Three web sites have transformed my experience of pushing a new conversation, human plant communion, to the excitement of catching up with an old conversation, human plant communication!

Here are the sites:

Psychobiology: http://www.psychobotany.com/

Ecopsychology:
SEEDS FOR THOUGHT: An Ecopsychology Blog: http://thoughtoffering.blogs.com/ice_seeds/

International Community for Ecopsychology: http://www.ecopsychology.org/

From the Ecopsychology site, we read: "At its core, ecopsychology suggests that there is a synergistic relation between planetary and personal well being; that the needs of the one are relevant to the other."

And from the Psychobiology site: "Psychobotany attempts to cultivate a cultural terrain that includes a wide array of efforts at human/plant communication. Artists, scientists, subcultures, religions, activists, and visionaries all share plots in the field of Psychobotany. Combining elements of scientific truth, spiritual beliefs, aesthetic savvy, and social expression, Psychobotany is a fertile ground where the diverse cultural roots of human/plant communication can take hold."

"Human plant communion" is not so much something that we do. Human plant communion, for me, at this moment, is more a way of being, an acknowledging, playful, open hearted, open minded presence to the living creatures about us.

Fully alive being human.

Yes, "Human Plant Communion" came to me in a vision of the Black Madonna, as a creative mandate, as a reality of which I had impoverished awareness.

Yet the phrase scarcely exists in English language usage; and when I introduce it, eyes glaze.

How is it that "plant" and "communion" are rarely juxsta supposed?

A look at our language, itself, is powerfully revealing:

In the English language, our choices for "third person" pronouns are "he", "she", and "it"; so, all non human life forms are are relegated to the realms of "its", the category of objects, of things. All the denizens of all the kingdoms of life, if non human, are "it-ed" in our languaging, and so in our experiencing. Confusing the map with the territory, with our thinking and speaking, we cast ourselves in a spell of separation and alienation from the rest of nature, with impoverished linguistic access to nature as community.

This linguistic process of objectification is convenient, facilitating our treatment of life as a resource, and killing life with impunity, for lack of a sense of relatedness from which ethic naturally arises. Objectification is devastatingly impoverishing of our experience of relatedness; and to be fully human is to be fully related, with access, then, to both compassion and joy.

With an "it", ordinarily, there is no sense of union, communion, communication, or community. And no call for compassion. On the contrary, "its", objects, are things to be used. Under this spell of language, all of nature is demeaned to the status of commodity, of "resource".

This "it-ing" of nature is synonymous with our alienation, the root of our suffering, the source of our fear, and the context of our participation in the most rapid extinction of species in the history of life on this planet, in no small degree as a consequence of habitat loss due to our food production.

No wonder Gaia, the archetypal Mother, is appearing in our dreams, calling us to awaken from the spell of our language and enter into the community of life.

This conversation is an invitation for us to bring other species of life into the "we space" of our language, and access our full human being.

Thanks for reading. Please share your thoughts, here and with your friends.

EXPLORATION OF "HUMAN PLANT COMMUNION" LEADS NATURALLY, EVENTUALLY,
TO THE PLANT TEACHERS ....
http://www.biopark.org/peru/goddess1.jpg
http://www.biopark.org/peru/luna-dissertation.html
http://www.ayahuasca-shamanism.co.uk/plantnames.htm

..... AND ENTHEOGENS, PLANTS THAT PLACE US IN COMMUNION WITH LOGOS, "OTHER" ...
http://www.csse.ca/CJE/Articles/FullText/CJE27-4/CJE27-4-tupper.pdf