52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth (reissued): 1 - Epazote

High Desert, Arizona on the border with Mexico, one of the book's main territories

Twenty years ago I had a dream that changed the course of my life utterly.  It was about a weed that grows along the waysides in Mexico, a plant I had never met. Ten years later I wrote a book called 52 Flowers That Shook My World where it heralds the encounters and medicine stories behind a radical departure from everything I had once known. Today, in celebration of the the book becoming available in PDF format, here is its first flower.

Notting Hill, London 1990 

That night I had a dream. I was walking through a green land and an Indian woman came up to me and put some herbs in my hand. I have been having dreams about plants since I returned from Mexico. Men and women are appearing silently from nowhere and giving me sage tea to drink, or instructing me to plant bulbs, or I find myself walking through fields of wheat and maize and seeing how their growing patterns have been disturbed. This dream was unusual, however, in that this native woman spoke the names out loud: one was liquorice root and the other had a name I did not recognise, epazote. 

In the dreams I know about the cornfields but I do not know about the herbs. I particularly do not know about this herb called epazote. That night I got up and sat at my writing table and looked at my hands. I have the familiar corn in my right, but in my left, I hold a plant I do not know. It is a stranger. 

I am in my flat alone in the middle of the night, holding this strange herb from a dream. I am surrounded by everything I know: shelves of books, thousands of them, line the walls of this kitchen study. In the adjacent living room the treasures of a thirty-something life sit in the darkness: pottery bowls from markets, pearwood chairs from auctions, a long handcrafted table where people meet, an Indian mattress where people sometimes sleep. I could pick up every object in this room and tell you its story: who was there when I found it, what it means, how it defines me; how this jacket came from Paris, the paella pan from Madrid, the blue meshed larder from Athens, this stone from a certain beach in Wales, these cow bones from the New Mexican desert. I could tell you all the recipes that I cook in these earthenware dishes, with my junkstore utensils that lie in a drawer, in my alchemical workplace of words and cooking pots, my rooms with a certain atmosphere many people love to come to, even more than being with me. Charlotte’s for supper, with its table and familiar objects, with its rough panelling, its windows without curtains, where you can hear the occasional sound of a bus passing, or a drunk reeling down the road. With its inspirational physical style. 

In this moment I feel all the attention that I and others have placed on these objects dwelling in these rooms. I feel the way I move about them, write about them, handle them is becoming more important than my own living being, and something in me shudders. 

I realise that my being is about something else that is not dependent on these objects. Life is not about things that others or I can handle. These objects are a replacement for a relationship with life. But nothing replaces that relationship, not really. It is a comfort, as a child is comforted in the night by a toy. But it is not the real thing. This plant I do not know yet is telling me this. It is having a certain effect as I sit and contemplate it. Everything I am surrounded by has become imbued with a different feeling, has become less secure in this moment. It as if these objects no longer have anything to do with me. They are losing their hold, unhooking themselves, as I hold this strange herb in my left hand. 

The entrance of the stranger on the solar path is the pivotal point, the point when it begins. The stranger is something about which you know nothing, that you allow into your life. Sometimes this is a person and sometimes a new idea. But whatever form the stranger takes, it comes like a strange attractor and breaks the limit cycle of our lives, like a philosopher’s stone that begins the strange alchemy of our souls. Our worlds are normally so circumscribed that we automatically do everything to keep this stranger out. We are programmed to defend ourselves, like genetically modified plants, to deport any visiting outsider as an undesirable alien, in order that we continue to conduct our affairs in the same small way, without questioning their validity. 

But sometimes we let the stranger in anyway. Sometimes by accident, and sometimes fired up by an ancient curiosity, our native love of secrets and mysteries, our desire for keys and clues and signs. Our souls lie in wait for such a moment, the moment when our consciousness starts to ask questions and rouses us out of bed to look at our hands. 

What has awoken me this night from my sleep is the memory of Mexico. This first germinating seed is a wild plant known as Mexican wormseed. Epazote is not a grand plant; in fact it is a common weed that flourishes by any highway, ditch or vacant lot from Sonora to Chiapas. Its name derives from the Nahuatl word for skunk, due to its unmistakable pungent aroma. It is a member of the goosefoot family, a whole tribe of flourishing weeds like tumbleweed and fat hen, all with small flowers and nourishing rich green leaves (beetroot, good king henry, spinach are all goosefoots). However, epazote’s power lies not in its leaves but in its rank and bitter seeds, which are a formidable anti-parasitic and vermifuge. It was once cultivated throughout the world as a cure against the ravages of hookworm. It has been used for centuries in Mexican cooking to flavour and act as a digestive aid in beans. In fact, once you have tasted its strange and musty scent, you can’t cook beans without it. 

Once I had tasted Mexico, I could not do without Mexico either. Its strange and bitter flavours. When I had travelled there with Mark that spring I had gone without any references. It was unexpected, something I had not calculated for. ‘No one I knew knew Mexico,’ as I would write later in a book about this journey. Mexico did not exist in my library or my internal world, so its presence could act on my being absolutely. And absolutely it did. This did not just mean the unusual physical senses of the place: the scent of tuberose, the colours of the painted walls, the long bus rides through valleys of glow-worms, a hot turquoise sea – but also things of a deeper, more cosmic level. It meant taking hallucinogenic mushrooms that tore my consciousness open in the Mayan rainforest, and now, as I am looking at my hands, it means Carlos Castaneda and the warrior’s path, a path of heart that goes through the desert. A certain desert of thorns and cactus. 

When you start the solar journey, you hunt for ways to begin. If you are a writer, you start with books, and of all the many books I was reading at this time, it was Castaneda’s account of his apprenticeship with the Yacqui seer don Juan in Mexico that spoke most urgently to me. While others I knew were fascinated by the book’s description of power and the control of dreams, I was absorbed by its meticulous description of the energetic acts of the warrior, those strategic steps of the will that enabled one to live with fluidity in the world: the assuming of responsibility, the letting go of self-pity and self-importance, encountering the mysterious presence of twilight and the concept of impeccability. 

The other ‘new-age’ works I looked at during this time had very little to do with impeccability. They concerned themselves with important gods and goddesses, family psychology and wounded healers, archetypes and temples. They belonged to the bourgeois city parlours I recognised from my novel-reading days. But Castaneda’s books were talking about something that did not originate in the city. The writer-anthropologist had left the city of Los Angeles in the early sixties in search of a plant called peyote that grew out in the desert chaparral that lay between Arizona and Mexico. There was something clear and autonomous and mysterious in his quest that resonated with my own being. His journey reminded me of the deliberate life I had come across in the works of Sartre when I was young. Don Juan’s teachings spoke of a rigorous and affectionate relationship between man and earth that was both sparing and tender, that lived quite beyond this indulgent, acquisitive, objectifying world I lived and worked in. Because everything he spoke of worked within the framework of death. 

Most of all Mexico meant death. Death is your advisor, don Juan advises Carlos Castaneda. We are all beings who are going to die. Every act you make as a warrior is your last act on earth, so you don’t have time for petty moods or failures. You don’t waste your time. 

I had not considered death before, my death. Death is something you don’t think about in the eternal shopping world of London or Los Angeles, but in Mexico death looks at you directly in the eye, rattling its smiling skeleton in the face of your artificial parasitic life, whose currency is inflated ten times its actual value. At a certain point, if you care about life, you turn to face death. You let go of the world you have been involved in constructing and start to work for the spirit of things. You realise you are not going to be on this earth forever and certain strategic moves need to be made if you want to experience this mysterious place while you are here. 

In Palenque that spring I had realised my life in the world meant nothing. It wasn’t worth a handful of beans. In the annihilating force of the mushrooms, I could hold on to nothing of this existence, not even my name. So I let them go. And what was left in its place was a relationship to life that now demanded my full attention, linked both with my own heart and with the mysterious man whose destiny now appeared inextricably bound up with my own. Mark. 

One day shortly after this epazote dream, I picked up the telephone. ‘Mark, Let’s go to Mexico for six months,’ I said. ‘We can write a book together.’ 

‘Oh, yes!’ he said. ‘But what about your flat?’ 

There was a pause. 

‘I’m going to sell it,’ I said. ‘I’m going to sell everything I own.’ 

When I left London I was thirty-five. The age when you let go of the corn you have been sowing in your right hand, and take up what destiny has given you in your left. When Death appears at your door, when the mysterious woman with her wand of wormseed comes to you and suggests you face another direction entirely. When you let go of everything you know and walk toward the sun, towards an unknown horizon.

You can order 52 Flowers That Shook My World from The Dark Mountain Project online shop here. Unpublished chapters are also posted on this site. You can read them here.

52 FLOWERS: 49 Vervain

Vervain is from the last section of 52 Flowers That Shook My World, Flower- mind. It is one of the unpublished pieces that focus on the invisible, solar aspect of the plant world - some of the flowers and trees that have been connected with the 'spirituality' of different cultures and its bonds through time. 

A small flower with a long history for Autumn equinox 2015. 

brightwell-cum-sotwell, oxfordshire 02

It’s a beautiful little house. You want to walk up the path and sit there in the garden amongst the flowers. The people who open the door are friendly and will let you wander about the garden, sit in the wooden armchairs the former owner of the house once made with his own hands, rest by the shady pool where the flowers surround you in all their colours in the brilliant July heat.

Mount Vernon is the house where the 'inventor' of flower essences, Dr Bach, lived for the last years of his hard-working life. By the time he arrived in the small Oxfordshire village he had already formulated the first 12 healers of his 38 flower cannon and the second 7 helpers in the English and Welsh countryside. In the nearby lanes he found the last 19 and finalised a formula, known as Rescue Remedy, his famous and well-loved mixture of star of Bethlehem, clematis, rock rose, impatiens and cherry plum.

The year was 1934, a hard time in history but a great unleashing of modern expression and ancient wisdoms that brought many original thinkers and seers to the fore. There was a longing for a new world and there were radical moves away from conventional thinking towards a deeper consciousness. One was made by a young Welsh bacteriologist, who influenced by these spiritual explorations, left a conventional Harley Street practice, and began to work on a set of seven homeopathic remedies for chronic conditions of the bowel.

As he sat beside his patients in the Homeopathic Hospital in London, he found that it was not the physical disease but the mind-set and emotional state of the people that determined their treatment. The same temperaments needed the same remedy irrespective of the disease. He began to treat these bacterial diseases with great success (the seven Bach nosodes are still in use today) but disliking the impure nature of homeopathic essences, he started to work with wild flowers. The first plant he worked with was a monkeyflower by a stream in Wales. It was his first remedy: for Fear of Known Things.

For the rest of his life, the doctor worked with flowers. He walked the length and breadth of Southern Britain, from Wales to Norfolk investigating the effects of flowers on human physiognomy and eventually gave up his medical practice entirely.  From homeopathy he took the method of succussion to extract the invisible workings of the plant material and form the basis of the mother essence. And he also took the practices of proving and profiling.  

Proving entails working with the quality of a given substance or plant, testing it on yourself, noting its particular effects (most medicine plants or substance contain both cause and cure, so that if you deliberately take a treatment when you are well, it will bring on the symptoms that plant or substance will treat). Bach reversed this process: when he found himself suffering from various emotional and mental states he would walk into the countryside and find the flowers that could release him from his torments.  

Profiling is the matching of a type of personality to the corresponding energetic structure of a plant or substance (e.g. a belladonna type, an arsenic type). Along the homeopathic principle of like cures like, the remedy stimulates conditions within your being that releases constricting patterns. As Bach experienced his own states of bitterness, loneliness, anxiety and so on, he built up a canon of “types” that corresponded to the character of the plants.

The first flowers and trees he worked with he called the Twelve Healers. The number was no accident. Deeply esoteric, a Mason, with a keen interest in astrology, the Healers corresponded to the twelve zodiacal signs, Each plant represented not a personality but a soul-type. In the esoteric tradition, each person is present on earth to undergo one of the twelve lessons of the soul, based on the ancient principle of reincarnation. The flower essences helped to remind you of your particular soul-lesson, your challenges, your strengths and weaknesses. Illnesses occurred due to a clash or separation between your ego and your soul, and in these cases the Healers could act as a bridge.

Dr Bach played down the astrological correspondences of his work, preferring to promote a simple system of remedies. The second nineteen of his canon addressed the seven categories of emotional and mental state and make no reference to the soul.  His followers in turn, and indeed most modern practitioners, downplayed the spiritual aspects of his work. Fifty years later it is hard if you go up to the door of Mount Vernon to see these underlying influences in the normal-looking brick cottage, amongst the familiar labelled bottles on the shelves. And yet they are there.

I had not taken any of the remedies when I sat in the garden. But I knew most of the plants and had explored some of their correspondences with Bach’s system.  I had stood under the shivering leaves of an aspen and shaken with unknown fears, dreamed of a honeysuckle that pulled me adroitly back from the past, felt the cleansing energy of crab apple blossom in a Welsh hedgerow. But some of the flowers did not correspond as neatly as the remedies suggested.. Some of them in fact struggled within the fixed and narrow band the flower essences had placed them.  One of them appeared to have no time for it at all.

ii

As I walked through the gate at Mount Vernon my eyes lit up: a giant turquoise dragonfly, an aesthena, was resting on a dead rose, and beneath them there was a vervain plant in full flower. Before my mind had even time to name it, my face had broken into one of those deep broad smiles that come when you have wanted to see a plant for a long time and one day chance upon it. For years I had read about these 'inconspicuous' wayside plants with their mighty reputations. And here suddenly it was. Vervain has been called the king of the herbs but you wouldn’t realise why at first glance. Nor it is easy to come across in the wild.

Once you find it, however, you know it forever. It has a dry bushy form with typical wavy verbena leaves, but it is the flowers that immediately arrest your attention – hundreds of tiny mauve and white flower that shine at the end of a myriad stiff stems. When you take a second look you see a complex head with a hundred eyes on stalks, looking at you like an ancient mythical creature, and you cannot but help stare back, your own eyes whizzing about, delighted, not knowing on which petalled point to rest your gaze. Oh, a seer plant! I thought, as I stood transfixed by its luminescence, as you might be caught spellbound by the sudden sight of stars in the nightsky.

Vervain is a traditional herbal medicine for the eyes, as well as a peerless nerve tonic, working on the human nervous system as an anti-depressant, relaxant, sedative and anti-spasmodic for tense and jittery stomachs. Its bitter-tasting leaves restore the body after illness, allay fevers and anxiety, migraine and virus colds. But it is more famous as a plant of the spiritual realms, as a talisman flower, a fortune-teller’s plant, a protector and luck-bringer that throughout history has been sought to ward off plague, avert evil, bad spells, calamity and in more modern usage, to heal holes in the aura. It was once an altar plant (its Latin name verbena means altar) claimed by both Druid and Roman priests and is the chief of the nine sacred Anglo-Saxon herbs. In some Celtic lands it was known simply as “the herb” and so highly regarded that you had to wait for one to be bestowed upon your garden.

In Dr Bach’s system. these high leadership qualities in the homeopathic system of “like cures like” becomes a remedy for righteousness, unrealistic idealism, over-enthusiasm (especially in regard to ambitions for humanity) and burn-out.

“Vervain is for those with fixed principles and ideas, which they are confident are right, and which they very rarely change, they have a great wish to convert all round them to their own views of life. They are strong of will and have much courage when they are convinced of those things that they wish to teach. In illness they struggle on long after many have given up their duties”.

Vervain was one of Bach’s core remedies, one of the original twelve. In his system of astrological correspondence in which the placement of the moon is an indication of soul-type, Vervain corresponds with those born with the moon in the fiery fixed sign of Leo. Which made the doctor of flowers  a 'Vervain'.

iii

Nothing happened in the garden. We sat in the doctor’s chairs. We sat in on the garden bench, and it felt comely and sound in the way you sometimes feel in Wales with the wild and mythic just out of reach beyond the tidy stone walls. The flowers were at their height and grew in profusion: monkeyflowers edged the pond, great stands of blue chicory and St johns wort surrounded the bench, roses tumbled over the doors. It was beautiful and yet something troubled me: what was it?

I found I could not speak about my experience. Afterwards I realised I had felt walled in  and unable to think for myself, trapped in the garden of a dead man. And then I had felt the flowers, all 38 of them trapped, like thousands of minute geniis in a bottle, waiting to serve sick and neurotic human beings who never would meet them, never talk with them or know their beauty and intelligence,, and I shuddered. After this day, I would not make a flower essence again.

 

Mount Vernon had been bequeathed to Bach’s devoted assistants and now has become a monument to the man and his work, as well as a training centre. Like many of the original spiritual thinkers and mystics of this time, Bach depended on his followers to transmit his discoveries. And, like other great men who depart and put their systems in the hands of followers, difficulties often ensue in the houses they leave behind. No one is ever the match of the original. There is a struggle to emulate the man who now takes on a holy hue: more Krishnamurti than thou, more Gurdgieffian than thou. Confined in the centres preserved by the faithful, it is hard to encounter the original energy of their creators. It is difficult to trace the doctor of flowers, to discover what led him to those conclusions about vervain. You are faced with a system that is fixed and perfected.: 38 formulas, 12 healers, 7 Helpers. You sit in the garden of Mount Vernon, and feel repressed by the quiet-voiced, white-coated people in the house.

You don’t want to and yet you cannot help feeling controlled by the business of healing, by the relegating of your soul to a type. You try and find out about the man, only to find that he has erased his own steps. His followers, adherents of the perfect system, offer few clues. You know however that the man was not perfect, he was impatient (many considered Bach an Impatiens soul-type) and that those chairs in his old consulting room were not constructed out of fancy, but from lack of funds (the doctor famously never charged for his flower treatments).

In between the glowing reports published out of Mount Vernon and in his own modest literary output you discover he died at 50 from exhaustion, weakened by a near-fatal illness suffered whilst working in a war hospital. Like many inventors and creators, Bach underwent a demanding alchemical process - the burning of dross, the darkness of melancholy, social rejection, the interior tussle with the formulation of new ideas, as he  faced the complexity of the cosmos, saw the stars of the vervain sparkle overhead. And yet of this personal struggle, there is no report.

The problem with spirituality is that it leaves out the creative, experiential process behind any original work. The creator is sacrificed for the system, his head laid upon the altar. He dismantles his own path in favour of the goal. What rules in his place are the managers of the system, the high priests of temples and pyramids, the secret masters skulking in Himalayan caves, under the Gobi desert floor.  

The doctor wishes the ideal to work, the soul-types to work, for the pure and simple flowers to be the solution for all our ills, when we are on a planet teeming with bacteria and complexity.The doctor wishes the hospitals to be clear calm places where the state of the soul is considered first before any remedy is sought, but the reality is they are filled with the maimed and the wounded from the trenches. In the ideal Bach world you move gently and quietly. You do not get impatient, get cancer, walk away from two marriages, face being struck off by the GMA and have to suffer every day.  

After an operation on his spleen in 1917, Dr Bach looked at death every day for nineteen years. But he doesn’t write  like this. He erases the underworld, the poison, the war hospitals, his own pain and poverty. He wants to get as far as possible away from those intestines and their filthy, chronic states, to render something intensely complex, pure and simple, without stain. All vice can be cured he declares, by flooding ourselves with its opposite virtue, as he sluices his ravaged body in cool water, dresses himself in white robes, sets out to make a flower essence in the purity of the early day.

Still the vervain waits in the garden, and still I feel uncomfortable with this altar plant within my sights. In his elegant, if now old-fashioned, pamphlet Bach begins his discourse with the statement that all disease has one cause, which is action against Unity and these actions are divided into types: “the real primary disease in man are defects: pride, cruelty, hate, ignorance, instability and greed. All these versions of self-love, every one can be cured by flooding it with our selfless devotion to serving humanity”. Our vice, he wrote, is our great challenge, “or there would no no need for our existence here”.

But when the people came to his surgery, sat in this room, in the depression of the Thirties, when the spectre of the Great War had ripped through every family and village in the land, did he see this too as their souls wanting a lesson?  Did he not ask himself, as they sat opposite him in those wooden chairs, that if this ancient, all-knowing system worked, that after all these aeons, we would have learned our lessons by now, and be treating each other and the planet in a more enlightened way?

And does not the plant with its myriad eyes still shine the garden by the gate and ask us to see what lies beyond the ever-whirling zodiac?

iv

It is the in-between times in middle England, when we are returning from Wales, trying to find a home. The following day after visiting Mount Vernon, I go to Oxford, to walk the towpaths and the nearby territories of our former plant inquiry. Beneath the great lime tree thrumming with bees I collect lime flowers in a brown paper bag for tea, collect St John’s wort flowers in the resplendent wasteground for oil. It is a hot day, and the river sparkles and beckons with its rich scent of water. I sit on the bank and cool my feet in its green shallows; the river flowers - skullcap, purple loosestrife, hemp agrimony and gipsywort - shimmer all about me. A barge goes by slowly. Small boys leap off the bridge and splash into the pool by Port Meadow. The willows and black poplar leaves rustle in a small breeze.

In the garden you are in a small space, in limbo, and someone else is in control. People are looking out of windows. The plants by the river live in big time, outside history, beyond this control, out of the garden. They don’t see the walls. They don’t even see you sitting there, unless you get down to their wavelength. They are getting on with life. You with your vices, your self-love, your controlling gardening shears, what are you getting on with?

Here I am considering the 38 flowers of the Bach canon, surrounded by those outside the system, considering myself as a social description, a soul-type, a personality, a state, and find I do not fit. Outside the garden, the wild plants live in their own worlds:  the horse chestnuts fly through the sky and rain conkers on the garage roof. The aspen creaks in the salt wild, the crab apple holds you in her embrace on a summer’s day. I have come to earth, like everyone else, to serve experience: to sit by the one who is dying, to suffer my own failure, to lose the sight of the land I have loved and my companions. To find a new home in a dark time. I have learned to forge meaning from all these experiences. Meaning can be found, I have realised, in the most difficult of circumstances, even in prison and war, as poets and seers frequently have told us. But this is not to excuse the prison, the empire or the wheel.

At some point you have to question the altar on which you lay your head.

v

Bach’s estotericism, his love for his brother masons with whom he kept close contact, even in his most isolated years at Mount Vernon, had bound him to a ancient wheel. His soul-types belong to a belief system that says all souls have to undergo the challenges of the twelve constellations. It is a rigid system that insists that earth is a kind of school of hard knocks for human beings, so that we can be made perfect, like diminutive well-behaved gods.

The problem with esotericism is that it is esoteric, that is hidden. Decrees about your destiny have made by special and high-ranking entities behind closed doors, and yours is not to question them. When you consider your soul’s challenge, you do not consider the parlous condition of the civilisation you find yourself in. Least of all do you look at the brotherhoods of man, secret societies, priesthood’s that are central to all of them.

All Western esoteric traditions and healing systems originate within the sanctum of Empire and everything within them, hidden or on show, is made to serve its cause: the vervain that lies on the bloody Roman altar, the laurel leaves inhaled by the priestesses of Delphi, the mushrooms taken by Aztec high priest, the flower essences that consolidate our consumer lifestyle. When healing asks us, as Bach does, to consider the soul, it puts all responsibility of the world’s difficulty on our shoulders and diverts our gaze from Empire. You did something wrong, now you need to fix-it! If you were good and clean, these diseases would not come to you! In this taking of total responsibility, in performing this perfect service expected of you, you are leaving something vital out, something that the vervain is supposedly curing: your acute sense of injustice, the fire of your indignation, your Self.

“We should strive to be so gentle, so quiet, so patiently helpful that we move among our fellow man more as a breath of air or a ray of sunshine, ever ready to help them when they ask: but never forcing them to our views.” (from Vervain – The Twelve Healers)

On the great wheel of reincarnation, you quietly accept your lot, whatever you station. Like the caste system of India, it is a matter of karma, not history that you are where you are and who you are. You do not question whether there is any real sense in the human world, or that it is fair that the man in the mansion is the man in the mansion and that you serve him. This is not because you are not capable of asking such a question, but because you cannot see the manifested world clearly, as it is; you see it divided into vice and virtue, morally shaped, idealistically-bound, by the spirituality and the gods that you admire.

Unbound, I sit by the shining river, feet immersed in green water, beside meadowsweet and purple-flowering mint. By 2002 I have listened to too many quiet and humble people, with their all-powerful opinions about the cosmos, with their ideas of perfection, of ultimate reality, with their squeaky-clean ideals, with their temple fantasies about Egypt and Rome, with their notions of Mother India with her masters and karmas, followers of the world’s wise healers and all their wise wounds. I have sat in the Quaker House library and come to my own conclusions about the great white brotherhood of saints and martyrs. I have argued too many nights and days with fellow travellers across blue tables, where the only reason we are at odds with another, are in a realms none of us wish to look too deeply into.

We should have looked at all the ramifications, and deconstructed the wheel. But we didn’t. We were too busily persuading each other to flood ourselves with virtues, to shakes our souls free from entangling relationships, playing doctor, medicine man, priestess and missionary. To see the wheel you need to look at everything, all at once, objectively, with your vervain eyes. And though it appears noble to alleviate suffering, to offer advice, no one in this business of helping and healing is able to look at what created that suffering in the first place, with the facts of history in front of our eyes. Without considering our own experience within that history, we are blind.

And the plant, the vervain that stands by the gate in the brilliant July sunshine, what does it have to say? The vervain flashes its lights. Switch it all on! The plant is no way the servant of any civilisation or its gods, of Jupiter or Thor, Jehovah or Ra. It is entirely a being in its own right, in whom we seek guidance on how to proceed along the way. The vervain includes everything, all stars in the sky, not just one. Spirituality works within a narrow band, a duality of right and wrong, within the simplification of an artificial linear system, rather than within the complexity of living systems. Its creed: if only you people behaved properly the world would be all right! Its spokesmen, the priests and the doctors, speak on behalf of the wheel of humanity, not for the earth or the human heart. To question its supremacy, you have to go to the river, feel its flow around your feet, revisit the garden in your mind’s eye, with the flower that stands beside you.

vi

Originally the plant did not come alone. It came with two companions, which the flower guides will tell you are watermint, the wild mint of the English river, and meadowsweet, the rose of the wetlands. The guide books do not say why these humble plants once held special divinitory powers for the Celts, any more than they say why vervain is chieftain over the nine herbs, the Anglo-Saxon lucnunga, which include the other great roadside plants, plantain and fennel. You have to see for yourself why this is so.

I did not come across vervain during our original flower inquiry in Oxford, but I did find it in French Joe Canyon one awkward afternoon with Mimi and Francisco. There was a stand of the American blue-eyed vervain under a white oak. I sat beside the flowers among the scratchy grasses a while, and afterwards went swimming in a waterhole. I realised that this trio of ancient 'visioning' plants were about seeing in time. The meadowsweet was about seeing into the past, the watermint, the future. Vervain was about the present, about seeing in all-at-once time, many eyes in one place time. Seeing what is staring you in the face.

Born in a fallen house in a fallen time, I could never make any claim for purity, nor did I ever seek to become an immaculate abstainer, born-again, an example to all unfortunates. How could I? The solar path is an alchemical path, a medicine path, a poison path. The old habits you kick become your katchina; your once before loves, your materia. The blue pill, the tin of tobacco, the glass of vodka, the elicit affair. These substances are neither your shame nor your enemy, resisting them has given you the inner strength to walk from Empire. Like all creators, your struggle has kept the flame of spirit burning inside your heart. With this flame you can hold the poison of the rose:  spring cherry, wild plum, crab apple, meadowsweet,

The poison of the rose is particular. The source of prussic acid and cyanide, it is a taste you sometimes catch biting into the kernel of an apricot or peach. The poison’s characteristic odour of bitter almonds is most striking in meadowsweet, once highly esteemed as a strewing herb in Elizabethan parlours and dining halls. When you bring the fragrance of this rose to the doctor’s house, something unexpected happens.

In Oxford the queen of the meadow stands tall in the waterlands: fluffy-headed, scented, mysterious. The wild mint by the bank stands like young god, laughing, with horns on his head. The Thames sparkles alongside them. United with its companions, the vervain flashes its lights, no longer dusty and dry by the roadside. In the Arizona canyon I had swum alongside the little garter snake in sharp-cold rainwater and afterwards lay naked on the rocks to dry. Something troubled my heart as my companions gathered their healing plants beneath the shadow of the red rocks. Something vital between us was missing.

You enter the garden, coming from the outside, bringing your experience of those difficult moments with plants and flowers with you, bringing fluidity in your wake. The meadowsweet and the mint live beyond the garden, in the wild lands, in the watery meadows, everywhere that is moist and free-flowing. Bringing succour to the dust-headed king, chief of the nine herbs of the wayside.

Meadowsweet brings back the poison of the past. Dr Bach, scrubbed clean, white robed,  pure-minded, sees the building of god beautifully constructed. It matters not if you are born high or low, he says, everything will make sense in the end. There are challenges to face, but no shadow. Disease will one day be conquered. The hospitals will be quiet meditation places. The light around us is ever-lasting. The earth is god’s garden. All manner of thing shall be well.  As we look through his eyes, we are look towards this uplifting future, but the past is weighing hard upon us.

The meadowsweet lives outside god’s empire, tall in the damp woods, in the marshlands, carries the pain-killing properties of aspirin in her tough stems and leaves, her ability to decrystallise, to release all trapped energies in her fragrant and flowing presence. The rose enters the room, with her faint odour of cyanide. The doctor stands amongst the flowers redeemed from the margins, god’s chosen healers, without history or mythical association, without any poison in their veins: American monkeyflower, Himalayan balsam, African blue cerato, Dutch honeysuckle.

The meadowsweet brings wildness and complexity into the garden and floods the order of Empire; brings her poison to the doctor’s door, poison that would cure a broken spleen and heart.

vii

Like all seer plans, vervain is a tranquilliser. A tea from its leaves brings you into a relaxed state so you can access your heart and imagination, your own flowermind. It brings a stillness that allows you to find the inner pathway to the sun, in the darkness, in the deep night time of your soul. Sometimes what you behold are not images, but feelings. In Dr Bach’s garden, I had felt claustrophobic. This feeling of being spiritually trapped was not personal, it was alerting me to souls that were held trapped on the wheel, like so many genii in tiny brown bottles. Somehow I needed to find my way out of the garden.

The bush by the gate lights up your mind, so you see everything-at-once, in all its complexity. The flower essence guide will tell you that this remedy for 'overdoing it' can be seen in the plant’s  structure, the way it branches out rigidly in many directions. All that effort just for those small flowers! The stiffness of the plant is your stiffness. Like cures like. But this is to not acknowledge vervain as a plant of seers. Standing at a certain distance, your body experiences the plant in its entirety, as it appears like a globe. You get the vervain total effect: it electrifies your circuits, lights up mind, body and heart in a split second. That’s when you realise why it is the king of the herbs, commanded by the regal lion of the firmament.

With all your strict vervain eyes, with your switched-on heart, you are not fastidious, You look straight on, at all the ramifications. The spiritual system wants everything neat and tidy, boxed up and numbered,  a solution for every problem, with all the bad things and inconvenience out of the way,but the earth is not neat and tidy. It is vast and complex, a free-form interweaving of myriad lifeforms, in which each human strand with its many subtle hues, with its stories and experiences, runs through like a silvery thread flashing through silk. As you see a tiny corner of this fabric is revealed to you, a microscopic strand of many dimensions that reveals the giant complexity of the whole. Our unique and subtle appearance in this web cannot be relegated to a formula. If this were so, the earth would be a machine. And it not, it’s a transforming matrix of dimensions, most of which we cannot see in daily life, and some we will never see. And the very nature of this creative and transformative process means life can neither be  pure, nor simple. Anymore than bacteria, whose archaic forms constitute the very soil which feed the plants so life can happen, can be cleansed forever from our hands.

To see  with your vervain eyes, is an art, a voyage into the unknown, a task. The work it exacts is to acknowledge with unwavering clarity what appears in front of your eyes and translate it into daily terms. It is to see what is. What is requires you look unequivocally at what lies before you, without dismissing what you are seeing, fighting, superseding it but keeping it steady within your sights. From here you ask questions and receive readouts. You question what you see. Switch it all on! Nothing hidden, no god, no ulterior purpose, no esoteric principles, no masters, skulking in caves for aeons. Only you and what you see. You hold a fixed position because, belonging to Leo, the sun is not going anywhere. You can’t leave yourself out because without you, without the sun, core of the self of all human beings, nothing is seen. You are the eyes of the cosmos, the light that switches itself on in the dark. What you see in the dark doesn’t happen without you. To see with the heart means you cannot let the mind interfere with its eternal say-so, with its great tuppence worth of opinions and criticisms, but most of all with its predilection for ideals.

Ideals blind the seer. To hold an ideal means you desire to see things as they should be, rather what than are, within the movement of transformation. With the vision of perfection before you, you start wishing that everything on earth were otherwise that it actually is. Spirituality promotes the ideal perfect state without pain, from which you have fallen because of your imperfection. Believing suffering is wrong, you start constructing realities where pain does not exist. Realms where masters walk in robes, temples where everything is pristine and orderly.

Suddenly you are not on the earth, in time. You are inhabiting a perfect, clean world in the future. You wish you were as you imagine you can be in your mind-sphere. You start erasing and excluding those things that are not perfect, with simple clear cut choices of all spirituality (good and evil, right and wrong, love and fear). The system you have invented you realise is perfect, but you are not. Pretty soon you end up not being that important. Soon you are irrelevant, squeezed out. You are a number, a soul-type who fits or does not fit the system. Spiritually, politically, it’s a dangerous road. War is the worst of its manifestations, Dr Bach’s 38 flower canon is a less dangerous system than most, still I feel squeezed in the garden, on an earth whose only raison d’etre is that fallen human beings evolve and learn their lessons.

The stems of the vervain are rigid because they hold the light, the structure of light intrinsic within all living forms. When you bring the structures that hold of the world to light, you see whether they tally with the living systems or not. This ability to look at any individual and collective action in this multi-light (of the vervain) enables you to ask the question: for what purpose this war, for what purpose this inequality? Does my action bring liberation? Does it serve life? Does it bring the light of the sun to bear within all things?

When you ask the question, you realise that all artificial systems of the world- political, religious, scientific, medical – serve only mystify and divert the human ability to see what is. None of them encourage our innate ability to directly perceive the fabric of life.  To see into the river of life, into the fluid and dynamic non-linear dimensions is a radical act, the dangerous act of creators, since the Empire is founded on rigid and linear system of duality. They require allegiance to the perfection of the artificial mind. But the hearts of seers and creators are not loyal to empire, they are true to the sun, since it is the sun that brings the light to see in the dark.

After the Great War, when new world orders were being drawn up and new world servers recruited, two of the century’s greatest seers, Rudolf Steiner and Krishnamurti walked away from the theosophical spirituality that influenced Edward Bach, and forged their own ways of seeing the hidden dimensions of the world. Both conducted their own individual investigations into the perception of reality, and spoke and wrote about their findings.  Some of their most illuminating insights come from their direct encounters with nature: Krishnamurti walking in the early morning light amongst the live oaks of California, encountering an owl under his bed in India; Steiner in Austria and England, investigating the alchemical effects of wood ants and bees, wild camomile and horsetail within the living soils of the planet.

The sprit shines like the sun, permanent, endurable, but the soul walks a different path. Like the moon, waxes and wanes, brings tears, redemption, inspiration, keeps close to us in our lives, hold our accounts, makes the changes in our spirits possible. Bach’s vervain soul has a fiery core, ruled by Leo, the lion-king. In his small book, this fire flashes when he speaks of animal vivisection, the cruel relatives who trap their children, the friends who bind you to their will.  To be free is the path of all souls he says. Krishnamurti looks at the world of matter with his eagles eyes, his rishi’s eyes. All is laid bare beneath the Brahmin’s gaze. Steiner, like some forest salamander, glowers strangely amongst the ashes of his crucible, looks deep at the workings beneath your skin. Though their work is engrossing, illuminating, somehow there is something not quite human about the way they look at you.

 Doctor Bach leans quietly forward, his round Welsh face like a full moon, as he shines a light into your heart. There is no penetrating analysis of the people who came to see him, nor in the flower’s alchemical workings. You are not shown the interiors workings of beehives, or behold the cosmos or the face of the tigers. You find his words, pious, almost frustrating. And yet, it is the inconspicuous doctor, whom you  accompany, as he walks through the gate and goes down the Oxfordshire lane, to drink a beer and to sing a song with the people of Brightwell-cum-Sotwell on a summer’s day.

viii

  Dr Bach sought out the wild flowers and in a time of crisis, which was his own  and that of history, they came to his assistance. His followers in white coats, may not follow him out into the Oxfordshire hills or along the seashore of the Norfolk coast or speak with the humble vervain of the wayside. But inspired by him, some of us go and sit in the canyons.

When we sat beside these flowers, these bushes and trees, we realised to release yourself from the wheel you have to look at consciousness itself. You need to go beyond spirituality and esotericism, and look at the role of the seer with your own heart and inner eye. You have to imagine the relationship between the sun and its technicians that forms the basis of all consciousness. And find a way out of the garden.

The Empire prowls the world seeking ancient wisdom. It seeks secret knowledge, like physical treasure, as a power, a tool of supremacy. It goes to the temples and pillages the tombs of kings and sages, scours the constellations, looking for signs and star-gates, mighty position and talisman. Where is the secret of immortality? It must be here! No one finds it. Great Thoth has hidden it somewhere, the seekers declare. The shrewd and wily philosopher, Derrida, stepping outside the pyramid, overhears a dialogue behind closed doors at the beginning of Empire.

It went like this: when the artifex of medicine, Thoth asks the king for his bless his new invention of writing, The Pharoah Sun-King shakes his head: writing is a substitute for the real thing. You say the text is a tool for remembering but because of your tool the people will lose their memory. You say it will contain wisdom, but the people themselves will not be wise. The text will become more powerful and all-knowing than themselves. The king said it was a poison, a phamakos. And from that time on all writers and inventors have suffered Thoth’s fate, the fate of the pharmakon: they invent a cure that is also a poison.

When Dr Bach invented the flower essence, he substituted the remedy for the flower. Soon enough the people thought the essence was more important that the flower. In fact they did not know the flower,, nor the territory in which it grew. While his flower essences were sold in their millions in the health boutiques of the world, his healers and helpers were vanishing from the English countryside: the water violet was quietly disappearing from the dykes, the elm trees could no longer grow tall and stately as once they had, the rock water had became poisoned and it was hard to find the small scherlanthus in any neighbourhood. Meanwhile the creator found himself in a wilderness, a holy goat loaded with the sins of the world upon his shoulders.

To redeem the pharmakon, the creator of all kill-or-cure medicine, you need to look at the doctor, at the heart of the man, who suffered like all men. To redeem the creator is to look at the flower, in all-at-once time, with the poison of the rose. It is to look at the origin of all things, at the role of the sun and its technicians within ourselves.

In the spirit of leonine generosity, Dr Bach left his methods for people to make the essences themselves with the flowers and trees of the wild places. Which all modern practitioners of flower medicine, all plant seers around the world have followed until this day. As indeed I had until I walked into his garden and found myself shudder. Soon after we left Oxfordshire, we found a house, and one month later, walking the lanes of the East Anglian countryside, found large stands of wild vervain, in full flower, along a sandy track. Oh, You are here! I exclaimed, as I stood among their great constructions of dotted light. 

There was the sound of the wild ocean behind me and a heathland before me. The land was in restoration, recovering from long agricultural use, skirted by small woods of larch and hornbeam and wild rose. I sat down by the track and felt at home. That’s when I knew why vervain is the chief. When you look for the origin of all things, you find the sun. When you sit in the wild company of the flowers and ask life’s great questions, you find the tablets of wisdom inscribed in your own heart. This is the way home, said the doctor, smiling, as the heather and the gorse glowed in front of me, as the wind soughed in the pine tree, the centaury shone along the cliff edge. Your medicine is everywhere, I said and laughed, as the vervain, shimmering, became alive with bees.


Images: vervain (flowering steams); Mount Vernon; vervain in Leonhart Fuch's De Historia Stirpium Commentaria Insignes (Basel.1542); Dr Bach; meadowsweet by the Thames; vervain (single flower); heather, Suffolk; vervain along the track (whole plant), Suffolk

52 FLOWERS: 25 agave

This is a story originally written for the Speaking Bush section of 52 Flowers That Shook My World. The section revolves around a series of plant essences made in the Arizona desert between 2000 -2001. It begins on the night we are about to leave for Mexico, where we will find ourselves waiting in a small town called San Miguel de Allende.

Four people are walking silently up the track with two dogs following behind. It is dusk and a full moon is rising as the light drains from the sky. We stumble over small red rocks and cacti, as we make our way towards the gully. When we arrive in front of the agave with its vast candelabra of flowers, there is an awkwardness in our silence I can’t quite fathom.

It is the end of Indian summer. These giant lilies now command the slopes with their tall stalks and ornate flower heads. Agaves are sometimes known as the century plant because they flower only once in their long lives. They build up reserves for this great event over years. The plant becomes like an artichoke with a heart full of ever-increasing sweetness, waiting for the right time. 

Then one day this heart bursts forth: a huge green pole shoots into the sky, branching into fifteen or more arms and unfurling gold honey-scented flowers beloved by hummingbirds, moths and long-nosed bats. Once the flowering is over the plant dies back: its cycle complete. Deep into the desert you can find ancient roasting pits where hearts of agave were once cooked and fed a whole tribe. You can use everything,  Fransciso once told me about his chief medicine plant: the leaves, the flowers, the root. You can even use its needles for acupuncture and to sew clothes. And use the agave fibre for thread.

The agave points towards the sky on the hillside, like the needle of a compass, directing our gaze towards the bony face of the moon. Here at the beginning, I think, and now at the end. I remember the plant on the red hill above the town, how it had anchored me, so I could chart my own position in a rocky time. It was the first plant to make itself known that summer, the first to come in a dream: its straight spire stem fusing with my back bone, pulsing with energy. I'm feeling the co-ordinates shift once more, as we prepare to leave. 

We stare upward into the flowers, the moon comes over the hill.  There is a stillness around us in the twilight, on the dark hill, but an unspoken turmoil inside.

I don’t make an essence with the agave flowers that night, but I do have a dream: in the dream a voice tells me:

It is important that the agave is the mother.

ii

In Mexico, the agave or maguey has been used for centuries, not as a food but as a drink. The well of the plant, its heart, is filled with a sweet nectar known as aguamiel or honeywater. This is the foundation of pulque, the fermented drink that intoxicated the ancient tribes of Mesoamerica. When the European conquistadors overran the Aztec and Mayan empires, they brought to this once sacred drink their refined and barbarian arts: the beer-like pulque was distilled into the more potent mescal and tequila. Tequila became the national drink of Mexico. By the twentieth century this liquid silver and gold began to flow across its borders and found its way into the sophisticated quarters of every modern city. Now thousands of wild agaves are harvested each year to fuel not just the domestic cantinas, but all the cocktail bars of the world.

The goddess of the maguey is known as Mayahuel. Unlike most Aztec gods she is beneficent. She is so beneficent to humanity, providing them with rope, thread, paper, needles, food, soap, medicine, building materials and alcohol, she has four hundred breasts. Like most Aztec gods, this is a double-edged gift.

iii

When we arrive at the town of San Miguel de Allende, everything looks the same. The old colonial buildings in their colours of rose and terracotta, ochre and acquamarine, their garden walls tumbled with bourgonvillea, the wonky cobbled streets, the shady square where people gather at dusk. Seven years ago it was a lively bohemian hang-out for long-distance travellers and American exiles. On the first morning we walk past the courtyard where we once lived. The gate is open and we peer in at the great tree that shaded the apartment block with its curly grilled windows and balconies. There is an old man there wandering about vaguely in baggy trousers:

“Can I help you?” he says, blearily. The place feels depressing, stagnant, unloved.

“I don’t think so, Mark,” I whisper fiercely, “Let’s go.”

Everything looks the same but it is not the same. Something has changed. Something I don’t understand yet. We go to the square where the urracas are gathering, like starlings in a European city, to roost for the night. Urracas are myna birds: they have oil-slick feathers and a wicked gleam in their orange eyes. And they like to talk. They have got so much to say to one another at the end of the day they take at least two hours to settle down within the thick shiny foliage of the trees. 

This is the time when the people of San Miguel also like to gather in the square - to talk, exchange news, before departing home for the night. The small bright-painted taco stands do a brisk trade. We go to sit below the trees and an American woman comes and sits beside us. And talks. She has got a big theory about the financial situation of the world which she wants to share. The non-stop talking is amusing at first but then it starts to be annoying. I like listening to the birds, but I don’t like being talked at by another human being as though I am not actually there.

Later we go to the bar where Mark had first met Robert and ordered him to join us in a play, and we drink our first tequila. A margarita, stone-cold, salt-rimmed, doused with the juice of tiny sweet-sour Mexican limes. It is shocking after so many dry months in the desert and runs like fire in our veins. We start to talk in that animated way you do after drinking tequila, or any distilled drink. But when the initial effect wears off, I feel an edge in the night creep in I had never felt before: an edge of darkness.

Walking back to the hotel, past the square where the birds are now quiet and sleeping, I realise I am in a different time. It is longer the time of singing with Ellen in our courtyard, of reading our books out loud in the café, of taking part in plays and workshops, of our great voyages to the mountains to take peyote, walking with Robert up the cobbled street, arm in arm, seeing women in men’s bodies and men in women’s, catching turquoise taxis with Julianne and Susie to the mineral baths outside the town. It is no longer the time of going to neighbourhood markets and coming back to my small kitchen to cook up great feasts, perfumed by chocolate and coriander, to lie down in the stormy afternoons, watching the turtle doves in the great pepper tree. 

It is a different time because I am different. But it is a different time for the town too. We left years ago, but something else has also gone.

iv

Walking by is a move you make on the solar path. It was perhaps the first one I ever took. 

Before I knew Mexico and had just met Mark, he came by my London flat one day and said: Who’s Helen? 

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“There is a spirit here,” he said in that nonchalant way he had when talking about metaphysical things. “Quite naughty,” he added and looked across to an old oak desk, secreted in the corner of the room.

“I don’t know anybody called Helen,” I said.

I fell silent, imagining ghosts. I didn’t like the idea of my flat being haunted. I looked at the desk and it was at that point I realised he was talking about my grandmother.

“What is she doing here?” I asked.

“Perhaps you should answer that question yourself,” he replied.

We leave our spirits in places sometimes, and sometimes we need them back. Sometimes our spirits long to return to a place, but do not know how to proceed. The desk belonged to my maternal grandmother, who had been born in Lancashire and lived her married life on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Who was this person, outside my small child’s memory of her? I caught a train North to find out. 

I went to the house where she had once lived, which I had never seen. I stood in front of this ordinary suburban house and looked into its neat garden. That’s when I knew what to do. I walked into the town and booked a room in the inn, and spent all day up on the moors. I needed to get in touch with something, I wasn’t sure what. I just knew I had to walk the territory my grandmother had once walked.

It was windy and grey up on the moor, but within its wide open expanse I felt at home. It was as if something unwound in me. I lay down in the springy folds of the heather, drank water from a dark brook, gazed up into the sky, felt immersed in the elements, my head full of sky and air. It felt good to be out of the city. I walked for hours in all directions. I did not meet anyone. As I walked around the land, in all that space, I thought about the person who shared my name, whom I hardly knew. When I returned to London the next day, something had shifted. Helen had gone.

After that I took to walking by places that had once held me in their arms: the country cottages of my childhood, boarding school classrooms, basement flats I had shared, terraced houses where ex-lovers still lived. I walked past them deliberately, but without a plan, sometimes pausing to look at the new painted door, or a familiar tree now in bloom. I took note of whatever feelings or thoughts arose, a detail my eyes caught, the sharp inner recollection as it surfaced. Most of these walking by sessions were uneventful. Sometimes I felt troubled as I stood there, or had dreams. Often I wept for no apparent reason, and afterwards felt clear. Whatever happened during the visits, there was always a feeling of release afterwards, of old nostalgias dropping away. What remained was the spirit of things. The essence of places and time.

My naughty grandmother sat in her Shropshire bungalow in a Bohemian black turtleneck, teaching my cousins to smoke cigarettes. She played Liszt on the piano, painted watercolours and invented a host of imaginary ailments, so that you knew never to ask how are you? on the telephone, or the talking would never stop. She called herself Helen, but her real name was Charlotte Ellen. Ellen was a maid’s name, she said. After she died, she led me back to the wild places, to the wide expanse of moorland under the Northern sky where her spirit had once roamed free. That was a different grandmother.

You walk by: something goes, but something else remains.

v

The second margarita is served in a hotel by the municipal gardens where English-speaking films are sometimes shown. Tonight there is a documentary directed by the artist, Julian Schnabel, about the Cuban poet, Reinaldo Arenas, called Before Night Falls. It is a story about a man who loved nature and freedom and, like many radical poets, fell foul of the petty bourgeois nationalists and their repressive regime that followed the revolution. Arenas survived the horror of the Havana gaol by writing letters on behalf of his fellow prisoners, and later escaped to live and die in poverty in New York from AIDS.

All the way through the film an American couple are talking behind us, their voices grating and sharp in the darkness, interrupting the film:

“Shhh!” I tell them. At first politely, and then annoyed. “Be quiet”! I say loudly and glare at them.

Eventually the couple leave, but the atmosphere is jangled afterwards: an edge of darkness before night falls. On our way back to the hotel Mark and I stop by the square and drink hot chocolate and thick maize pancakes, known as gorditas. The Mexican women sit in front of their napkin-covered baskets with flowers in their shiny dark hair, smiling.  It feels good to be out in the open air.

Mexico is not a light place. Its long history of conquest, inquisition, genocide and revolution, are as dark as any modern nation’s. There were dark things in the gringo quarters too when I lived here. There were paedophiles, alcoholics, failed Hollywood movie stars, disturbed Vietnam vets, bankrupts, drug addicts. Seven years ago, I didn’t notice them. These dark things were covered over by our singing in the cafes and our theatrical performances. By the self-absorption in our writing and travelling. But they were also covered over by something else. San Miguel was a stronghold in those days for new age spirituality. While the Mexican townspeople gathered in the ornate turquoise churches, the gringo community came together in spiritual gatherings, ecumenical services, discussion groups for 'lightworkers'. Amongst the congregations were healers, bodyworkers, horse whisperers, edge dancers, leaders of drumming circles, new men and women who ran with wolves. A lot of adventurous metaphysical work went on behind these colonial walls. Some of these things I took part in. This was before I had come to my own conclusions about the new age among the red geraniums in Santa Fe.

In 1993 the American Dream was not just about materialism, it was the spiritual dream of the world. Most seekers at that time believed that America, with its exploratory, future-looking spirituality and native tribal heritage, would lead the way in a quiet revolution of consciousness. But seven years later, as I walk by, there are no longer notices for these paradigm-shifting events. The meetings are not happening. Some of the people we knew then still lived in these coloured houses with their orange trees and tiled fountains, but they are talking in a different way. The preacher who once spoke luminously about god is talking about land rights. The owner of the café where we once sang and gave readings is talking about the prostitutes in Cuba. The dress shop owner who looked after our cat is talking about witchcraft and dangerous neighbours. No one is talking about poetry anymore.

You hold on to these spiritual dreams for a long time, hoping one day they will come true. You hold on to the idea of an 'American' future as beneficent and evolutionary, but that does not mean the idea is real. You held on to the idea of your grandmother, when she was someone else entirely. She lived in a house which was silent, unknown to you. But that did not mean she was not there. 

In the Mexican town where the gringos live, something is wearing thin and the talking is not covering it up. A skull is showing through. Underneath the suburbia of my grandmother’s life, the bones of a landscape were appearing: granite, shale, gneiss, basalt, flint.

Above our heads, the full moon rises over the rooves of the town in a clear and endless sky. “I call it the summer of death,” said the American teacher who used to sing with Mark in this cafe. We were on our way to have supper in a house where Mark once lodged,

Before there was talk of paintings and spirit in this house, now there is talk of lawsuits and property,  about a young man dying. The kitchen feels enclosed and full of shadows. It is not personal this moment: it feels bigger than that, as if this once-bright lifestyle had become endarkened, was downgrading, fragmenting. On hills above the town the gringos who were once Bohemians are building villas, with maid-service and swimming pools. But down in the square the dream is not holding. I sip my third margarita out of a sticky blue glass and find myself unable to speak. When I wake up the next day, I feel stiff and poisoned and decide not to drink tequila anymore.

vi

It’s important that the agave is the mother means the agave needs to flower. Without the flower life does not continue. The moth does not arrive in the night to drink its copious nectar; it is not pollinated, it does not set seed. The agave does not flower when its heart is ripped out to make tequila.

Agave is a terrifying plant to consider in Mexico. Its thorns were once used to prick the skins of sacrificial victims - known as flowers because of the blood that spurted from their chests when their hearts were ripped out. As these cultures degenerated and the rites in their city temples grew more frenzied and mad, priests demanded thousands of the people’s hearts be given to satisfy the insatiable lust of their god, Huitzilopochtli, There could no more brutal and literal expression of the 'spiritual' price civilisations exact from the human heart. You could be deceived by the temple statues of sorrowing saviours and dancing devas in other countries, but when you look at the carvings of Mexican gods with their spiky and horrifying faces it is impossible to gloss over their barbarity. Even the abundant Mayahuel is hard to look at with her four hundred breasts.

What is not hard to look at are the real flowers of Mexico. For in late September there are flowers everywhere: morning glories tumble down the walls in midnight blue, sky blue, scarlet and magenta; lion’s ears, wild tobacco and trumpet vines spring exuberantly between the cracks of every building; sunflowers and devil’s claw overtake every vacant lot. A vase of fragrant tuberose permeates our rooms in the old hotel. We talk about our dreams on a balcony under a poinsettia tree, and spend each day walking by, without a plan. Mark collects coral beans from the street and puts them in his pocket, takes photographs of prickly poppy and castor oil plants. I step across carpets of wild dahlia, zinnias, and marigolds on my way to the mineral baths. In the cool courtyard of the bellas artes school I sit with my notebooks, surrounded by monstera leaves and bamboo. 

We are released into endless balmy afternoons: from the hard martial grip of the American desert into the warm and bountiful arms of Venus.

On one of these afternoons I go to a lecture on cosmic time at the library. It takes place in a room where an artist is quietly at work painting a mural of Quetzelcoatl, the feathered-serpent of the morning star who was banished from the Mesoamerican pantheon, because he had no taste for sacrifice. The Aztecs and the Maya are famous for their intricate calendars of cosmic time which revolve around the axis of Venus. When the conquistadors came they forced everyone to live their lives according to linear time – the time of the clock – rather than original or ancestral time, thus making their rigorous balancing of past and present unnecessary. 'Now' became this monodimensonal moment, rather than a 'now' in which all time and all dimensions are held. 

In linear time there are no cosmic consequences. But in Mexican culture, the lecturer informed us, the creation does not begin with birth but with death. Life comes from the bones of the ancestors. There are always consequences. When someone in the audience asks the lecturer about the ancestors he looks nervous and starts to backtrack. It is all right to talk about ancestors as if education has got them under control, filed under history and mythology, but not as if they were still here. Not as if they were real. The conquest destroyed them, he repeated, several times.

But we all knew, even though we could not say this to each other, that the conquest had done nothing of the sort. We were in Mexico after all, not the United States.

We get nervous because at some point the agave has to flower. At some point you have to pay. At some point the ancestors say the past is not in balance with the present and if you don’t do something about it, they will. All ancient peoples know this and make the balance in their own ways, whatever the conquest says.

In 1993 I did not go to fiestas, but in 2001 I do. The patron saint of the town, San Miguel, the archangel Michael, slayer of dragons, is celebrating his victory at the end of September. The gate leading to his church is covered with marigolds and tonight great rockets will be thrown into the air and bonfires burned in his honour. By early morning the streets are lined with people, craning their necks, up and down the stony hills, as the procession winds about the town. 

Down the street it comes: a band of musicians and floats, and suddenly you see scores of men and women, dancing with feathers like the rays of the sun coming from their heads, led by enormous puppets with large and small heads that seem familiar, but why I cannot say. It is a parade of all parades. As the procession goes by everyone breaks out cheering in a wild jubilation. Huge smiling beings, hoisted on great poles above our heads, bob above us. They are dancing with each other, in coloured skirts, horn-headed, whirling, sometimes diving into the crowd, leading the great snake of rainbow-coloured, feathered people through the streets. 

“Who are they, Mark?” I ask.

“They are the ancestors!” he replies and laughs. 

And it seemed to me in that moment as if we had not laughed for a very long time indeed.

52 Flowers That Shook My World - A Radical Return to Earth is published by Two Ravens Press (£9.99).  For further info contact theseakaleproject@hotmail.co.uk

Images: agave flower stem in Southern Arizona (CDC); Mayahuel  from the Códice Borbónico (1530s Spanish calendar and outline of life in the New World (wikicommons); graveyard at Heptonstall, Yorkshire (CDC);Mexican sunflowers in the street in San Miguel de Allende (Mark Watson);marigold-studded Cathedral gate for the feast of St Michael, San Miguel de Allende (MW)