I Love Plants

A love letter to our green best friends

I distinctly remember when my plant obsession onset. I suddenly appreciated the few house plants we had, and felt drawn to them, bought some cute pots and more plants from Home Depot, and began decorating my room with their green accents.

It turns out many of my friends also went through a similar phase in their early adulthood, when suddenly plants went from being something you wouldn’t even notice in the room to being a necessity for making a space. But why?

The answer, I surmise, may be around the energy plants exude.

What kind of energy is this, and why does it seem to permeate our field of appreciation in early adulthood?

Let us begin by regressing to a time long, long ago.

Plants are the greatest representation of life. They are earth’s first breath. Our modern plants descended from prehistoric ancestors who wreaked havoc on the world and killed every living thing in it. They were comparatively complex beings at the time, and had learned to thrive on the only chemical in the prehistoric air, carbon dioxide, extremely well. Their byproduct was oxygen — a toxic chemical to life that had subsisted on a carbonated world. As the carbon guzzlers ate all of the carbon around them happily, they spread to the entire world, suffocating it of it’s most precious life-sustaining chemical and spitting out an atmosphere of oxygen. Oxygen permeated the air of the living, strangling many who needed carbon dioxide the plants had taken, and onsetting a world-wide extinction on their own kind, too, as the carbon dioxide began to run out. This is the closest earth has ever been to a total apocalypse.

The apocalypse onset slowly. It was a process that may have taken millions of years. Given this time, luckily, a savior had evolved. Presented with a C-O world, the being was capable of ingesting the oxygen in the air and spitting back out carbon dioxide, which the plants ate up happily to aid in their own survival. As we neared no carbon, these beings proliferated, and the plants were ever happy for it. This was the first time a trade had been stricken between two kingdoms — carbon for oxygen, oxygen for carbon.

For millennia to follow, plants and animals would never break this bond. Plants are our first allies; the truce we made with them to sustain each other via our byproducts is the first establishment that two entirely separate kingdoms of life have made to live together in peace and harmony.

Perhaps, in our unconscious, we can sense this trust in the plants we surround ourselves with, and perhaps this feeds a calming part of ourselves a cellular level.

Perhaps, too, that we feel a calming sense around the plants just as we’d feel a calming sense as a babe resting our head upon our mother. Before us oxygen-ingesting individuals came along to bring balance to the world, there was only a world of photosynthesizing beings from whom we, too, descended from.

Plants are a great manifestation of female energy. They are a reminder that all living things today decided from a single mother cell to whom we trace all of life’s ancestry back to.

They are a reminder of self-reliance and independence, of the burden and duty that mothers carry to pass on their DNA. They are a reminder of a world once united in the divided duties of genetics, that now demands so much from our earthly bodies that we must require two separate genders to create life.

They are a reminder of a simpler time, when life was new. They are a reminder of the worlds we have lost, as well as give us hope that in the new worlds to come, the old will find a way to persist.

It is for these reasons that they are an integral part of our lives. For millennia we lived embodied by them in nature; a livelihood surrounded in omnipresent vegetation. Our bodies came after the plants did. We are made to live alongside them: to breath their air, to feed off their offspring.

Perhaps, as we enter the adulthood portion of our lives, the first time we are free from the societal construct of “growing up” and able to let our brains roam and the time of enacting our own procreation draws near, we are drawn back to this innate feeling of bondage to our plantae allies, and in the absence of forest in our modern industrial foot-printed world, decorate our living spaces with their natural green glow.

I embrace the energy plants exude, from small house plants to great California redwoods.

Our energies were compatible with them from the beginning, and they will be with us until the end of time. Perhaps, each time we see a plant, we’re reminded of this everlasting truce of kingdoms — perhaps this unspoken bond is where the room-filling energy originates, and this is why we feel so closely drawn to each other.

To all plants, this is my love letter to you.