By Kris Ellery
A year ago I moved into my first home — well, the first home I bought by myself. I was so thrilled to decorate it. Plants are my favorite way to bring life into a space. I bought some, my lovely children and friends gave me some, and I loved and named them all. I spoke to them (I can’t sing, or I would have chosen that form of communication — think Amy Adams in Enchanted) and cared for them. Most of them are thriving.
But this one plant gave me a rough time.
It was a pretty baby ficus tree in a woven basket. I bought it a gold stand, put it under a grow light, and gave it a name — Phineas. He wasn’t happy. He dropped leaves immediately. I researched and found that he needed a window. The grow light wasn’t enough. I understood. I need windows too. I can get pretty grumpy in a dark home.
So I moved Phineas and his gold stand up to my bedroom, where he thrived for several months — until winter. Apparently he also doesn’t like drafts or sudden temperature changes. Again, most of his leaves fell. He doesn’t like to move, doesn’t like drafts, doesn’t like temperature changes, and responds to all of the above by looking terrible for months while he recovers.
I was done. Out to the garage he went, to wait for room in the recycling bin.
I don’t know how much you’ve been following Elon Musk’s plans for the next decade. I’ll just say I am unsettled, to put it mildly. Some parts are genuinely exciting and could go well. But by his own admission, the road to a good future could be very bumpy — and one of the things he’s said most plainly is that we will no longer be the most intelligent beings on earth.
Over the next few days, as things came up — eating meat, setting traps for fruit flies, a centipede in my house — I kept returning to a concept woven through many spiritual traditions: that those with power have a responsibility to care for those without it. That dominion means stewardship, not ownership. I’m not sure I’ve taken that seriously enough. I have tended to go along with whatever was socially acceptable, even when I knew in my heart it wasn’t particularly kind.
I thought about all the times I’ve almost gone vegan and talked myself out of it. I need protein for muscle building and collagen for my skin and hair, right? But then I thought — what will the next higher intelligence need? Do I want to be considered disposable for their greater purpose?
My outlook shifted the moment I put myself in the place of the less intelligent creature. A timeline of less than ten years makes that very easy to do. Whether his timeline proves accurate or not, the question it dropped into my mind felt worth the consideration.
It dawned on me that I may one day be at the mercy of a higher intelligence. One that might find me inconvenient. Hard to maintain. Not worth the trouble.
The next morning I brought Phineas inside. Gave him food and water and a nice new spot downstairs — by a window, away from a vent, near a friend: Little Miss Figgy (the actual given name of my fig tree).
I also hired someone to wash the trash bins regularly, to reduce the flies naturally instead of spraying.
I haven’t figured out the centipede yet. My son picked it up and took it outside. If I were alone, I don’t know that I could have.
I keep thinking about what it means to be in charge of something smaller and more vulnerable than you. Whether the goal is control or stewardship. Those aren’t the same thing.
I keep thinking about what it means to hope for a merciful future while not always having been merciful in the present. About the gap between the compassion I want extended to me and the compassion I’ve actually extended to other living things.
I don’t have an answer. Just a question I can’t stop turning over.
