My friend Elsa always talked about plants. I thought she was crazy. Surely crazy, but definitely detached from reality. Until the plants laughed at me.
In the fall of 1980, returning home from a rare dinner after intensive healing on my land in the Catskills, I stopped to get my mail. One unusual envelope contained a $500 money order, signed “Mother Nature” and this note: “It’s my birthday and I can’t think of a better gift than to give her the means to build a shelter for teaching her.”
How wonderful. How disconcerting. Even back then, $500 wouldn’t put up a floor, let alone walls or a roof! What building could you create with such a large gift for such a small sum? In a waking dream I saw the answer.
I bought a tipi. It occurred. I put it upstairs. I decided to sleep in it, at least until it got too cold.
Have you ever slept outdoors? If so, you know that it is very noisy outside at night. The dark is full of sounds: mosquitoes and grasshoppers, crickets and frogs, geckos and bats, nightjars and coyotes. Those sounds soon became the background noise of my nights in the tipi.
Background of the thunderous noises made by the monsters just outside the tipi. It’s amazing how noisy a small animal is moving around in the dark. Of course, there were no monsters, just the night shift: opossums, skunks, raccoons, flying squirrels, and the occasional deer. As I began to recognize the “monster” sounds, they became regular noises and I relaxed even more. That’s when the laughs started.
At first it was a quiet laugh, suppressed joy. Then it grew and swelled into a laugh. Like the sound of thunder through my mountains, laughter spread and reverberated.
“Who is laughing?” I thought. “We are,” came the answer in my mind.
“Whose?” “We, the plants.”
“The plants are laughing.” “Yes, oh yes.”
“Because you are happy or because something is funny?” “Because you’re funny.”
“What makes me funny?” “You tell people that herbal medicine was developed by trial and error.”
“What’s so funny about that? How else could we have learned which plants are edible, which are poisonous, and how to use them for food and medicine?” “Trial and error is too slow.”
“But there is no other way.” “Of course there is!”
“Than?” “Than?”
“What what?” “What are you doing?”
“What am I doing?” “Yes!”
Long break. Laughter. laughter A breathless, red-faced laugh, rolling on the floor.
“You’re talking to plants!”
“Wow! I am.” “That’s how people learned to use us. They listened to us. Just like you are.”
Thus began my plant lessons. They continued to this very day. And it will most likely continue at least until my death.
“I want everyone to be able to hear you,” I told the plants one summer. “No problem,” the plants replied.
“Take off your shoes and socks; allow the energy of the earth and the energy of the stars to mix in your body. Take off your glasses and contact lenses; allow yourself to see as you see, not as you are supposed to see. Spend less time at high speeds in metal containers; let the sun and moon, season and weather set your time. Sleep in a round structure. Our voices get caught in the corners.”
Do you want to contact the devic realm? find the fairies? Talk to plants?
The simple answer is: “Be in Nature, not on your terms, but on Hers. Put your bare feet on the ground. Be silent. Be receptive.”
The slightly more complicated answer is: “Choose a wild plant, small or large. Breathe with it for at least ten minutes every day. Keep bare feet. Keep quiet. Keep receptive.”
Upon opening, you will discover chaos. When asked how to tell a wild plant from a cultivated one, I say, “Cultivated plants are carefully planted; wild plants flourish in chaos.”
Chaos is a delight to fairies and a threat to humans. We like fixity and we dislike change. Nature knows that fixity is death. Life is changing. Balance is the step prior to death. Life is dynamic imbalance, never static. Life grows, changes, ages, gets sick, rots, molds, and recycles itself into more life; it’s never perfect, it’s never done. Life is chaotic. Death is rigid. He resists and refuses to interact; stands apart; is in control.
Nature is chaotic. He doesn’t like straight lines. When I’m in the woods, the road bends, the trees have crashed, the wild flowers bloom in impossible and unlikely places, there is always a miracle. To describe the living presence of Nature in its chaotic creative totality, we can use the words “deva” and “fairy”. Fairies flee from gardens planted in neat rows. To attract fairies, practice being comfortable with being a little out of control.
Are fairies and devas different? Fairies are in the middle of everything; the devas are “above all”. Fairies are local; the devas are international. Fairies are fickle, flirtatious, changeable; the devas are responsible, serious, dependent. fairies shine; devas emanate. fairy party; the devas supervise. Fairies can be invited into one’s garden; no one would dare to ask a deva to do something. (However, a deva may ask you to do something.)
Tradition and legend say that fairies spend half the year underground and half the year above ground. The fairy door opens on May 1, the First of May. It closes on October 31, on the Day of the Dead. Fairies only frolic in wild places, so leave a small corner of your farmland wild: a “fairy corner” where chaos can reign.
To invite the fairies: On or near the eve of May Day, eat delicious food, drink dazzling drinks, enjoy soulful music, better yet, make intoxicating music, sing, dance, take off your clothes, stretch your senses, fall in love. If you invite fairies to your home and grounds, remember: fairies love fun, it’s best to laugh at what they do. Fairies love to confuse things, better to delight in it. Because fairies can be mean, and if you’re surly, they can cause a lot of little evil. Fairies are said to like milk and pineapples. It is not bad to leave them small gifts.
“We are the devas. We are the fairies. We are the trees. We are the rocks. We are the blooming plants and floating footprints. We are the voice of Nature. We are Green Blessings.”