In this interview Emma Kidd, author of First Steps To Seeing: A Path Towards Living Attentively discusses practical ways to deepen your relationship with plants, by enhancing your ability to ‘see’ plants more fully, in a way that no mainstream botany class will ever teach you.
As Emma says: “On our way to work we may pass trees or other plants but not notice them – the changes of the trees through the seasons? We miss so much, not only individually but as a society too, by simply not paying attention.
By using the analogy of ‘seeing’, Emma discusses how to really and actively see what is in front of us rather than merely accept the shortcuts that our brain gives us to categorise and rationalise what is passing us by.
When it comes to being able to ‘see’ plants, these exercises and methods allow us to enter into ‘deep intimacy’ with plants, and reveals some surprising discoveries, as well as revealing just how blind we actually are. As the philosopher GI Gurdjieff was fond of reminding us, “as humans we live our lives in a near permanent state of hypnotic sleep”.
About Emma Kidd
Emma Kidd is an educator, writer, independent researcher and Attention Coach. Her practice is centred around leading living inquiries into how we can co-create a happy, healthy, and peaceful world.
Emma leads practical, interactive workshops and private, one-to-one sessions, designed to cultivate awareness and an ability to locate our attention, so that we can concentrate on getting to know life as it is, rather than be constantly distracted by our brain’s automatic definitions, judgments and assumptions.
The overall aim is to develop the participant’s full attention so that they can experience and understand life – people and nature – in deeper, richer and more meaningful ways. Emma also works with educational charities, third sector organisations and businesses, and has a Masters degree from Schumacher College, UK, where she specialised in Phenomenology and the work of Henri Bortoft. Her book First Steps To Seeing, is published by Floris Books.