If plants possessed attention, where have they pointed it? Is it the same for human beings?

The human mind is a thought generator. Turn it to how much you dislike someone or something and it will generate thoughts aligned with that direction. Turn it to something you are passionate about and it will generate thought aligned with that direction. Unlike plants, we have the free will to turn our attention in whatever direction we choose. To possibility and something fresh … or to the ground hog day of habitual ways of thinking, feeling, talking and acting.

In preparation for a journalling circle recently, I initially turned my attention to memory – to what I knew and how it would structure a probable outcome. But in the back of my mind, an image from a journalling group several years ago, kept ‘knocking’. I wanted the lightness and feeling of that moment in our meeting.

So, I put aside what I thought I should do, and sat with the feeling. The thought came to pick up a book about journalling and browse. Again, my intellect wanted to categorise into useful and not useful, but instead I let the feeling guide me. I resisted the prompt that resonated. ‘List the milestones in your life, add a few details and write about one.’ My head said it was too banal, but I chose to trust the nudge, and wrote up my preparation.

Wow, what a rich time we had. No one writing yielded the boring writing I had anticipated. Everyone accessed something fresh and new.

‘I’m the driving force of my direction.’

‘Living smaller doesn’t mean living smaller.’

‘Whatever is to come, I know I will be okay.’

‘I can choose to enjoy the time before me.’

In the myriad of the words we wrote, a sentence or a phrase in each piece ‘grabbed’ us. The human mind is a thought generator, but not all thoughts are equal. In the midst, deeper truths can be felt. Maybe there is more in common in the Nature that animates us and plants than we think.