That’s the cost
of forgetting how to see
life
everywhere.
But your body remembers.
It knows
the difference
between standing near a living tree
and standing near a telephone pole.
It feels the shift
when your feet move from pavement
to soil.
It responds
to the presence
of other living beings,
even when your mind
dismisses them as objects.
This is where change begins.
Not in the mind,
in the body.
In trusting
what you sense
more than what you’ve been taught to think.
The fern
doesn’t need you to believe
in its intelligence.
The oak
doesn’t require your permission
to be responsive and alive.
They continue
being
what they are.
But when you slow down.
When you let your attention rest
with them
rather than rushing past.
When you notice
what your body feels
in their presence...
...something shifts.
The world
stops being a collection of things
and becomes a community
of beings.
You stop being separate.
You start being part
of something
that has been here
all along.
Let your eyes
remember
how to see.
Let your body
lead the way.