Chapter 1: Too Much CO2

There is a connectiveness among all life, and especially closely to one's near kind, linked in Beingness. The great Redwood Forest knew itself especially throughout its extent, not just now but remembered all its pasts, of how things changed. In this endless meditation of being and knowing, purpose was there guiding too, of having and doing on the pattern level, serving as sifters of possible realities providing preferred channels of flow of physical assembly. And so it was one day as the Redwood's beingness decided that the increasing CO2 in the air, warming and dryness had become too much for comfort. The source of the CO2, flowing into the atmosphere far faster than the sunshine powered photosynthesis could reclaim it, was these two-legged animals with their new clever machines of metal and plastic. The metal machines fed on petroleum, sucked like a mosquito on the crust of the planet, through long roots pressed down to where the nutritional juices were. Not for the carbon therein with which to build structures for themselves, the machine-animals only wanted the energy that had been stored from sunshine by myriads of photosynthetic beings over millions of years, eons ago, in the process of locking away the excess carbon from the air's CO2, that the higher energy of oxidation might power more robust life forms more interesting on the planet, the animals. And so it was, all life in its interconnectdness, edging on into the future, wisdom being a part of the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

Yet now the two-legged scrappy clever animals seem to have lost connection with life's great beingness, and were romping open-loop through nature's resources. Their gathering and sharing of how-to-do knowledge was unseen before by the forest consciousness. Let those clever animals provide the solution, the forest Redwoods meditated into the vast pattern consciousness of life, arm and arm, root in root, with all consciousness in the universe, closer to the nearby.