The Secret Teachings of Plants by Stephen Harrod Buhner

Author:Stephen Harrod Buhner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: New Science/Ecology
ISBN: 9781591439820
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Company
Published: 2010-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

All phenomena, when focused upon, will generate an intimation of a particular mood or quality within you. We are daily touched by the world within which we are embedded, we feel that touch upon us in the thousands of nameless feelings we experience each day. They flit over the surface of our consciousness like shadows across a grassy meadow. In paying attention to them, they come forward into consciousness and begin to reveal their secrets, for each emotion registers the impact of a particular meaning that has touched us. They are transforms of information, of communications, from the world around us. These transforms contain extremely condensed and elegant communications about what we are encountering.

Though the gods have the power of speech

more often they choose a flower or plant:

elder leaves pressed on a blotter,

or spring buds emerging from a winter stem

These messages they send—

so ordinary we usually miss them:

an easy laughter and lightness,

or legs casually crossed and touching

The way a serpentine dike blends seamlessly into bedrock

or the way two possible lovers move,

starting and stopping, passing and pausing,

on an April trail

The subtlest oracles are always the most obvious—

seeing what is clearly in front of us the most difficult:

a butterfly hatching from a ruptured dream,

or a splintered tree rooting in the soil where it fell

—DALE PENDELL

Paying attention to the feelings of things and writing them down is a good beginning. It starts to train you in a specific skill. It is like learning to ride a bicycle.

or a unicycle

It takes a lot of practice to gain facility with it, to find the balance point, to trust yourself to it. After all, the experts have been telling you your whole life that there is nothing out there, no communications, no intelligence, no meaning, no sacredness or soul. Still, our ancestors walked this way before us. We are meant to feel the touch of the world upon us.

The true was already found long ago.

—GOETHE

This initial intimation, the impression or mood, the feeling of the plant, is the beginning of your connection to its being. Firmly anchor it into your experience.

don’t forget it

This initial intimation is the key to unlocking the mysteries of the plant itself, the way to understanding its uses as medicine. It is to this initial impression that you will return over and over as you refine your knowledge of the plant you are studying.

Keep practicing; it is repetition, repetition, repetition that will habituate the skill. The more you do this, the better at it you will become. The more plants you experience, the better you will find the process to be.

Know that these feelings are encoded communications from the world around you, transforms of messages. But they are not feelings from which you can remain distant. To feel them is to connect with the world around you, to allow your life to interweave with that of the plant and the world in which the plant lives. It is the beginning of an intimacy with life, a mode of living in which you

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