This essay stems from an ongoing series of practical and conceptual explorations in how bodily movement is sensorially embedded in the larger ecology of humans, nonhuman beings, and living systems. Drawing on David Abram’s eco-phenomenology of perception¹ and inspired by Natasha Myers’s critique of Anthropocentrism,² I explore how our relationship with trees can be reconfigured as an improvisational interplay between different forms of movement, by reclaiming the human propensity for engagement with every aspect of the perceptual world as sensible and sentient. This essay documents and discusses the emergence of an eco-somatic dance practice through which the human sensorium is imbued with arboreal attention, and trees are recognized and honored as intimate companions of becoming.

As an outcome of her prolonged studies in how plants pay attention to the world in which they are embedded, and how scientists make sense of this phenomenon, Myers claims that “the work of reckoning with plant sentience is really about waking us up to our accountabilities to these forms of life.”³ The intertwinement between perception, ecology, and ethics is also a central aspect in Abram’s phenomenological accounts of the reciprocity between the perceiving self and the earthly sensuous. For Abram, the shrinking of the biosphere, the loss of biodiversity, the disruptions in climate patterns, and other contemporary ecological disasters can be traced back to a fundamental lack of perceptiveness towards nonhuman living beings and systems. The challenge of our time involves “turning our animal senses to the sensible terrain” in order to become “a creature of earth.”⁴ The weight of these claims can be assessed in the shadows of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Forced isolation, social distancing, and the widespread intensification of the presence and use of digital communication technologies in people’s everyday lives are exposing the nexus between ecological crises and the distorted paradigm of perception underpinning the extractivist cultures of global capitalism. This exposure allows us to question how we undermine the primacy of our direct sensory participation in the world and endanger our coexistence with the other species of life on which we depend for our sustenance and survival. It is arguable that both drives rely on the still predominant Cartesian assumption that the sensing body is a bounded, material, and incognizant entity controlled by a detached, immaterial, and conscious mind. To reckon with plant sentience and honor our interspecies responsibilities, we need to recognize and value how perception is enmeshed in a more-than-human web of reciprocities. We are called to commit our sentience to a deeper connection with the bodily, earthly ground of life.

Working in this direction, Myers proposes the concept of “Planthroposcene” as an aspirational assemblage of “scenes or epistemes, both ancient and modern, in which people have learned how to grow livable worlds by staging solidarities with the plants.”⁵ Abram connects the much-needed development of an ecological consciousness with cultivating the ability to perceive depth as “a particular dimension of the experienced world”, that is “wholly dependent” on our embodied position “within that world.”⁶ In what follows, my aim is to contribute to this eco- anthropological-phenomenological vision by offering a fresh perspective and a practical framework for empathizing with trees as participants in our sensorial experience, while considering how we participate in theirs. Reciprocity is articulated as an experience of sensory inter-penetration in which humans and trees become witnesses of each other’s presence. Reflexive discourse and conceptual discussion are enriched by textual, photographic, and audiovisual materials from my movement inquiries in nature.

“Reciprocity is the very structure of perception. We experience the sensuous world only by rendering ourselves vulnerable to that world. Sensory perception is this ongoing interweavement: the terrain enters into us only to the extent that we allow ourselves to be taken up within that terrain.”⁷

“What we call anthropomorphism may actually be evidence of our capacity and willingness to open ourselves to others, to let other modes of embodiment inflect and transform our own.” ⁸

David Abram, a geophilosopher, cultural anthropologist and sleight-of-hand magician, as he defines himself, understands perception as a deep experience of reciprocity between human and nonhuman living beings and systems. This perspective was articulated in his two major works, The Spell of the Sensuous⁹ and Becoming Animal¹⁰ and in several other articles, essays, and interviews published over a period of more than thirty years.¹¹ The purpose of an ecology of perception, Abram claims, is to investigate how the activity of our sensory organs functions “to bind our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem.”¹² To uncover the hidden nexus between the world as sensed by the subject and as a sensible reality, Abram takes roots from the phenomenological method of investigation introduced by German philosopher Edmund Husserl.¹³ and further developed by French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.¹⁴ One of Abram’s main theoretical aspirations is to uncover the ecological potential of Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished attempt to break away from the dualism between the body-subject and the body-object in the work published after his death.¹⁵

According to Abram,¹⁶ Western culture has created an irreconcilable opposition between scientific determinism and spiritual idealism. Human “subjects” are set in opposition to natural “objects”. Scientific determinism approaches the sensible and objectifiable nature of the world as a “purely passive dimension suitable for human manipulation.”¹⁷ Spiritual idealism posits the sensing subject as “pure sentience, or subjectivity” in abstraction from sensible matter.¹⁸ Referring to Husserl’s attempt to address this opposition by “returning to the things in themselves”, Abram argues that the “life-world”—to which Husserl alluded in his final writings¹⁹ as the web in which things are embedded and through which they are experienced—“has been disclosed as a profoundly carnal field.”²⁰ Phenomenological research has made evident “the hidden centrality of the earth in all human experience”, revealing the human mind as “thoroughly dependent upon (and thoroughly influenced by) our forgotten relation with the encompassing earth.”²¹ For Abram the “life-world” is “nothing other than the biosphere—the matrix of earthly life in which we ourselves are embedded” and which “is experienced and lived from within by the intelligent body.”²²

In articulating his embodied-poetic understanding of reciprocity as the structure of perception, Abram draws on Merleau-Ponty’s unfinished phenomenological investigations in The Visible and the Invisible. ²³ While Merleau-Ponty initially focused his research on the human body as both subject and object of perception, in his last work he investigated the “collective” Flesh as an elemental power encompassing both our flesh and “the flesh of the world.” ²⁴ Abram describes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the Flesh as “the mysterious tissue or matrix that underlies and gives rise to both the perceiver and the perceived as independent aspects of its own spontaneous activity.”²⁵ Thinking with Merleau-Ponty leads Abram to define “perception” as “the concerted activity of all the body’s senses as they function and flourish together” in the larger perceptual field in which human life is corporeally embedded.²⁶ This perceptual field, referred to by Abram as the “more-than-human” world, is a “living landscape” that can be accessed through the recuperation of “the incarnate, sensorial dimension of experience.”²⁷ The term “recuperation” here alludes to the limits and distortions of Anthropocentrism. Abram is critical of how the rise of a civilization based on written language and dominated by technology has impaired our capacity to feel compelled by the “voice of the earth” and to get involved in a process of reciprocation.²⁸

The critique of Anthropocentrism as a unilateral and unsustainable way of knowing and being is the meeting point between Abram’s eco-phenomenology of perception and Myers’s inquiries into plant sensing and sentience. Myers, a cultural anthropologist with a background in biology and dance, engages the reciprocity of perception by weaving scientific studies of the molecular mechanisms of plant sensing and ethnographic accounts of human bodily encounters with plants.²⁹ Myers claims that we have been blinded by both the paradigm of human exceptionalism and colonial common sense to see plants as “extractable resources we can bend to our will.”³⁰ On the other hand, as organisms that have evolved “in a responsive relation with other plants, animals, insects, microbes, and fungi”, plants might have a deeper awareness of and care for their surrounding world than we will ever have.³¹ As an alternative to the Anthropocene, which sets forth an epoch of linear progress led by the Anthropos as a singular agent, Myers envisions the emergence of multiple “scenes or epistemes” in which plants and people figure out how to “conspire”, literally and metaphorically, how to breathe together as a collective formation—the “Planthropos.”³²

In her account of what plant scientists make plant sensing mean, as she describes it, Myers refers to several experiments on the ways plants pay attention to and intervene in their ecosystems: for instance the molecular mechanisms at work in perceiving when another plant is shading their leaves from sunlight, the study of anticipatory behavior in sunflowers, or the ways orchids and insects get involved in acts of pollination.³³ Then she discusses how the discovery of these and other kinds of “sensory dexterity” in plant behavior across fields—such as evolutionary biology, biochemistry, biomechanics, plant physiology, and chemical and behavioral ecology—has fed the growth of a vast field of narratives on plant sentience. Since the 1970s, the mechanical understanding of plants as bodies reacting automatically to external stimuli has been challenged by scientific accounts of how plants can remember, anticipate, communicate and learn from their environment, and by the philosophical and anthropological interpretations and popularizations of these discoveries. However, reflecting on her interviews with several plant scientists, Myers highlights how the latter are often critical and defensive against the explicit extension of human models of agency and intentionality to plants. If we refuse to inquire and analyze our anthropomorphic tendency to relate with plants by making them more like us, argues Myers, we will keep reinforcing the boundary between humans and nonhumans. It is more productive to try to understand how we can let go of the drive to assert the superiority of human cognitive capacities and impose human needs and values as the measure of everything. For Myers, we need to learn how to engage with other living beings as the measure of human knowledge and experience, that is, to feel more like them too. This requires getting “entangled” both kinesthetically and affectively in the behaviors, rhythms, and temporalities of plants to deepen our perceptiveness and sensibility towards them.³⁴

Myers’s search for ways of knowing and living in a close and collaborative relationship with plants resonates with Abram’s immersive notion of perception as one that allows us to be “taken up” in the larger and deeper perceptual field in which the human senses are embedded.³⁵ Both authors approach and envision the human encounter with plants and other living beings as mimetic and morphic experiences of learning, through which the meaning of sensing and sentience is radically reconfigured.³⁶ Their original models of inquiry and research idioms have encouraged and enhanced my somatic explorations into the reciprocity of perception and their linguistic articulations. I want to consider how the relationship between the human body and the larger body of the earth can be engaged and understood through direct encounters with trees as key players in my improvisational dance. By exploring how the body senses and makes sense of itself and the world somatically and relationally, I aim to develop some practical and conceptual tools for cultivating a feeling for trees as sensible and sentient beings.

My inquiry unfolded throughout the autumn of 2020 and involved daily movement excursions in different natural sites to engage the more-than-human through “actual, in-the-flesh kinaesthetic experience.”³⁷ When referring to trees in this essay, I am not referring to them as independent entities separated from each other and the rest of the natural environment. Rather, I am referring to the ecosystem—the soil, the river, the air, the sun, the clouds, the wind, the grass, the other plants, the insects, and the human-built world—in which they are embedded. Developing a methodology to explore my embodied relationality with trees involved weaving together the field of somatics, with which I was already familiar, and the field of ecology, with which I was starting to engage. The term somatic (as a quality of bodily experience) and the cognate expression somatics (as a field of study) both derive from the Greek word soma, meaning “the living body in its wholeness.”³⁸ These terms were introduced and discussed systematically in the 1970’s by existential philosopher and Feldenkrais practitioner Thomas Hanna. Hanna’s aim was to bring together a broad range of first-person approaches to movement based on the human body as an internally sensed and immediately perceived living process of physical, mental, and spiritual awareness.³⁹ The term ecology derives from the Greek word oikos, meaning household, habitat, or dwelling place. Ecology is the study of how organisms interact with one another and with their environments; by focusing on relationality and interdependence, ecological thinking displaces the human from the center of the world and foregrounds the key role of natural elements like water, plants, minerals, and gases in our survival.⁴⁰ Positioned in the growing field of eco-somatics, the practice of “sensing with trees” investigates the relation between the direct experience and knowledge of the body’s sensations and systems—which is central to somatics, dance and other embodiment practices—with the ecological understanding of and dynamic connection with the larger terrain of living beings and systems in which human life is embedded.⁴¹

Throughout the inquiry, I worked individually within the territory of my small town on the periphery of Milan, from which I could not freely move due to the coronavirus restrictions. I started with walks and bike rides to familiar parks and green areas, but was then driven to explore the wilder areas adjacent to the river flowing through the town—some of which I had never visited before. I wanted to be out there with nature every day, to step over the line of abstract thinking and meet the earth halfway with an open attitude of investigation. Be it with a warm sun and a clear sky or on a cloudy, windy, rainy, or freezing day, I would go out on my bike early in the morning, after taking my kids to school. I would continue the exploration in the afternoon until sunset. I wanted to challenge the comfort zone of my urban body: a clean, safe, and detached body. I would lie and roll on the soil, the grass or in piles of leaves fallen from trees, dry or wet. I would move in deep contact with the bark of the trees, soft or rough. I would touch the gelid water of the river with my bare hands and feet.

Each exploration began by waiting for a sensory input from the outer world to move me towards a specific natural site. It could be the reflection of sunlight blinding my eyes or the appearance of shadows on the ground. It could be the color of the sky, a hole in the street, the chatter of people, the noises from a building site, a car engine car, the traffic noise as I approached a crossroad, or the changing rhythm of my breath. Once I arrived at the site, I would wait for some external impulses to move me towards a specific tree. It could be sounds, colors, the density of the air, the presence of people, the pine needles hanging from a branch, silence, or another form of vibration felt on my skin. Day after day, through this process, I would gradually transition from seeing trees to meeting them with the whole body. Then, after engaging the bodily, earthly terrain between us, I would touch a tree and start moving with it. Given the urban setting of the inquiry, I was rarely completely isolated from other people and the sound of motorcars, factories, and church bells during these explorations. This made me more self-conscious about the strangeness of my actions (or non-actions) in places where people would normally walk alone, with others or dogs, sit and smoke on the benches, chat, jog or other forms of exercise—but usually without an explicit sense of engagement with nature.

The explorations of sensing with trees were guided by a range of somatic and improvisational modes of movement and attention. Among these modes, lying, grounding, and shaping—which I will explain below—were the ones I engaged more often, more intensely, and through which I gained the clearest insights into arboreal livingness and responsiveness. I mainly drew on three practical resources: Andrea Olsen’s “Body and Earth” exercises,⁴² Rena Milgrom’s improvisational practice of “shaping” into another body,⁴³ and Moshe Feldenkrais’ method of awareness through movement.⁴⁴ Following Olsen, I have approached sensing with trees as a process of “inviting awareness”, of waiting as well as placing attention, of moving attention to various parts of the body in the experience of contacting the earth, the tree, or both.⁴⁵ Milgrom’s work has inspired me to engage the human-tree encounter as an active and relational process of adapting to the physical qualities of the tree in a constant dynamic of giving and receiving sensory information.⁴⁶ Finally, drawing on Feldenkrais, I have engaged sensing with trees as a process of “reducing all stimuli to their bare minimum” which facilitates noticing and integrating the finer changes in the muscular and nervous systems.⁴⁷ A key aspect of this inquiry was to allow my body to feel movements without focusing on a particular intention, or letting other thoughts take hold. What began as a series of tasks evolved into an assemblage of rituals of belonging and thanksgiving to the body and the earth. As rituals, these explorations felt strongest through the act of repetition.

In following a first-person approach which prioritizes the felt qualities of the kinesthetic and affective relationships with trees, I have attempted to incorporate the insights emerging from the inquiry into the experience of movement itself. This process of embodying insights, however, worked as a continuum between what is felt somatically and what is evoked, and brought to life again through words and images. Through still and moving images, writing, or audio recordings of my verbal responses, I tried to capture or liberate what had been previously evoked in the somatic experience of movement. Images and words were not static impressions but creative continuations of movement that could also evoke new possible forms of embodied resonance with trees. I kept a daily research journal to weave together these three dimensions of experience and inquiry—what is felt, what is seen, and what is said—and the research material collected by engaging with them. In keeping the journal, I gave myself the task of accounting for three interwoven elements of practice-research: practice, methods, and concepts. My aim was to constantly monitor the risk of one merging into the other. I kept addressing three key self-reflective tasks: What does my movement experience involve? What materials am I collecting and how am I transforming them towards new insights? How am I conceptualizing my experience in a conversation with what others have already done and written? A continuous direct sensory engagement with trees was key to maintaining a constructive balance between conceptual thinking and creative expression.

How can language help us engage with and evoke the direct experience of sensing with trees? Inspired by Abram’s accounts of how words can both disconnect us from and connect us with the sensuous life of the world,⁴⁸ I engage with both speaking and writing to attend to the encounter with trees from inside the felt experience of movement, rather than as verbal representations of this encounter. Abram is convinced that Anthropocentrism is a trap of our own thinking because we have become accustomed to using a kind of language that represses the spontaneous and mimetic exchange between our animal senses and the livingness and responsiveness of the earth around us. However, Abram argues, words can also be “wielded” in ways that can “encourage and enhance that spontaneous reciprocity between our bodily senses and the earthly sensuous.”⁴⁹ My practice found that words offered a heightened state of somatic presence during the encounters with trees. Spoken language has revealed itself as a powerful tool for channeling a real-time commentary on the internal adventures of movement. In what follows, I integrate the transcriptions of the audio-recordings of such commentaries with notes written in my research journal and still images taken by a photographer in correspondence with some particularly relevant stages of the inquiry.

In the first exploration (“lying under the tree”), I observe the internal movement impulses through breath and contact with the earth while noticing how I am being witnessed by the tree. The second exploration (“grounding with the tree”) facilitates a gradual shift from seeing to touching the tree; I focus on the weight of the body and the force of gravity and engage in a small duet dance with the trunk. Finally, in the third exploration (“shaping into the branches”), I work on and with a comfortable branch where I can yield my weight and thoughts to engage in a fleshier duet with the tree. Each exploration is preceded by a short video-essay which creatively frames the improvisational experience of sensing with trees. In these video-essays, spoken words are paired with visual materials and sounds from the field. By combining different modes of expression and sensory traces of my first-person experience of movement, I hope to bring to life my process of improvisational co-creation with trees while offering the reader a practice framework to engage and embrace a style of perception which promotes immersion and participation.

One day I was riding my bike to the park near my home. As I crossed the gate and started wandering down the dirt track, I felt attracted to a large bed of leaves resting on the grass and a powerful landscape of trees lurking in the distance. So, I stopped, got off my bike, to start taking photographs. I had almost forgotten, but a sense of resistance reminded me: “Always begin by finding a more intimate contact point with the earth”. I put the camera away and lay down under a hornbeam tree. Suddenly the possibility of a sensuous interplay with the surrounding environment became tangible. I was not alone in the park anymore. I was embedded in a larger, welcoming sense of presence, with shapes, colors, and voices. I was awakened in thoughts, feelings, and movements. What had triggered my reaction to observe the environment as a spectacle was now enveloping me into its thicker web of relationships: the air, the fallen leaves, the smell of autumn, the bird songs, the pointy shells of chestnuts, the grass, the moisture, and...my body! Yes, my body.

Humans and trees can dance with each other because we are both living forms of this same living earth. Because we are both earthbound. We are bound to this body and to the larger body of the earth through the pull of gravity. Gravity defines the conditions of our sensibility and of our sentience. So why this contemporary aversion to moving down onto the ground and meeting the skin of the earth with the whole body? Is it the fear of recognising that we, too, are earth? It makes sense to begin a duet with the tree by lying under it. This earthly space is a space in between; neither body nor tree, both body and tree. Lying under the tree is a mode of embodiment where human perception is met by a radically different way of sensing and responding.

Sensing with the tree begins by embracing the stillness that trees so beautifully embody. I hear my feet crawling through the leaves as I am still standing. I overcome the resistance to lying on the earth with my naked body. I dive into this wet, mysterious pile of decomposing leaves under the tree. Closing my eyes, I find stillness by finding the stillness of the earth: that profound presence of something very ancient, of a time much older than one can even begin to imagine. The key to this sensory attunement is breathing. I play with touch and weight. The whole body shivers at each little pressure. I follow the heart pulsing in the chest, in the belly, in the hands. I notice the impulse of my fingers tickled by the leaves. The earth is breathing with me. The tree is breathing with me. A tiny creature just crawled across my neck, and then another tickled my ear. A bird lands on the tree above, and suddenly takes off again. Another leaf falls from the tree behind me, to meet her destiny on the ground. I open my eyes suddenly, caught by surprise from the light of the sun crossing the air between the branches. To stay here is to become a witness: of my heart, of my breath, of this earth, of this tree. To stay here is to be witnessed: by the layers of broken branches, pieces of bark, bits of leaves of different kinds and colors, pebbles, worms and insects, moisture, and dried matter.

Earth and body: the body scans the earth, the earth scans the body. As I lie under this tree, reciprocity with the more-than-human becomes a fleshy terrain. These strata of embodiment, this soil, these leaves, and what lives under them, can speak through me when I listen and wait. The world speaks to this embeddedness and to the illusion of being separate. The world speaks to this embodiment as a morphing boundary between the inside and the outside. So much life can be witnessed under the body, so many other creatures are thriving in this pile of leaves. The tree is not there on its own. This mysterious pile of decomposing life expands the boundaries of the felt body and calls me to stay. Don’t run away! What will be left of this reciprocity after the body has gone? A trace of pressure on the leaves. A trace of gravity. A bodyprint. I was here. My body was here. My thoughts were here. Now I stand back and observe all this passing, all these traces. Am I still witnessed by the world? Are these written words part of this moment, of being touched by these leaves, by the insects crawling across my neck and by the bird landing on a branch of this imposing tree? Is this writing still part of the body, still part of the earth?

Trees are the meeting point between earth and sky. As the trunk pulls upward, the roots are pulling downward. As the roots pull downward, the trunk is pulling upward. This constant tension between different forces defines the movement of becoming. Grounding is growing creatively out of the constraints that define our sensibility and our sentience. Grounding is dancing with gravity to become the meeting point between freedom and necessity. Grounding is bringing awareness to the empowering effects of being bound to this earth. Trees are masters of grounding. To learn this art, we need to awaken our senses and our imagination to the possibility of a more-than-human perceptual interchange.

Meeting a tree is a process of negotiating the space between the human-body and the tree-body. I see a tree and I feel drawn into its intimate space. I walk around the trunk but still at a distance, with caution. How close is too close, right now? There is a place where I start feeling the presence of the tree more vividly. I stand there and I listen to the tree, in stillness. How does the tree respond to my presence? I inhale, observing the thickness of its core, the color of its skin, the extension of its limbs. I exhale, observing how my inner awareness meets the awareness of the tree in a perceptual space that is neither inside nor outside, that is both inside and outside. As breath comes in again, I pour my weight into the earth. Then I release my weight and breathe out my internal feeling of the tree. This might be the beginning of a breathing conversation.

I am facing the tree, just standing there, and observing how my feet are being touched by the earth I am standing on. The tree is a witness of my grounding. Is the tree hearing my breathing? Is the tree feeling witnessed too? Sometimes I feel like expanding my chest and looking up towards the edges of its beautiful body. Then I condense onto the earth to meet its roots again. I dig my feet into the soil and give thanks to gravity for making this encounter possible. After a while, the tree invites me to move closer. I perceive more clearly the density of the space between us. Now we are nearly touching each other. My left hand reaches out. But it feels too early for physical contact. So, I wait. The tree is now welcoming me to move even closer. I feel like touching its skin. We are now body to body for the first time. These feet finding depth into the earth are my feet. But as I touch the trunk with my hands, I also feel the feet of the tree, its roots. The more I stay in touch with the trunk, the more our reciprocity becomes intimate and respectful. The more this physical contact becomes intimate, the more I feel how I am also being touched by the tree. I feel invited to yield weight into the trunk, to lean into it.

My pressure on the bark is met by the pressure of the tree. My release of pressure is met by its release. There is very little muscular tension involved. I try different points of contact: the chest, the shoulders, the head, the arms. I play with increasing and decreasing tactile pressure on the bark. The tree and I are moving in a shared relationship with gravity. The sound of our breathing guides the unfolding of a duet. We are having a small dance with each other. Slowly, very slowly, I allow my pelvis the freedom to turn without losing contact with the bark. I find my back leaning on the trunk. In this play of pressure and release, one movement falls into another. My arms and my neck are now extending upwards. The senses are drawn towards a vertical space. Then the body becomes small again. Now the encounter unfolds with different parts of the body touching the trunk at the same time. The level of movement shifts from higher to lower and then to higher again. Grounding is becoming a dance. This is a dance of not doing much, a dance of witnessing movement arising from the changing pressure between our bodies and the ground on which we both stand.

Have you ever abandoned your body on the surface of a branch, in a state of suspension between earth and sky? When you sit, lie, or stand on a branch, your movement depends on the presence of the tree. You can feel how the tree is demanding something of you. The tree demands your sensitivity to its structure and to its shapes. It demands your responsiveness to its breath and to its touch. It demands that you listen to its height and width, to its softness and firmness, to its individuality and its participation in the larger ecosystem. Shaping into the branches is a way of embracing these demands by engaging the intelligence of our sensory organs and bodily systems.

This shaping cannot occur until my body is willing to be shaped by the tree. There is still too much tension. I am trying to find a sense of cuddling. The branch is my cradle. I observe whether I can be the cradle for this branch. I become smaller to feel more comfortable. I try to experiment with the structure of this encounter so that it can suit both my body and the body of the tree. Then I start playing with small sideway turns. The body meets the branch where the pelvis meets the spine. The limbs extend to follow the movement of the branch. I explore this space of stillness as the only space I have, as the space of my body, of becoming a body.

I try different points of pressure: the feet, the vertebrae behind the chest, the back of the skull. I witness the inward cavity between head and neck folding with the branch. How much tension is too much in this shaping of bones into wood? How much softness can I achieve while still offering a structure to the branch so that the tree can feel into my body? Some parts of the body resist so that others can yield into the branch. This play of yielding and resisting intensifies the presence of the tree. I feel shivering. My body is wrapped around the branch. The tree expands, and my body condenses into it. I caress the bark, clinging to the knots. A foot extends to touch the trunk. The torso feels stable. Back, torso, pelvis, foot: points of contact on the right side of my body. On the other side, only a foot touching the branch on the edge of our shared line of extension. Human and arboreal tissues are engaged in a relationship of pressure and release of pressure. I bend the knees and start oscillating to each side. I am playing with the instability of leaning on and sloping down. Gravity is pulling me down. I slide the bony edges of my body on and off the surface of the branch. I am falling off. I just fell. Now I am back on the branch again, standing and morphing.

It’s not just the tree that is here for me. I am here for it too. We are healing each other. We share the burden of this encounter with gravity, the tree and I. This is what we share. Holding on to each other. This is what we share. Shaping is breathing into the vibrant materiality of the wood and then out of it. Shaping is being shaped. I know that I am shaping my body but do not know how I am being shaped by the tree. Shaping is knowing and not knowing at the same time, without contradiction. It is letting go of my thoughts. It is a bodily becoming. When I arrived here today, I saw the tree as a stranger. Now I witness a sense of friendship between us. We are dancing together. We are speaking with each other. The form of our dance is embedded in the shapes of these words. Sensations have turned into sounds that speak back to this moment. The shapes of these words speak of an encounter, of different living forms morphing into each other.

By weaving together somatic, verbal, and visual elements, this essay articulates sensing with trees as a mode of ecological perception and co-creation with the more-than-human. Reciprocity is approached not as something to be grasped or explained, but as a continuous and open-ended relationship between the perceiving self and the perceivable world. Something unexpected and unintended is invited to address our conscious awareness whilst remaining outside our grasp. In his eco-phenomenological philosophy, Abram describes knowing as a practice of something coming to our knowledge in a process of “crossing paths” with other living beings and systems.⁵⁰ Abram argues that

We may conceptualize the eroding cliffs and the bracket fungi as determinate phenomena, as fixed and finished presences resting complete in themselves, but we can never really perceive them as such. We cannot experience any entity in its totality, because we are not pure, disembodied minds, but are palpable bodies with our own opacities and limits. We are in and of the world, materially embedded in the same rain-drenched field that the rocks and the ravens inhabit, and so can come to knowledge only laterally.⁵¹

Similarly, my eco-somatic encounters with trees reveal how reciprocity with the more-than-human comes to our knowledge through the unfolding of a shift from a flat experience of perception, focused on the human will to move and act upon the world as a separate entity, to a deep experience of being moved by the world within which we are embedded. Sensing with trees involves having a felt sense of how our awareness is addressed by their presence in carnal ways. How do we become aware that the soil, the trunk, the branches, the leaves, and the air are sensing us as we are sensing them in a bodily field of relations that exceeds human subjectivity? Befriending depth requires engaging in a more subtle and challenging form of attention that runs through the entire body and cuts across inner and outer spaces. As an attentional practice, improvisational dance frames the possibility of experiencing touching, grounding, and shaping, among other sensory acts, as nested within the encounter that is unfolding. Based on my explorations, I want to offer an understanding of the reciprocity of perception between humans and trees as a slow and responsive dance in which we become witnesses of each other’s presence.

I propose the phrase "with-ness" to foreground the spaces between witnessing and being witnessed by trees that come to our senses in the lived experience of movement. Drawing on Abram’s account of the “mysterious” interpenetration between the perceiving self and the perceived world, with-ness evokes the uncertainty and vulnerability of an individual experiencing the body as both the subject and object of sensing.⁵² With-ness is not sought but met in a gradual process of letting moments and sensations emerge spontaneously with the breathing of life. In the active experience of with-ness (witnessing), the tree is encountered as the sensible world and the human body is engaged as a being who is sensitive to it. In the passive experience of with-ness (being witnessed), the body is encountered as nature and the tree is engaged as being sensitive to it. The active and passive perspectives exist as imbricated rather than as exclusive to each other. The tree and the body are witnessing each other’s living systems and bodily, affective states which belong to our shared earthly nature. With-ness is a mode of resonating with, of vibrating with the presence of the other through the key somatic processes of breath, touch, and movement. With-ness involves being moved by each other’s presence by making our embodied connection accessible to the senses. If I want to know how the tree feels, I need to feel like the tree.

As an osmotic encounter between humans and trees, with-ness relies on the power of waiting and suspending judgment. To perceive reciprocity in the experience of sensing and to evolve an awareness of this reciprocity through movement, we need to slow down human temporal patterns. We need to embrace a meditative yet playful form of stillness which puts us in a condition to intuitively intercept non-human temporal patterns that would otherwise go unnoticed. Take flowers blossoming. This process occurs over a long period of time, but it becomes perceivable to human consciousness as a single, integrated phenomenon only by watching it as a visual time-lapse. To sense the agentic forces of nature, we tend to frame them in human time. Otherwise, what we see is immobility, which is confused with inertness. Returning to Myers’s cultural anthropology of plant sensing and sentience,⁵³ sensing with trees can be described as a mimetic and morphic dance in which the human sensorium is “vegetalized”. This involves approaching trees with patience and respect and be open and responsive to their relational sensory mechanisms and extended time frames. The practices of lying under the tree, grounding with the tree, and shaping into its branches—among other eco-somatic practices—can, to borrow Myers’s words, “dilate our morphological imaginaries, altering our sense of our bodily contours, and what we can see, feel, and know.”⁵⁴ Witnessing the extended temporal patterns that characterize arboreal life can help us connect more intimately with how trees move in relation with other living beings and systems in a web of interdependencies that is hard to notice and understand for us as humans.

This essay contributes to the debate on possible responses to the ecological crises of our time by articulating an eco-somatic phenomenological approach for studying perception as an unfolding co-creation with trees. Human-tree reciprocity is engaged through direct sensory perception by activating and nurturing a heightened sensibility and responsiveness to human bodily systems as integrated in larger ecosystems. Sensing with trees emerges from the inquiry as an improvisational dance of awareness and attunement that nurtures a deep sense of aliveness and discovery. Drawing on Myers, this can be described as a dance of “thinking feeling doing” that involves getting to know the movement of trees “in their own terms” and “outside of the rhythms of capitalist extraction.”⁵⁵ The emphasis is placed on how the somatic perception of movement from the inside-out is also a perception of how the body is being moved by the sensuous world from the outside-in.

The more we meet our bodily awareness through the fundamental somatic processes of breathing, touching, and moving, the more it becomes possible to perceive the outside as part of the larger field in which perception is occurring. This involves bringing attention to how the embodied presence of a tree can catch us by surprise and call us to challenge default habits so that we can experience our body as the result of the movement of everything else above, beneath, and around us. It involves approaching our bodily sense of self from the perspective of a tree that, in the autumn, offers its dying leaves to be decomposed into organic matter that will feed other living beings. These are ways of humbling oneself to recognize that we are here because trees are here too. They are ways, echoing Abram’s thinking, of recognising and honoring our “ancient solidarity” with the earth.⁵⁶ As a practice of waiting and witnessing, sensing with trees exposes our responsibility to question the culturally sanctioned abuse of nature in pursuit of unidirectional human purposes. Engaging the nexus between the sensory, the ethical, and the ecological dimensions of movement and knowledge is a step towards conspiring with trees and bringing about more livable worlds. I hope this essay will open pathways for reclaiming the connective, transformative power of bodily movement and dance in pursuit of societal and ecological sensitivities that promote more just and compassionate ways of life.