#031: Plants Want to Communicate With Us
We have a fun conversation about co-creating with Nature spirits, plants, robins, bunnies and more.
The big takeaway: Listen. Plants want to partner with you. All of Nature is speaking but plants are the easiest place to start.
Jen started communicating with fairies as a young child. Now she listens to nature spirits' advice on how to restore the land she caretakes and teaches herbalists, healers, green builders how to listen to plants to assist them in their work and lives
Synchronicities abound in this interview as Jen tells the story of how she found the land she cares for and the long work to restore it to health. She even found she had an unknown ancestral connection to the land after she bought it.
During our episode, Jen says she experiences communication with plants through:
feelings in her body,
hearing words in her head, and
seeing images.
Other people can receive communication through different methods such as songs, poems, or images.
There's no wrong way to communicate as long as it works for you, but there are some basic ways to start.
For more, check out Jen's book, Communicating with Plants: Heart-Based Practices for Connecting with Plant Spirits,
Based on her fifteen years of teaching hundreds of people, Jen offers seventeen ways to listen and confirm your answers.
I'm so excited to read this book and try out her methods.
I've got so many questions about family, racial justice and regenerating joy, money, traveling, etc.
Would you like to read it too?
You can purchase Communicating with Plants on Amazon or buy at your favorite bookstore.
(The link above is my amazon affiliate code.)
Want to talk about plants with me and Jen?
Read Along with Amanda Summer Book Club
Thursday, June 26 @9am pacific/12pm eastern
Drop in as we discuss Jen's Communicating with Plants.
Connect with others in our community and meet Jen!
Get your zoom link here.
TRANSCRIPT
Amanda Aminata Sol
It. Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of the Mother Tree Network podcast, where we are being joined today by our special guest. I'm so excited to talk with her, Jen Fry, who's written a new book on how to communicate with plants, one of my favorite subjects. And so what we're going to do with this interview is I'm going to start off by asking lots of questions and getting Jen to tell us all kinds of stories. And then probably about midway through, I'm going to be joined by some members of the Mother Tree community who are also way deep into plants and communicating with plants to hear a couple of other voices and perspectives. So, Jen, we'd like to start off every phone call or podcast episode with the question, what is good? So what's good for you today?
Jen Frey
Well, the sun is shining. The weather this week has been, I want to say perfect, but at the same time, we also need some rain. It can't be like this every day, but it's like the perfect day. Perfect temp, sun shining. The plants are growing. The plants are in abundance right now. It's great to be in the garden and connect with the plants. I had a robin come down and rob the strawberry this morning while I was out there. We had some conversations, so that's all good.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Well, okay. So there are two threads I have to follow up with because one is about the robin coming to rob the strawberry, and the other one is wait, you talk about your garden. So tell us, I know you're the author of this book, how to communicate with plants, but you also have your own gardens or situation. Tell us a little bit about what you have, what you're growing, what's going on over there?
Jen Frey:
Yeah. So we live on what I call heart spring sanctuary. So it is four and a half acres. We have three ponds and a creek that runs through it. So a lot of, like one of our ponds, I think originally this area is probably wetland. So we're trying to work on helping that restore. So I always get nervous when people want to say they want to come see my gardens because my gardens aren't like they're not longwood gardens. They're not like what somebody's going to think that a plant lover's gardens would look like. I'm not meticulous I design for beauty, but I design with the nature spirit. So they inform me of what plants they want to grow where, and that's what we plant. And when I say my gardens, well, actually, during COVID we started growing vegetables for years. I had grown vegetables a long time ago, and then I had stopped because where we live, we're surrounded by so many great organic farmers. And I thought, why not just support them? And I'll put my time into growing things for the birds, for the other beings of nature, and also just restoring the land. So that's what I did as well as I have students that come here, so I have to grow some plants that we work with in our classes. So I was growing those as well. But during COVID when everything shut down, we're like, you know what, maybe we should grow some grown food. So we put in it's grown. We have three raised beds. They're a little bit bigger than that, but we grow a small amount of our food. But it's actually a small amount. But in the height of summer, it feels like a really large amount that we can't keep up with it. So that's what I'm growing. And I forget all of your questions, Amanda, so I may have lost a threat there, so please.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Yeah, thank you. Thank you. That does give me a picture. I just want to get a picture of what your, quote, operation was, you know what I mean? I wanted to physically locate you. If you feel comfortable telling us where you are situated on the planet, it might be helpful to hear that as well.
Jen Frey
Yeah. So I'm in Washington Borough, which hardly anybody is going to know, even from Langster County. So we're in Langster County, we're 2 miles from the Susquehanna River, so I can see the river is like, right down the road from me. And I'm in, obviously, the Susquehanna River Water Basin. And at one point this was where oh, my gosh. My mind just the Susquehanna people. Yeah, Susquehannak. And then later conestogans. These are colonists names for these people. We don't actually know what they called themselves, but apparently just down the road from Me is actually the largest the place where they found the largest amount of artifacts of the Susquehannac people. I didn't know that. I thought it was somewhere else in the same town, but that's where it is. And I didn't know it when I came here, but I have ancestors that lived here a couple generations ago. It would be my grandfather's grandparents, I believe. So I found that really interesting because that family never wanted to share their ancestry. And here I ended up, I felt this call. We looked for land for three years. I've been living here for six years now, and we were looking for the right place and I drove past it and I saw the ponds and was like, if the ponds are on this place, I want it. And I got out and I stepped 1ft on the land and it was just like, this is the place. And so it had really great energy when we moved here. I work with the hope this isn't too much for anybody, but I work with fairies, and so the fairy energy was really strong here. And then from our experience, we've also just been doing a lot of healing of the land because there's farmland around here and the two major farms, the water comes right onto our property and was immediately going into the stream that eventually goes into the Conestoga River. And so we've been doing a lot of restoration work to try to mitigate all the chemicals coming in and helping the land repair.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Wow. Okay. So beautiful. And thank you. Thank you for being so willing to share with us. I'm just happy to say that you might be my first Lancaster County Co resident guest. Everybody else is from so far away, and here you were all this time. I was going through all this stuff during the pandemic. I had no idea who you were. So beautiful. And you were talking about the Susquehanna people and how you're very close to what was like a major population. And I just want to take a moment to acknowledge those ancestors, those people who care took this land, that you are so fortunate to be partnering with right now. And I'm so fortunate to be partnering with right now as well. So just say thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for welcoming us and holding us. And then, of course, you mentioned Nature Spirits as, like, cocreating with Nature Spirits. I wonder how, for people who need a little bit of a handle as to how you get there, can you tell us something about how you got to being able to feel or experience Nature Spirits? Maybe an origin story, perhaps, or if there's something more recent that will help us to know what you mean by that?
Jen Frey
Yeah, I think so. You mentioned my book Communicating with Plants, and I wrote a book about communicating with plants because as far as I'm concerned, working with the plants is like, one of the easiest inroads to communicating with all of nature in my life. I actually do communicate with all of nature, but in my teaching, we focus a lot more on plants. In some more advanced courses, we go deeper into other beings. But plants are just so generous, and they're stationary, and we have this really deep ancestral bond between us that our lives literally depend on them. So they make it really easy. They also recognize their role as trying to help humans to remember who we are and help us come back into this fold of nature. So they generally want to communicate with people. They're excited to do it. So that's why we start with plants. So as far as my own origin story, it's hard. I don't know that I really can say, because what I know now is that even as a young child, I was communicating with fairies and having these experiences with fairies, but it wasn't something that was talked about in my family, so I didn't even have that word for it. I mean, of course I knew fairy tales, and of course I saw Disney movies, but they were all make believe. It wasn't something that was real. And so I was having these experiences, like things showing up in my bedroom, like, gifts would show up in my bedroom that nobody could say, yes, I gave this to you, or it just didn't come anywhere. And then as an adult, I started realizing as I started going into my magical trading, it was just like, oh, that's fairies. That's what that was. And so now we have that experience. And I think one of the things that I would say is if this all feels too much for you, then just when you're in nature, like, if you're walking along in nature and then you just suddenly feel like, an upliftment or joy or like I mean, you can feel like you're in the presence of magic or like sometimes the air even gets a little there's a little glimmer in the air. That's a sign that you're in a place that has high nature spirits. And it feels good. It feels good to be there. I think in general, most people actually have these experiences, just like I was saying. But we don't have words for it. We don't have understanding for it. And then when we start to so even when we talk about communicating with plants, people get this image in their head of what it's supposed to be like. It's supposed to be like Moses burning bush, yelling at you and just being very clear, like, hey, you need to go gather these berries today, or you need to go turn off the stove. And that can happen, but it doesn't happen very often and usually not like your first experience. It's just kind of smaller.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Yeah, I love what you said. I'm going to stop repeating that because I think I'm going to love everything you say. But I want to get to this thing about an ancestral bond. And the way I want to introduce this is by saying that a lot of us 21st century industrialized people feel lonely or disconnected. And one of the reasons I feel for that is because of a loss of ancestor bonds. But you said that we have an ancestral bond with plants. So tell us more about that.
Jen Frey
Yeah, plants are our ancestors. They've been on this planet long before us. As I said, we have such a strong connection to them. And plants have always evolved before their animal counterparts, so they evolve, and then that allows us to evolve, and that allowed humans to come into creation, and it also is continuing to happen. So when we think about evolution, most people think of, like, Charles Darwin as this was something that happened in the past a long time ago, or, It takes a really long time before we see evolution. But evolution is happening every single day of our lives and we can see it now that it's like things have sped up so fast. So it's just happening. And as we're learning how to live in this time of great Earth changes, we can go back to the plants because they've lived through those Earth changes for so long. And then when you talk about the loneliness and the separation and that ancestral disconnect, we can tap into the plants. And it doesn't even have to be the plants from where our ancestors originated from because we're all on Earth. So it's the plants where we are still are connected to all of the plants all around. So what they're doing is they're just helping us to remember that we are nature. We are part of this great system. We're not separate from it. We are an equal part, as are the ants. Or I mentioned the robin, and I just want to apologize because I actually pulled the robin. He could have a whole strawberry, just leave some. So he didn't really steal it from me saying that. So I'm sorry about that. But getting back to the ancestral so that's what the plants are doing is that they're helping us to reconnect with the Earth that's on under our feet here and helping us to remember how to live on this spot of Earth. And with that, then we all have ancestors who once upon a time lived connected to nature. Some of them we may know. Some of them we have to go back many, many generations before we can reach those ancestors who lived connected to nature. But they're there. And so that means that in our very DNA, we have those memories. We just have to awaken them. And that's what the plants in front of us is doing, is helping us to awaken those ancestral memories and memories of being connected to nature.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Wow. Okay, so let's talk about working with you said that you are working to restore the land. For example, you've used the word restore a couple of times, and this is like, a very important concept for me because I'm thinking about how do we do regenerative racial justice? And so for me, part of it is restoration, is to restore ourselves. And I love how you're saying restore land. Tell me about what you mean when you say restore land.
Jen Frey
Yeah, so one that's like such a big category, right? So I'm just going to talk about my specific area right here. So this land that we live on, like I said, it was once we're pretty sure it was once wetlands, and it was definitely forest. Like most of Pennsylvania, it was forest. Right? And then prior to our house was built in the 80s. So prior to that, this was farmland. So that means the trees got cut, the lands got drained, and it was farmed. Right. So where I live, I live on a little corner, and across the street, on two sides are farms, and they're huge farms for people who don't live around farmland. I think you might not understand this, but when we talk about farming nowadays, it's so different than what we at least what I think in my head or what I grew up with a grandfather who grew his own food. They literally drive tractor trailers on the farmland constantly. And they put lots of chemicals on. They put lots of fertilizers, which is also chemicals, and contain lots of antibiotics and medicines from their animals on there. So because they drive over it so much, the ground becomes harder than cement. And so I can watch when it rains here, because one part of our property is a drainage culvert, and it comes off of the one farm. And I could watch when it rains, it actually pours off of the farmland more than if I go down the street to the church parking lot. It can't soak into the ground because the topsoil has been removed. The ground is so hard,
it can't so where I'm living, because it hasn't been farmed for like 40 years, and because we're at this place where all of their topsoil was coming, the soil is actually really soft. So it really was quite sweet when I came here to plant things very different than when I used to live on another farm.
But again, here, it's that the land still wasn't able to utilize this water. So we're trying to work. It became obvious to me my second year here, my first year, we just kind of observed and that drainage culvert, there was never water in it. The second year in April, which was that was 2018, we had such a huge amount of rain and we had massive flooding. And from April of 2018 to February of 2019, that drainage culvert was never dry. It was always wet. And it would go right from there directly into the stream. And I feel like I'm getting off on I'm saying too much here, so I just want to shorten it a little bit and say when I moved to the property, as I said, there was this wetlands area, and that's what I wanted to work on. I wanted to help the wetlands recover.
But the nature spirits were very clear in pointing to this other area and saying, this is what I need to do. And I didn't know what that was. And as I started clearing where they told me to clear, I discovered that it was the dump on this land. So it was once, I think, a burn pile, but the husband was very sick for quite a while, and so I think things just accumulated there. And so it took us about a year to get all the trash out of here. And we did. And then what I saw was that there was just this natural concave, and that was where the drainage ditch flows into there and out.
So it wasn't the first weekend that we had flooding, but like maybe the second or third. And I was like, okay, something has to be done with this water. I was teaching somewhere, and I went to teach, and they totally changed the schedule up so it turned out that now I had time to go to this class before me, and the class was on rain gardens. And that day I was like, I don't know what to do. What am I supposed to do here? And here's like, oh, okay, I'm supposed to put a rain garden in here. That's one of our forms of restoration here. And it's been the biggest project here that it's been in different stages. I mean, it's actually a really huge area. And if I showed it to you, you wouldn't think it's a rain garden. You wouldn't think there is anything going on there. But it's very intentional of, again, slowing down the water, but also putting plants in there that help change the vibration so that there's water molecules that are coming through all the poisons. When they hit here, they get changed so that by the time they get to the stream, they're not holding that same vibration anymore.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Wow, okay, because I asked you about the principle of restoration and you said you were going to get specific with your land. And you told us, you said you watched. The first step was just to watch. And then you listen to these nature spirits and like, bill, do this, focus on this area so you clear it out the trash and then you put in a rain garden so that it could absorb the water but also shift the vibration of it. Yeah, interesting. Gotch. Okay, you want to say something more?
Jen Frey
I do, I just want to say because I missed a real key part. There was that there was resistance too. And I just have to own that because this area was so big and it wasn't something that I knew what to do for. And so I was just like, it's too much for me. I know what they want, but I don't really know how to make that happen. And so there's this plant, Japanese hops, that's considered to be an invasive and it started growing on our property the second year. It wasn't here at all the first year, and then by this third year that I'm still not putting in the rain garden, but I know what has to happen. It completely took over that whole area. And when I finally sat down with this hops that had been asking for my attention and I was ignoring because I was too busy, and then starts grabbing my students attention saying, hey, we need to talk to her. Then when I finally sat down, they showed me what needed to happen. And in the end, Japanese hops actually smothered all the other plants there. So all we had to do was clear the hops out of there, which was really just like rolling up a mat. I'm saying this to say that part of when I say with, it's really with. And it's letting go of mostly letting go of our own beliefs of what has to happen. And listening. But it also is helpful to bring in, especially once we get more comfortable with it, bring in our own knowledge. Or, like, sometimes I think this is particularly potent with restoration.
Sometimes the nature spirits don't understand the limits of our bodies or that we need to sleep or we need whatever. Or sometimes it's even we need money. Like, hey, I'm happy to do this, but that's thousands of dollars of work. So tell me how I can do this in a manner that doesn't bankrupt me. We have to let them know of our own information, and then we can together, which that's always the key, right, is, like, we all bring in our expertise, and then together we create a better vision. So that was the part I wanted to add in there.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Thank you. Wow. Okay. I want to talk about the hops, talking to your student and then you talking to the nature spirits and you and the robin earlier, because I just want to confirm something happened to me. We put some plants in, I believe it was kale and something else, and the rabbits ate it immediately in my garden. Right. And I told my friend Amy, who's on this call and who we will invite into the conversation soon, I was like, what do I do? Because I know she grows food. She's like, well, you could put up a fence, and you might want to talk to the rabbits. And I was like, I don't want to put up that ugly fence. And a little embarrassed. It never occurred to me to talk to the rabbits, because I know people around me don't think that that's a thing. So I did talk to the rabbits. Like, I prayed, and I was just saying, please, you've had a lot I would like to have some of these crops. I would love to have some of these veggies this year. Can you please eat other places? And I am not lying. I put in more things, and they have not eaten them. And I put things in different containers, and they didn't eat those. I'm just amening and confirming, wow, it did happen. And so I'm really grateful. So thank you for talking about that and saying how you talk with the Robbins about sharing the strawberries. And we never think that that's not never. Some of us don't even remember that's an option. So that's beautiful. Regenerate, tell me about how you look at regeneration. And I'll just say, for me, I'm thinking about your regeneration somehow creating holistic cycles so things feed on each other in a harmonious way so nobody's depleted.
Jen Frey
Yeah, I think it's interesting that you gave me that question, because my partner, this is actually his work. He talks about using Regenerative frameworks, and he's in the green building industry, and so he leads workshops to help with that. And then he also is working with a nonprofit that they are regenerative farmers. So regenerative is like this big word he uses all the time, and I never use it. I think it's just interesting. But in my head and I think part of the reasons why I don't use it is because, one, it feels like it's taking on that key phrase like sustainability. It's like becoming the it word. Like, we tend to find a word and that becomes the word that gets used for everything. So I've seen Regenerative used I can't think of examples right now, but I've seen it used in really suspect ways. While I'm not asking it in myself, what I'm thinking constantly is, yeah, what you're saying about this system of creating something that is supportive of all and not overly taxing anyone and by anyone being all of nature, not just people. And so that's what I do try to think on here. We can use the word permaculture as one that's often used for growing food. And I think there are some aspects of permaculture that are really great and some I've struggled with, but at the end, it's just going back to nature because that's nature's system of we like to think that we don't live in a closed system, but we completely live in a closed system. We're all here. Even though we're trying to send rockets out into space all the time, we're really still in this gorgeous, incredible planet that has provided everything we could possibly need. And we don't even know what all is here. And I'm not talking like we can't discover more species. Like, yeah, there's more species to be discovered, but also working with energy. Like, there's so much possibility that's beyond what we can think of. And so that's I think what I'm holding with Regenerative is that I don't live in a healthy system, we don't live in a healthy culture. So it's stretching my mind a little bit to try to shift that and think, what does it actually look like? And I still have a question mark.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Mmhmm, me too. Me too. And maybe that is the way to approach it, is like, I'm learning and keep absorbing. And I just loved how you learn from the land and still are learning for sure. And also, you talked about evolution. You said it's not this thing that just happens over extremely long periods of time. It's happening every day. I love that shift in the framework. We're going to take a little break now and hear word from our sponsor and then we're going to come back and have joining our conversation some people from the Mother Tree community.
So we're back with our special guest, Jen Fry, who's written this book called Communicating with Plants. And it's been a fabulous conversation so far, and my joy is to get to weave into it two of my friends from the Mother Tree Network, amy Keatsman and Kirsten Bull, who both have exciting relationships with plants and nature spirits and all kinds of stuff. So, Kirsten, why don't you start us off? Do you have a question or what's going on for you, hearing Jen talk?
Kirsten
Sure. I was reminded of the time that I've been spending in the yard at the land where I live. And I appreciated how you described kind of the length of time that you allowed yourself or that it required to listen and respond. I sort of have fallen into that backwards here. And for me, it's often very micro, like, oh, pull this little bit, leave that little plant. And I'm doing it all intuitively. I have no idea what I'm doing. But hearing you speak, I'm reaffirmed in the sense that that guidance is a real thing and that I'm not supposed to know everything right up front. So that is immensely reassuring. So thank you for that.
Jen Frey
Yeah, I don't know how you could possibly know everything up front. Illusion. But that's one of the things that we always think right. I think, particularly as Americans, you know, we're and that's that individualism, right, that we all have to know it all, we all have to do it ourselves, we have to be experts in everything. And part of that is also that humans know better than nature. And so it's like having to relearn that we don't actually know better than nature. In this case, we're talking about plants, but the other beings of nature know much more than we do how to be in community with one another and how to be support cowardive of one another. And they're trying to remind us of that. When it comes to learning how to communicate with plants or communicating with nature, I think one of the biggest steps is just that humility that it takes to it's being humble that we don't know it all. But at the same time, that just takes so much pressure off of us. It just allows us to relax and open up and realize that the weight of the world is not actually on our shoulders. We're not responsible for everything. We can only do, like you said, the micro. Sometimes it is just really what's right in front of you right now. And sometimes that's the most important. I said I have four and a half acres. I'm working here, but working with here, but it could just be a patio outback or like a couple of pots on a windowsill or something. And if we just work with them and really listen to what's needed there, then that's powerful and that's potent and that brings huge change that it doesn't have to be huge. Wow. Go ahead. No, go ahead, Kirsten.
Kirsten
I'm bordered by other people's regular lawns on every side, and it's about half an acre here. And so there are different dialogues. And it took I'm seven years in here. Is that right? And it's taken that long to just get the boundary on one side, it took about three years on the other. Side because it's not obvious. But what is obvious when other people is that, well, it looks like she's not doing anything over there, so I should help her out and just mow this. But it has to be done in a spirit of kind of right relationship, too. And that has there's even more humility there, so lots of layers. But yeah, we just this week got finally put a little bit of thread, just a little bit of thread, and it was enough. It was enough. So anyway, thank you.
Jen Frey
I have the same thing here. I mean, I said I have these two farms, but we have another neighbor on the one side that it is just total lawn. I mean, he also has multiple acres, and it's all lawn, and it's very cleanly mowed. And everybody's like, well, where am I going to when they come here to look for plants? Well, how will I know when I hit the boundary? Oh, don't worry. You'll know, there's no confusing it. But what I'm a fan of is mine are from United Plant Savers. I'm a member of United Plantsavers, and this land is part of their botanical sanctuary network. So with them, we get signs so they're posted that says that this is a sanctuary, that we're growing medicinal plants here, medicinal and rare endangered plants here. And so please don't harvest anything. Please don't trespass. Please don't spray anything. But there are many other signs all around that are available now about recognizing that it's a sanctuary. And I think that's so helpful, and it helps people know a good portion of our land, we normally mow paths through. We let most of it wild, but right now, like, probably three quarters of it, we haven't done our first mow for the year yet. So it's really wild. So it just lets people know that, yes, we are here and we are taking care of it. We understand that it might not look that way to you, but it's just a different way. So, yeah, signs, I think, are helpful, and these are not like, they're not horrible. Like, oh, you suck, because you spray poisons. Because, like you said, it is about human relations. And if we go at our neighbors so negatively, then it also defeats the purpose because then you become like, those nutty environmentalists who just hate everybody rather than, like, this is another way of being with the land.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Tik Nahan was asked a question about how do we save the planet? And he said we got to save the environmentalists first. So I love thank you for saying that. And Amy Kietzman, my friend and fellow plant sister, what's happening for you with this conversation? You are muted, by the way.
Amy
Yeah, so, I mean, one of the things that happened to me is it's a similar time frame. We've been on this property for this is our 8th year, but it's huge. And so I think that's been part of it. It's 20 acres and ten acres of woodland and ten acres of former pasture, some of its yard. And I not only have issues with my neighbors, I have issues with my husband. But the question or the area that I'm interested in is it became clear that I was in an intense apprenticeship to the land. But I think for the longest time, I wish I'd had your book, but also for the longest time, I was expecting to hear words from the land and from plants. Mostly. That's not what I hear. I mean, sometimes I get a really strong no, but it's a no feeling. It's not the word. And sometimes words come. Like one time as part of a forest bathing experience and I was doing I just felt the urge to sing. So I was singing to the forest and then it was almost like images came and what that kind of resolved into the forest was telling me. It was missing the large animals, the bison that used to be here and the wolves and the mountain lions. And then following that was oh, so humans are the top predators now. And so what does that mean? And I've I've really been trying to, you know, figure out what that means. But anyway, it would be interesting. I mean, you have used words in what you said the plants are telling you, and so maybe you do get words, but are there other ways that you experience the communication?
Aminata Sol [00:36:15]:
And before you answer that, Jen, I want you to tell us all the correct name of your book, because I feel like I've said it a couple of different ways.
Jen Frey
Yeah, it's communicating with plants, heart Based Practices for Connecting with plant spirits. Okay, so let us know how to do that. Yeah, Amy, that's a great question, and it's one that commonly comes up when we start talking about plant communication because, yeah, like I said, everybody thinks about Moses and the burning bush. And so one of the things that we're doing, whether it's with the book, so in the book, there's 17 different activities that you are invited to do with your plant being that you're working with. And we do similar things. I teach weekend long classes, and we do similar things with that with them in my classes. And so one of the reasons why we're having all these experiences is to see the different ways in which the plants can communicate with us, and in that is not only the different ways that they can communicate, but also what are the ways in which we receive information. I always take it back to communicating with humans, and so when we have these communications with humans, conversations with humans, we're receiving information in so many different ways, and we each do it differently. I'm a pretty kinesthetic person, so I sense things. And my partner, I'm like, you're not sensing this? He's like, no. I'm like, well So it's also like, what's our skill set? And really it's just about training in and honing into how it is that we receive them. So just to answer, how is it for me, I do get feelings in my body. I do hear words. I don't hear them like, I can hear your voice. I hear them in my head. And it's usually using different language or different tones than what I use myself. And I also see images a lot. So particularly with when I was talking about the rain garden, I would see an image of what it's supposed to look like. Or sometimes I'll see an image of a plant and I don't even know who that plant is, but I have to go find the plant to like, okay. And that's always interesting because then they come into my life in really bizarre ways and it's just like, oh, now I know who you were. Thank you very much. So there's so many different ways. I have one student who gets songs every time she connects with I mean, she can get sing your song. Everywhere she goes, she's singing songs. And another student that she brings in poems when she's sitting with the plants. But it's just like there's no one of the one of the foundations that I'm trying to get across with this work and that the plants are hitting me with just huge. Not even two by fours on top of. My head is that we just got to get rid of this idea of a hierarchy. Or better than so there's no better way to communicate. There's no best way to communicate with plants. It's however you receive that information so that you know what it is and you know what that means. And to be fair, sometimes we receive the communication and it can take us even years to understand what that meant, but then we get it. And it's not fortunately, that's not all the time that that happens, but sometimes it is, and then we understand.
Amy [00:39:43]:
Yeah. I think I'm particularly dense in certain ways, but one of the people that I've depended on has advised me to when I feel like I've gotten a communication that I understand, then to also ask, did I get it right? To ask again, because that's the other thing that we humans do is we think we know. And that's certainly true in translation, but I was really happy to hear you say that each of us is different because I love languages and early on somewhere, I just got the sense that actually we're always translating. Even if we're speaking in the same language like that, there's just this translation that needs to go on all the time.
Aminata Sol [00:40:36]:
Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Thank you, Amy. And for our listeners out there, I want to alert you to amy, speaking of translation, we're always translating. Amy is a short story writer, and I feel like your stories seem to figure people who are on the boundaries of world, translating between seen and unseen. Beautiful. So I brought that up because I hope that somehow I'll link to something in the show notes so you can experience some of Amy's work. So we're coming toward the end of our time, jen Fry, and we'll just have to do something longer together in the future. But I want to give you a quote from your book and actually have you share with us why you think this way, because I thought this was a very hopeful statement and I want to hear why you think this way. So you say in your book, plants can help us to discover solutions to any problem or question, including big collective issues such as climate change, social injustice, energy alternatives, poverty, agriculture, diseases, anything that keeps us from thriving. So tell us why you think that plants can help us to discover solutions to those kinds of things too.
Jen Frey
All my answers because they can. But I just want to say there's an expansion to that quote. And that is why I feel that everybody needs to learn how to communicate with plants. Because in general, in my classes, I've been teaching plant communication for about 15 years, and the majority of the people that come to my classes are plant lovers or herbalists or healers. And last year I had the privilege of teaching a class to mostly green building people. And they were all professionals, and very few people in that class were actually plant lovers or that wasn't their world. And it was so important to see that, how one their experiences with it, how they just took it. But also that really gave me that feeling. I mean, I've known that plants can give us those answers, but I saw it here in a very practical way, like, oh, so if they were going to communicate with plants as they're designing a building, then how would that building be different? And so I think it's important that everybody learns this because whatever area of expertise we have, the plants connect with us exactly where we are. So when we bring our expertise, when we bring ourselves there, we include our wounds, we include the traumas that we are carrying. And so the plants give us the message that we need at that time. And that's one of the beauties of why we can continue to communicate with the same plant our whole life, because we're changing and we're healing. And so then the plants can give us the message that we need for there. And so we need everybody who has their own expertise, because if I go communicate with a plant and they're giving me information about energy, alternative energy sources, it's going to go right over my head because I have no context for it. So most of the messages I get are about healing and helping people to heal and recover and restore to their wholeness as well as answers for the problems in my life, but that's because that's the context that I need and that I can understand everyone.
Amanda Aminata Sol
Wow. I love that nuance. So not only might people get different messages, but the context that you bring to it allows you to absorb and sort of work with whatever it is that you get. Right. Interesting. Well, I want to thank you, Jen Fry, for being our guest today, for sharing your book, communicating with Plants with us and your stories. And I want to thank, of course, Amy and Kirsten from the Mother Tree Network community for sharing their stories. And if you want to know more about Jen, how can they connect with you, Jen? Oh, yes, my website, Bridgetsway.com, and there's lots of ways to connect with me on there, so check me out. And how do they get your book? You can order it from me now and my publisher, Inner Traditions. And then on June 13 is when it'll be released to Amazon, Barnes and Noble Bookshop, hopefully your local independent bookstore. And wherever you get books. This came to me, and so I'm going to say it out loud. I am going to host a monthly book group this summer. So one in June, 1 in July, 1 in August, and we are definitely going to make your book one of the books. Yes. So stay tuned, everybody, for that. But I'll also put whatever links Jen gives me into the show notes. And stay in touch. Let us know about any communications that you have with plants, what they tell you about any big social issues or concerns that you have. Thank you. That's it. Thank you.
