Original post from June 12, 2021
I’m again diving into one of my favorite animist authors, Stephen Harrod Buhner, and want to share from his unique and insightful perspective (with excruciating brevity and a pinch of my own insights). This time I’m reading an older book: The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. When Buhner writes “intelligence of the heart”, he means exactly that.
The real world is communicative (that is, it contains and transmits information), fractal, and infinitely complex. As an example, Buhner presents the coastline, which is drawn on maps as if it can be defined and even measured. In reality, the closer we look and the more precisely we measure, the longer the line gets, adding smaller and smaller twists and curves. Moreover, the border between sea and land is in constant motion. There is no maximum from which no more complexity can be added. What is true about the coastline also applies to a tree or a leaf or a root or ourselves. This is completely opposite the impression we get and strive to create in human construction of straight planes and smooth colors. The real world has an infinite number of layers that live, breathe, move, communicate, and change, in a ceaseless intertwining.
The complex and changing existence is constantly producing an enormous amount of fluctuations, electromagnetic and other waves that contain information (just as radio waves are electromagnetic waves that contain information). There are oscillators even in the bodies of plants and animals that both produce and receive and decode this subtle electromagnetic information, as in the systems with which bees and birds navigate. We also have such sensors-generators in our body, particularly the heart.
I’ll skip all the technical explanations (which Buhner so excels at), and jump to his point that our heart directly perceives and responds to these fluctuations. When our system synchronizes with our hearts, we react to incoming information with the required complexity, and we perceive meaning in every encounter with energy – we reliably feel the changing character and feeling of a room, a grove, a person, even of an idea or a point of view.
When we tune into the mind, we miss all of that. We tend to think of the brain as a super processor capable of handling the greatest levels of complexity, but it is not. The brain’s sensing and processing patterns are more linear and simple than those of the heart, less reactive, more subject to random noise. Social media platforms and most screen-mediated content, like our routines in workplaces, like our schools, like our whole way of life, reflect this model – a form of sensing and processing that doesn’t come close to being enough to deal with a living world.
The good news is that the intelligence of the heart is still accessible to us, and we can still learn to perceive it. It’s true that practice and persistence are required, like any other skill or art. A degree of guidance and instruction is also often required. I definitely needed it – I remember how in my youth I was so drawn to the woods, feeling deeply that there was something there for me and the enormous frustration I experienced when that something remained out of my reach – and I still have a lot to learn and am grateful for every bit of guidance and direction. But much of this innate, essential ability can be restored, and the more we gain access to it, the healthier and happier; more peaceful, present, and alive; and better able to know how and actually live in harmony with the whole we are.