“I just wanted to check in with you,” I say, speaking via cell phone while standing out in the yard in the afternoon sun. I had reached out to a friend who does live-in elder care several states away. It’s June, 2020. I’m trying to make sure this friend doesn’t fall into isolation.
“But I may not be able to talk too long,” I continue. “My son-in-law is working on the roof and may need help.”
“Is he working on a vent pipe?” she asks.
“Why, yes. How did you know?”
“I just saw him there,” comes the reply. Then, without preamble or a moment’s pause, she continues: “And by the way, that property where you’re living was once the site of Native American habitations. You might want to offer some tobacco to the land to help heal the wounds and bring a better balance.”
Maybe it was the closely sequenced pairing of the two kinds of long-distance seeing — one easily verified, the other less so — but I decided to act on the suggestion without delay. As I walked back toward the house, I recalled a conversation my wife and I had with a neighbor here on Indian Lake years before. The young mother told us that her two preschool-age children had been frightened at night and described people in native dress walking around in their house.
By coincidence, the phone conversation happened take place in the same year I had decided to grow a “Three Sisters” garden, a traditional Native American growing strategy in which corn, runner beans and squash are inter-planted. The experiment was part of my ongoing study of permaculture. Feeling motivated to start producing more storable food calories in our home garden, the previous summer I’d had two trees taken down to lay the groundwork for this year’s garden expansion. By the following June when this phone conversation took place, the corn, beans and squash were already planted and growing. In fact, I was standing right by these plantings as we spoke.
So the next question was, where to get the tobacco for an offering? Turned out I’d saved some dried leaves from a flowering tobacco species (
Nicotiana Sylvetta) that I’d grown a couple years before, so I could make the offering as suggested. I’m not knowledgeable about things Native American, but I do like plants. I recalled I had seeds of three other tobacco species that I’d purchased a couple years before so I could give a live tobacco plant collection to a friend as a wedding gift. I planted the seeds. Two of the three (
Nicotiana Rustica and
Nicotiana Tabacum), grew.
Thinking about this project, however, I had to admit that I never really understood the reverence with which the people indigenous to this land have held tobacco. Why tobacco? Tobacco?!? Yuck! It made no sense. Growing up, my personal experience with tobacco was a world of smelly ashtrays in public places, cigarette machines in bowling alleys and cartons of smokes stacked behind the counter at the corner store.
But living plants are different than commodities. As they started to sprout in their seed trays, I found myself captivated. You have to hold a tobacco seed in your hand and then actually plant it to really understand what a miracle it is. The seeds are incredibly tiny, averaging 10,000–20,000 seeds per gram. Naturally, such small seeds germinate as tiny, tiny, tiny plants…but then, look out! Given the richly amended soil they need, they grow remarkably fast.
Within weeks the seedlings were ready to transplant into the garden. The space I found for them, appropriately, it seemed, was in a new garden annex adjacent to the Three Sisters Garden I’d planted earlier this spring. This was also near where I’d been standing during the phone conversation that started me down this path. The plants grew fast in their new home. But what happened next was unexpected.
I’d always been intrigued by reports I’d read from ethnobotanists and anthropologists around the world of indigenous peoples who said they connected directly with the “spirit of a plant” in order to better understand its gifts. People from the traditional societies of every continent share the same story. I’ve also admired herbalists like Stephen Harrod Buhner and others who have recovered enough of their indigenous wisdom to be able to perform similarly. I’ve never had that ability.
However, all my life, I’ve loved plants. And that’s what I did with these new arrivals. I thought they were adorable. I’d check on them the way new parents check on sleeping babies. I’d gaze at their fuzzy little leaves with wonder. None of this made a whole lot of sense to me, but then, does love ever really make sense? Still, I wasn’t planning on eating, smoking, or doing anything else with them besides offering them back to the earth, so the fascination, attention, and devotion I lavished on the tobacco might have seemed a bit strange given all the other work to do in the garden. I just wanted to see what they’d turn into.
In the morning I’d go out and visit the plants, standing in grass wet with dew. In the afternoon or evening after returning from a walk, I’d swing by the tobacco plants on my way to the house. Day after day, again and again like this. During dry spells, I’d water. And along the way, plenty of liquid plant food, to which these hungry plants proved incredibly responsive.
It was toward the end of July that the first “verbal bleed-through” happened. I call it a “bleed-through” because the words did not seem to come from a part of myself that I am familiar with. Two words: “Fierce compassion.” They came unbidden as I approached the growing tobacco plants, and instantly I knew that this was a simple and comprehensive way of characterizing the plants themselves. Soon thereafter, I realized it was also a very concise answer to my longstanding perplexity over why these plants have so long been held sacred by so many. Again, I am not a scholar of indigenous ethnobotany. Instead, I’m building my own capacity to connect directly with the plants in my own way.
A little more than a week later, another word came, this time in a slightly different part of the garden adjacent to the plants just after I checked on them.
The word was: betrayal.
I mention the locations where the various words came to me because each of these specific received perceptions felt connected with those very local areas, as if I were a probe stuck into the living brain of the earth, translating a signal. Each location impressed vividly in my memory because of the emotional impact of the experience there. Also, the words that came through were not ‘words’ as some might think of them, abstracted words from a page in a dictionary. Instead, they were living words that carried in their train full sets of relationships and associations.
This time, the word that came through was betrayal.
Riding in on that word, I saw that betrayal and broken promises function as a key emotional resonance point, a dynamic link between the experience of the people indigenous to this land and the current experience of the people now living in North America more broadly. This stood out vividly as the word rolled through my mind: We, the people of the United States, feel deeply, deeply betrayed.
Of course, as we saw at Standing Rock and many other places, the betrayal of the indigenous peoples never ended. But if you look around now, as you read news reports, as you talk with friends and relatives, watch for the element of betrayal and how it lurks beneath the conversation of pretty much everyone you interact with when the discussion turns to public affairs. It shows up as blame, as despair, as anger, as fear and distrust, as depression, as extremism, cynicism, or nihilism. These carry strong feelings, so also look for projection, blame, distraction, denial, scapegoating, self-destruction and self-medication. Alone or in combination, these maladaptive coping strategies are typical of how we as a culture often work with strong feelings.
The betrayal was and is enormous. I’m not going to list events or cite evidence to support this point. Just look. Look and feel in your own heart, think back in time, and then look around you. My sense is, it didn’t just start this year or last, or even in the last decade or two. I’m not saying when it started, I’m just saying that I feel it reaching a crescendo. People feel betrayed, wronged, and the sense of wrongness is growing. As a nation, we feel a promise has not been honored. We feel deceived. And we feel it deeply.
I sat with this for a couple weeks, sharing with close friends what I’d seen and felt, and how it came to me. During that time, as often happens, the perception seemed to gather its own evidence, which is why I’m suggesting that my readers carry it forth into their experience and see if it has any explanatory power for you around what’s going on. For me, it does. It seemed especially poignant given that my original intent in growing the plants was to bring a better healing to the traumas of the society that lived here before me, in which betrayals figured so prominently. I had a growing, terrible awareness that our current situation as a nation is a completely foreseeable, natural and logical continuation of the betrayals that have characterized the relationship of indigenous people with the newcomers to this continent and their leaders.
On the upside, looking the reality of betrayal in the face allows for something else to happen. With betrayal, I was given a key to understanding the connecting point between the historical Native American trauma and the current trauma now facing the people of the Americas as a whole. I call this correspondence a point of “functional resonance.” The betrayal that we are now feeling is a problem with a leverage point outside of the present. To address one side is to begin addressing the other. But to truly address a trauma, one must recognize its actual emotional depths and dimensions.
This means feeling it.
Fierce compassion, indeed.
The essence of this fierce compassion is incisive, uncompromising honesty. The time has come to ask, as individuals and as a nation: Do we want a true diagnosis and remedy for our woes, or a mere palliative? Tobacco offers only the former.
As I continued feeling into it, and in total contradiction to all my previous experiences and negative cultural conditioning about tobacco, this plant is in essence a call to honesty and a more honest relationship with life as it is lived. And obviously, I’m not talking about people who “just need a cigarette to calm down.” That is a palliative. It’s an abuse of the plant. The plant doesn’t become less fierce when it’s abused. It becomes more dangerous.
My work with the living plants, by contrast, showed me the positive side of its fierceness. The fierce honesty it calls us to is demanding, multilayered and uncompromising. It’s compassionate because ultimately, the capacity for honesty is necessary to truly serve life. To see the gravity of a grave situation is a gift. Doing so opens doors that may ultimately help remedy our errors and mitigate the worst of the consequences of the mistakes already made, if enough people open to receive a bigger truth.
Only another week or so went by before the next big download came. By this time the larger tobacco plants had grown as tall as me and were flowering, topped with large sprays of trumpet-shaped white flowers. During a gathering I gave a little garden tour, stopping to look at them with a couple of our guests. Standing in front of the plants themselves I shared what I’d learned in my interactions with them, and the conversation took on a decidedly dark feeling tone. We then continued walking around the fenced perimeter of the garden until we reached a little garden annex where, just outside the deer fence, I’d moved some extra corn seedlings just to see if they’d make it. They surprised me, growing into fully mature cornstalks. I then noticed that one of the husks of this fast-maturing corn variety had already turned papery dry. I picked the ear — the first of the season — and peeled back the husks to reveal a stunning mix of deep red and orange kernels gleaming in the sunlight.
The mood instantly shifted. Holding the corn in my hand, I felt the stark difference between the energies of these two plants. Immediately I understood that corn offered the balancing principle for the tobacco. I could feel it. Over there, a few meters behind us, was the fierce and unyielding energy of the tobacco. Here, glowing in my hand, a humble ear of corn. One could hardly imagine a greater contrast.
Over the next couple hours during our gathering I had to go inside periodically to write down notes as they came through, and more came throughout the evening and over the following weeks as I fleshed out the insights. The download this time was comprehensive in both its diagnosis and prescription.
What came to me is that in basic terms life moves between the polarities of austerity and abundance, as embodied in the changes of the seasons, rhythms of exertion and rest, want and satiety, exhale and inhale. Austerityis a word many aren’t familiar with, and the image that keeps coming to mind is of Shaker furnishings: bare, stark, unadorned and utilitarian. Shaker furniture embodies austere design principles. Tobacco likewise embodies the principle of austerity, which takes the form of being willing to be stripped down and humbled, to become innocent of the guile and subterfuge of the mind, opening one’s self to receive a level of truth that comes from a clear inner connection with life.
Corn, on the other hand, is abundance. While the immediate effect of tobacco is to nauseate us and empty us out, corn pleasantly satisfies and fills. It’s no surprise, then, that people would pursue corn and reject what tobacco offers in its deeper spiritual manifestation. However, a healthy individual or society will check the impulse to indulge exclusively in corn-fueled abundance, and voluntarily enter into austerities. Only when I held the season’s first ear of corn in my hand did I realize how absolutely essential is the balance of these polarities: Through contact with the austerity principle one can enhance one’s ability to manage abundance without being corrupted by it. Failure to approach such austerities voluntarily is an invitation for austerity to come knocking on our doors instead. Collectively, this is where the rich nations of the world now stand.
For generations, our society has been literally awash in corn, veritable mountains of it filling silos, barges, railcars and ships. Not coincidentally, as a society, we have also been seduced by the abundance principle. Sure, if we’re talking about misery — suffering without need, meaning or consequence — of that, modern cultures have plenty. Picture all the chronically ill people eating corn snacks and drinking corn syrup-sweetened beverages looking at electronic screens that seduce them to buy more. Yes, we have misery, of this kind and many needless others. But of austerity and the capacity for true seriousness it bestows, as a culture, we have little.
Over the following weeks I considered how the corn taken from the indigenous people was handed back as liquor, and how ultimately the corn was refined and engineered until even our food became poison. The modern weaponization of food reveals a lot about our culture. And even without this ongoing horror show, abundance itself, taken to absurd excess and with no counterbalancing force, has proven intoxicating, disorienting, stupefying. In direct consequence, the nation’s capacity for seriousness has largely been drained into petty concerns: personal fortunes, financial shenanigans, political appeasements and intrigues, juridical abuses and the proliferation of “industries” devoted to amusement, obfuscation, sickening food, needless wars, useless trash, industrial imprisonment, and various other brands of mass-marketed or state-sponsored death.
So what is the austerity we’re being invited to, with increasingly insistent knocks upon the door? What forms help us to strip down, be humbled, become innocent of the guile and subterfuge of the mind, and open ourselves to receive a level of truth that comes from a clear inner connection with life? Austerity often looks like a taking away of things. In addition to the possibility of embarking upon the rigorous traditional teaching path of tobacco itself, austerity can take the form of fasting, for example, or of sacrifice. It can take the form of physical extremes: heat, cold, voluntary isolation, vigorous exercise or other kinds of endurance. It can take the form of discipline — even disciplined thought, for example — or spiritual or artistic practice. Any form of letting go can be an austerity, but especially letting go of habits and cherished beliefs or certainties. Pride, vanity, gluttony, sloth, etc… these are all just habits, too. Devoted service of any kind can also be an austerity. In effect, the basic principle of austerity is the cutting or dropping away of that which does not serve. In so doing it allows us to connect more deeply with the things that do serve, and then to build again from there. This is what I mean by true seriousness as an outcome of austerity, and austerity being the necessary steering wheel to direct our abundance in a life-giving way.
However, I feel a little cautious about extolling the virtue of seriousness given how much mock-seriousness flows through the media and our business and governmental institutions. For many, the habit of hiding within a parody of seriousness serves just as poorly as any of the other vices. In fact, for the habitually serious, letting go of that habit could very well be an austerity, since almost always such seriousness is a cover for something else, perhaps an ego-driven desire to be taken seriously, for example, or a need to intimidate or control others, or perhaps a need to maintain an inflated sense of self-importance. None of these in themselves are truly serious goals.
Stripped down and left open, however, we can arrive, be present and feel what there is to feel. What I notice in this emptiness is that the feelings of betrayal in the air are now meeting with those moving through the earth beneath my feet. They meet in me; I am a connection point. When I say that the feeling of betrayal is a place of “functional resonance,” what I mean is that standing at this point of intersection, any efforts made toward healing the terrible betrayals of the past will be catalyzed by unflinchingly surveying the scope of the enormous betrayals of the present, and vice versa. They are connected phenomena. It may seem like the past is past, so why bother? Or it may seem that the present is our culture’s just deserts, or that the situation is hopeless, or there’s really no problem, so why bother? But the past isn’t ‘past’ when it is present in my feeling body, and the present is just another opportunity to address the dynamic as a whole.
This is what’s coming to me now.
And I feel that, one way or another, it’s what’s coming to all of us. Therefore, it’s best to understand both the current winds that blow and the earth that yet trembles beneath us with the burdens of the past by understanding the emotional dynamics that connect the two. Healing this is serious work, but it’s better to undertake it now and willingly than to wait until the manifestations of the pattern get any more deeply engraved on the world than they already are.
