“I want to talk to people who think like me, because they don’t think like me.”
                -David Wright Faladé

                I’ve been struck lately by how little I understand the movements inside what someone’s saying—and even more, the thinking behind those movements. Sometimes when it seems we agree, when we approach things in similar ways, I tend to assume we’re on the same ‘side.’ (As though different ways of thinking can be well imagined as sides). And so often we’re not.
                Here’s an example: months ago my friend and I were weeding in a garden. It was a pleasant kind of work, the shade and the sunlight, the repetitive, sensual task of touching leaves and stems. The gentle recognition of noticing the difference between garlic shoots and grass stems and peas and oxalis and all the other things I don’t have names for. Inside that task, I mentioned something about how peppers are spicy because the plant is “trying to stop itself from being eaten.” The plant wants its fruit to fall around its seeds, to decompose and become nutrients for those seeds. I was taught that sometime, way back in middle school. My friend (a much, much more engaged gardener than I am) listened, let the remark go, and circled back to it. The first thing I thought I understood in what they were saying was that lots of plants grow by having their fruit and seeds eaten and so spread about. Which would mean, in a way, that the plant wants its fruit eaten. I interpreted this as a strategy, as though the plant were playing games to maximize its chances of survival and reproduction. Then I listened to my friend some more, and I realized their ground level engagement with the garden was different. They said something like, “Everything kinda gives back, doesn’t it?” Not that the plant was using a strategy of seed transportation by birds’ stomachs, but that they understood plants as part of ecologies, and understood ecologies more in terms of relation and gifting than in terms of individual competition.
                In that string of moments, trailing back toward my middle school class and forward toward now and including those moments of kneeling in the garden, I started trying to understand this one small piece of how my friend thinks. Which is not like me. The more I sit with it, the more I think about all the different ways of thinking and being unfolding all around me. The grass. The peas. The garlic. The oxalis. All the plants I have no name for.