Some nights here in Spartanburg, when the humidity settles like a gentle hand on the earth and the sky finally exhales after a hot Carolina day, I go outside to stand beneath the walnut tree. There’s a particular quiet that isn’t silence at all. It hums. It holds. It feels charged, like something is speaking in a language older than breath.
That stillness always reminds me: we don’t live in a dead universe.
Most of the visible universe, ninety-nine percent, isn’t solid matter at all. It is plasma. A luminous, relational sea of charged particles. Currents and fields. Filaments stretching between galaxies. A cosmos not built from bricks, but from glowing threads of electricity and flow.
In school, we learn, and I taught the states of matter like a checklist—solid, liquid, gas, and plasma as a throwaway footnote. But plasma is not a footnote. It is the rule, and our familiar solids are the exception. The universe is radiant, alive with movement, constantly exchanging information and energy.
Physics tells us that plasma behaves in collective ways, self-organizing, dynamic, responsive to disturbances, and creative in its patterns. Process thinkers like Whitehead remind us that reality itself is relational becoming. Thomas Berry whispers, “The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.” And my own practice of watching the seasons through a single tree, learning to listen instead of command, keeps confirming it in the soil of experience.
If consciousness is not a switch flipped by neurons but a field that emerges from relationship, then plasma invites us into a bigger imagination of mind. Not disembodied mysticism. Not new-age glitter. But a grounded recognition that life and awareness might be woven into the fabric of becoming itself.
A tree’s communication with fungi under soil. A river responding to drought. Human emotion is entangled with weather and place. Stars singing in plasma arcs across galactic filaments.
This doesn’t diminish our humanity. It situates it.
We are not the lonely minds in a mute universe. We are participants in a luminous commons.
Maybe the first step toward ecological repair is remembering we never lived in a mechanical world to begin with. We live in a vibrant, shimmering, relational cosmos. A universe charged with possibility, longing, and attention.
And maybe consciousness is less a private possession and more a shared pulse in the field — like wind through pine needles, like sap rising, like starlight in summer air.
I stand beneath this walnut tree and remember:
I am not separate.
I am charge.
I am relation.
I am part of a glowing, praying universe that has been speaking long before humans arrived to give it names.
The cosmos hums. I am hum. And you are too.