Learning to think like a leaf

by Donna Schaper | Aug. 24, 2016

On the day a major U.S. political party for the first time nominated a woman for president, I was sitting around in a lovely room at The Nature Institute in Ghent, N.Y., examining a leaf.

I was not just examining a leaf but examining a leaf in depth. There were 30 of us in the room at an occasion for religious entrepreneurs sponsored by Etsy.org, the non-profit arm of the e-commerce website of the same name. Our teacher Craig Holdrege, author of Thinking Like a Plant, was teaching us how to look at a leaf. We all picked one from the same tree, each of us staring at our individual leaves for 10 minutes. Then we passed our leaves around. And then something planted in almost all of us.

I had given the opening devotion that day from a Lewis Mumford poem, “Dragon Fly.” One of its prescient lines read like this: “Now there are grown-ups around, hurrying, who never saw one and do not know what they are not seeing.”

The reasons for this leaf gazing process were founded in great thinkers like Mumford and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, argued Holdrege in Thinking Like a Plant. So many of us do not know what we are not seeing. We need new glasses.

https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/eco-catholic/learning-think-leaf