Why does it matter if you know what it is like to be a potato?
Does it matter if you know what it is like to be a potato?
Can you ever know what it is like to be a potato?
Dark, bulbous, lightless, surrounded by damp, and other life… worms, and potato bugs, and nematodes, and slugs. As a tuber, you are dependent on the stem, the plant above ground, for your sustenance and your growth. Are you superfluous to the life of the plant? Do you matter to the growth or are you a sort of cancerous bulb? Yet you hold nutrients, and you are also the medium for further growth. There is green stored in you, that makes itself known as ‘eyes’ or buds. There is promise. There is to me this sense of something buried deep, unseen, unacknowledged even, that has the potential to not only become seen but to propagate, to create.
We can’t begin to imagine that the potato ‘knows’ this, or even ‘senses’ anything like this, but we can be in awe of the process, in gratitude for the way life grows. We share, even with the potato, a potential to continue through new iterations, perhaps even in a poetic sense, to rise out of darkness into potential. So, the practice of asking what it is like to be another being is a way of celebrating all the various ways of being in the world, finding delight in the living Earth. and promise. Finding promise in that too.
It is also, as Stephan Harding says, ‘essential to the deeper shifts in worldview and participation’. To me this means that a shift in worldview or paradigm, to include and acknowledge the sanctity of all life, not just human life, is essential if we are to change the way we act in the world, and come to regard the interconnectedness of ourselves with all other being on the planet. Harding goes on to say that these shifts in worldview ‘need to underly the transition to sustainable and regenerative cultures.’(ibid) This makes the argument that experiencing ourselves as connected to, in concert with, even somewhat alike the rest of the ‘biotic community’ (Aldo Leopold’s term) is essential to the transformations, first in ourselves, and then in the world, that will lead to a sustainable future. John Seed and other ‘deep ecologists’ assert that when we recognize ourselves as an intricate and interconnected, in fact dependent, member of a larger community of living beings, we will act, not out of guilt or even altruism, but out of self-love and self-preservation.
So, why does it matter if I know what it is like to be a potato, or to be any other form of living being? Maybe what is most important is not to know, not to eventually find out, but to be willing to be humble enough as a species to regard the other life as large enough, important enough to be worth contemplating. Maybe it is the willingness to come into contact or relationship with the more than human world which is the shift that is needed, and maybe this type of practice helps us to develop that connection.
At any rate, I think the next time I hold a potato, firm and round and earthy, in my hand, I will remember something of this contemplation, and regard the potato as a sort of promise, a gift of opportunity for its own regeneration, and even, the promise of potatoes to come. That fills me with a sort of awe and gratitude and interdependence and even agency in helping to plant part of this potato, or another potato to ensure future abundance. Maybe that is also the shift toward sustainability that Harding is referring to.
REAP 