Content area
The journey began with an invitation from a Japanese crabapple, Malus floribunda. Drawn to his unseen beauty, the author embarked on a five-year exploration of daily co-creative practices guided by admiration, grace, and gratitude. This path expanded to other species and forests, revealing how plants and humans can co-create a shared world. Deep engagement with the plant realm mends our divisions with Life, fostering a "biomestizo" identity and a paradigm of interdependence and respect. By embracing co-creative relationships with non-human Life, we can cultivate solutions to ecological and spiritual crises, opening the way for a harmonious future.
The journey began with an invitation from a Japanese crabapple, Malus floribunda. Drawn to his unseen beauty, the author embarked on a five-year exploration of daily co-creative practices guided by admiration, grace, and gratitude. This path expanded to other species and forests, revealing how plants and humans can co-create a shared world. Deep engagement with the plant realm mends our divisions with Life, fostering a "biomestizo" identity and a paradigm of interdependence and respect. By embracing co-creative relationships with non-human Life, we can cultivate solutions to ecological and spiritual crises, opening the way for a harmonious future.
A crabapple seed
Enclosing a whole new world
And all its seasons
Sow into the Fabric of Life
The journey began with an invitation from a Japanese crabapple, Malus floribunda. The allure of his bark drew me in to contemplate his unseen beauty. This started a five-year exploration and daily co-creative practices with the crabapple guided by admiration, grace, and gratitude.1
The journey into the Kingdom Plantae continued with other species and forests; I sensed how plants and humans could co-create a shared world. Engaging deeply with the plant world mends the divisions between humans and Life. It fosters a renewed sense of belonging, a biomestizo identity, and a new paradigm that recognises our interdependence and respects all life forms.
By integrating a co-creative and respectful relationship with other non-human forms of Life, we develop a richer approach to solving today s ecological and spiritual crises. We are open to creating a future where humans live in harmony within themselves and with all life forms.
Co-creative Practices Documentation
I spent 5 years under the crabapple s canopy, open to the subtle multiverse of plants. Writing and photography were procedures to register extraordinary experiences and record facts I would otherwise have forgotten or disbelieved if I had no proof that they happened. In time, these became part of an artistic, immersive, sensorial, and co-creative approach to the plants.
The practice of Haiku-the ancient Japanese form of short poems mainly related to nature-created moments of deep connection and translated nature s fleeting presence into words.2 Collecting flower vibrations became a poetic practice to meet the plants spirit and integrate them into my inner garden.3 Video compositions contributed to sharing the beauty of these interactions in a literary and artistic way.4 The engagement in these creative expressions deepens my feelings and perception of a shared reality with the inhabitants of the Plantae Kingdom, and it offers a way to communicate those experiences to other human beings.
We see the footprints
The splendour of the present
It's invisible
Meditation and Chi Kung
Practising Chi Kung-a Chinese meditation involving slow, mindful movements to connect with the breath and vibration of the world-fosters a deep resonance with plants. I align my body rhythms with the trees by focusing on the energy flow. Chi Kung enables us to feel the energy of the trees without physical contact, experiencing a profound sense of unity with plants like with a 5,000-yearold larch, a cherry tree in the Jardin des Plantes, or a forest in Patagonia. This practice nourishes a relationship with plants beyond the limits of thought and language, a state of being where the distinctions between the self and the plants dissolve.
Gardening and Reciprocity
Gardening is a definitive way to live in reciprocity with plants when we do not have a utilitarian approach to cultivating plants to eat or heal; it is about cultivating a mutual relationship. Growing a garden emphasises a bond that isn't about control but rather about respecting and sharing, about humbly integrating oneself into the garden's flow and letting the plants permeate and integrate into you. In tending to the plants, we sense their needs and rhythms, guiding us in how to care for them. This approach mirrors the non-linear, non-utilitarian approaches I appreciate-where plants and humans co-exist in a resonant dance.
A Shared Purpose
The journey with the crabapple was not about achieving a human goal but being present in a shared reality. This lack of purpose made me receptive to the tree's subtle guidance, and over time, a shared purpose began to emerge. Through delicate and sometimes fantastic signals, the crabapple tree became a teacher, guiding me toward a deeper understanding of plants and their world. This shared purpose was transformative, shifting my position from a detached, objective observer to a respectful and grateful participant and apprentice of the Plantae Kingdom.
The breeze blows softly
Swaying the petals curtain
A pink ablution
Arboreal epiphanies The change of time
Time is a doorway into the plant's world. Unlike humans, who adapt primarily to spaces and move through, plants are rooted in a fixed place and finely attuned to the becoming, flowing with the change in seasons, the shifts in sunlight, and the rhythms of nature and the cosmos.
Slowing down and tuning in to their time unfolding changes human perception and allows us to witness movements like buds unfurling or leaves turning toward the light. When time seems to stop, Life moves very fast.
Spiritual traditions often mention being here and now as a synonym for being fully present. But our primary focus is on the 'here'; the 'now' is often abstract. However, when you enter the time and rhythm of plants, the 'now' becomes concrete; it reveals another dimension of being present. It is a doorway to the co-emergency in a shared world between humans and plants, where we can engage and connect.
Other senses, other worlds
When sharing the time of the plant world, the perception and senses become more accurate and sharper. The most significant change among the usual human senses supervenes with the smell. In the Plantae Kingdom, many meaningful interactions relate to odours. Through chemicals and terpenes, plants manifest danger, attract pollinators, and express their stress. It would be reasonable to imagine that smell would be their choice when interacting with us.
Plants extend, sometimes very long distances, to modify the becoming of other plants and the behaviours of different species, pollinators, and animals, among them humans. In our visual and solid view of reality, we feel that a cloud of aroma is an attribute, not the plant herself.
While in Wasiwaska-a research centre on plants and ethnobotany in the South of Brazil-I had an experience with the extended boundaries of plants with ololiuqui, Ipomoea corymbosa. One night, a little before dawn, I got a cramp so intense that I could not go back to sleep. I decided to go outside. It was still dark.
That pushed me to rediscover a fantastic plant. For days, I had admired the gigantic flowering ololiuqui that extended along the wall in front of my apartment, stretching sixty meters long and four to five meters tall. But at that dawn, I encountered a different ololiuqui. The flowers were starting to open; the fragrance was not as subtle as during the day; it was sumptuous and intense, almost numbing, so bold that after being inside that fantastic cloud of scent for some time, you could enter a vivid dream state.
The plant extended so far that tens of thousands of bees would come from all over the surroundings to bathe in the flowers. Different species of bees vibrated together; the sound of the diverse vibrations elevated in the space like a Bach cantata in a cathedral. It was a breathtaking moment; I started attending every dawn. How far did the ololiuqui extend through its fragrant arms to touch that chorus of pollinators until they came to enter its flowers?
When you are inside a cloud of plants or trees, you feel that you are inside the plant and that the plant is inside you. The plant world invites us to look at and think about different conceptual boundaries. The external perception of objects with neat borders transits to a vaporous and intertwined world, where orientations, vibrations, and energies are all over. The limits between the "I" and the surroundings become porous.
My foot gently grounds
In spongy basal humus
My roots are growing
Communication and resonance
Plants со-emerge with their world through a sensorial system different from humans. Their complex interactions between them and species of other kingdoms don't occur through something within human language or communication laws.5
To describe the interactions between humans and plants, the idea of "resonance," defined by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa, is more accurate than the overmanipulated word "communication".6 In this context, resonance refers to the attune between humans and the natural world. It is a state where we are deeply moved and transformed by interactions that are not predictable but show a sense, leading to a feeling of deep and meaningful connection.
Expanding my co-creative practices with plants, I created resonant gardens in Brazil and Chile as spaces designed for interaction between humans and plants. These gardens are places where plants can thrive beyond strict human control, offering a space for meaningful, non-hierarchical, human-centred relationships.
Synchronicities as Connection
Synchronic occurrences are intriguing connections between humans and plants, unlikely and meaningful coincidences that challenge reasonable explanations. For example, when I was "finishing" the planting of the resonant garden in Brazil, I read about the central place of the tobacco plant in indigenous cultures. The next day, I noticed a new plant, which I could not identify, was spontaneously growing and flowering at the garden's entry. It was a tobacco plant; I had never seen it before in the large territory of Wasiwaska.
Such synchronicities often happen in the shared world with plants. They may constitute a form of language, but not a human operating on repeatable, expected, measurable outcomes. These coincidences are unique and unrepeatable but feel deeply significant. They invite us to explore the plant world through an immersive openness and wonder, not through distant scepticism and objectivity.
These connections manifest a shared world in a resonance beyond words and, occasionally, even with words. Plants have ways of getting in contact with humans that are unusual to our Western civilisation but that some Amerindian cultures have recognised for ages.7
The Austral footsteps
Inside my chest, a forest
I am now budded
Becoming a Biomestizo
As my relationship with plants deepened, I reshaped my self-perception. I queried the roots of traditional anthropocentric views. I evolved into a "biomestizo" identity, no longer confined to the boundaries of the usual human experience.
This new identity didn't rise from a conceptual approach; it emerged first from organic practices, perceptions, and feelings that shifted a mind-centered existence to one integrated with Life.
Historically, in Latin America, the word mestizo has been used for people born from a mixture of Amerindian and European. With "biomestizo", I wanted to honour the blend between humans and plants emerging when we arborise in that shared world.
A New Paradigm
The experience of interacting with the Plantae Kingdom cannot be fully lived or captured through words or concepts. It is about cultivating a presence in the world that regenerates the bond with nature and reintegrates us as complex and multidimensional beings.
This new paradigm of being and living emerges not from an intellectual construct but from lived experiences, which integrate reason, emotions, and actions. By becoming with the plants, we arborise out of the pot of a human-reason-centered world.
This paradigm shift could have broader implicationsfor addressing global challenges like climate change, ecological degradation, and human well-being and peace. The solutions to these challenges require a change in consciousness that recognises and respects our complexity and the interdependence of all Life.
Primordial spark
The glimmer that announces
All mighty forests
Mending the Relationship with Life
The insights from this journey challenge the utilitarian human-centred lens of considering nature and the non-human as a resource to be used or exploited in some way.
By slowing down and being present, we reawaken our connection to plants and nature and appreciate the intricate dance of Life we are part of, transforming how we experience reality and reality itself. Individuals and communities can rediscover a sense of wonder and belonging lost in the rush of modern Life.
Becoming a "biomestizo" leads to rediscovering the beauty and wonder of acting with reciprocity, respecting and enjoying a shared world with all life forms. A vision of hope and gratitude emerges for reintegrating ourselves into the magnificent fabric of Life and becoming the world we aspire to be.
Endnotes_
[1] Mauricio Tolosa, Ml maestro el manzano, Bitácora de un vicje al Reino Plantae. (Santiago, Ediciones Urano, 2023)
[2] Matsuo Basho, Shiro Tsujimura, Jane Reichhold. Basho: The Complete Haiku (Tokyo, Kodansha International, 2013)
[3] Dr. Edward Bach, Bach Por Bach: Obras Completas (Bueno Aires, Ediciones Continente-Pax, 2013)
[4] Mauricio Tolosa, Haiku Austral ¿Sueñan los manzanos? https://youtu.be/K076LqEvfqA
[5] Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch, Evan Thompson. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press 1992)
[6] Hartmut Rosa, Résonance, Une sociologie de la relation au monde (Paris, La Découverte, 2018)
[7] Machi Maricel de Traiful, interview by the author, Valdivia, February 13, 2024.
Copyright The Antennae Project 2025