The Forest of Becoming
Learning to Sense a Self Beyond the Human
It was dawn in the mountains of northern Vietnam when I entered the bamboo-green forest. The sky had been gray for days – normal for that time of year – but the persistent cloud cover left me with a muted, inward feeling, as if something in me had folded itself slightly shut. The day before, I had wandered through these hills without really arriving anywhere, my thoughts drifting as aimlessly as my feet. This morning, I needed another walk, hoping movement might loosen the fog inside my mind.
As I moved deeper into the forest, I made a small practice of opening my senses deliberately. I lifted my nose to catch the scent of crushed herbs. Thick roots twisted down red clay slopes like muscular ropes, gripping the earth with subtle determination. Above me, stands of bamboo and dipterocarp trees formed a dense green ceiling, filtering a rare shard of sunlight into trembling patterns across the forest floor. Somewhere behind me, a motorbike sputtered away – the last trace of human presence before cicadas, dripping foliage, and birdsong took over.
A narrow trail led me up a slope and then leveled off. After about half an hour, the path opened onto a small clearing dominated by an ancient tree. Tucked between its gnarled roots was a humble shrine built of rough wood and stone, draped with orange cloth. On the altar lay offerings of fruit and burned incense sticks planted in an ash-filled bowl. Despite the dense undergrowth, I had glimpsed the altar from a distance – a trace of red and orange against the greens – but the man sitting beside it took me by surprise. For a moment I hesitated at the edge of the clearing, suddenly aware of myself. I had felt almost invisible wandering among the towering trees, but now my presence mattered; it was as if I had stepped into the middle of someone else’s whisper.
We greeted each other with a gentle nod and smile. There were no words at first. The man was elderly, dressed simply, and had the calm of someone who had been here many times before. After a minute, he spoke a few halting words of English and gestures, explaining that the great tree behind the shrine was sacred to the mountain spirits of this place. As he spoke, he paused often. When a bird’s song suddenly broke off, he waited, listening. When a breeze shifted the canopy and changed the light, he adjusted his posture slightly. I couldn’t be sure how he understood these interruptions, but I became aware of how closely his gestures and silences were entwined with what was happening around us. What struck me was not any clearly articulated belief, but a way of presence that gently displaced my own habitual way of observing.
I was no longer simply looking at a shrine or at a forest; I was being drawn into a wider field of relations – human, vegetal, animal – held together by shared attentiveness.
When I finally bowed and continued along the path, something of that attentiveness stayed with me, my senses subtly recalibrated, so that the forest around me was no longer merely a backdrop but began to feel like an interlocutor in an ongoing, wordless exchange. Back on the trail, even the landscape itself seemed to open up as something readable: I stepped over a fallen branch, its sawed-off stump exposing concentric growth rings – an archive of years of sunlight, rainfall, drought, and recovery – while further on the air grew louder with a rising chorus of cicadas, their timing precisely tuned to the increasing light levels at the start of the day. Bird calls layered the canopy above me, the sharp warning of a crow giving way to softer coos echoing through the ferns, and even the wind appeared to participate, shifting suddenly, carrying the smell of distant rain and setting the bambooleaves whispering with a low, restless hiss.
Moving through it all, I realized I was inside an ecology of signs. Tree rings encoded years of abundance and scarcity; animal calls carried information about alarm, invitation, or territory; insects inscribed their presence into leaves in patterns that signaled stress, decay, or interruption in growth. A snapped branch was not just broken wood but a message that something had passed, prompting another body to slow, flee, or look up. Meaning shifted with the reader: the same bird’s shadow that would send a mouse into hiding barely registered for me, while the play of light that caught my eye meant nothing to the mouse.
This is what anthropologist Eduardo Kohn points to when he writes that forests think – not because they reason like humans, but because meaning does not begin with us. In his book How Forests Think (2013), he explains that meaning circulates through the living world wherever beings must attend and respond. A jaguar reads the scent and tracks of a peccary; the peccary reads the sudden silence of insects or the warning calls of birds. In such moments, when interpretation matters, the other temporarily functions as an orientation point for action and survival. The forest is then no longer a collection of silent objects, but a field of participants – human and more-than-human – who shape one another and are shaped in turn through the signs they encounter.
From this perspective, even the familiar riddle – if a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it – loosens its grip. The forest hears it. The crash sends vibrations through the soil, birds lift into the air, light spills into a newly opened gap, seedlings adjust their growth. Meaning unfolds not because a human witnesses the event, but because the world responds. The forest is never silent or unobserved; it is full of listeners.
Hours later, when I emerged from the forest and returned to the village road, my mind was buzzing with impressions. I found myself recalling the ideas of the philosopher, logician and mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce, whose work on semiotics (the theory of signs) offers a framework uncannily suited to what the forest had shown me. Peirce proposed that a sign is not just a symbol with a fixed meaning, but part of a living process. Any sign involves three components in relation: there is the sign itself (or representamen, the form the sign takes), an object (the thing or idea the sign refers to), and an interpretant (the effect or understanding produced in a mind by the sign). The interpretant is essentially a new sign in the mind of the interpreter – a thought, a reaction, a mental image – which can then lead to further interpretation. This means that meaning is dynamic: it unfolds as a chain of sign-interpretations, potentially without end. For Peirce, a sign’s meaning is not something contained in the sign itself; it comes into being only through the relation between the sign, what it refers to, and the response it elicits. I’ll try to explain with my forest walk as an example:
In the forest, I heard a sudden crack of a branch above me, that sound was a sign: it stood for some object (perhaps a monkey leaping or a branch giving way). The interpretant was my sharp halt and spike of alertness – the way my mind and body interpreted that sound as “something moved; pay attention!”. That interpretant (my state of alertness) became a new sign that meant “possible danger” or “look up” – which in turn caused me to scan the canopy for a monkey or squirrel. In this way, a single broken branch set off a little chain of semiosis: sound → alertness → search for cause → relaxed laugh when a macaque bounded into view. Crucially, if I hadn’t responded at all – if the sound produced no interpretant in me – then for me it would have had no meaning. A sign, to be a sign, must be interpreted by some mind (or “quasi-mind,” as Peirce would say).
As Peirce wrote, “a sign… creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign… The interpretant is the sign’s effect on the mind”. And because that effect is itself a sign, we get an endless, evolving conversation rather than a tidy, closed message.
Peirce also recognized that this process is not exclusively human. Any creature capable of responding to a sign is, in a basic sense, thinking. He even provocatively suggested that “thought is not necessarily connected with a brain. It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and throughout the purely physical world… one can no more deny that it is really there, than that the colors… of objects are really there… there can be no thought without signs.” In other words, wherever something reacts to a sign – even a plant bending toward light or an iron filing moving in a magnetic field – a rudimentary semiosis is taking place. Now, one can debate what counts as “mind” in such cases, but Peirce’s radical point is that the difference is of degree, not absolute kind. Our human thinking is just a very sophisticated mode of sign-interpretation, built on top of more fundamental sign processes that run through the living world. We are in continuity with nature’s meanings, not apart from them. I think you can now see how Peirce was a big inspiration for Kohn’s work.
Peirce’s and Kohn’s perspectives helped me articulate what I felt in the forest. In that environment of intense, necessary attentiveness, knowing was not a matter of detached observation; it was a dance of embodied responses. My body understood how to navigate the terrain before my brain put it into words. I ducked under branches, recoiled from a spiderweb, slowed down on slippery ground – all without formulating a plan, simply reading and answering the forest’s signs. Knowing, in that context, was not a neat, momentary recognition of some fact; it was a movement, a continuous flow of adjustments.
As I walked on, I began to notice that not only my perception of the forest had changed, but also how I experienced myself within it; seen through the relational lens of semiosis, the self is a semiotic process – our identity and consciousness are continually shaped by the signs we absorb and respond to.
In the forest, my sense of self had indeed become more of a process than a fixed point. I was still me, of course, but “me” was not a sealed container; it was an awareness distributed among sound and soil and memory, carried along by the dialogue between my senses and the forest.
When I think back to the shrine and that brief exchange of nods with the old man, I realize it was a perfect microcosm of this idea. Two humans, two selves, met among the trees – but our communication was almost entirely through signs other than spoken language. A bow, a smile, the shared glance at the sacred tree, the silence we held together when the forest itself “spoke” in bird or wind. In that interaction, the forest was not just a context; it was an active participant that shaped our behavior. My presence was a sign to the man (perhaps a sign of respect, since I bowed; perhaps a sign of curiosity or foreignness, since I was clearly not local). The man’s gestures were signs to me. Both of us took our cues from the more-than-human signs around us (the bird stopping its song, the sunbeam shifting on the shrine). None of this was spelled out explicitly, yet it was richly meaningful. We were, in a very real way, thinking with the forest – letting its signs guide our meeting.
By the time I left the forest’s edge that day, the light had softened with a fine mist of rain, and I noticed I was carrying with me a changed orientation. The boundary between “observer” and “environment” had blurred. The forest had not given me a lesson in words, but it had trained my attention into a state of reciprocity. It had made my mind a little more like a forest itself – alert, responsive, and entwined with everything around it.
Reading this now, you are probably not in that Vietnamese forest. But you are somewhere – perhaps in a room, or on a city street, or sitting by a window.
And wherever you are, you too are surrounded by a world that is speaking in signs: a tapestry of light and shadow, the hum of an appliance or the rustle of leaves outside, the subtle cues of your environment that you’ve learned to ignore or attend to. Attention is always at work, shaping what comes into focus and what fades into background. In a sense, the encounter never really ended when I stepped out of the forest – it continues in every moment that I remember to notice the “conversation” happening between myself and the world.
The great insight (if it can be called that) which lingers with me is a humble one: that the self is not a static, private island of consciousness, but a node in a living network of meaning.
Reflecting on Peirce’s and Kohn’s work, you could say that selfhood is distributed, it is a constantly becoming, relational ‘we’ – an ‘ecology of selves’, in Kohn’s words –rather than a mentally isolated ‘I’. We don’t exist in isolation; we become ourselves through our interactions – through the signs we interpret and the signs we emit. This view is both comforting and challenging. It is comforting because it means we are deeply connected to the life around us; we are less alone than we might feel, since every breath, every footstep is part of an exchange with the world. It is challenging because it asks us to let go of the idea of absolute control or absolute knowledge.
We must, like that old man at the shrine, sometimes pause and listen, letting the wider context speak through us. We must accept that responsiveness, not mastery, is the wiser path to becoming and knowing.
Sources: How Forests Think (2013) - Eduardo Kohn, and Signs of the Self: An Exploration in Semiotic Anthropology (1980) - Milton Singer