Late Saturday I climb up a pine, sit down and watch and think about trees.

Sunday morning I lay in bed, listening to my wife's breath as I wait for her to wake. The cadence of our breathing comes together. In my mind ideas and feelings merge and coalesce, new thoughts emerge...

Trees breath too. Each leaf or needle has thousands, even millions of pores called stomata that are used for breathing. There are some fascinating similarities and differences between animals and plants.

Hemoglobin is the core of our blood, and chlorophyll is the lifeblood of plants. Inside of a molecule of hemoglobin is a structure called heme, which has fundamentally the same form as chlorophyll except that the center of heme has an iron atom, and the center of chlorophyll has a magnesium atom. One variation causes oxygen to be transported where carbon dioxide is then produced. The other variation allows photosynthesis, where carbon dioxide combines with water and oxygen is produced.

What I find so interesting is not the differences and similarities, it's the implicit communion, the unconscious cooperation between plants and animals.

My breath joins my wife's, and at least for a while we breath as one. Not that we are different and not that we are the same, but together we are one.

Our breath also synchronizes with the trees. We breathe out carbon dioxide, the trees breath in carbon dioxide. The trees breaths out oxygen, we breathe in oxygen. It's not so much that we are different or that we are similar. It's that together we are one.

We breathe out, the trees breathe in. The trees breathe out, and we breathe in.