[:December 14th, 2021:] • I write this under December 14th. Technically it's December 15th, 12:15AM. • ... and I will be writing about my experiences on December 13th. • Yesterday I took the cat outside and met a plant. I chose a tree that I could see from my window, so that I would be around it passively throughout the day. • Thoughts recorded: • We used this tree for ourselves, and this is not love. The tree is here because it makes our roads look nicer and makes the apartment more appealing to potential renters. Not because we love it. • Plants are selfish: they take for themselves. But only as much as is required to live. Humans conquer and overbear. An invasive species dominates by accident, but a human dominates intentionally. • Spending time with the tree, I had some almost-physical sensation or connection. It reminded me of a recent experience being with a close friend and feeling a physical sensation of her body, distantly akin to hugging her, but we were not touching. • I continue to experience the tree merely as a reflection of myself • Even as I come and connect with it, on an intellectual level I see this connection as only existing as a personal experience, rather than something necessarily shared with the tree • Even when thoughts arise "from the tree", I identify the thought as being something that I have been exposed to before and have had latently in my mind already. By opening myself up to the tree, I feel that I am opening myself up to these latent ideas. This is strikes me as both (A) constructive, as it pushes me to explore concepts; and (B) incredibly dangerous, as I am opening myself up emotionally to these concepts before investigating them skeptically. • Again, I overall do not consider "the tree is a reflection of myself" to be a bad thing. More fundamentally I reject the concept of a shared experience in the first place and would argue that in each, actually both entities have an individual experience of having a shared experience. What's key here is that I don't think this necessarily detracts from the experience (though I feel it often may). I'm also butting up against the boundaries of common language here.