Radha Marcum

The other day, a friend remarked, "If they send people into outer space, I’m going. I could live quite happily there.” I got his gist: Our world seems so complexly disturbed, so troubled, the solitude of space is appealing. To me this was a desolate thought. In the absence of plant-life I wouldn’t know myself.  

My parents lived on a small, rural avocado farm in California when I was born. No siblings yet, I spent my first years communing less with people and more with trees and grasses, trailing sticks through ditch-water algae, listening after sundown for coyotes celebrating a kill just over the ridge.

A few years after that we moved to the redwoods of Northern California and then, eventually, to a dense suburban area in the Central Valley hemmed in by mono-crop agriculture and smoggy skies. But I never lost the instinct to know myself in relation to the plants around me, whether in noticing the leaf-sheen on a row of landscaped oleanders or taking in the massive scents of coastal redwoods.

Poetry’s boundary-shifting quality makes it an ideal medium to express this plant-human truth: We inter-are. Now I live in Colorado in a transition zone between mixed ponderosa forest and the plains. Unique scents, colors, textures … I pick up on local plants’ cues and gestures (what they’re communicating to each other, if not to me) every time I step outside.

During the pandemic years—and during these decades of extreme fires in the West—I have become even more acutely aware that what the plants exhale sustains me, literally. I exhale and know, in myriad ways, the plants take me in, too.