All living things transform and metamorphose. To perceive the essence of that which makes plants change from seed to blossom to fruit, we must first loosen our habitual focused thinking. We must bring to consciousness a view other than the purely material we have been taught in traditional schools, and nourish our imagination in other radically different ways as well as trust in our immediate experiences of the living world.

To gain real insight into this world of nature we begin by trusting our own direct perceptual observations and lived experiences. If we, for example, try to stop thinking for a few minutes, we notice how thinking is identified with the body. When we try to stop thinking we may feel an inward anxiety and then perhaps almost panic. We also can observe how thinking inserts itself from seemingly nowhere. We are thinking before we even recognize we are thinking. This ordinary thinking is a kind of narrowing of spiritual activity that makes possible our experiencing the world as we do in our ordinary daily life. Our perception is filled with our own inner chatter. Meeting the living world and getting acquainted with the realm of plants, is an intimate encounter that can only happen in a different mode of consciousness than what we ordinary are present to the world in. Entering Silence is the key. Just as we get to know a person as we sit with them in intimate Silence, we get a felt sense of a plant through being with it in loving Silence and reverence.

Our first step towards being with the living world is therefor to enter into Silence. When entering into Silence with a plant, we experience different qualities of what we are with. The calm deep presence of millet differ from the self contained gesture of nightshade tomato. We discover the exuberant bright quality of day lilies, and the introverted gesture of the sweet winter squash. Once we feel these different qualities of the plant or plant beings, it seems as if they begin to 'speak' wordlessly. As if they were hiding until they were addressed in terms appropriate to them.

The step of entering into Silence with the plant or plant being cannot be by passed. If we do, it's a given that what we discover has more to do with our own unconscious wishes and desires than it does with that of the plant's. Silence is the living worlds mode of presence.  We can spend lots of time with the plant world from within Silence, looking for nothing other than to befriend the plants, and perhaps understand them through this different mode of consciousness. To be with the world from within Silence nourishes the world. In that the moment of perception we actually create a wholeness or unity between the earth, cosmos and ourselves. It is as if the world is waiting to be perceived, and while we are perceiving the world, we ourselves may sense that we also are perceived by the world.

Perhaps it seems a huge step from experiencing the holy Silence of a plant to speaking of a plant being and actually begin to feel a presence of a being. Most often we neglect the gesture of meeting the plant as a living presence. When we perceive a plant being and its individual gestures, we are actually perceiving the activity of the spiritual world. The natural world longs to meet us, and to have us perceive it in its spiritual presence. To give our attention to the world without expecting direct response, or any thing in return, is what we give to the spiritual world and what we are spiritually able to give to the future of the Earth. 

Resources
Silence, Robert Sardello
Cooking for the Love of the World, Anne-Marie Fryer Wiboltt