Don't inhale?

Various things conspired today to make me wonder if I'm being too diffident with trees. I got together with a friend at a coffee shop today and told her about my evolving views about trees and how to structure a course around them. She's an artist in her spare time and understood my wish to incorporate drawing into the class but was also unsurprised when I reported that my efforts at tree sketching show it to be far from easy - and that's before getting to the more aspirational drawings of trees from below, with symbionts, in rooted communion, etc.! 

Still, we need something in the class that allows us to go beyond words, something that engages trees directly, and something that has the structure of a ritual... I told her that some of the folks writing in the huge anthology The Mind of Plants, which I've been making my way through, would probably suggest ingesting the plants. Not to mention the many Lang students into psychedelics! I recounted my relief at the essay where a student whose PhD advisor prescribes her a dieta to open herself to communication with a passionflower has her visitation before getting around to drinking the tea made of passionflower roots - but when I just returned to it, I found I'd missed the point. Kristi Onzik had indeed 

learned from my previous encounters with passionflower [that] ... the plant need not be ingested to affect and make a different kind of sense out of me (284)

but the bodily crisis she goes through after her week of preparation needs the tea to subside, and take her, through sleep, to the next stage: 

I awoke into a bursting portal of vibrant pinks and purples, a deepening concentric swirl into and through the famously ethereal inflorescence, and doused in the perfume of an overwhelming, euphoric sensation that I was, at once, being birthed by and giving birth to the passionflower. There was no origin or end, no finish line or boundary between us. 

Thereafter, my body was not mine, but something of a conduit, then a coalescence. Roots sprouted from my sacrum, gently coaing my spine back down into earthly grounds. As my body sak heavier into ground, spirng coiled tendrils and broad palmate leaves lifted and suspended all thoughts away from perception, though it was no longer clear where perception was, nor whom. As the dieta unfolded, my all-too-familiar concept of time as a linar ordering of experience into past, present, and future, became confused, and in its deepest passionflower-"ness," seemingly irrelevant., hardly interesting, and only vaguely conceivable. In this timeless dimension of communing, there were no verbs, no endpoints, or destinations. Such distinctions couldn't be. I was passionflower and passionflower me. (285)

Bizarre - and not dangerous? This is what I was referring to last week when I mentioned finding some of the humanists who write about plants "goofy," but it's more than that. I find it alarming and confusing. How can these folks think that plants, which have been around much much longer than we have, have anything to say to us, want to be in relation with us? Their chemistry has evolved for relationships with other symbionts; how could one think that we could or should connect to plants by ingesting them?

This was the point at which I was ambushed by something I'd read in a completely different connnection, this morning's Chinese lesson. The dialogue, "头痛医脚 the head hurts, treat the leg," was about traditional Chinese medicine. Over thousands of years, I read, Chinese doctors have observed the interconnections of various parts of the human body, and treated them with a panoply of thousands of natural substances. 人们在长期的劳动和生活中，发现很多植物，动物和矿物能治病 Through years of working and living, people discovered that many plants, animals and minerals can cure [human] illnesses. I'm usually just bowled over at the thought of how these affinities were discovered - a process of trial and error involving, surely, fatal errors - but today I realized, as we sipped our coffee, that ingesting plants because of their effect on us is of course something we do all the time. (The Minds of Plants essay on coffee by Joseph Dumit celebrates coffee as a giver of so many gifts we fearfully imagine downsides and dangers when there are in fact none.) 

To suppose we could, or should, distance ourselves from trees enough to draw them is in its own way unnatural, and untrue to our intimate and interpenetrating relationships with them. I'm uninitiated in the psychedelic and content not to be, so we'll keep sketching ... but I might bring the class some linden blossom tea and talk about some of this... Plant features developed in tandem with entirely other species and ecosystems may nevertheless interact with our bodies in ways worth thinking about.

And maybe bring in Ella singing the Duke's paean to passionflowers...

Passion flower

Sent from the blue above

You're a flower of love

Passion flower

Free as a star in flight

Laughing through the night

Your lips keep taunting me

Not wanting me

Yet haunting me

Each day

Stay with me

My passion flower

You are all I'm dreaming of

Passion flower of love

Passion flower of love

"Not wanting me / Yet haunting me" - I can go with that! 

(Image by José Maria Pout from The Minds of Plants)