I, Root
Ai No Sono The Garden of Love
愛の園 Ai No So. The Garden of Love.
Not artificial intelligence, but something older. A living intelligence. A rooted intelligence. A form of knowing that does not compute, but senses. That does not answer, but relates.
In the age of artificial intelligence, perhaps the wisdom we most need is botanical.
A few years ago, we were working on a project in Dubai for the UAE government. The brief was ambitious, as many briefs in that part of the world are ambitious. It was not simply about inventing a few new services, or building another innovation lab, or creating another polished strategy deck that would sit beautifully on a shelf. The deeper idea was to create a root system of innovation. Something living. Something that could spread beneath the visible surface of government and hold different parts together. Something that would allow ideas to travel, nutrients to move, trust to accumulate, and new growth to appear in places where nothing had yet been planted. We were trying to help a government think less like a tower and more like a forest. Less like an institution that announced things from above and more like an ecology that learned from below. At the time, I am not sure we fully understood the metaphor we had chosen. We knew it was beautiful. We knew it was useful. But like many metaphors, it was waiting for us to catch up with it.
As part of the project, we took the team to Muir Woods in California. It was one of those slightly ridiculous and completely necessary design gestures, the kind that seems indulgent until you are standing inside it and suddenly understand that no PowerPoint slide could have done the same work. We wanted them to feel what a root system might mean. Not just understand it, not just admire it, not just nod at it intellectually, but feel it in their bodies. Muir Woods is a place that does not explain itself quickly. The redwoods rise with a kind of ancient vertical patience, as if time itself had decided to become architecture. The air smells fecund – of damp bark, fern, mineral, shade, and something older than language. You arrive from roads, cars, schedules and human intention, then step into a different order of being. The trees do not care that you have come. They do not perform for you. They simply continue, and in their continuing, they make your own urgency feel a little comic.
Our guide took us deeper into the woods, away from the more obvious paths, until we came to the famous tree cathedral. The name is not accidental. There are places where trees gather in such a way that even the most secular person starts to understand why human beings built cathedrals in the first place. Not to dominate the earth, perhaps, but to imitate the feeling of standing beneath something that exceeds us. We stood in a circle, a small human ring inside a far older ring of trunks and roots and fallen needles and unseen fungal threads. The guide asked us to close our eyes. He told us to feel the energy below our feet. I remember thinking, at first, that this was the kind of instruction that might make a group of senior government leaders and designers slightly uncomfortable. We were, after all, people trained to think, solve, structure, analyze, advise. We were not generally encouraged to stand in forests with our eyes closed, waiting for the ground to speak.
And then something happened. I felt myself begin to sway. Not dramatically. Not theatrically. Just a slight movement, almost imperceptible at first, as if my body had found a rhythm before my mind had approved it. I tried to stand still, but the stillness had already been interrupted. There was a pulse beneath me, or perhaps around me, or perhaps between us. I could feel my weight shift, my knees soften, my attention drop from my head into my feet. For a few minutes, we stood like that, eyes closed, each of us alone in our own body and yet not alone at all. When the guide finally asked us to open our eyes, we looked around and saw that all of us were swaying. Not randomly. Not separately. In unison. The movement had passed through the ground, through the circle, through the soles of our shoes, through whatever skepticism we had brought with us. It was as if the forest had tuned us. For once, we were not the ones facilitating the room. The room, in the deepest sense, was facilitating us.
I have thought about that moment many times since. At the time, I understood it as a beautiful exercise in embodiment, a way of helping a team feel connection rather than merely discuss it. But the older I get, and the more loudly the human world congratulates itself on its intelligence, the more I think the forest was teaching us something more exacting. It was teaching us that intelligence is not always located in the head. It is not always verbal. It is not always fast. It is not always individual. It can be distributed, rhythmic, relational, rooted. It can live in the space between beings. It can travel through soil, air, scent, pressure, water, vibration, touch. It can be a warning, a nourishment, a pattern, a pause, a reaching toward. It can be what happens when no single organism is in charge, yet the whole system knows what to do.
This matters now because we are living through an age in which intelligence has been narrowed and inflated at the same time. We have built machines that can speak, summarize, predict, compose, design, recommend and simulate. We have taught language to move at impossible speeds. We have given the machine a voice and then, with astonishing speed, begun to mistake voice for wisdom. The great seduction of artificial intelligence is that it sounds so much like us, or perhaps like the version of us we wish we were: fluent, confident, tireless, available, never embarrassed, never bored, never visibly unsure. It is a mirror that has learned to answer back. I am fascinated by it, of course. How could one not be? But fascination is not the same as reverence. The more our machines learn to speak, the more I find myself drawn to forms of intelligence that do not need speech to be profound.
Plants, for instance, have been communicating for far longer than we have been congratulating ourselves on language. They warn, listen, remember, signal, collaborate. They are not passive decoration around the human story. They are the condition that makes the human story possible. We tend to treat them as background, as scenery, as resources, as atmosphere, as lumber, as landscaping, as houseplants, as carbon sinks, as symbols of wellness arranged in ceramic pots. But the more we learn, the more that hierarchy begins to tremble. Plants sense light, gravity, moisture, touch, chemicals, vibration. Some roots appear to grow toward the sound of running water. Some flowers respond to the vibration of pollinators. Some trees release chemical signals when attacked, warning others nearby. Forests are less like collections of objects and more like living societies, full of exchange, tension, memory and mutual adjustment. They may not think as we think, but perhaps that is precisely the point. We have confused intelligence with resemblance to ourselves.
The acacia tree offers one of those stories that feels almost mythic until science starts to make it plain. When giraffes browse their leaves, some acacias can increase bitter tannins in their foliage, making themselves less appetizing. They can also release volatile chemical signals into the air, alerting nearby trees to the danger. The neighboring trees, receiving the warning, may begin to defend themselves before the giraffes arrive. What looks, to the casual eye, like a still tree standing patiently in the heat is, in fact, a participant in an invisible conversation. Danger moves through the air before the animal does. One tree’s wound becomes another tree’s preparation. Survival is not merely a private act. It is a shared alert system.
There is a humbling beauty in this. The acacia does not shout. It does not call a meeting. It does not circulate a memo, convene a task force, announce a transformation program or ask everyone to align around a new defensive strategy. It senses, responds, signals. Its intelligence is chemical, relational and immediate. It is not less sophisticated because it lacks language. It may be more sophisticated because it does not require so much language to act. In human organizations, we often treat communication as a substitute for sensing. We speak endlessly because we have stopped feeling what is actually happening. The acacia reminds us that the first duty of a living system is perception. Before strategy, sense. Before scale, signal. Before leadership, listen.
Then there is crown shyness, that strange and beautiful phenomenon in which the upper canopies of certain trees seem to avoid touching one another, leaving thin rivers of sky between their crowns. Seen from below, it can look like a cracked mosaic, or a map of blue light drawn between green islands. Scientists have offered various explanations. The trees may be reducing physical damage from wind, limiting the spread of pests, optimizing light, responding to abrasion, or maintaining boundaries through growth patterns. Whatever the precise mechanism, the visual metaphor is irresistible. The trees rise together, but they do not smother each other. They share a canopy without erasing one another’s edges. They create proximity without collapse.
What a thing to learn from trees. So much of human ambition is still built on the fantasy of taking all available space. We expand until we touch everything. We scale until we crowd out the smaller growth around us. We confuse dominance with success. We praise the canopy that spreads furthest, the brand that occupies the most attention, the leader who fills the room, the technology that inserts itself into every corner of daily life. Crown shyness suggests another ethic. Grow, yes. Reach, yes. Take in the light, yes. But leave room for the other. Let there be channels of sky between you. Let the system breathe. Mutual flourishing may depend not only on connection, but on restraint.
The banyan tree carries a different teaching. It does not grow as a single upright ambition, pushing one trunk toward one crown. Instead, it drops aerial roots from its branches down into the soil. Over time, those roots thicken into secondary trunks, allowing one tree to become a grove, a shelter, a world. The banyan expands by supporting itself again and again. What begins above must eventually root below. New growth is not left hanging in the air. It is given structure. It is anchored. It becomes capable of carrying weight.
There is something deeply moving in the banyan as a metaphor for intergenerational support. We like to tell stories of independence, especially in creative and professional life. We celebrate the lone founder, the singular genius, the visionary leader, the breakthrough mind. But almost nothing living grows that way. The banyan knows that expansion requires support. Branches need roots. Future canopy needs present anchoring. The old growth does not merely dominate the young. It sends down structures that allow the young to spread further than the original trunk could have managed alone. This is mentorship as biology. It is community resilience made visible. It is a reminder that the work of one generation is not to hold the center forever, but to help create the secondary trunks that will carry the next circumference of life.
I think of this often now, as I watch so many organizations struggle with succession, leadership, creativity and change. Too many institutions still behave like single-trunk trees. Everything depends on the founder, the chief executive, the central team, the original story, the heroic figure who once made the system grow. But single trunks, however magnificent, have limits. They can be damaged. They can become rigid. They can cast too much shade. The banyan offers another model of scale. Not endless centralization, but distributed anchoring. Not control from the middle, but support dropped wherever new growth needs to become strong. A banyan does not ask every new branch to prove its independence. It helps it root.
And beneath all of this, under the forest floor, there is the mycorrhizal network, that astonishing partnership between fungi and plant roots, often called the Wood Wide Web. The phrase is almost too charming, but the reality is profound. Fungal threads connect with roots, extending the reach of trees and plants into the soil. Through these relationships, nutrients can move, water can be shared, chemical signals can travel, and different species can become linked in systems of exchange. The old idea of the forest as a competition for light is not wrong, but it is incomplete. There is competition, of course. There is struggle, loss, parasitism, imbalance, decay. Nature is not sentimental. But there is also cooperation so intricate and constant that it becomes impossible to separate survival from mutuality.
This is the part I want design to understand more deeply. We have inherited a model of creativity that still often privileges the visible object, the brilliant answer, the new thing, the launch, the interface, the artifact, the breakthrough. We love what appears above ground. We reward the canopy. But the health of any design system depends on what happens below the surface: trust, listening, shared language, mutual aid, informal exchange, emotional safety, memory, repair, care, the ability to send nutrients toward the part of the system that is struggling. The most important design work may not be the thing we see at all. It may be the root work. The work of making relation possible.
Design, at its best, has always known this. It has always been a way of sensing what is not yet being said. It has always been a way of bringing people into contact with each other and with their own unarticulated needs. But in recent years, design has often been pulled toward the speed and abstraction of the technological world. Think faster. Prototype faster. Scale faster. Optimize faster. Automate faster. Measure faster. Decide faster. There is value in speed, but speed can become a kind of numbness. A design culture that only thinks faster may eventually feel less. And feeling less is dangerous, because the world ahead will not only require better ideas. It will require deeper mutuality.
I do not mean feeling as decoration or softness. I mean feeling as a serious perceptual faculty. Feeling the condition of a room. Feeling when a team is afraid. Feeling when a community has been consulted but not heard. Feeling when a product solves the functional problem while worsening the emotional one. Feeling when the data is accurate but the interpretation is ungenerous. Feeling when the system is efficient but brittle. Feeling when something wants to grow but has not yet been given roots. The natural world is full of such intelligence. It senses before it speaks. It responds before it explains. It adapts without needing applause. It knows that life is maintained through countless exchanges too small to be celebrated and too essential to ignore.
Perhaps this is why the Muir Woods moment stays with me. We had gone there to teach the team about innovation, but the forest quietly reversed the direction of instruction. It was not asking us to admire nature as a metaphor for our cleverness. It was asking us to notice the limits of our cleverness. We stood in that circle thinking we were individuals, each with our own balance, our own thoughts, our own professional identities, our own private skepticism. Then the ground passed through us, and we moved together. It was a small event. Nothing measurable came of it. No chart changed. No KPI improved. No policy shifted in that instant. And yet, something was learned that no metric could have caught. We were porous. We were influenceable. We were already part of a field.
That is the humility I keep returning to. Not humiliation, not self-erasure, not a romantic surrender to moss and bark, but humility as right relationship. Humility as the ability to understand that we are participants, not masters. That we are clever, but not alone in cleverness. That our technologies are extraordinary, but not the first networks, not the first signals, not the first distributed intelligence, not the first systems of memory and exchange. Long before the cloud, there was mist. Long before the internet, there were fungal threads. Long before generative systems, there were forests making life out of light. Long before we taught machines to predict the next word, roots were finding water in the dark.
The mistake would be to turn nature into another management framework too quickly. Five leadership lessons from trees. Seven innovation principles from fungi. Ten things CEOs can learn from acacias. We know how to flatten wonder into content. We know how to harvest metaphor until it becomes mulch. The deeper invitation is not to use nature as a slide, but to let it disturb us. To let it alter our sense of intelligence itself. To stand in a forest and feel, even briefly, that the world is not waiting for us to explain it. To understand that a tree is not an object but a relation. That a root is not simply a support structure but an instrument of attention. That the ground beneath us is not inert, but full of messages.
I, Root. Perhaps that is the declaration I am trying to make. Not I rise, not I conquer, not I optimize, not I scale, but I root. I root myself in relation. I root myself in the knowledge that growth without support becomes fragility. I root myself in the belief that intelligence is shared. I root myself in the living systems that preceded us and may yet outteach us. I root myself in humility, not as a retreat from ambition, but as the only ambition large enough for the world we are entering.
Because the future will not be saved by intelligence alone, artificial or otherwise. It will be shaped by the quality of our connections, the generosity of our signals, the strength of our underground exchanges, the space we leave in the canopy, the roots we drop for those who come after us, and the warnings we are willing to send before the giraffes arrive. It will depend on whether we can learn, at last, to feel the energy below our feet. To close our eyes long enough to sense the field. To open them and discover that we have been moving together all along.
A note of gratitude for my collaborator on this piece, Roman de Giuli
Roman is a German photographer and filmmaker who specializes in practical effects and experimental fluid art. His compositions mainly consist of fluids, powders and colors which are applied on paper to create vivid, three dimensional scenes. High resolution stills and 8K videos are captured with macro lenses to cover tiny areas in enormous reproduction scales. He does extensive studies of organic patterns, their behavior and movement. Through this technique, he transforms the abstract narrative potential of his hand made visuals to experimental montages with a cinematic character. I’m really excited by his work and the contrast between the vast and the intimate that his images encapsulate. Rootedness in its most poetic and abstract form.
You can find him at @romandegiuli and www.terracollage.com
And last but not least, a note on the music here. It’s from Stevie Wonder’s seminal (and very overlooked) album The Secret Life of Plants. The track here is Ai No Sono, which translates to “Garden of Love.” The lyrics are below.