The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors

The forest is not a collection of entities joined by such networks; it is a place entirely made from strands of relationship.

A network, once established, might be called an individual.

The fundamental nature of life may be not atomistic but relational.

Without the network, the homogeneous chemical soup lacks any tang of life.

Tilting our heads away from the atom, it seems that life is not just networked; it is network.

At least half of the other species in the forest find food or home in or on the recumbent bodies of fallen trees.

Virginia Woolf wrote that “real life” was the common life, not the “little separate lives which we live as individuals.” Her sketch of this reality included trees and the sky, alongside human sisters and brothers.

Omaere Foundation, which she leads,

Spirits are not otherworldly ghosts from a distant heaven or hell but are the very nature of the forest, earthed and grounded, connecting soil and imagination.

Two billion years ago, the boundary between the self and the community was already blurred.