Oaks, Oracles, Druid, Dream Plants, Ghostpipes, and the Green Ones the Empire Keeps Trying to Kill

There is a Druid standing just behind my left shoulder, and he has been there since 2016 I think, and I have never once seen his face. I just know it’s a Druid despite the fact that I never met one in what we sadly call “real life.”

He turned up on the fourth day of a plant dieta, under an Oak, in the Catskills, while I was eating plain rice with no salt on it like some medieval penitent who had done something terrible, and he never really left, and I have never tried to explain him to people who would need him explained.

So we are going to talk about him. Or around him. I am not sure we can talk about him.

And we will talk about the Tree in Greece who was an oracle. An actual Oak, who answered questions, who kings and generals traveled for weeks to consult, and who was still speaking out loud a thousand years later from inside the hull of a ship. And about the emperor who sent men to cut Her down.

And about the World Tree, who is being eaten alive as you read this, and the three old women who keep Her standing.

And about the Nettle who came into my dream, put out with me, the way a relative gets put out when you have not called. And who then showed up on this Land months later, right where I would have looked for Her if I had known anything at all, which I did not.

And about the Ghost Pipe I harvested wrong, and still think about, and probably killed.

And then, God help us, what they did to Them. Because they did do it. With axes. With dates. With names, written down proudly by the men who swung, in the annals, in the lives of the saints, in the Forest Service permit files. 723. 772. 1964.

And at the end, the northern hedgerow of this farm, where a two-hundred-year-old Oak stands between my Land and my neighbor’s (dead) wheat field. I will show you what is alive on one side of Him and what is dead on the other, in this drought, this month, this week.

Let’s dive in…

The seven days

Seven days is not long. That is what I told myself going in. Seven days is a work week. I have done harder things in my life.

Plain grain. Plain vegetables. A little fruit. No salt. No spices. Roughly the same meal morning and evening for a week, and if you have never done it you cannot imagine how loud salt is (and how chocolate cookies are closer to heroin than we think). You do not find out that salt is a shout until somebody takes it away from you and the food goes quiet in your mouth and something in your head starts screaming for it, which, honestly, tells you a great deal about what else is shouting at us all day that we have stopped hearing as shouting.

The Oak was on the land at the Sanctuary in the Catskills, where I stewarded for about twenty years, where the Bees were and maybe still are, where I learned most of what I actually know as opposed to what I can say (those are two different piles and the second one is much, much smaller).

I sat with Him. I meditated and prayed near Him. I did nothing that a modern person would recognize as anything productive, and the whole time there was this voice in my head, the old voice, the corporate one, the one that raised forty million dollars from Silicon Valley VCs and stood up at Harvard Business School in a good jacket and got called things like “entrepreneur of the year,” and that voice was saying, this is insane, you are wasting your one life, get up, get up, get up and do something productive with your life.

Three days of that. Three days of a man arguing with himself under a Tree. I find that in spiritual community we are too good at arguing with ourselves but that is not the story here.

Around day four, the world got wider (I wrote a book about it if that interest you). But wait. That is the wrong word. Wide is a word about space and this was not about space.

Let me try it another way. A machine had been running in that room my entire life. Some motor. Some noise I was born into and never once identified as a noise. Most people live with that noise and call it music or silence.

And on the fourth day, it cut out.

And what arrived in the gap was not silence.

Before we go on, one thing, because I do not want you to think this essay is about me.

The seven days are only where I found the door. The door is not mine. It is much older than me and it will be standing long after I am in the ground, hopefully not far from an Oak tree, and it is open right now, about four meters from where you are sitting (and it has been open the whole time).

Here is what is below, down in the heart of the essay. Not my story. Ours. Yours.

• What came through when the gates of consciousness opened. And why it was the boredom that did it, and not the medicine, and what that means for anyone who has been saving up for a ceremony or retreat they cannot afford.

• The five green doorways. Teacher. Elder. Doctor. Kin. Witness. The Green World does not speak in one voice, She speaks in five, and they ask completely different things of us. Once we can tell them apart, we know which Plant we are actually standing in front of, and what She is offering, and what She wants back.

• How to tell Her voice (The Plant) from our own hunger. The hardest problem in this whole practice. The Plant I harvested wrong, and probably killed, and how I know now what I did not know then. This one cost me something.

• Why we have the hunger and lost our lineage. 723. 772. The 390s. Three dates, three axes, and the paperwork the men who swung them left behind, signed, proud of it I am sure. I think a lot of us carry our rootlessness as a private failure. That we are dabblers. That we are making it up as we go. That we are borrowing somebody else’s grandmother because we do not have one of our own. We are not, and I want to hand that back to us, with the dates, and the names of the men who did it.

• How to read the ground we are standing on (yes your ground). The field beside my Land is dead. Not struggling. Dead. Killed on purpose. And ten meters away, in the same drought, the “weeds” are green. I will teach you to read the Plants that come up uninvited in the cracks of your own street the way a doctor reads a chart. They will tell you what happened to that soil and what is trying to heal it and you.

• How to begin. Tonight. One Plant. The closest one. No ceremony, no plane ticket, no teacher, nothing bought. The whole practice, and what will happen, and what to do in the long stretch when nothing happens at all (because THAT happens).

• And the Beginner’s Herbarium (18 pages PDF Guide). Twelve Plants. How to find Them, how to ask Them, how to take without wounding Them. Print it, fold it, take it outside.

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