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During the first week Jack took us on a plant tour. We started near the big kitchen-dining building, which actually had a grass yard of sorts they kept trimmed with a machete, and he showed us mapacho and a chacruna plant. We all looked, dutifully, but for me they were just plants and I probably wouldn’t recognize them again in 5 minutes. Even after my first few ceremonies I wasn't making connections with what happened in that rich dark tea-impacted time with the rest of the world or with plants. But then… he showed us an ayahuasca vine. It was coming out of the ground with only 4 little leaves and appeared to make its way up a smallish sapling where it became too hard to even make out its other leaves if it even had any. Jack explained that it couldn’t grow, that it was too sensitive to all the human energies nearby and would never get much bigger or be harvested. I found myself profoundly impacted by this. How could this plant, this master teacher plant that when swallowed wants to heal humans, that blends with human consciousness to produce the craziest healings imaginable, be so sensitive to us that it can’t even grow? The disparity felt shocking to me and I thought about it for days. 

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There are plenty of scientific studies about house plants that are positively affected by beautiful music, loving human energy, and kind words. What if the little vine needed loving energy, what if it only got stymied by discordant human energies, unconscious and unfocused human meanderings? I told the group my wonderings and several of them lit up.

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But I was the only one, at first, to actually start visiting the vine, carefully and gently approaching it and sending it love. I would just look at it and summon up loving feelings, like a meditation practice only with this living growing vine.

Within a week it sprouted 2 new leaves.

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Lizzie played her flute for it. It put out more leaves.

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As the 3 months passed, I started sending it love across the field, whenever I remembered as I was walking towards the kitchen. I felt a response of a happy almost puppy-like energy from the plant.

 

And it struck me in a new way that human consciousness blended with others, with non-human ones, creates something new, especially if that consciousness is intentionally loving. It felt as though our true natures, what we are in our purpose, is stewards (not overlords, this world was not created for our extraction), and that we can change our world for the better in ways most of us have not yet begun to fathom.

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