When you see the rustling of leaves on a tree in front of you, what meaning do you make of it?

Pressure differences in the nearby region causing air to flow in a particular direction and the molecules of air impinging upon the leaves causing them to move, creating a tug on the twig they’re on, springing them back creating a fluttery effect.

Or

Trees speaking to you overjoyed at receiving your attention on them, connecting from their spirit to yours.

We carry varied meaning-making frameworks in our mental faculties. Sometimes we are aware consciously of what meaning-making framework is activated when perceiving a certain phenomenon. Some other times we are just unconsciously using one, unaware that we could pick another and that they might even be able to coexist.

“My heart feels light and expanded as I take you in with my eyes and feel your presence and your breath syncing with mine.”

“I love you and want to marry you.”

“I feel safe and alive in your company right now and it's been such a long, dreary, lonely fall in a new country that being here with you makes me feel connected to that sense of being home that I did not realize I would be letting go of when I left my home country.”

“I love you and want to marry you.”

“I am feeling quite challenged presently in connection to you and notice my heart has shut and my sexual attraction has dropped. I’m not sure how to reignite that and am afraid.”

“I need a divorce.”

In the absence of conscious awareness of what meaning-making frameworks are at play, we are prone to making poor choices.

A classic fallacy in the science-driven world that we live in is the reactive dismissal of meaning-making frameworks other than what has been scientifically established.

If I were to tell a human, who is limited in their mental faculties by the assumption that all that is not yet proven scientifically is expressly false; if I were to tell such a human that a shrub outside a bakery in Amsterdam shivered with delight as I was reminiscing about old, ancient, wise trees in Appalachia, holding space for the very human problems of the humans who come to them, while also sharing a sense of amusement of sorts about the scale at which these human challenges exist, such a human would scoff at me with a, “What nonsense are you speaking!”, unaware in that moment of their limits, both of their perception—a blind man scoffs at the notion that Red and Yellow mix to make Orange—to not be able to see the trees speaking directly, and of their fearful clinging onto meaning-making frameworks that make good use of words that sound scientific.

In this case, they would be expressly wrong.

Right scientific attitude, driven by curiosity, directed towards the edge of scientific understanding, actually requires a simultaneous holding of what we know and have proven, and what lies beyond the present boundaries of scientific understanding.

Boundaries that are being consistently nudged forward by those imbued with this right scientific attitude, to the point where layfolk—even in scientific academia, those scientists and professors who are just “doing the thing” to pay the bills—such layfolk scoffing at hypotheses which get established a century or so later, is not unheard of as a phenomena in the history of science.

Spirit-based meaning-making and science-based meaning-making can actually coexist. Both the explanations of the rustling of tree leaves can hold. In different plane. One has more support in the physical laws established thus far in science. The other has more support in the seemingly subjective, spirit-based, direct perception of the human experiencing it.

Seemingly subjective only because we haven't yet created verifiable, repeatable procedures for spirit-based phenomena. This is not entirely true if you look at the work of J. C. Bose and others in relating to plants.

The trees around me rustle in agreement, and if you listen closely to the audio version of this, you might be able to hear their rustling too.

The tiny little boy inside me triumphantly claims victory with the battle cry of “Aha! Confirmation bias!”.

(Shrub outside Ulmus Bakkerij, Amsterdam that rustled at around the same time that memories of Luca sharing how ancient trees in Appalachia felt gently amused when he shared his human problems with them floated through my mind. Causation or codependent arising, that is the big question)