Life in slow motion

Today I watched an inspirational video by a gentleman called Louie Schwartzberg who has been making time-lapse photography films for over thirty years. Mr Schwarzberg makes stunning films of nature, of the sky and how it is constantly changing colour as the clouds speed across it over our heads, it may never appear the same way twice. Even more stunning are his captures of flowers moving, speeded up, opening and closing and turning and adjusting themselves. He has named the film Gratitude, as soon as you watch it you will understand the connection to its title and feel that too. You can watch the film here: Gratitude When I was younger I always saw flowers and trees as objects, rather than living beings. Lately I read a couple of very interesting books: The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, and The Intention Experiment by Lynne McTaggart. They discussed, among other topics, how professional scientists have studied plant life and trees and discovered that they respond measurably to us, to each other, to pain and trauma. Of course trees live in their own time frame, they are awake all through the first three seasons of the year and go to sleep in winter, rather than existing in the day to night time frame as we humans and many animals do. Some flowers on the other hand close up at night and go back underground to sleep and rise again in the morning just as we do. Trees communicate under the ground via their roots to one another and connect there and help one another there, rather than with their voices or with sound. They support the young and the sick and form family ties. Though trees vary greatly from plants in that they can sometimes grow up over night whereas trees can live for five hundred years or more and can take many decades to even come close to being fully grown, they do have something in common, with each other and with us. They are alive and they are sentient. Do Plants Have Feelings? Peter Wohlleben is a very short video on Youtube that summarises what he wrote about in his book and researched in his work. Likewise Lynne McTaggart, together with renowned and reputable scientists discovered the same evidence in controlled laboratory experiments in which they sometimes hurt insects or plants and recorded the astounding responses of the plants to those various environments in which they did or did not thrive. Of course there are plenty of people who find this sort of theory far-fetched mumbo jumbo. I'm more open to it than I used to be! When we were kids at school we used to take beans and put them on tissue in jars to watch them grow, to observe the shoots go up and the roots go down. I suppose I was too young to appreciate the depth of what that meant, I took it for granted. Recently my partner planted a sunflower seed for me in a shallow, transparent, plastic fruit tray. Suddenly all my recent reading came to life before me. After a couple of weeks of expectant watching and no results I was on the point of throwing the tray away when I noticed a miniscule green leaf, just millimetres across. A week later it was a centimetre tall, a couple of weeks after that it was as tall as my little finger and when I lifted the container I could see all its tangled roots stretching far across the width of the tray. I bought it a large pot and transplanted it into some fresh earth. Less than a week later it had doubled in size, was almost as tall as my hand and sprouting many large leaves. This is going to be transplanted to the back garden now and it amazes me to think that it will grow to be a sunflower, perhaps six feet tall, in no time. The turning point for me was when I first put the little plant in the pot: it was bending over in one direction, because it reaches for the sun of course, but, novice that I am, I felt concerned it might lean over too far, so I turned it to face inwards to the kitchen and went out to walk the dog. Less than 90 minutes later I returned to find it leaning right into the window again. In such a short time this little creature had readjusted itself and turned its foliage around a full 180 degrees! That was the moment I realised this little thing is alive! You can walk along and not see anything if you're not careful. When you think that trees live in a different time frame to us, they experience everything much slower so it has to be speeded up for us to appreciate it at our pace of life, where as a fly, for example, lives a far shorter life than us, but it travels around at extreme velocity, especially in comparison to its size, and it has eyes that can take in so many angles and views as it travels, it puts our perspective to shame. Yet it is our human eyes that show us all this colour and texture and beauty. They talk about the great oak tree coming from the acorn and so on. When you start thinking about it, it really is a miracle that we can see colours and that these things grow from nothing and know what to do and what to be. Flowers blossom, seasons change, night turns to day and back to night, all without our command. We as humans want to control everything but nature and the weather just happen. You can only study it and wonder at it and marvel at the magic of the functioning of your own body, eyes and heart. Without you ordering it what to do at each minute of the day, your body goes ahead and functions, you are just the spirit within it that is along for the ride!