A MIRACLE OF SYMBIOSIS
Our breath consists of an inhalation of oxygen and an exhalation of carbon dioxide. All the oxygen on the planet comes from trees and plants both of the land and sea. All the oxygen we breathe is directly from the green world of trees and plants. What a miracle symbiosis exists between plants and people through this exchange of breath! Symbiotically speaking, we're more related to plants than we are to other animals. Plants and trees make up 99% of all living organisms on the planet. We're a part of nature, but we've forgotten this. We've fallen into a deep amnesia. Our separation from nature began perhaps most dramatically during the Industrial Revolution of the late 1800s. Our relationship with nature, with plants, has since become perverted. Now nature is a commodity. Now nature is a commodity. And we've forgotten what it means to be a good steward.
Yet we remain in this co-existent symbiotic relationship with the green world. We breath, so therefore, we are in a relationship with plants. We need them. And we can learn from them. Plants know how to adapt and evolve. And this moment in time is about adapting. Right now, we must look to plants for guidance, as we are forced to adapt ourselves. We must learn how to adapt to a changing climate, a changing culture. Everything's changing right now. Plants have been here adapting, changing, for millions of years -- in order to continue to thrive. They have wisdom and they can teach us -- if we're willing to listen.
Plant magic is focused on nurturing our partnership with plants, bringing into conscious awareness that we are in relationships with the plants, and then from there -- helping to build a co-creative partnership. We're in it together. One of the things we must shift, is the belief that we can't really make a change. We have help. Our role is to work alongside nature, to take our rightful place as good stewards of the plants of the land and sea. That is our birthright. We can achieve a dynamic where the people and mushrooms and trees and people -- all work together to create a partnership where all life, including human life -- thrives on this beautiful planet.
NATURE REMAINS
After exhausting daily work in politics, business, conviviality, love and so on - have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear -- what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons - the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, 1892
We live in an era of isolation and disconnection, our screens a surrogate for bodily experience, a two-dimensional world slowly replacing our immersion in the living, breathing material realm. Our time online replaces our time in nature - our hands in warm soil, or tracing the rough edges of tree bark, our feet sunk into soft grass or stepping through a pine-needle path, above us, bright sun streaming through a stained-glass canopy of green. We have become separated, by industrial and technological revolutions, from the wild and growing things, cast out from Eden, not through an act of original sin, but of our own volition.
Look around, eyes open and one soon realizes that we remain in the Garden. The earthly delights are not hidden behind high walls, but instead, wait just outside our door. With Plant Magic we can plant the seed of awakening, providing a reminder to open ourselves up, once again, to the natural realm, to the plants, cacti, fungi, flowers, and trees that heal and sustain us. We explore the symbolism, ceremony and our ritual relationships with the botanical world. We trace the historical roots of plants and fungi in myth, religion and magical practices around the globe. And we celebrate botanicals as muse, both in popular culture and in the visionary art inspired by psychoactive plants, cacti and mushrooms.
Nature, in her generosity, offers us potent medicines and nourishing foods and restorative spiritual, mental and emotional sustenance. By exploring the history of our relationship with the natural world, we find traces of our lost selves, our own stories threaded through the myths of the ancient deities once worshipped by our ancestors. And as we begin again to comprehend our deep and symbiotic connection with Mother Earth, the hope is that we will listen to and learn from her, becoming better and more gentle stewards, nurturing the environment that in turn - nurtures all life on this planet.
We built these pages with Taschen's Plant Magic book, the Forth Book in their Library of Esoterica collection.