Roses

Dreaming last night, I was walking in my garden, which was unaccountably - since it is Winter - full of roses.

Huge blooms of all colours grew from bushes and trees, and although I rarely get the sense of smell vividly in my dreams, still I knew that their scent was powerful and beautiful.

When I awoke, something was nagging me...what was it now..oh yes, my doctor had found an unacceptably high blood pressure reading in me when I visited him for the 'flu two weeks ago.

Roses, for those who don't know it yet (and that apparently included me up to a few hours ago) are a sovereign aromatherapy for high blood pressure.

Right Relationship

..and of course, what I totally forgot to say last week, in expounding the virtues of plant medicines, was that it's always important to ask the plant.

Here's Stephan Beyer and Christina Pratt reminding us of why it is important for us as humans to be in right relationship with the world in general and the plants as allies specifically.

One picture which Dr Beyer painted, of healing plants being administered only in hospital settings by authorised medical personnel, was particularly chilling. Is this what we want? And what is it the plants want?

Rather than grasping at possible miracle cures, I suggest that we all take the time to alter our worldview.

Get out there. Sit with the plant, or the spirit of the plant. Ask it what it desires of us. Enough of this casual, anthropocentric disrespecting of other corporeal and non corporeal life forms already. It's a contributing factor in the wetiko disease, after all.

Le Bois Sacre

A friend of mine is celebrating six years of sobriety tomorrow.

I have no idea if she attends AA meetings, but for myself - and I suspect for many an addict -they just never did work sufficiently to put me in that place where I could achieve consistent freedom from alcohol.

Today I'm looking back down 14 years of continuous, wonderful, almost unbelievable lack of dependence on either alcohol or tranquilisers. I still sometimes dream of how it was, and I wake up terrified. Lest I forget.

I was quite surprised this week to find myself watching an episode of Law & Order - Special Victims Unit. Surprised to be watching the gods-damned telly, for sure (especially a series dedicated to murder porn in which the victims are nearly always women), but more surprised to find that the episode contained a strong endorsement for Ibogaine as a substance-abuse treatment.

Iboga - used by the Bwiti and NeoBwiti people of West Africa for ages as an initiatory drug - is found chiefly in the roots of 3 plants, 2 of which(Tabernanthe Iboga and Voacanga Africana) are found only in Africa, while the third (Tabernaemontana) flourishes as far afield as Australia.

It is quite usual for a heroin addict to break her dependency on opiates after a single-dose treatment of Ibogaine; something almost unheard of in drug rehabilitation. No scary and life-threatening withdrawals either.

This plant ally seems to work by kicking the addict gently out of her well-worn groove of substance abuse. It confers a heightened ability for introverted insight, the process sounding a little like a near death experience. Or a Shamanic Dismemberment, which I understand is its usual application in Africa.

So, all the nations of the world have picked up on this wonderful medicine and are using it to break the chains of heroin dependence throughout their lands, no?

No, of course not. In the US, Australia,Sweden,Denmark, Poland, Belgium, France and Switzerland it is a schedule I drug, tightly controlled, and even growing the plants turns one into a criminal automatically. Notice that those countries are among those with the highest level of tragedy concerning Heroin abuse.

I see that we apparently boast an Iboga treatment centre in the Western Cape in this country, though. I wonder if it's still a going concern? That would be something  - for all our violence and extreme forms of patriarchal woman abuse - of which we could be very proud.

Pic: le bois sacre, or Tabernanthe Iboga, courtesy of the vaults at Erowid

Coleus And Cosatu

A thin but very dense cloud came and sat over us just as the invisible lunar eclipse started. It looked as if we were sitting under a grey mushroom which dropped a little hail, rumbled a bit of thunder, and discharged lightning along its interior.
Then it was gone as if it had never been. The eclipse was over, and I was visited by another plant in my dreams.

Allow me to introduce Coleus - whose scientific taxonomy actually reads Solenestemon, but we've been calling it Coleus for so long that the name has stuck, for humans.

The meeting was in a garden courtyard, full of rain and luxuriant vegetation, which I was looking at through a glass door. There were wooden chairs among the plants - indicating humans of a low level of technology. A rocking chair with a broken left arm was sitting not far from a patch of Coleus, and a voice said to me: "Don't worry, we can fix this."

There were people being killed and re-appearing from parallel dimensions, too.

Coleus - to my surprise,although maybe it shouldn't be - is considered psychoactive., but unresearched in the entheogen department. While I have no intention of taking it for this purpose, still it remains a fact that psychoactive plants are invariably beneficial to humankind in other healing ways.

And now, with a psychedelic change of subject,a word from COSATU:

In the wake of a High Court hearing on eTolls at which the defence advocate descended into threats against both the judge and the prosecuting advocate(however smarmily disguised), the Congress have decided they're going to mobilise against the government decision to ram the privatisation of the freeways down our throats.

Tomorrow the protest marches begin. Gather at Mary Fitzgerald Square at 9am.
Next week Thursday the people intend to occupy the highways. There may well be violence.

I leave it to your individual consciences whether or not to join in. But I will say this: it's about bloody time we all started to take action.

A Little Help For My Friends

We do try to keep the gardening down to a minimum.
The principle is that the less you interfere in the plant kingdom, the healthier it will be.

But the roses - except for the Thug Roses, which need only occasional guidance around a wooden pole - need to be pruned in Winter, poor aliens in this land that they are.

The pruning took place in July, and the English Maids are thriving now. This morning my mission seemed to be to help out the Honeysuckle which has woven itself over the North face of the Circle over the last 7 years.

The poor thing was mostly dead wood, so I secature'd away with heartfelt apologies. Within the dead wood, however, was a single tendril of living, pale green and leafy Honeysuckle plant. I had to extricate it from its protection, and wound it around the North wooden balustrade. I heard it thank me as I smeared some of my blood over its stem, courtesy of the neighbouring Thug Rose.

Sometimes - as today, as a fortnight ago when I stripped dead Yucca leaves from our over-ten-foot-tall specimen - they welcome a little help.

Lemons are falling, Spinach is shooting up, Jasmine almost finished but heavenly-scented, Yesterday-Today-and-Tomorrow throwing a blanket of ultra-sweet over the street gate. Green appearing everywhere, along with the straw colours of the Winter Dead.

It is such an honour to be able to give a little hand, and to hear the long-wave pulse of the plants themselves greeting the Spring, and me.

Coltsfoot Speaks Again

Does the nose cause the smell? Do the eyeballs cause the thing beheld?
Why, then, do we cling to this pernicious idea of consciousness arising from and caused by the brain?

It was the middle of last night when I was almost forced to get out of bed. Phlegm had trickled down into my lungs as I slept and I was wracked with useless unproductive coughs.

I took a slice of bread and peanut butter and some water in the dark. It was then that I remembered the promise to a colleague which had slipped my mind for days - I took out the boxes of dried Coltsfoot flowers and Artemisia, mixed them together, and sealed them in an airtight bag.

As I did this, the Coltsfoot spoke directly to me. Under its direction, I picked out a pinch of Coltsfoot flowers, crushed them a little, and inhaled the tussilaginous aroma. I could feel the vapour dispelling the phlegm from my chest as I drew it in. After a couple more sniffs, my lungs were clear and I went back to bed.



As I have ranted before, parsimony compels me to ascribe such knowledge as coming from the plant, rather than that murky, somewhat abstract and completely undefended notion of the-brain-making-shit-up.

Unfortunately, we seem to have bought that idea hook line and sinker: that consciousness arises in and is created by the brain, rather than the idea which more closely fits all the experiential knowledge, that the brain is an organ of reception for consciousness just as the nose is an organ for the reception of smell and the eye an organ for the reception of sight.
Sometimes, I just don't know what to do about humans. I just don't.

Parsimony

I was listening to Terence McKenna talking on ethnobotany this morning (courtesy of the Psychedelic Salon), where he mentions Ayahuasca.

Apart from the fascinating entheogenic properties of this psychotropic brew, the discovery of it is fascinating in itself.

We don't know who the first human was to put psychotria viridis leaves together with smashed stems of banisteriopsis caapi as a tea, but the awesome fact is that, amongst tens of thousands of plant species in the Amazon jungle, these two in combination – and only in combination – produce an intense DMT trip. This trip which, somewhat distastefully to me, is available to casual tourists in the Amazon basin today.

The one plant, psychotria viridis, produces DMT in its leaves, but this DMT is unavailable to humans until a monoamine oxidase inhibitor is added: and banisteriopsis caapi is the vine whose bark contains exactly that. It could have been a process of trial and error which led humans to the correct combination of plants.

But, you know, there's this tool much-used in the bag of tricks which metaphysical materialists carry with them wherever they go. It's called Occam's Razor, and it basically says that, when faced with a choice of explanations for a phenomenon, choose the simplest. I like this principle of parsimony very much, not being given to understanding the Cosmos as a terminally complicated place governed by a jealous god who goes out of his way to make things non-understandable to people.

Turning back to the topic of plants again, I remember when, a couple of years ago, I dreamed of a small yellow plant with odd-shaped leaves. And in the dream, I heard the name Coltsfoot uttered. When I woke up, I wrote it all down. Now, I had never suffered from bronchitis before in my life- despite being a fairly heavy smoker – and, even though it was Winter, I wasn't aware of anyone around me at home or at work who had bronchitis. Therefore it was a stunning revelation to me when, about 10 days after dreaming of Coltsfoot, I came down with bronchitis for the first (and so far only) time. Why stunning? Well, one of the major properties of Coltsfoot is its ability to dry up phlegm. It was a remedy much used in the past in cases of bronchitis.

Now, I suppose I could explain this somewhat in the following manner:

I somehow knew, ten days ahead of time, that I would contract bronchitis (even though my body had never hosted this particular pneumococcal bug before). Plus, I somehow knew that the plant Coltsfoot was sovereign against this disease – it's not impossible, to have subconscious knowledge which comes out in a dream. But to dredge up this particular piece of arcane lore just before I came down with the illness it is strongly indicated for is, really, pushing it. Although I guess it could all have been coincidence. There's at least 3 fuzzy suppositions in there.

The much more parsimonious explanation – and the one I prefer – is that the mechanism at work here is simply that of a living being communicating with another living being. And we know that's a common,if not universal, modality.

What gives depth and strength to this preferred explanation – that the plant spoke up and warned me – are the numerous occasions of plant communication in dreams which followed. To this day, I continue to speak with the plant kingdom, and although their timing may not be human (as with the Pin Oak who produced a gorgeous green-leaf-bearing shoot at exactly eye-height for me on an otherwise artificially stripped trunk), and their reasons sometimes obscure, it remains a rich and rewarding field of experience which draws me ever closer to a knowledge that the entire damned universe is alive, and, if you are inclined to listen carefully, speaking.

Pic: Banisteriopsis Caapi, the Vine of Souls

This Place Likes To Have Fun

 


Yesterday I made up a tea of crushed Juniper berries and Buchu leaves - a first time for me.
It tasted delicious, so I assume my body was craving something in the mixture. But more importantly, it started to work almost immediately. I've had one sore kidney since Sunday night's 'flu onset, and while not debilitating it was a bit annoying.
Juniper and Buchu are both great diuretics. Juniper helps blood flow to the kidneys - I'm thinking this is what caused the practically instant effect - and both have antiseptic properties when processed through the urinary tract. After three cups of this brew (just boiling water added to a tablespoon of berries and leaves) I'm feeling a real improvement. Buchu has other properties which were well known to this country's indigenous people; I think a digestive aid is one of them. But Juniper grows in my garden, in the shape of two sentinel bushes and a tall bouncer tree, and I feel absolutely at home with its fruits.



I've also been having run-ins with beaks over the last couple of days. First it was a Green WoodHoopoe, a little rain-bedraggled, perching just outside my window and cackling at me.

Next I found myself scolding three Scimitar Bills who were quarreling loudly in my neighbour's Kaasboom yesterday.

Right after I'd got them to quiet down, a bonded pair of African Hoopoes walked under the front gate and started drilling up the soil.

All of this Hoopoe-ing activity is quite apart from the odd behaviour of a pair of Hadeda Ibises which, for the past week, have seemed intent upon annoying and teasing Taranis and Scylla by landing heavily on the grass right in front of the dogs and yelling loudly from the Douglas Fir. All day.

Don't ask me, I'm just the Witch of this place - and sometimes, this place likes to have fun.

Reports From The Pantheist Front

Since I'm in the office any time between 5 and 5:30 in the morning, I tend to take a lunch break at about 11.

I wander downstairs for a change of scenery and have a smoke next to the wastebin beneath a poor, tortured, caged Pin Oak.

(No, I don't have a problem smoking a cigarette near the tree. It's only humans it seems who have dramatic hissy fits at the smell of tobacco)

When I've finished smoking I pick up the litter of dogends, plastic earbuds, chewing gum and crisp wrappers which are strewn on the earth beneath the tree. Yes, just half a metre from a wastebin, people still prefer to throw their refuse on the ground.So, I pick it up for them.

This morning as I walked toward the Pin Oak, I opened my bag to get my cigarettes, and a swirl of wind blew a perfectly Autumn-toasted Pin Oak leaf into my handbag. Just one airborne leaf, in the air, into my small shoulder bag. Thank you.

I have it on my computer monitor now.

Green Aid

I have a tincture of fresh Plantain leaves macerating in a coloured bottle today - it should be ready sometime in the second week of March. But I'm keeping an eye on it. The plant seems to grow only in one specific place in the garden, and is considered a weed by the unintelligentsia.

I've already guinea-pigged the tincture on myself, and it's wonderful for skin lesions, stings, itches and rashes. Taranis is presently on cortisone to control his allergies, but I'm hoping that the Plantain will be an added soother for his red inflamed skin.
Anyone else out there tried this?

Meanwhile, back at the workplace, a colleague is so hooked on my dried herb remedy for his sinusitis that he got into trouble with the police a couple of months ago. They pulled him over in a routine roadblock and searched his car. The little baggie of Wormwood and Coltsfoot aroused more than suspicions - they were about to lock him up, when a nurse who was accompanying the Metro Cops confirmed that the plants were harmless. Well, I wouldn't call them harmless, myself - but certainly not illegal.

Standing Still In The Land

Since our little Daewoo didn't quite get through the vehicle roadworthy test last weekend, we brought it back today with a tightened-up handbrake and new ball joints.
While we were waiting for the examiner to go over these two points, I revisited the Vygies.

The bright purple Mesembryanthemums were tightly wrapped up against the overcast morning, but, as I stood there drawing in their anarchical beauty in the middle of a testing-station parking lot, they started to unfurl. Deep golden stamens were presented to what there was of the sun. Because we've got a lot of rain coming (with flood warnings this weekend), the wind had started to blow quite hard, but the little purple flowers with their succulent leaves stayed quite still - apart from this gorgeous opening movement.

Did I mention that a couple of minor physical irritations which I've had for years have disappeared with the recent solar eclipse in Capricorn? Well, the inability to stand perfectly still when in an upright position was one of them. I am now able to dig my roots deep into the Earth and just stay there, for hours if necessary. And it was effortless to stand like that to witness unfurling Vygies.

Eventually, a flurry of yellow wings caught my attention, and I turned to one of the Sweet Thorn Acacias standing around the lot's perimeter. A half a dozen Weaver families had built their incredible nests there, and I was being threatened by a bold male: wings flapping quickly as he rode the swaying tree branch, trying his best to look three times his size.

I sent him my reassurances of peaceful and loving intent, and he stopped, hopped onto the next branch, and became an upside down bird for a moment as he checked on his chicks and mate in the nest. But for a while there I was also riding the wind-moved branch, my plumage gaudy and shining in the sun, a proud bird with a mate and family to defend.

This land is - even with all the concrete, tar and steel - my place. As much as it is the Vygies' place, the Weavers' place and the place of the Sweet Thorn Acacia and the rawking Pied Crow passing high above us.

Take, Eat...

Yes, the dominant culture really does turn the living world into dead things.

And yes, I eat living things, too.

But there is, you know, a difference between a living being eating other living beings as part of being a living being, and a culture taking living beings and turning them into dead objects for nothing more essential than bodily adornment, or a means of getting somewhere really fast, or plastic goodies to keep cutlery in.

And, in that vein, I really don't care very much what another living being eats to sustain hir status as a living being, as long as that's what the eating is for, and not to address some shadow issue s/he had with hir parents twenty years ago.

And so, considering the pie-ing of Lierre Keith by a bunch of vegans, apparently in a fit of revenge for her having written  The Vegetarian Myth , last year at an Anarchist Book Fair, I am deeply saddened to have come across this website.

Not because it critises Lierre's book - that's a legitimate part of open and honest dialogue - but because of some of the stances it takes on the plant realm.

In the section Plant Sentience we read that "While it is true that plants have fascinating, complex stimulus feedback systems, modern science knows that these are not sufficient to give rise to consciousness.."  That makes me very, very sad, as you can imagine if you've been following along in my plant communication series.
 
Even if you haven't been following my particular adventures, how hard is it to accept that the whole darned world is engaged in sacred communion with itself - eating and being eaten, killing and dying, absorbing food and being food?

This arbitrary drawing of a line in the sand, and declaring one side of it to be populated by conscious beings, and the other not, is appropriate only to the science of the Wetiko culture - which sees life not as a self-sustaining web, circle or sphere, but as a domain to be dominated and dissected, and turned into gold and diamond rings and toy guns for little boys.

The Consciousness Goddess

Lo, and I saw, from within the forest's shade, the plains of Africa displayed. And a ragged band of chimp-like hominids following a herd of wild ungulates at a distance, watching for the infirm, the very young, the very old, to lag behind the pack where they could be picked off for supper.

The females and younger males of the chimp-like band were also foraging for food - the berries, nuts and herbs which the Mother gave so bountifully. And also for the mycotic species of plants which could be found growing often within the dung of the plains herds.
The fungus which when ingested improves visual acuity and also opens the doors and windows of consciousness in anthropoids, the mushroom which may have promoted and indeed formed the imagination in early humankind: the psilocybin mushroom.

And those wild ungulate herds themselves! Before we tamed them and made them into cattle, could these have been the basis of our worldwide early veneration of the cow? Mother goddess in bovine form, progenitor of the sacred plant. Soma, manna, eluesinian mystery source - dropped from Her hind quarters as a benison!

...and today I read that right here, right now, we still arrest the people  for growing the sacred medicine. How unutterably sad.

Image: from 'Shroomery

I Breath Starshine

Last night, just before falling asleep, I experienced one of those hypnagogic states which often teach me far more than I can learn trawling through books and the internet.

I saw a vast expanse of plants of all sizes and species - rolling over low hills, forming bushveld and forest, plain and meadow. The tawny back of a large cat could just be glimpsed through the plants at one point. The plant life was so thick that it created the landscape. I breathed the starshine of those cellulose beings.

And I was made to know that this is what the plants do. They bind the earth, and bind the Earth, forming the geography of our planet.

I was then made aware that, just as animals are life forms which can move freely in space, so are plants those life forms which move in time. The seed of a plant is the result of a plant moving backward in time.

A cool wind swept over my almost-sleeping body, then, and I saw my patron deities displayed as beings made of plants: Hecate a maiden all of wild grasses, bundles of cereal stalks in her hands, Anubis a maize-eared being sheathed in flowers.

We animals, I noted, rely upon the plants to drive our mobility in space; plants rely upon animals to facilitate their propagatory movements through time. It dovetails. So much beauty in this cosmos that I am swept away in wonder and with awe.

Wabun 'k wabuna

Rising, thou risest.


(Children of Dune: Frank Herbert)

Welcome to the Dream Season, the season in which the soul undertakes its most important evolutionary strides, the season in which the plants and animals whisper into your mind as you sleep, and all the world seems bent on becoming more than it was before....

On the night when Neptune turned retrograde, in the sign of my natal moon, the plants returned to communicating with me in dreams.

This time I received more of a genre specification than a species.

Five flower heads arose on one stem, each one a different colour. The central flower looked a little like a large daisy, and I knew it was linked to the Sun, as the flower heads around it were linked to the Moon and other planets.

It was the Solar flower which held my dreaming attention - a voice said Serpentine.

I have never heard the term before, but behold: an entire category of plants bearing this name.

Apparently, they're great at removing specific toxic elements from the soil.

Now to find out if any local varieties exist which I can use in my own slightly tainted suburban soil...

Image: John Schoenherr

Methodology

Being a Mad Person, yesterday I undertook to help Warren load an entire chopped-up Pearl Acacia and an entire chopped-up Bougainvillea onto the bakkie and take it to the composting centre near Roodepoort. 'Flu bug and all.*

In recognition of the fact that I was not 100 percent well - still shaky, nauseous and sore - I took frequent sitting-down breaks in the lapa.It was on one such interlude that I noticed a plant growing down near my feet.

I've had a small amount of experience with plant communication by now, since the Coltsfoot opened the dialogue a couple of years ago, so I went ahead and asked the plant what it was we call it.

Plantain came the clear reply.

Now, the leaves of this plant are deeply veined but have a somehow comforting look about them, as if you would not hesitate to apply them to wounds, stings and grazes. And it is indeed possible that I have read about Plantain, stored that information in the brain, and accessed it when my gaze fell upon a specimen.

This is the standard scientific answer to why I identified a plant which I had had no ready knowledge of, up to that point.(For yes, on consulting the books, this was indeed plantain I was looking at).
Except, of course, that we don't really know how memory gets stored, or where it gets stored, or exactly how an arcane piece of it becomes retrieved and reactivated, accessible to the top of the mind following a sensory cue.There are theories,and models, and we have seen memory recall in action in live brains, but we don't know precisely how this works, because we lack a fundamental, all-encompassing explanation of how the brain does stuff like this. So we make shit up, basically, and call it neuro science.

The paradigm I tend increasingly to go with is laughably woo to neuroscientists, but it goes like this:

The plant lives, and by dint of this, has a consciousness about it. It may not look like human consciousness, but why should it? I, as another consciousness-bearing life form, may receive communication from it, which may be triggered by sight, smell, sound or touch, or indeed by another method entirely for which we don't have a word as yet. In other words, the plant identifies itself to me upon questioning- much as another human might offer hir name to me in response to a raised eyebrow, or other interrogative modality.

Since I began weaning myself off of the sometimes glib and usually unsatisfying answers that science purports to give us some time ago, of course I'm going to prefer my own interpretation of what happened in those seconds under the lapa.

The plant spoke to me, and told me its name.

I don't have any more of a road map to explain the method of this communication than science has to explain the method of data retrieval - but I'm infinitely more at ease with it.

*=Have you noticed how decomposing vegatation has a scent which is very nearly pleasant, under some circumstances? A kind of fizzy green aroma which I, at least, find acceptable (but then, I'm a Mad Person, as I believe I've just mentioned). There was another, underlying smell at the composting plant however-instantly identifiable as rotting animal matter, which I guess I'm not alone in finding far more distressing. Warren and I marinated in these assorted odours for some time, unloading the garden refuse, and then proceded to walk into the auto-spares shop, which was full of customers, and stand in line to buy brake discs.Smiley face icon goes here.

Sedge

Witkoppen Road at 5:30 of an evening is a study in the hellacious nature of this culture.

Cars and trucks nose-to-bumper, gasoline and diesel fumes heavy on the air and in your lungs; motorbikes weaving with death or serious injury between the larger vehicles; pedestrians darting between taxis on the shoulder of the road.

When the sedge plants call to me from the wasteland between shopping malls I turn my ears to listen. Behold - the wild Verbena




and the even wilder Datura




And Thistle! Pearl Acacia! Long-Stemmed Purple Thingy I Don't Yet Have a Name For!
Fuzzy-seeded grasses and yellow-flowered sedges, low clumped plants of so many greens my mind is laughing.

And from this motely crew, a message: wordless, yet clear in its information.

Joy.

The very bliss of being here, now, incarnate upon this plane. Among the sedge-rows. And the cars.

Vitam Edoceo Vitam

"Life teaches Life - We are a glance in a great eye watching "
Over ten years ago, my Shamanic Dismemberment featured a total absence of non-human animals, which is pretty unusual for this event. But listening to Terence McKenna on the subject of imagination, and a colleague's recounting of the morning's experience, have got me thinking about the reasons for this, and several other disfunctionalities of my life so far.

The colleague had related how she was made late to work yesterday by a Dachshund following her out of the gate - she had thought for a split second, deciding whether to be a heartless sod or to help the little animal. Most people in this culture would have gone for heartless sod - not that they'd think about it that way, as we're expert in rationalising our actions, whatever they may be. I know I am.

My family of origin was perhaps typical upper middle class of the last century. We weren't taught to be ruthless and selfish, as such, but the lessons which would have taught me that humankind is not the only animal worth considering on the planet were, frankly, missing.

"Life teaches life - through every mind the seed is passing"

But some seeds fall on barren soil.
I had to be taught that there is other life upon the earth which is every bit as deserving of consideration as the human form - perhaps more so.

Terence McKenna doesn't seem to have absorbed this too well. A head case himself, he allowed that non human animals probably have their own language, but were not on the same level as humans in this regard. He spoke with plants, yes, and some of his teachings in this regard are powerful indeed. Terence was known for advocating the view point that anyone, however hopeless a materialist, would, if he ate the mushroom,'meet his maker', which I find both amusing and very deeply true.
But what he failed to understand is that it is not necessary to ingest an entheogen to enter into communication with it.

A few years ago, I had a dream in which the plant Coltsfoot presented itself to me by name. Less than ten days later I was bedridden with the first case of bronchitis I had ever experienced.

Certainly, the fact that Coltsfoot is sovereign against bronchial inflammation might have been known to me, somewhere in my subconscious. I was well-versed in the magical properties of many plants but not the healing aspects - and I'd certainly never made use of this one before, either.The fact that I couldn't have known of my impending illness, however, puts a different spin on the whole experience.And of course the conversation has not stopped there - plants now regularly have something to say to me, both in dreams and in waking reality.

Yes, plants do have a faculty for communication with humans - something I now know but didn't ten years ago.

"Four billion years of evolution - A lifespan's the froth on windswept tide Peel off the fears and savage delusions / savaged illusions - And wave after wave of the old gods die"

Many people, human and otherwise, have been teaching me. A slow learner but a fairly thorough one, I can now pay tribute to some of those who have helped me along the way, and who continue to do so.

The plant 'kingdom', of course.

Also my partner, a man of few words,who shows through his actions that swerving for birds and stopping to attend a dying cat on the road is not remarkable, but rather what the human animal should be doing as a matter of course.

My canine friends all - Charybdys, Chippy and Bart all three of whom are now romping in Summerland; and Scylla their sister/mother who survived the traumatic holocaust of her kin, and of course Taranis, the 7 month old puppy who can knock a full grown human woman off her feet with his enthusiastic play.

Sparrows and Pied Crows teach me - and I, networking my mind, am attempting to learn from them.

Salamanders and bees in the garden also speak - and I listen.

Derrick Jensen and the people who stand beside him.

Friends, colleagues, voices on the wind and on the 'net.

Christopher Bingham and Gaia Consort.

I conspire with you to educate myself. Eventually.

"Deep in the seed that moves between us
The shape of the meaning as cells combine
The weave of the dream before we see it
Leaves trace elements of your hand in mine"


Pic: Coltsfoot.
Words: Chris Bingham
Struggling Articulation: my own

Hello

Sometimes, things conspire to interrupt your complacent flow.

You know - whirlwinds, a death in the family, sudden PitBull shows....

On Saturday we attended the Pitbull Union show and, in between giving Taranis a trot in the ring and Scylla lots of trots around the rugby field, we managed to squeeze in the weekly hour at puppy-training school.

Beth and David train from their plot in Honeydew, and we go every Saturday to socialise Taranis plus benefit from Beth's considerable years of experience with dogs.

This particular morning, Scylla and I were loafing around between the Bauhinia tree and the herb garden while Taranis and Warren did all the work, as is our wont. Misty, a middle-aged blue-eyed Husky who helps keep the little puppies in line with a whack of her paw, came sniffing around the huge, old Camel's Foot tree. Eyeing me hopefully in case I had any treats about my person.

I had none, alas - but then I felt it.

Rising from the ground through the soles of my takkies, spreading up my body like a warm wave on this chilly morning - a sense of love and cherishing so intense that my jaw dropped open. I looked at the tree. I looked at Scylla, who didn't seem to feel it - or maybe she's used to this kind of thing, I'm not sure. I looked at Misty. Misty continued to look back at me.

A feeling like being wrapped in someones arms and assured that you are truly loved - yet not only you, but every sentient thing (that is, every thing) is equally loved and treasured.

Was it coming from the land?

The place I have lived for the last 6 years sometimes reminds me in this way.

The land speaks, and I am starting to hear.

Down the dusty dry path to the parking field. Across the water-swollen grass on the verges Scylla and I moved at the end of the hour. Walking to the car around the huge fenced compost heap, I stopped.

There, sprawling under the fence, in unmistakeably-leafed glory. My first plant friend, Coltsfoot.

Hello.

An Interesting Fact...

...is that, since May 2006, when plants first started talking to me in dreams, I've had a significant communication from the Plant Kingdom each time the Sun was in Taurus and the Moon in Leo.

I've had communications during other configurations, but this particular geometry has worked in 2006, 2007, 2008 and now 2009. Plus one with the Sun Taurus/Moon Aquarius.

The interesting fact here is that I have my Sun in Scorpio and my Moon in Aquarius - in opposition to this apparently favourable-for-hearing-plants configuration.

Why is that, I'm wondering?

Pic: hacked from Real Astrologers