Apples have a social relationship with humans, bears, horses, deer, porcupines, mice, voles, gophers and birds. In Canada, this is called an environmental relationship.

Canada also calls this either a prey relationship or a harvest relationship: prey for those who destroy the tree; harvest for those who gather in its fruit, or at least peck at it.

One is allowed to shoot the prey, but only if one if a professional harvester. Otherwise, not. These are all social relationships. I have a social relationship with this peach shrub.

I have one with this siya?

When it rises in the sun and when it droops in the rain.

It’s not just that they all blossom to catch my eye, and give fruit for me to take away. It’s not just that I am their walking. It’s that the bonds I have with them write my life.

Which I then read. I’m pretty clear that I’m just a supervisory cognitive function over these relationships, and it would pain me to deny them if it weren’t that my essence isn’t in this supervisory function. My essence is to be a doorway through which things communicate, socially, in an eternal present.

In contrast, “Prey” and “Harvest” are settler concepts. They are the ideas of a culture that is not at home. It does not walk for these plants, or choose apples for their sweetness, as bears once did in Khazakstan. It does, however, allow for beauty, which it describes as feminine.

And it allows for bees, as a kind of divine visitation.

But it says that social relationships happen between individuals in human society, or between humans and those animals they keep as pets. These trees are kept as pets, too, I suppose.

Bees are allowed to have social relationships with each other, as are trees, but not with humans. This is just silly. Right now, when we have a social relationship with a virus is a great time to set that nonsense aside.