(1) To love the plants is to know them. To know the
plants is to make them your friend. To make the plants
your friend is to surround yourself with teachers as old
and wise as the Earth itself.
(2) Just as no one wanted to cloud the skies with the
smoky haze of accumulated car exhaust, or wanted streams
to run muddy with plastic bags and human waste, no one
wanted the world to become a noisy place. But noisy it is,
all the same.
And, now that noise has become a part of practically
every landscape—even the most isolated and highest
mountain ranges have jets roaring above them—how shall
we ever know what the deeper, more subtle effects of noise
on the human psyche really are? Or on Nature as a
whole? For the question has in a way become: where are
the untouched control groups to be found? And where are
we to find even a single researcher who has not been to
some extent profoundly conditioned—even while still in
the womb—by a sea of surrounding noise?
My guess is that noise works on the mind something
like a slowly contracting air-tight room. As the noise levels
increase, the walls of the room close in and the pressure builds.
Finally, one finds one’s face pushed up against the wall, until
one can no longer hear oneself talk, or even think. An ur-scream
of almost unbearable angst would almost
certainly be the result.