Hello juniper, good day to you. I come to you this rainy September Saturday to greet you and to wish you well and to talk with you about sentience. It's strange because it's autumn but still the air is filled with tiny mosquitoes that make me very, very much aware of my own sentience. And I didn't expect them this time of year. Of course, they don't bother you because they want warm blooded animals, their blood and not your sap, which is anyway protected deep behind your bark. I'm looking at your beautiful blue berries, all of them now ripe this year and I don't see, I see only a few green ones that will ripen next year. So, I know that you're a lady juniper or a female juniper or how you want to see that, because unlike most or many other trees and shrubs you’re either a male or a female. Yes, but sentience. So, we were discussing the idea of sentience last night with a group of people who participate in a project called Gifts from the Sentient Forest and of course one very obvious gift from the forest traditionally considered such is your berries and all the other berries of the forest. But I'm not so concerned about the idea of gift now, so I don't expect other gifts from you at the moment except the gift of listening to me and thank you for that, but I'm interested in this idea of sentience. And while I'm speaking, I realise that I'm all the time trying to remove the small mosquitoes from my face so they wouldn't settle down and suck my blood because that's so itchy and causes me pain. And of course, pain is sort of the ultimate sentience. But I realised when we spoke last night that for me sentience is something very practical, something that we all living beings need in order to be able to relate to our environment and to move towards that which is good for us and nourishing and helpful and move away from that which is harmful or painful or useless even. And of course, your situation is very special because you can't move away from things or move towards things except slowly and with your roots. Of course, you can move towards light as all plants do. But still, sentience somehow is even more important for you because you have to adapt so totally to the place where you're growing. So of course, sentience could be thought of as more like emotional or spiritual or even how should I say in some sense otherworldly capacities, but I've always thought of sentience as something that is common to us, that we all share, all living beings, whether animals or plants or even microbes or mould or fungi and all kinds of bacteria or archaea or whatever they're called, because it's like a characteristic of life to choose. And in order to be able to choose you have to have some sentience, you have to be sensitive and to be able to distinguish what you like and what you don't like for instance. And I definitely not like these mosquitoes. But they have now, they’re using their sentience to gather around me because I'm like their party, their real feast for today. There are not so many mammals around right now. It's also funny that to my senses, to my visual sense your berries are so really beautiful, and they remind me of blueberries and other delicious berries, but I know from my experience that they taste rather bitter, and they may be good as a spice but they're not sweet to eat as they are, so I leave them alone. And of course, sentience alone will not take us so very far, so we need experience to make decisions based on our sentience. I know biologists and botanists and cognitive scientists they argue now about plant intelligence or plant cognition or plant thinking even as philosophers like Michael Marder speak of. But nobody has - and many scientists think that it's wrong to use the word intelligence because they think that intelligence is somehow related to having a central nervous system and a brain, but that's of course a very human centric idea that you need to have a brain to have intelligence. I think intelligence is somehow related to sentience although we tend to think that sentience has to do with sensing and feeling and emotions, but of course intelligence also needs sentience, because how can you make distinctions without that. So, you've been intelligent enough to create a way of living that doesn't feel disturbed by these mosquitoes, so that's very intelligent of you. Millennia, thousands and thousands, well probably millions of years have helped you develop so that you can thrive here. And humans are of course young and inexperienced as a species, but yeah. Maybe I realise that my sentience now - I'm too sensitive to be able to focus and concentrate on you. I have to concentrate on surviving with these mosquitoes. So, I apologise for this incoherent talking to you and apologise also for now leaving you, because it's not because of you. I really think you're beautiful and I would love to breathe in the scent of your needles and your refreshing oxygen that you produce with your volatile chemicals spicing it up, but I just can't take it. I'm too sensitive now, my sentience suffers from these mosquitoes, I will have to leave you. But I really hope everything is fine with you and that you will enjoy the rest of the autumn season and yeah. I wish you all the best and thank you for your patience with me today. Take care.
