thinkingwith: writing strategies for reconnecting to earth

Read:

Watch:

John Berger’s 1972 4-part BBC series Ways of Seeing

Listen:

Check out this Spotify Playlist Music for Plants

Write:

In discussing how to widen our sensory perception, Stephen Herrod Buhner notes that the most important step is merely being intentional, so that’s what we’ll do. We’ll also take some cues from Claude Monet and Clark Coolidge to treat this as an ongoing practice, not meant to self-improve or perfect a technique, but more like a spiritual practice.

First, find a non-human entity to thinkwith – a house plant, a pet, a haystack, a building, an intersection, or even a crystal. Don’t sweat what it is. Think of it like a first date – it’s likely not going to be perfect, but you may both get something out of it. That said, it should at least be something you can be in real physical space with.

Each day, spend some intentional time with this entity (even if it’s just 5-10 min). Journal through your experience, taking notes. Try to be thorough, and it’s ok to use sentence fragments and lists.

One way to start opening up your sensorium is to shift your attention to a particular sense. One day you might try to exhaust your visual sense of the thing. The next day, switch it up and try to hone in on what you hear, then feeling/touch, smell, taste, and so on. Try to push yourself beyond the basics. keep taking notes until you encounter a surprise. On Sunday, we can talk as a group about what you learned from your non-human collaborator.

Recording of Zoom Session for Feb 22, 2026 

Read: Lab Notes for Week 3 (posting on 2/22 at 6pm) and Plant Intelligence Ch 4-5

and here’s some samples of different approaches to collage (read whatever draws you in)

Watch:

Michael Levin, All Intelligence Is Collective Intelligence

Annaka Harris on The Mystery of Consciousness

Rupert Sheldrake on Why the Mind Is Not the Brain

The Beauty of Bacteria | Discover The Microcosmos INSIDE You | FULL DOCUMENTARY

Listen:

Check out this episode of the LifeWorlds podcast with Paco Calvo, Spanish Philosopher and Scientist investigating Plant Intelligence

Write:

If we’re going to take thinkingwith and collaborating with nonhumans seriously, we have to start to make some space in our writing for the non-human to be able to contribute. As someone whose practiced astrology and forms of divination like Tarot and Bibliomancy (divining from books) for years, I can think of no better technique than collage to help do that. Collage, as a writing practice, works by cutting and pasting found text into a poem, story, etc. Since the found text is not one you composed, it can help you to distance yourself from the idea being expressed. For this exercise, try to spend some time each day with the non-human you observed last week.

This time, bring a book with you. Something completely random is best (so you are less tempted to manipulate what comes out). Start reading a portion of the text (you can begin at the beginning or pick a random starting point). When you encounter a statement or phrase that resonates with you, write it down. As you do that, pay attention to your own thoughts and observations. If your thoughts start to respond to or build on the quoted text, write that thought down as if you were having (or relaying for a reader) a dialogue. Keep moving through your text, collaging, and responding, until your session is up or you reach the end of the passage. This may seem rather odd, but what you’re doing is training your mind to listen to what signals may be coming in from whatever is around you instead of trying to control it with a metaphor or pre-packaged picture.

Recording of Zoom Session for March 1, 2026

Read: Lab Notes for Week 4 (posting 3/1 at 6pm) as well as Plant Intelligence Ch 6 & 7

and here’s some samples of poetry and prose that highlights the patterns that connect:

Allison Cobb: early version of Plastic: an autobiography

Erin Hobbie, The Orange (and the main source of quotes John McPhee’s Oranges)

Oni Buchanan, The Mandrake Vehicles

bp nichol, Zygal

Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, A Treatise on Stars

Peter O’Leary, Phosphorescence of Thought (excerpt)

Juliana Spahr, “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache” , an excerpt from The Connection of Everyone with Lungs

Watch:

Nora Bateson, An Ecology of the Mind (documentary on Gregory Bateson)

Listen:

Sturgill Simpson, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music

Write:

Toward the end of The Metamorphosis of Plants, Goethe notes that the circularity of development and metamorphosis makes it impossible to describe the (Platonic) meta-form,

“the standard against which to compare the various manifestations of it’s form. For the present, however, we must be satisfied with learning to relate these manifestations both forward and backward. Thus we can say that a stamen is a contracted petal or, with equal justification, that a petal is a stamen in a state of expansion; that a sepal is a contracted stem leaf with a certain degree of refinement, or that a stem leaf is a sepal expanded by an influx of cruder juices.

We might likewise say of the stem that it is an expanded flower and fruit, just as we assumed that the flower and fruit are a contracted stem.”

If the Universe is indeed a series of nested self-regulating systems, than we should expect to see these types of metamorphic “backward and forward” types of relationships. so let’s look for them. Spend some time with your non-human subject/collaborator. Try to describe “it” the way Goethe suggests. Don’t isolate the parts (i.e. don’t verbally pull it apart to reverse engineer it), but focus on the chain of relationships – describe the leaf in terms of the stem and vice versa. Keep in mind that if you scale out or in you’ll start to see that those relationships extend beyond your pre-conceived subject and at some point include you as well. If you can follow the chain until you find yourself in it.

Recodoring of Zoom Session for March 8, 20206