## Metadata - Author: [[Stephen Harrod Buhner]] - Full Title: The Secret Teachings of Plants - Category: #books ## Highlights - What so many New Age practitioners call the “energy” of a thing turns out to be, in fact, the energy of a thing. It is the electric and magnetic signaling that all living organisms give off, not only as part of their physiological functioning, but as part of a complex signaling network among all life forms on Earth. ([Location 1394](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003ZHVB80&location=1394)) - All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind, is in some shape or other to tell the story of his love—to sing, and, if he is fortunate and keeps alive, he will be forever in love. This alone is to be alive to the extremities. It is a pity that this divine creature should ever suffer from cold feet; a greater pity that the coldness so often reaches to his heart. I look over the report of the doings of a scientific association and am surprised that there is so little life to be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry technical terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in popular language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of these learned professors has been almost as inhuman and wooden as a rain-gauge or self-registering magnetic machine. They communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of blood-heat. —HENRY DAVID THOREAU ([Location 1794](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003ZHVB80&location=1794)) - At any one moment in time there is an informational gestalt, a gesture of communication, going out from the heart to both the external and internal environments in which it lives. And this particular gestalt changes from moment to moment, depending on the information the heart receives from those environments. ([Location 1840](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B003ZHVB80&location=1840))