When I water the flowers on my deck, I use a forceful spray. I am thinking how beautiful the colors are. Or maybe how hot the day has been. My goal is to keep the flowers alive so my guests and I can enjoy them.

When my neighbor Jean is ready to go on vacation, I offer to water her flowers. She invites me to see how she waters them. I expect to learn how her hose and spray work, but as she starts to water two large pots of fuchsia pink petunias, she is spraying gently, almost like sprinkling water on the head of a new baby. Watching, I see the flowers as gentle beings in need of attention and water, almost smiling at her.

I am aware of the Indigenous people’s belief in everything having a spirit. With all the books I’ve read, talks I have heard, and even movies I have made of spirits of the river, the earth, the sky, I never quite understood each flower deserving a gentle watering because it is alive. I thought I understood that humans do not have dominion over all other forms of life. Yet, a flower has a spirit, does not exist only to please me.

As someone who has heard of the preciousness of everything in nature, I thought I understood how everything is connected. Balanced. Some say that for peace and harmony all the elements need to be seen as spirit. Like the torrential rain. The fast-moving stream. Otherwise, there is war and extreme weather.

I am glad to be learning what plants are native to Vermont. Many of our flowers are grown for us somewhere else. I remember riding through the steppes and taiga in Mongolia on a horse. First there would be endless fields of yellow flowers, then purple, then orange, and one red lily as we were climbing a hill. None were planted.

Another time in Mongolia my grandkid Dune, a sound technician for our movie Transition, followed a Mongolian doctor to a field to gather medicine. It turned out to be rhubarb. An endless field of rhubarb. Dune said, “I didn’t know rhubarb came from Mongolia. I didn’t know it grew wild. Well, I guess every plant must come from somewhere.”

Rhubarb, by the way, is named for the Rhu River in Central Asia, so yes, it does come from there.

Maybe we are so spoiled by our seed catalogues that even though we grow fruits, vegetables, and flowers, we lose the bigger picture that they are their own beings from their own home. I am trying to fathom this.

Nature has its own plan, its own connections. I am learning about this when I look back on an interview with a reindeer herder named Chuluu G. A couple of years older than I am, and also a grandmother, she describes life from her childhood and younger years. Her father, she tells me, was a shaman. Under socialist time, people in power used to take the instruments and tools away from shamans.

“How did he manage to practice?” I ask Chuluu G.

“Oh, he performed a ceremony to request protection from the spirits. Thirteen years ago, after my father died, we placed his tools and clothes on a tree away from here, but still accessible to me. When something goes wrong for me, I go to that place.”

I find this both fascinating and curious. I ask if there are still pieces there.

“Everything was okay when I visited until last year when the lower part of the clothing was torn off. When I go to that place, it is very strange. Sometimes it rains on them. They get purified by the rain. That’s what I feel.”

“Yet there is a dry circle around the tree when it snows in winter.”

Chuluu G. told me this directly. I know these connections in my mind, but I am still not living them.

As for the flowers, I try to water them softly but slip into my old ways. I have a lot to learn.

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Sas Carey is grateful to continue learning. Her book “Marrying Mongolia” is available at www.nomadicare.org and the Vermont Book Store. Find the audio version wherever audiobooks are sold.