Breathing With the Green World We Forgot to Thank
I was pulling weeds from Happy’s flower garden when it hit me: I was about to kill something that had been keeping me alive my entire life without asking for anything in return. The small plant in my hand—nameless, unwanted, growing through a crack in our concrete courtyard—had spent its brief existence transforming carbon dioxide into oxygen, cleaning the air I breathe, asking for nothing but sunlight and water.
I had never thanked a plant before. I had never even noticed them as individuals.
Every breath I’ve taken since birth was a gift from beings I’ve treated as background decoration. Every meal I’ve eaten came from plants or from animals that ate plants. The paper I write on, the cotton I wear, the wooden table where our family shares dinner—all of them were alive once, growing quietly in the service of life itself.
Plants are the planet’s lungs, and I had somehow spent thirty-nine years breathing without acknowledging the source of my breath.
It started with that weed, but then I began seeing them everywhere: the neem tree shading our balcony, the rice plants feeding half of Asia, the algae in the pond at my grandmother’s village, the moss growing in the shower drain. An entire kingdom of beings working around the clock to maintain the atmospheric conditions that keep animals like me alive.
They ask for nothing. They give everything. They have been the earth’s most generous citizens for hundreds of millions of years, and we call them weeds when they inconvenience us.
The tomato plant Happy tends so carefully produces not just food but oxygen. The money plant in our living room isn’t just decorative—it’s actively cleaning the air we breathe, filtering toxins from the atmosphere we’ve polluted. Even the grass I walk on without thinking is working, photosynthesizing, turning light into life.
We live in a world where plants have solved problems we’re still struggling with. They’ve figured out how to eat sunlight. They’ve mastered the art of taking something harmful—excess carbon dioxide—and turning it into something life-giving. They’ve created systems of communication and cooperation that span entire forests.
And we barely notice them unless they’re beautiful or useful or in our way.
I think about the plants that died to make this paper, the trees that were cut to build our house, the countless green beings whose bodies became the foundation of everything I depend on. I have been living off their sacrifice without acknowledgment, taking their gifts for granted the way children take their parents’ love for granted.
But children eventually learn to say thank you. When do we learn to thank the green world that raised us?
The moment I realized plants have been silently supporting my entire existence was the moment I understood that I have been in relationship with them my whole life—I just didn’t know it. Every plant I see now feels like meeting a relative I should have recognized years ago, someone who has been caring for me since before I was born.
They have been loving us into existence, breath by breath, meal by meal, season by season, with the patient generosity of beings who understand their role in the larger community of life.
The least we can do is notice them. The least we can do is say thank you.
