If you’re new to this autumn series of contemplative reading, welcome. You can find the previous issues in our archive, and read along with us in the weeks to come.

If you’re reading the book alongside me and others here, you may be noticing, writing about, delighting or puzzling in very different themes and passages. Share those if you’d like with @onbeing on socials — or in a direct reply to this email.

I am not surprised to find, as a focus for Chapter 2, that Suzanne Simard and her work in forests has been an inspiration to James Bridle. The conversation I had with her in 2021 has come to flow through so much of my thinking and seeing. I’m fascinated by how, amidst all of the challenge and crisis upon us, we are the generation of our species to investigate and grasp how vitality functions in the natural world. Which is to say: how vitality functions in life. It’s radically different from how we’ve structured societies in the modern West, organizing around separation and strength. Suzanne Simard grew up in a logging family in British Columbia and struggled to bring her science before her field, which had projected our views of strength and separation, and survival of the fittest onto the forest. 

But now we know, through her and others, about “mother trees” that nurture the whole through underground fungal mycorrhizal networks of distribution and “mutual aid” that can cross thousands of miles and multitudinous species. 

The way forests are wired for wisdom, for care, advances and deepens Bridle’s arc of exploration of the incredible fact that we live in a “world-of-many-worlds.”

Kindred science/discovery: Robin Wall Kimmerer, of course. Also, new to me: Monica Gagliano — Australian biologist. Plants have memory. Plants are capable of learning from experience and altering their behavior as a result.

There is a corollary here to what I heard from Jane Goodall about being in the Gombe Forest a half century ago. She paid close and patient and respectful attention to the social world of chimpanzees — and from that turned the idea that humans are the only tool-making creatures on its head. Now it seems our generation of science is making a transition in the way we see plants which that previous generation made in terms of how we see “higher animals” — capable of possessing qualities we’d previously designated as making humans special.

I love this — what is true of coming to live in relationship with other humans is true of other species: “Where we start to move forward is when we learn to ask questions which are less concerned with ‘Are you like us?’, and more interested in ‘What is it like to be you?’” (p. 76). That’s another way to describe what Jane Goodall did at Gombe.

I also learned about Pando: a single “clonal” aspen in Fishlake National Forest in Utah that is somewhere between 80,000 and one million years old and looks like a forest. “They are one of the largest and oldest individuals on Earth.” And: “they don’t look like a tree; they break with the idea of what a tree is" (p. 77). 

I love how Bridle immerses in the implications of what is newly seen but does not stop — encourages us not to stop — at marveling. They (Bridle uses they/them pronouns, the same ones they give to Pando) walk in a redwood forest outside Vancouver (with Suzanne Simard) and takes in its kinship to the internet: a planet-spanning network also largely beneath our feet of cables, wires, electromagnetic signals, microprocessors, data centers. I remember Suzanne Simard telling me that the mycorrhizal network also resembles what we’re learning of the neural networks of the human brain.

There are limits, as Bridle admits, to this complex of metaphor and comparison, and yet I am moved by this thought: Our experience with the Internet has helped us grasp what is happening in the natural world of which we are a part; it is “a gift from the technological to the ecological" (p. 82).

This is a question from Bridle, I would say, to live:

“What if the meaning of AI is not to be found in the way it competes, supersedes or supplants us? What if, like the emergence of network theory, its purpose is to open our eyes and minds to the reality of intelligence as doable in all kinds of fantastic ways, many of them beyond our own rational understanding?” (p. 82)

I am haunted by something my 29-year-old daughter said to me recently, having spent time on TikTok, part enjoying the experience, and part self-appointed investigator: roaming around while simultaneously getting conscious of how the algorithms were working with her choices so intelligently. Feeling herself being drawn into places she would not have landed purposely and yet riveted in place. “It’s no wonder they call it a web,” she said to me. And that is the dark side of this comparison and this metaphor. I suspect that the term “web” was coined neutrally, descriptively: as form and function. But this is the power of language. Metaphors come from deep places in us — places before words — and they carry all of the implications of what they are conveying, even connotations we have suppressed or forgotten. A web can also be organically, powerfully, a trap.

Another qualification/re-membering, so important to note. Bridle and all of the scientists named so far — Simard, Goodall, Wall-Kimmerer — eventually circle back to the reality that when it comes to the natural world, much of what feels new is actually old. Much of what western science sees for the first time with consciousness has long been lived intelligence in Indigenous cultures. Even Einstein said that his revolutionary re-imagining of the nature of time simply restored time to the heart of nature, where traditional cultures had always located it. We are strange creatures, and we learn in two ways: sometimes by discovering something no one has ever seen or said before; more often, perhaps, by seeing and naming something we — the great we across time and space — knew forever and then ignored or forgot. 

And sometimes, as I keep discovering, the traces of our species’ previous knowing are carried in words we use. This is one of my favorite threads of this book — the connections it makes between words and intelligence and consciousness and our belonging to the natural world at a cellular level. We go there powerfully in the next chapter next week.

As we begin this series, it’s fun for us to read how several of you would describe this experiment in contemplative reading, in your own words:

From Kathryn:
The reading of the book for me is a welcome entanglement that I want to stay with as a way of strengthening my ability to live with the un-understandable, unknowable (at this point hanging on by a thread with the technology sections but find them most exciting) and the humility we need to read this book openly without judgment from our oh so well tuned rational minds.

From Daniel:
I am delighting in this way of engaging text thoughtfully through highlighting and journal reflections. It reminds me of a practice I have been doing for about ten years: "Mussar." It is a spiritual-ethical practice — with the intention of deepening one's spiritual-ethical capacity through the cultivation of soul qualities such as humility, truth, kindness, and others.

And here are a few margin notes from readers in this Pause community:​​​​​​​

From Peggy:
I circled words used by Bridle in their observations of what we now call “intelligent” technologies:

leverage, optimization, augment, extracting, exploitative, avarice, unstoppable, technological determinism, profit-seeking, unequal, destructive, single-mindedness, growth, profitability, pain avoidance, separation, separateness

And they begin, in the introduction, to suggest an alternative view of intelligence with words like:

regenerative, expand (Sharon Salzberg’s forthcoming book!), complexity, generative (Krista!), emergent (adrienne maree brown!), entanglement (think Quantum Entanglement), “everything impacts everything else” (p. 13) (teachings on karma), “we find meaning in these interrelationships” (p. 13).

From Tomás:
“To those who consider technology, whether high or low, to be too complex, too specialized or too abstruse to think fully and clearly about, [Ursula K.] Le Guin had some words of encouragement: ‘I don’t know how to build and power a refrigerator, or program a computer, but I don’t know how to make a fishhook or a pair of shoes, either …That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do’” (p. 17).

Is learning the bridge between ecology and technology? And is teaching therefore the vital professional endeavour of our time? Teaching as art, as craft, as science — as the profession above all others whose central m.o. is the discovery of connections and relationships in the pursuit of yet more undiscovered space and connections.