An Epilogue on Entangled Knowing: Science, Spirit, and the Lives of Plants

This essay is adapted from the closing keynote given on May 17th, 2025, at “Thinking with Plants and Fungi,” organized by and held at Harvard Divinity School, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard University.

There are places where the boundary between matter and spirit blurs. Not dissolves, not vanishes, but blurs in a way that invites a new form of clarity, one that doesn’t depend on sharp lines or final answers, but on presence. I know these places. Plants have shown me.

The Thinking with Plants and Fungi conference that gave birth to this volume gathered at this boundary. It was not merely a conference; it was a moment of listening at the edge. Of entangling. Of remembering that knowledge is not born in the mind alone, but rather out of deep relationships with the more-than-human world. It reminded us that inquiry can be a form of devotion to the plants and the radical new ways of knowing they long to teach us. 

Attendees met in the thick of questions that resist resolution: How do we think with fungi? How do we listen to plants, rather than speak about them? How do we hold the tension between what we can measure and what we can feel or know by other means? How can we reach toward and beyond the limits of our knowing? What tools—scientific, contemplative, artistic—can help us?

These are not questions with clear answers. They are invitations into a different mode of attention. A different ethics of presence. These questions—and the plants and fungi that inspire them—ask something more of us than analysis. They ask for attunement to the radically strange and wondrous lives of the organisms with which we share this world. They require research in the strict etymological sense: to re-search. To seek and seek again.

I come to this work—of attunement, researching, remembering—as both a professional scientist and someone who has been undone and remade by encounters that I could not explain with plants and other more-than-human beings. I was first trained as an animal behavioral ecologist; my early career unfolded underwater among coral reefs and schooling fish. It was the fish who first taught me it was time to change how I did science. Their behavior refused to fit my design, and their patterns asked me to find a different kind of attention from the one my formal training demanded. While that training had taught me controls, care, and how to let patterns speak, it also prepared me to notice when a pattern opens into a new form of relation. 

For well over a decade I’ve brought that different kind of attention to plants, designing peer-reviewed experiments on learning, memory, and communication and developing protocols for listening to plants’ acoustic lives. I describe many of these encounters in my book, Thus Spoke the Plant:¹ the chili plant who spoke to me about science; the trees who moved in anticipation of an eclipse; the spirit of a forested mountain offering reassurance through grief. These interactions are not metaphorical. I regard plants as my colleagues, my teachers, my co-authors.

And so I begin here, not with data or declarations, but with an invocation—a question that continues to echo through my work, and through the places I walk with: What happens when we stop asking how to know the world, and start listening to the world as if it is already speaking?

Because it is. 

And the first task of science, perhaps, is to become quiet enough to hear its call.

A call, simply, to relation.

There was a moment—perhaps many—when something in me turned. Not away from science, but toward a wider horizon that the science I was trained in could not quite reach. My formal training prepared me to measure, to predict, to define. But life—especially life with plants—has asked something different of me. It has asked me to listen. 

In his book, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, historian of religion Jeffrey Kripal chronicles a number of scientists who encounter the weird, the unexplainable, the prophetic, and spend their careers attempting to integrate newfound perspectives on the intersection of mind and matter, spirit and cosmos.² He found that these experiences are not rare among scientists. He also found that such “flips” do not result in an evangelical conversion or a complete disavowal of scientific training. Rather, they cause scientists to think in newer, deeper, more creative ways. 

My own “flip” arrived not in theory but in practice—while working with and listening to plants speak. When I say plants speak, I don’t mean with a booming voice; I mean they convey information: through growth patterns that have answered questions I hadn’t yet asked, bioelectrical signals that diverged from predicted baselines, and sometimes images or phrases that arrive in my mind with the unmistakable feel of “not mine.” Learning to recognise these communications and translate them into testable questions changed my practice. What I had regarded as objects of study revealed themselves as partners, quietly steering design, sometimes outright dictating it; nudging questions; insisting on timings that were not my own; and reframing which so-called anomalies merited a second run. Outliers became invitations to look again. I heard their messages and felt their wisdom, and as I listened, my research—and my path—changed direction. This was my flip: not a break from science, but a threshold that deepened my devotion to it. 

And like any threshold, it required letting go, releasing certainties I had worked hard to earn—that only the measurable counts; that the observer must stand outside the system; that feelings are contaminants rather than data about relationships. It meant shedding ideas and frameworks that no longer served—the reflex to dismiss the unaccounted-for as experimental noise, the habit of forcing phenomena into linear causality, the assumption that control is superior to consent. Not because these tools were wrong, but because they had already done their work. Hearing plants speak changed what counted as data, how I designed protocols, and the humility with which I interpreted outliers. I began to see my scientific knowledge not as a fixed structure, but like petals that bloom, then fall, and in falling nourish the soil for seeds yet to come.

Letting go is not abandonment. It is transformation. And in that transformation, I have found a different kind of knowledge—one that emerges not through dominance or dissection, but through relation. Not by standing apart from the world, but by standing with, and in, it.

I now make a conscious effort to sit in a space of not-knowing. Not because I am confused, but because I want to stay open. Because life—the plants, the fungi, the mountains, the winds—has shown me again and again that what I know is only ever a fragment of what is.

And it is in this unknowing, this uncomfortable middle place, that something extraordinary begins to stir. In this place, unknowing itself is reclaimed not as the absence of knowledge, but as a meaningful path to it.

As a scientist, I continue to work with instruments and collaborators; what has changed is my relationship to practice—how I pay attention and with whom I consider myself in relation. Here is what that looks like in the field.

In the Dolomites of northern Italy, our team—physicists, technologists, engineers, and I—built an infrastructure to monitor, in real time, the bioelectrical state of trees both as individuals and, more importantly, a collective network. We expected to see circadian rhythms: day-night cycles of sap flow, photosynthesis, and the subtle electrical pulses that accompany them. 

Then an eclipse arrived. With a long baseline of “before” data in hand, we could compare what happened next with extraordinary clarity—and what unfolded became an unexpected doorway into plant wisdom.

Fourteen hours before the moon’s shadow darkened the sun, the older trees we were monitoring exhibited a tenfold surge in bioelectrical activity—not a slight wiggle from shifting light or temperature, but a dramatic spike. If this had been an animal system, we would call such behavior anticipation—the ability to predict and prepare, a key feature that makes synchronized behavior possible, as in birds flocking or fish schooling. That initial signal soon rippled outward, uniting our network of individual spruces, collapsing the divide between tree and forest, individual and collective. By the time the eclipse arrived, the network’s activity had converged—as if a single superorganism were readying itself for the event.

We had instrumented a small network of mature spruces with electrodes and continuous loggers; the recordings were comparative and continuous, which is why the fourteen-hour lead became visible. What makes this finding striking is its scale: During a solar eclipse the sun-moon gravitational configuration peaks—an effect sometimes described as a gravimetric wave—and no extant plant model predicted that trees would register that configuration so far in advance. Intrigued, we applied a quantum-inspired neural-network model—originally developed to describe coordinated activity in the human brain—to our tree data. The fit was uncanny, suggesting that nature repeats its patterns across kingdoms.

In that moment, the forest revealed its capacity to anticipate, communicate, and unite across distances in time and space. It taught us that scale is a matter of perspective, not essence—and that the smallest signal (an electrical surge fourteen hours before an eclipse) can carry the memory and wisdom of an entire forest. 

In many ways, this was a traditional science experiment. We had a hypothesis and an experimental protocol. We took observations, logged continuous measurements, and drew conclusions based on evidence.

Western science prizes the image of a detached observer—an impartial eye measuring from afar. Yet, as feminists and science and technology scholars have long argued, “objectivity” and “neutrality” are myths. Methods are entangled with the worlds they measure; what we see and say is shaped by standpoint, embodiment, and power. We are already, always, everywhere entangled. 

Every protocol, every sensor, and every data point in my work bears the imprint of human presence, and of a living system welcoming or resisting our arrival. Even when we train to minimize our footprint, our presence persists in the choices we make: which species and sites we select; where we place electrodes; how we set sampling windows and thresholds; what we call “noise” and what we dignify as “signal.” Our bodies alter microclimates; cables and loggers introduce heat and electromagnetic hum; footfall compacts soil; our breath adds CO₂. Trees register these things. Pretending otherwise does not increase rigor; it obscures relationship. As I have argued elsewhere, true inquiry demands presence and empathy, not detachment.³ Refusing to care about the subject of study is a blind refusal of all the ties already at work.

To honor this entanglement, I now ask permission before I proceed with experiments. When we arrived in the Dolomites, for example, I carried with me a small bundle of mapacho—the Amazonian tobacco I offer to the land. Before stepping into the forest, I told my colleagues, “I’m going to ask permission to be here—and if the forest says no, I’ll walk away.” Their raised eyebrows were understandable: The project had cost months of planning and thousands of dollars in equipment. Fortunately for the team, the forest’s reply was clear: “You are welcome—but the story to be told is not what you think.”  

For months that cryptic message echoed as we gathered our baseline data. Then the eclipse arrived, and in its wake the revelation hidden in those recordings appeared. Only afterward did I return to that mossy clearing, mapacho in hand, not to ask again but to give thanks: for the trees’ generosity, the soil’s patience, and every pulse of electricity that taught me how to listen.

This practice of asking permission, recording openly, and returning thanks is more than a personal ritual—it is the protocol of a relational, empathic science. It recognizes land, plants, and fungi as active collaborators with their own stories and agency. It shows us that what appears as decay may be preparation, what seems like solitude may be community, and what feels like chaos may be the pulse of renewal. In honoring these protocols, we enter a genuine partnership with the more-than-human world, and discover that true scientific rigor arises not from detachment, but from deep respect.

Those tobacco offerings also mark a deeper epistemic shift: precise measurement and embodied intuition are not at odds, but partners. Data alone tell only half the story; questions, feelings, and intentions complete it. In practice, this means treating trees, fungi, and land as co-researchers—framing experiments as ceremonies of exchange rather than extraction, and committing to sharing findings, protecting ecosystems, and upholding ethical accountability.

In empathic science, we do not chase an impossible neutrality. Instead, we embrace how curiosity, wonder, and even doubt shape our experiments, transforming cold numbers into a living dialogue. By asking permission, offering gratitude, and honouring our own humanness, we dismantle the myth of the disembodied scientist and step into a truly relational science, one in which measurement and meaning, method—and yes, a little magic—co-author a richer understanding of the living world.

Across continents—from Australia’s deserts to the Amazon’s rainforests—Indigenous peoples have practiced relational science for millennia. These knowledge systems weave together ceremony, observation, and reciprocity; they do not banish spirit from the land or from living beings.

Colonialism first displaced communities from their territories, then redefined the living world as mere “resource,” stripping away spirit and agency. Learning alongside Indigenous teachers and ontologies has shown me that what we deem “invisible” is simply what we’ve forgotten how to perceive.  It is through long relationship with the land—returning, tending, listening across generations—that people have learned its precise workings: when to burn, when to harvest, where to refrain, how to rest a site. Whether through fire-stick farming (cultural cool burning), seasonal calendars, or ritual offerings, Indigenous protocols are precise, repeatable, and steeped in empathy.

In my work, I strive not to appropriate these wisdoms but to learn from their protocols of co-creation, recognizing that every experiment is already a meeting of knowledge systems, both human and more-than-human. To honor this lineage, our conference and our publications must integrate Indigenous perspectives at every stage, from framing questions and interpreting data to dissemination and community feedback.

By restoring protocols of reciprocity—returning the spirit to the land, sharing benefits with Indigenous communities, and acknowledging the enduring contributions of those communities to science—we begin to transform both our research practices and the landscapes we study.

How can we transform large institutions, academia included, that are resistant to change? How do we reshape science so that intimacy is not excluded but welcomed?  

In a Zoom call leading up to the Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference, Rachael Petersen and I brainstormed about how to capture three days of ideas in one playful gesture. I shared how I had recently discovered the work of the Italian artist Maria Lai, who was trained classically in Rome and Florence. In her legendary 1981 experiential piece Legarsi alla Montagna, she invited every resident in the small Sardinian village of Ulassai to weave 17 miles of sturdy denim ribbon through their homes, across fields, and up the mountain. For three days, elders and children alike bound themselves to place and to each other in a literal, communal embrace. If the “invisible” is what we have forgotten how to perceive, Lai’s work was a lesson in remembering: Not a manifesto or a lecture, but a simple act that retrained perception to see relation. 

Inspired by this exercise, Rachael and I brought rolls of bright synthetic threads into our final session of the conference. Each of us took a length and began to weave—through chairs, notebooks, and laptop bags. Threads snaked under tables, stretched between scattered seats, and linked colleagues who hadn’t spoken before. Laughter and surprise rose as the usual rows of a conference room dissolved into a vibrant tangle.

The three days had already revealed connections that were there all along, woven through every conversation, every glance, every shared question. The threads didn’t create new ties; they merely made visible the web that had always held us. The now literal threads that connected our dialogues and understanding mirrored the myriad entanglements that connect forest and mycelial networks underground. 

When the threads were finally cut free, I did not see scraps but a lesson I could carry with me: beneath every protocol and every data point lies an unseen web of relations. May I carry that lesson into every experiment, honoring the living tapestry that binds us—for no strand stands alone.

1. Monica Gagliano and Suzanne Simard, Thus Spoke the Plant: A Remarkable Journey of Groundbreaking Scientific Discoveries and Personal Encounters with Plants (North Atlantic Books, 2018). [Return to Section]
2. Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (Bellevue Literary Press, 2019). [Return to Section]
3. Christine Webb et al., “Un-tabooing empathy: The benefits of empathic science with nonhuman research participants,” Conversations on Empathy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Imagination and Radical Othering, ed. Francesca Mezzenzana and Daniela Peluso (Routledge, 2023). [Return to Section]

Gagliano, Monica. "An Epilogue on Entangled Knowing: Science, Spirit, and the Lives of Plants" in Thinking with Plants and Fungi: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Ecology, Mind, and the More-than-Human World, edited by Rachael Petersen, Russell Powell, and Natalia Scott Schwein. Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, 2026. https://doi.org/10.70423/0003.15