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When I was five, there was a neighbor's tree that was perfect for climbing into and hiding. Often, I would go up there with a book and sit for who knows how long. Once, I remember the neighbor trying to see if her senses were right — was there a little human up there — but the thickness of the branches seemed to hide me.
This is one of my earliest memories of non-human entities feeling like kin to me.
Of course, as I grew older, society did its best to dampen my connection to the other beings who inhabit this world. I forgot for a time that I am connected to all things and can understand them on a more subtle level.
On a weekend in June, a couple of decades later, I found myself on the farm of an herbalist and High Priestess. We spent the day touching the earth, foraging our lunch, and creating medicines from the plants all around us. At the end of the day, when everyone was heading off, I noticed she tapped each car twice and said, “Home safe.” I knew she was casting a spell.
What I didn’t realize is that some other sort of magic must have happened too. Back home in my urban garden, while watering my herbs and foods, I actually started to hear their gentle voices telling me exactly how they would like to be watered. My eyes grew wide, and then I complied, them thanking me. A friend of mine who went on the trip said when she got home she could see the auras around her plants.
Something magical had happened.
But this kind of communication is not unheard of. Throughout time, mystics, sages, and wise people have always said that they could communicate with the plants. That plants have told them how to use them and taught them lessons about the nature of this reality.
Hildegard of Bingen, the Buddha, Saint Francis of Assisi, the völva, ayahuasceros, shamans, herbalists, and many others talk to the plants, or any conscious beings on this planet of which there are many.
And this communication is available to all of us; we merely only need to slow down, pay attention, and listen.
Once I joined a group of energy healing practitioners in a monthly gathering called “Circles for the Earth.” Each month they decide on a group or area to focus our efforts on healing. On this night they had decided on the Amazon rainforest.
During the healing session, as I always do, I received messages directly from the Amazon herself. She told me many things, among which included her telling me that she intended for ayahuasca to leave the rainforest, to reach out to those who needed it most. To the people indoctrinated by colonization so that we may heal and in turn save her.
I have not personally consumed ayahuasca nor been to the Amazon, but that’s not necessary in order to communicate with a conscious being. When I relayed these messages in the group I remember some of the practitioners looking at me incredulously. I was honestly a little hesitant to share myself.
But then, recently, about three years later, I was chatting with someone who was recently down there and sitting with the medicine. I told him what I had heard the Amazon rainforest say and he told me, “Wait did you know that already?”
I shook my head. “That is exactly what the medicine man said when I was down there. He said that they had been instructed to keep this medicine a secret. Then in the 1970s they had been instructed by the plants to share this medicine more widely, outside of the rainforest.”
On another occasion, I found myself in India after the most tumultuous time of my life. The person I was seeing at the time had invited me to go but then fell seriously ill. He decided to leave only a week into our trip and asked if I wanted to go back to the states with him. Feeling completely lost and confused I took some time to sit on the rooftop of the guest house we were staying in, crying and asking for guidance.
I felt the mountains of the Himalayas reach out. To me, it felt like the spirit of India, and she felt feminine. She told me to stay. She told me that I would have more fun than I could possibly imagine. She told me that I would find parts of myself that I had lost.
Reluctantly, I listened. The next day my partner left and there I was, alone, in India with no plan except to stay the length of my trip which would be another six weeks. In that time I was nurtured by the flow of life and the people who I would come to meet. New destinations revealed themselves to me and onto buses and trains and tuktuks I went.
That time in India ended up being more magical than I had even expected. I healed in ways I didn’t know were possible. I felt supported by the earth and mysteries were revealed to me.
One year later I would find myself in ceremony, the focus being on the goddess Parvati. While the person leading the ceremony started to introduce us to this goddess, she told us that Parvati is considered the mother spirit of India and that she is said to personify the Himalayas. Her gifts include power, energy, nourishment, harmony, love.
Recently I have sat with the little plants that most people think are weeds but in actuality are food and medicine. I paused for a while, in silence, and amidst the space a few tiny voices began to speak psychically. They told me of roots and ancestors and the duality of being both ancient and new.
They have not been indoctrinated so they have an understanding that is a bit clearer than ours. But no being on this planet is hierarchically above or below another; we merely all have our parts to play and roles to fill. The plants know this and are happy to chat with us and help us to grow.
I have reached out to the spirit of cocaine. It doesn’t think of itself as bad; it is merely lonely. But lonely in that way that people sometimes are where they don’t know it and will seek out any type of relationship to fill the void. Being divorced from the other parts of the plant, what remains is seeking companionship but instead creates two detached, lonely beings when consumed.
There was a time when I learned from indigenous elders about how the spirit of the animals was trying to save the planet. They called in one of the most ancient forms of life, the virus, to help us slow down and to heal. This was among one of the less harmful options that apparently had been presented at the council that day.
And back in India, I sat for days and days in front of the Bodhi tree. She told me on the first day there was nothing to be revealed to me, that I must come back, showing dedication and commitment. Day after day I would show up to the holy grounds and meditate and pray.
Eventually, after a few days, the Bodhi tree revealed a lesson of reciprocity that I am still integrating and dutifully trying to practice. She engaged in a tonglen practice with me. It was one of the most powerful lessons I have ever received.
All of this storytelling is to help support you in your practice of talking to plants, mountains, trees, animals, herbal medicinals. It merely takes us slowing down and dropping into the more subtle spaces of communication. The places that we talk to each other, even,
through energy signals.
Know that the information can come in a variety of ways. Maybe your senses are sharper to feelings or deep knowings. Perhaps you understand through hearing words or even melodies in your head. Sometimes the communication can come through images, appearing in the mind’s eye much like a memory does.
And see what arises. Allow it to be a two-way street. That’s what they want as well. It wouldn’t be very fun, or mannerly, to have a conversation where only one person is talking the whole time. The same goes for any energy-being you wish to communicate with.
It is wild to me that we were all born in the same compact little cluster of the big bang. That we were all literally, objectively one thing at one point in time. Of course, we are connected. Of course, we are all in this together. Of course, we are more powerful when we are unified and combined.
Just as we seek to integrate and make whole our individual beings in this lifetime, what will help to heal our world is the integration of our earthly family as one.