This morning I stumbled across a question—one of those questions that is not meant to be answered so much as sat with:
What if plants give us food and oxygen not out of generosity, but because, one day, we return the favor?
What if we are not the masters of the garden… but part of its crop?
Not literally. Not scientifically.
But philosophically.
Let us imagine for a moment that we step outside the story we have told about ourselves.
The Story We Usually Tell
Humans, in many traditions, place themselves at the center.
We speak of dominion.
Of stewardship.
Of being uniquely made, uniquely aware, uniquely significant.
We build cities that scrape the sky and call them achievements.
We look at the nests of birds or the tunnels of ants and call them instinct.
But every species, if it could narrate its own existence, might tell a similar story.
The oak might say:
I hold the soil together. I summon rain. I feed generations. Surely this world was grown for me.
The wolf might say:
I shape the herds. I keep balance. I test the weak. Surely I am the necessary one.
The fungus beneath them all might laugh softly and whisper:
When you are all finished, I will still be here, turning endings into beginnings.
The Limits of Knowing Ourselves as “Special”
We often claim that humans are set apart because we can reflect—because we can think about our own thinking.
But here is the experiment:
How would we know if another creature also reflects?
We cannot ask the crow what it wonders as it watches us from a wire.
We cannot ask the whale what passes through its mind as it crosses an ocean older than our species.
We cannot ask the forest what it remembers.
Our certainty may say more about our inability to listen than about their silence.
Reversing the Lens
Imagine an observer—not a god, not an alien, just an impartial witness—watching Earth from afar.
They see:
- Creatures breathing in oxygen made by plants.
- Those creatures living briefly, then returning their bodies to soil.
- The soil feeding the plants again.
- The cycle repeating for billions of years before humans ever arrived.
From that vantage point, there is no ruler and no subject.
Only exchange.
Only participation.
A Larger Body, Perhaps
Now stretch the imagination further—not as belief, but as metaphor.
If the trillions of microbes inside our own bodies can form entire living systems within us, each playing roles we barely notice…
Why could we not be something similar within a larger whole?
Not the purpose.
Not the center.
Just one functioning part among many.
A cell rarely understands the body it belongs to.
Yet it is still essential.
What if one day we were to discover that the earth is an organ inside a larger body that we see as the universe, and life on earth is but the Flora and Fauna. How would that change us?
Equality Without Sameness
To consider this possibility is not to say humans are meaningless.
Quite the opposite.
We matter—immensely—just as:
- The ants matter.
- The forests matter.
- The unseen bacteria cycling nutrients matter.
Not because we are identical.
But because systems survive through relationship, not hierarchy.
The cycle of life is not a ladder.
It is a weaving.
Why Run This Experiment at All?
Not to dismantle faith.
Not to reject science.
Not to claim plants are secretly plotting our composting.
But to loosen the grip of certainty.
When we imagine that we might not be the center of everything, something curious happens:
We begin to see ourselves less as owners…
and more as participants.
Less as rulers…
and more as relatives.
The Question That Remains
What if the goal is not to decide who is most important?
What if the goal is simply to recognize that importance was never meant to be ranked?
That every breath is an exchange.
Every meal a borrowing.
Every life both a receiver and a giver.
This is only a thought experiment.
But sometimes the value of a thought experiment is not the conclusion it reaches…
It is the humility it leaves behind.
Baba Yaga's Cabin 
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