Hi! I’m Lex Orgera, and this is the Finding Spirit: Feeding the Ethereal Self column, where I discuss nature + culture through the lens of herbalism, literature, art, ecology, and more!
The assignment from my teacher, David Winston, is this. Find a wild plant. Spend time with this plant. If it’s a woody plant, you’ll have more seasons with it. Treat this plant like an honored elder. Learn everything you can about this plant——its physical attributes, its living conditions, how it behaves in various situations (in the rain, after a frost). A personality will begin to emerge, a picture of this plant and, because plants have species consciousness, all of its ancestors. You will do this for years before you really get to know the plant. Over time, though, you’ll begin to understand its essence.
Because I’m writing a paper on various species of the Plantago genus, I begin with Plantago major, broadleaf plantain. It’s the one you see everywhere, along with its cousin Plantago lanceolata, narrow leaf plantain. Plantain is a healing plant, excellent for bug bites, wound healing, respiratory issues. Specifically, I’m sitting with a determined, if straggly, plant growing from a crack in the driveway alongside some crab grass, prostrate knotweed, a spindly dandelion.
Of course, I find myself talking to this plant about my problems of the day——not part of the assignment, but I guess I need to slough off some detritus. My dog sidles up to me, insistent on pushing the notebook and pen from my hand. The yard around me smells faintly of poop. Suddenly, I’m thinking about violence. The harshness of living in the cracks. How much fortitude this plantain has, how its spike of the tiniest flowers will go to seed, carried on the wind to everywhere, everywhere. How its rosette of fat, parallel-veined leaves looks like a cupped hand with thick fingers, even though Plantago comes from the Latin, planta, sole of the foot.
In a chapter of Rooted about solitude and its importance, Lyanda Lynn Haupt writes,
In the poetic rightness of etymology, the word alone comes from the Middle English——not separateness, but all + one. Both at the same time. While extended solitude does lead to a sense of inspired ease with our individual mind, it also leads us paradoxically into a deeper comprehension of our essential interconnection with other humans and the beyond-human world. We look around us at the trees, the birds, the flowers, the foxes and find they are not “other” at all.
For Haupt, being out in nature, in the solitude-but-not of the vast, is what brings her closer (closest?) to this interconnection. But what if this sloughing off of the self were a natural phenomenon happening all around us?
In an essay called “The Greening of the Self,” eco-philosopher, activist, and scholar Joanna Macy talks about our profound interconnection with everything, too. She posits that our human notion of self is actually changing, the barricaded small-ego-self is dissolving, making room for a more expansive view of self. How can it not, says Macy, when our world’s burning and we’re faced with a death so much larger than that of our individual bodies:
Planetary anguish lifts us onto another systemic level where we open to collective experience. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don’t apologize if you cry for the burning of the Amazon or the Appalachian mountains stripped open for coal. The sorrow, grief, and rage you feel are a measure of your humanity and your evolutionary maturity. As your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal.
Macy calls this greening of the self a spiritual breakthrough in our journey. “The life pouring through us, pumping our heart and breathing through our lungs, did not begin at our birth or conception,” she writes, “Like every particle in every atom and molecule of our bodies, it goes back through time to the first splitting and spinning of the stars.”
“We are beginning to realize that the world is our body.” —Joanna Macy
I’ve felt this in the garden and out in the woods——where you stop being a contained self even for just a brief moment, a few hours. In a small but significant way, we can all participate in the greening of the self——let’s face it, we don’t have the luxury of sticking our heads in the sand——a nudge to our consciousness, tending to our own back yards. Sitting with a plant. Tending the vegetable garden. Watching the goldfinches in the sunflower patch. Taking a favorite hike in the woods slowly, with purpose.
Will these moments save the planet? I believe they will, actually. This awakening to spirit puts us in proximity to an entirely new way of being, feeds that part of us that feels broken. The more we practice, even in the smallest ways, being with, say, plants, the less distinct, less distant we’ll be from them. Like meditation or exercise, it is a practice. A few minutes every day to a world where othering doesn’t exist at all. As Macy writes, it requires us to be open to feeling more pain——but won’t it also require us to then do something about it?
xo,
Lex
No time like now, eternity is now ;-)
In the same line (re: alone) the word "atonement" springs to mind where in Middle English the sense points to at-one-moment. Both leaning more towards a much needed axis mundi if wish for a longer ride on this mother earth spaceship.