Gardens are simultaneously a material and a spiritual undertaking. That's hard for scientists, so full brainwashed by Cartesian dualism, to grasp. "Well, how would you know it's love and not just good soil?" she asks. "Where's the evidence? What are the key elements for detecting loving behavior?" That's easy. No one would doubt that I love my children, and even a quantitative social psychologist would find no fault with my list of loving behaviors: - nurturing health and well-being - protection from harm - encouraging individual growth and development - desire to be together - generous sharing of resources - working together for a common goal - celebration of shared values - interdependence - sacrifice by one for the other - creation of beauty If we observed these behaviors between humans, we would say, "She loves that person." You might also observe these actions between a person and a bit of carefully tended ground and say, "She loves that garden." Why then, seeing this list, would you not make the leap to say that the garden loves her back?

Conventional scientific discourse privileges the sensible field in abstraction from sensory experience, and commonly maintains that subjective experience is “caused” by an objectifiable set of processes in the mechanically determined field of the sensible. Meanwhile, New Age spiritualism regularly privileges pure sentience, or subjectivity, in abstraction from sensible matter, and often maintains that material reality is itself an illusory effect caused by an immaterial mind or spirit. Although commonly seen as opposed world-views, both of these positions assume a qualitative difference between the sentient and the sensed; by prioritizing one or the other, both of these views perpetuate the distinction between human “subjects” and natural “objects,” and hence neither threatens the common conception of sensible nature as a purely passive dimension suitable for human manipulation and use ... Contemporary discourse easily avoids the possibility that both the perceiving being and the perceived being are of the same stuff, that the perceiver and the perceived are interdependent and in some sense even reversible aspects of a common animate element, or Flesh, that is at once both sensible and sensitive.

The human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth. [ . . . ] By acknowledging such links between the inner, physiological world and the perceptual terrain that surrounds us, we begin to turn inside-out, loosening the psyche from its confinement within a strictly human sphere, freeing sentience to return to the sensible world that contains us. Intelligence is no longer ours alone but is a property of the earth; we are in it, of it, immersed in its depth.

My world was warm with April sun my thoughts were spangled green and gold; my soul filled up with joy, yet felt the sharp, sweet pain that only joy can hold. My spirit soared above the gulls that, swooping breathlessly so high o'erhead, now seem to brush their whirring wings against the blue roof of the sky.