EARTH By Renée McCready Lady Pachamama, Earth Wisdom Keeper
Cultivating Quiet Listening and Discernment: A Fundamental Teaching from the Plant Realm
“The earth herself becomes my master story teller” Thus Spoke The Plant - Monica Gagliano From a witness perspective, the earth sees us observing her and her offerings. She welcomes us to utilise her abundance for medicine, ceremony and food, shelter and warmth. The more I drop into my role as an “Earth Doula”, the more I’m understanding the need to assist others in discerning certain protocols. Specifically, understanding what is okay to take from the earth and how we can reorganise our own ways of interacting with her offerings in safe, honest, respectful and sustainable ways. This month I want to touch into a tender subject. One that I’ve been quietly speaking about, as I’ve been softly listening to the plants and observing how their role plays out in the greater ecosystem of our human spiritual awakening. I want to talk about the overuse and popularisation of certain plants for smoke cleansing or “smudging”. Are you currently using white sage or palo santo for smoke cleansing or blessing? My wish is to pass forward awareness and not to condemn anyone’s choices. I hope to enlighten a deeper inner dialogue, cultivating the act of quiet listening and discernment from the plant realm.
There are plant spirits whose song is being misappropriated. They seek us to pay attention to our choices, and how we go about utilising their offerings. An important teaching I’ve gained from the earth is to quietly listen and practice discernment. What I’ve learned is that plants do not have to fit into our structures and confined version of their teachings. We use our human platform to give them a voice for how we desire them to be, but we are residing in
their domain. We need to allow their voices to move through us, not from us. What is apparent in the popular spiritual and the wellness culture can be quite the opposite. Plants are often grown in large quantities in a monocultural manner, over commercialised, over harvested and their wild medicines are taken without respect, prayer and offering. Because often humanity only wants to extract one part of them, in excess amounts for our own perceived needs.
A living plant is a dynamic organism. If we speak for them without their song, we miss the lifechanging medicine they offer in their totality. Two plants that I want to speak to are white sage and palo santo. Both are being over-harvested in the wild and are very deeply sacred to their original caretakers. White sage has been over-harvested in the United States. Any imported white sage possibly comes
