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Potawatomi elder and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer once reflected, “Had the new people (the Euro-American invaders) learned what Original Man was taught at a council of animals – never damage Creation, and never interfere with the sacred purpose of another being – the eagle would look down on a different world.”

Indeed, there would be eagles to look down on us now instead of pigeons.

Yet she reflects further, in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “Maybe the task assigned to Second Man is to strive to become naturalized to place, to throw off the mind-set of the immigrant. Being naturalized to place means to live as if this is the land that feeds you, as if these are the streams from which you drink. To become naturalized is to know that your ancestors lie in the ground, to take care of the land as if our lives and the lives of all our relatives depend upon it. Because they do.”

Yet how are we to come home to this Earth, this Turtle Island, upon which most of us, children of invaders and immigrants as we are, have never truly walked? How are we to “go native” — except through our storytelling?

The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence is an eloquent and loving step in that direction. Continue reading “The Mind of Plants: A Review”

My father used to tell me a story, a story that his father told him and his father had told him, about a time when animals were free. The story about how stars became. Father said that there was a time when, gazing up into the night sky, instead of the dark bluish sky dotted with stars you saw pure light. Heavenly, almost. One glance at it and you’d feel as if all your worries melted away, soothed by the light, its warmth sinking into your bones. Every night, all the animals would gaze up into the sky for hours on end, bathing in the radiant light.

But one day that all abruptly ended because of one grasshopper’s idea.

One night no different than any other, as all the animals were bathing in the golden light, Grasshopper had an idea. “I should fly up there. Being a winged creature, I’m sure I could do it. If the light is incredible from down here, it must be something of dreams up closer to it.” The words escaped his mouth before he had time to stop them. The whole forest went quiet for a few seconds, then, as if planned, all the birds exploded out of the trees. They had heard him. Feathers scattered everywhere for a chaotic few seconds, covering the sky with all different colors. Grasshopper, who had also taken flight, struggled in the midst of the chaos. After seconds that felt like hours, he dropped back to the ground, where he stayed hidden in the long grass. There he is to this day, not daring to fly above the grass for fear of being trampled by the ferocious flurry of feathers. Now, he only jumps above the grass in a feeble attempt to get a glimpse of the light.

Meanwhile, far from grasshopper swarmed the birds. The smaller, less powerful birds fell back down to earth, their wings tattered by the sharp talons and ferocious wings of the bigger birds. As soon as the remaining birds touched the light, they were set afire. Shrieking and squawking in pain, the panicked birds began flapping their wings in a desperate attempt to stop the flames from swallowing their bodies. After a few agonizing minutes, the flames died down. The large brown birds that had touched the light were no more. In their place loomed scaly creatures flapping their huge wings. Spikes ran along their necks and backs, their beaks were painfully twisted into scaly snouts, and sharp teeth lined the inside of their gaping mouths. Dragons!

Doomed they were to seek darkness in the depths of caves hiding from the light, yet greedily they stowed away gold coins in a feeble attempt to replace the heavenly light. The smaller birds, on the other hand, had been transformed into phoenixes: large birds with the tips of their feathers still in flames, glowing a radiant reddish orange hue. Cursed to live on in this forsaken world for all of eternity, unable to die, they would burst into flames whenever their bodies became too old. Once more, they were born in scathing flames.

For they had angered God. The light is a holy thing, a blessing to the animals, and the birds had greedily gone up seeking for more bliss. For this God punished them. And to stop other birds from trying to fly to the light, he covered the sky in an endless cape of darkness. Every night instead of the accelerating light there would only be shadow. Though other birds continued to try to reach the light, desperately poking holes in the infinite cape, trying to get through was pointless. Like bugs to a bulb, they banged desperately, all their efforts in vain. And to this day, every night all the birds flock up to the cape, poking holes in the night sky, in hope to once more bathe themselves in the heavenly light. And those are the stars we see today.

I am putting the final touches on my fantasy novel, “The White Snake: The Raven and The Servant,” which retells an old Brothers Grimm fairytale with a lot of shamanic twists and turns, as well as some old fashioned literary fun, such as this old horse’s account of how General Relativity theory helps explain a raven’s supernatural abilities!

Arriving at the swinging double doors, Caedmon laid his hand upon the latch and then paused. Once again, a low mumbling emerged from within. The horses were in conference. Placing his ear to the crack, Caedmon listened.

“Nooooo,” that familiar low, rich voice intoned, “it wasn’t his father nor grandfather that served the previous kings. It was that white tufted rascal himself.”

“Honestly, I had no idea ravens were so long lived,” said the same younger voice, clearly dubious.

“They aren’t,” the rich voice responded. “They have normal lifespans just like the rest of us. No extraordinary longevity – if you clip their wings, that is. Or if they are the stay-at-home type.”

“So how do you explain this paradox. How can a raven of a normal life span serve three kings?”

“Well, it has to do with their unusual gift, of course. You are not aware of it?”

“All horses know they can fly between worlds, even into the land of the dead. So what?”

“It has to do with how they live in time, or perhaps I should say spacetime. A raven’s perspective of our world is like a stone’s perspective of the surface of the pond it is sent skipping over. It is true, they have not yet learned how to travel into the past, seek that wormhole as they may, but…” Continue reading “The Horse Explains A Raven’s Unusual Longevity”

It was raining, dark rain clouds covered the gloomy sky, Raindrops pounded in the tiny coop’s roof like nails. I shifted uncomfortably in the straw. I lifted my head drowsily as my vision cleared. I glanced around. My friends lay snoozing in the straw shuffling towards each other for warmth. Suddenly, something cold and wet splattered on my head. “Ugh not another leak!” I groaned. Sitting up, I shivered. I guess I should wake up the rest of the coop I thought wearily. I dragged myself out of the comfy straw bed and walked to the coop door glancing through the thick barbed wire. I sighed. Longing swelled in my chest. Longing to feel the wind through my hair and the grass touching my feet instead of the rough dry shed around. I turned around regretfully. Well, there’s no use thinking about it now.

Once I had awakened my friends, we all huddled in groups murmuring excitedly to one another as we waited impatiently for our feeder to come and deliver us scraps. “What do you think it’ll be today?” I asked Raya excitedly, “Maybe they’ll give us some moldy bread as a treat today!” Raya exclaimed happily, “Or maybe some hard raisins!” Finn piped in. The chattering was suddenly interrupted by the creak of the coop door opening “The feeders here!” Jack said. A large turkey wearing a messy button-up shirt, some filthy jeans, and a straw sun hat entered the coop with a black dirty bucket filled with all sorts of leftovers. Behind him stood a turkey I had never seen before, wearing a black trenchcoat and carrying a shiny black suitcase. Continue reading “Dead Hope: A Thanksgiving Tale by Maitreya Tindall”

Over the years, I have seen some wild callings. A geologist shows up in the rainforest to study a mysterious boiling river, drinks the brew of the local shaman, meets the spirit of the river and becomes the ecosystem’s champion on a global scale. A young man drinks ayahuasca and, through much fortuitous circumstance, gets his medical degree at Stanford so he can champion the use of plant medicines in healing. A young woman has a vision of the womb of life at a treatment center for addiction in Peru and goes on to study the phenomenology of healing experiences with icaros, or sacred songs, becoming a pioneer in the psychotherapeutic discipline of integration of psychedelic experiences.

The list goes on, of course.

This is what makes self-confessed “psychedelic virgin” Brian Muraresku’s “calling” to reclaim the memory of the original Christian sacrament all the more interesting. Stirred by the recent resurgence of psychedelic research, Mr. Muraresku, a lawyer and Jesuit trained scholar of the Classics (oh, let’s throw in Sanskrit for good measure) embarked upon a timely quest: to take up the tracks of classicist Carl Ruck, chemist Albert Hofmann, and mycologist Gordon Wasson in their groundbreaking 1978 publication, The Road to Eleusis. This work, largely reviled and ignored, wove a compelling case that the kykeon, or sacrament utilized in the ancient Eleusinian mysteries, was psychoactive and thus the visionary experience reported within the Telesterion were facilitated by sacred plants.

Continue reading “A Psychedelic Eucharist? Brian C. Muraresku’s The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name”

A Ted Talk by my friend Andres Ruzo, a geologist and National Geographic Explorer who has sought to understand the magic of the boiling river that is so integral to the healing work of the curandero Juan Flores.

There was a time when scientists weren’t ashamed to go on record contemplating the meaning of the cosmos as revealed through the scientific method, and one of the great practitioners of this genre was Loren Eiseley. While waiting to take my daughter to school this morning, I came across this passage in his book, The Unexpected Universe, published in 1964 — one year before I was born.

Here is the kind of mythopoeic perception that Eiseley was capable to bringing to phenomenon that are now treated as mere cold facts:

A few days ago I chanced to look into a rain pool on the walk outside my window, and the beauty and the strange rhythm of the extending and concentric wavelets entered my mind. I saw that I was looking symbolically upon the whole history of life upon our globe. There, in a wide, sweeping circle, ran the early primates from whom we are descended; here, as a later drop within the rim of the greater circle, emerged the first men. I was the mammoths pass in a long, slow, world-wide surge, but the little drop of man changed into a great hasty wave that swept them under.

Watch instead, I thought, for the great tides — it is they that contain that planet’s story. As the rain hastened or dripped slowly the pictures in the little pool were taken into my mind as though from the globe of a crystal-gazer. How often, if we learn to look, is a spider’s wheel a universe, or a swarm of summer midges a galaxy, or a canyon a backward glance into time. Beneath our feet is the scratched pebble that denotes an ice age, or above us the summer cloud that changes form in one afternoon as an animal might do in ten million years.

This is mythopoeia. All of this from gazing into a little pool pelted by drops of water! It’s as beautiful as Shakespeare (who Eiseley loved as a gift from his father), and captures the exquisite drama of the human adventure in ways that few scientists’s writing can now do.

Eiseley concludes, “The truly perceptive man must know that where the human eye stops, and hearing terminates, there still vibrates an inconceivable and spectral world of which we learn only through devised instruments. Through such instruments measuring atomic decay we have learned to probe the depths of time before our coming and to gauge temperatures long vanished.”

How akin Eisley’s “Where the human eye stops, and hearing terminates, there still vibrates an inconceivable and spectral world” is with W.B. Yeats’ “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.”

The president of Uruguay, Pepe Mujica, like a gadfly Socrates, lets the truth all hang out about the reality of economic progress in a recent meeting of world leaders in Rio:

For more info on this most remarkable of world leaders, who donates 90% of his income to the poor and chooses to live on his wife’s ramshackle farm instead of in the luxurious presidential palace in Montevideo, check out this BBC article:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20243493

We are happy to share that Ayahuasca, Vegetalismo and Cultural Survival is now available for viewing below!

Generations of shamans, mad poets and intrepid researchers labored to give birth to this event on the endangered practices of entheogenic plant shamanism and the Amazonian ecosystem at City Lights, the literary mecca of San Francisco, with

Robert Tindall, author of The Jaguar that Roams the Mind

Lou Dematteis, author of Crude Reflections, which documents the environmental and cultural devastation left behind by Chevron in the Ecuadorian Amazon

Ralph Metzner, author of numerous works, including The Psychedelic Experience with Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert, as well as the more recent Sacred Vine of Spirits: Ayahuasca, and Sacred Mushroom of Visions: Teonanacatl

Dale Pendell, author of the trilogy Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Teachers and the Poison Path

We were fortunate to have this historic evening — City Lights was the publisher of The Yage Letters between Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs 25 years ago — captured on video. This video is the first in a series — please find the subsequent sequences on YouTube!