Joseph Campbell said,

“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.”

Welcome to The Soul Podcast I’m Stacey Wheeler.

Did you know that plants can hear? I recently watched a show that revealed this… and it also said plants make sounds outside of our hearing range. That’s outrageous, right? Plants communicating?! I found this hard to believe. So, I looked into the research. It turns out there’s a lot of it out there-and it’s being done all over the world.

Research done at Tel Aviv University in Israel, revealed that flowers exposed to the sound of a flying bee (or to a sound signals at similar frequencies), made the flower produce sweeter nectar within 3 minutes. This increase in sweetness created the potential to increase the chances of cross pollination.

Essentially, a flower can be triggered with sound to make itself more attractive to a species that helps it replicate itself. The flower could pick up on the vibrational frequency of a bee. It’s sounds a bit technical. So simply stated, “picking up a vibrational frequency” is what we refer to as “hearing”. So, they showed that the flower can hear. 

For a long time, we’ve understood there’s a form of intelligence in plants. The symbiotic relationships they develop with bees, birds and other animals are one example. Now we also understand plants use a form of hearing to make informed decisions. In this instance, to make itself more attractive in order to reproduce. 

Moving to another part of the world… another study out of University of Western Australia also found that plants can hear. This one was a little different but also showed that plant actions can be changed when exposed to sound. 

In her study, Monica Gagliano, an evolutionary biologist, and her colleagues worked with pea seedlings and found that the roots of these pea plants grow in the direction of the sound of water. When given multiple directions its’ roots can travel, the plants send their roots in the direction of the sound of water. This happens even when there is no moisture in the soil, only a sound being played. 

Gagliano said, "They just know that the water is there, even if the only thing they recognize is the sound…" 

What’s equally amazing is that we now know plants can make sounds as well as hear sounds. 

The reason I love this research is because it is an example of one more thing we didn’t know, we didn’t know.  We constantly find new things that prove to us that the full scope of our world is way beyond our wildest imaginations. And these revelations bring forward many new questions…

If plants can hear and make sounds… Do they communicate with each other? Do they also feel? Do plants have consciousness? These may seem like ridiculous questions, but moments before you learned that plants could hear and make sounds, didn’t the idea that they could hear and make sounds also seem ridiculous?  So, maybe the idea that plants may have a form of consciousness isn’t completely wild… But of course -at this time we don’t know.

There’s so much we don’t know. When we keep our minds open to the wonders of the world, we find that there is much more wonder in the world than we’ll probably ever know.

And think about it - people have been talking to plants forever probably. We all know someone who talks to their houseplants. I talk to mine. Until now it may have seemed silly to some. But is talking to plants really all that silly, now that we know they can hear? 

So, why do I share all this? 

It’s important to keep our minds open. And it’s vital to listen to our intuitions. Even when… maybe especially when our intuitions seem silly to others. But don’t take my word for it. 

In 1929, Albert Einstein was asked in an interview what the source of his genius was. Einstein had no doubts. He said, 

“I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am,” 

So, though his intuitions were unproven, he trusted his instincts. He followed his hunches and tested them. And he made amazing discoveries. Our intuitions often lead us to unseen truths. Like the intuition of talking to plants. It turns out they were listening all along. 

Many of us brush off our intuitions. Maybe we have a thought that vibrates somewhere in us. It feels true. In that moment we can either believe it or cast it aside. When Einstein pursued one of his ideas, he developed ways to test it when he could. The others he left as theories. You see, we don’t even have to prove an idea for it to be valuable. After all, when most of us think of Einstein we think of his equation E=Mc2. And that… is the theory of relativity. A theory.

Theories can be valuable… even if they are theories, we alone hold in ourselves. 

There’s so much we don’t know. So, much of our journey here involves theory. We must guess at things before we can decide if they are true. Millions of little things. Our brain does this every moment without being prompted. And our intuition is also at work in the background. When something vibrates in us, why not consider the possibility that it is true? Maybe it’s your intuition!

What in your life feels true to you, yet is unproven? 

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. said, “Every now and then a man's mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”

And you see, that’s what happens when we learn something that impacts our understanding of reality… even if only in a subtle way -like knowing plants can hear. Will you ever think of plants exactly the same again? That’s what Holmes meant. Your mind has now been stretched beyond its original dimensions. 

You’re welcome. 

When we trust our gut…. follow our bliss… the universe opens new doors and new spaces for our minds.