Robin Harford Spend five seconds on social media and you’re drowning in theories about how to live.
Most are what I call ‘sounds good in theory’. A snippet of science stretched thin and twisted into a neat worldview designed to make you feel certain, comfortable, and right.
Nature connection is no different.
People want the truth about plants handed to them. They want to know what’s medicinal, what’s edible, what it all means. Certainty wrapped up with a bow.
But here’s what gets lost in that rush: the ability to actually see.
When you’re busy collecting facts about a plant, you’re not looking at it. You’re categorising it. Boxing it. Reducing it to data points that fit your existing mental models.
You’re making yourself comfortable instead of curious.
Years ago, when I taught the odd session at Oxford University, I told a professor I’d spent 35 years undoing myself.
She looked genuinely shocked.
“Most people want to lock themselves into a worldview that makes them feel right, so they can go back to sleep.”
She was correct. That urge to lock yourself in kills scientific enquiry. It shuts down real learning. It turns exploration into confirmation.
I’ve never been interested in sitting in certainty.
So when I teach, I don’t start with plant names or properties. I start with something harder: learning to see.
Really see. Deeply. Attentively.
It’s an outward process, sharpening observation, but it stirs something inward too. Reflection. Intuition. Insight.
Sometimes, after weeks of simply being with a plant, a student will suddenly understand how to work with it. Not from memorised facts, but from relationship.
That’s the transformation most people miss.
They’re so busy learning about plants, they never learn to be with them.
What would change if you stopped trying to understand plants and started seeing them?