Many of you know that I have a particular biased view of plants and their magnanimous nature. This view comes mostly from years (my entire adult life) of being with plants in the wild, in the garden, through cooking and making herbal preparations and working with them both on the physical and non-physical plane in healing work. I have grown to rely on plants for all my physical needs which include my breath, my food, my medicine as well as my emotional and spiritual needs like my sense of kinship, my inspiration and my avenue to connection to that which is greater than myself which some may call spirit. I have looked to plants and trees as my teachers and have found that when I’m confused or worried or don’t know something I can turn to them and they provide the answer or understanding through some form of communication. I have also experienced their directive to guide human evolution or consciousness-raising. They have always preceded their animal counterparts in evolution and again they are preceding us in our evolutionary path. We may find that the nature of evolution, of being linear and survival of the fittest as Darwin would have us believe, actually has more to do with cooperation than competition and with moving in a spiral fashion rather than a linear straight line. It seems that when I am ready or have reached a certain level of experience the plants provide another teaching that is more expansive than the one before. They are guiding me to deeper and deeper levels of understanding that help to raise my consciousness. The old Buddhist saying is “when the student is ready the teacher appears”. Each time I think I have learned as much as I can from the plants they give me another piece that weaves itself seamlessly into the beautiful fabric of life. An example is the deepening of my relationship with them through something as simple as conscious breathing and the profound experience of them being the very source of my breath and thus my life. Along these lines, myself and my students are increasingly aware of plants showing up that either weren’t there before or are “new” plants. One has to ask why now and for what purpose? For example, there was a recent discovery in melting permafrost in Siberia of a 30,000 year old squirrel’s nest. In this nest were seeds of a plant that had become extinct, however the seeds were found to be viable and plants were propagated from them. This plant waited thirty millennia to appear again and is now ready to share its gifts with us. Is this the spiralic nature of evolution?
You may know of Paul Stamets who does extensive work with mushrooms and various kinds of fungi. He is brilliant and I urge you to tune into his work. He maintains that fungi and our close association with this form of life gave rise to the human understanding of communicating through networks much like the internet because of the intricate communication network of mycelium that covers the planet. Stamets has developed a way to transform diesel fuel and toxic oil with the use of oyster mushrooms into rich regenerating soil within a period of six weeks. What was the reason that the EPA didn’t employ this method in the Gulf Oil spill? Also, many mushrooms have been found to arrest the devastating effects of rampant viral infections. Check out Paul Stamets on TED titled Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World.
Likewise a mushroom has been discovered in the Amazon that eats hard plastic.
http://m.gizmodo.com/5880768/amazonian-mushroom-eats-indestructible-plastics.
On a more esoteric note a community in Italy called Damanhur is doing in-depth research with plants and trees by monitoring the vibratory resonance of the plant whose electrical impulses are registered through an electronic device that is connected to a synthesizer. The plants and trees learn to work with the machines and then begin to produce intricately beautiful musical pieces. One particular Avocado tree has become a master musician and teaches other plants to “sing”. As more and more trees and plants in the Damanhur community learn to sing in harmony the entire environment becomes a sanctuary for healing not only humans but all life forms. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZaokNmQ4eY.
From eating plastic, to cleaning up toxic waste, to using aquatic plants to clean-up waste water to increasing the amount of carbon dioxide uptake to healing through harmonious sound to re-patterning the bio-photons at the nucleus of the cell into a healthy pattern, to decreasing infectious viruses, plants and trees seem to be stepping up to the plate to address the urgent needs of people and the planet. The sentience of the plant kingdom may be far greater than we can even imagine and when we engage within the matrix of human and plant consciousness a co-creative partnership emerges that just might “save the world”, an imperative the plants are actively participating in and are urging us to join them.
