This Moment Fall 2021
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on’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. ~Robert Louis Stevenson The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit. And many of the seeds we are planting right now, we won’t be alive to actually taste the fruit, but our children and our children’s children will. This is why it is so important that we take great care with what seeds we are planting each day. This is why it is key that we take great care of our sacred Earth and our Global human community. We are not on this journey for a brand, for the ego, all that is soulless. We are all in it as servants to the plant, and to this renaissance happening within humanity, and a more sustainable way is allowed to flourish. Ancient wisdoms married with modern science, a sacred union returning to the world between the masculine and feminine forces, the dark and light, human, plant, animal all equal and working together in symbiosis. This, to me, is what the plant is pointing us all towards. And we all will watch in horror as greed and the poisoning of the seeds and the plant continue during this next period. We are in it, thick in the quagmire and the only way is through. As Winston Churchill so poignantly said, when traveling through hell, keep going. The last renaissance took place after 20 million died in the Black Plague. It shook the foundations of church and state and allowed new ways of being and thinking to be born. We are in a similar time with so much devastation and shadow, but this is the shake-up, the the union of shadow and light, that will allow new realities to continue to be seeded and born. I grew up in a small agricultural town in California called Santa Maria. It was filled with wealthy white Catholic and Protestant people and Mexicanos, mostly from Oaxaca. My family was the only Cuban family in the entire town when I was growing up. My family came from Cuba when my mother was 15 and settled in California because my Grandmother’s halfbrother lived in Thousand Oaks. My family came with nothing except the clothing that they could carry in their travel bags as they were required to leave everything else behind. For my mom coming to a mostly white Catholic School and leaving her beloved Cuba was
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terrifying, and she was ridiculed and ostracized horribly, something that she has never quite recovered from. In raising me, she made it a point not to teach me Spanish, as she did not wish for me to be teased and taunted as she was. So even though I heard it my entire life and I’m now fluent, I moved to Spain when I was 20 to learn Spanish fluently. I must say that is also when I tasted my first amazing chocolate, hash from Morocco, and fell in love with hash for life. That was back in 1998, but not to digress. Truly I have been thinking about this so much in the last few years, realizing that I grew up in an extremely racist town and that I didn’t realize how I didn’t really fit anywhere. I felt that, but I really didn’t understand it at the depth that I now do. The stigma and the racism against Latinos and the Spanish language itself is something that children of the 70s, 80s, and 90s went through. It has only recently become popular to have bilingual schools and to have children from all backgrounds learning to speak Spanish. Back when I was in elementary school, that was something that I could not even imagine. And certainly, my mother would have never had those kinds of opportunities for inclusion. My grandparents also devoted their lives to being in service to their community and for decades taught English as a second language and helped people become American citizens. It was mostly all Mexicanos. I came to understand that the racist lies that were perpetuated in my school by the kids that I didn’t feel connected to did not fit with reality, as I knew all the Mexican people that I encountered to be extremely hard-working, generous, loving, and just all over good people starkly contrasted with the prejudice and stereotypes that I heard repeated in school by both children and adults. I now know the truth completely and fully, and I understand that we can create change, but we have to continue to build a better narrative and write a better culture than the one that we have had thus far. It is up to each of us to find the ways within our own network that we can do this. One raindrop raises the level of the ocean, and if a million of us raindrops contribute, we can truly create lasting change. We have an industry that is predominately owned and run by white males, even though many of the cultivators working the fields are
Latinos. Just like the labor rights movements led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in fighting for the people to have fair and equitable treatment, we have a fight right now within the modern cannabis industry to make it more diverse, inclusive and to help those that were most harmed by the drug war to find legal and equitable ways to work with the plant. It is extremely important to have visibility and opportunity for Latino, Native, Black, Asian and LGBTQ people as owners and leaders within the legal cannabis industry. It is key because they have suffered the most under the racist drug war. It is harvest time now, and the phrase, we reap what we sow has been repeating over and over in my mind. What are we currently sowing within the Global cannabis industry, and what fruit will that bear? It’s a worthy question for us all to ask ourselves, and we must be willing to listen for the honest answer. We can always do more to bring more humanity, more consciousness, more healing, and more empowerment not just to ourselves and our individual crew but the entire Global human community. Cannabis prohibition and the Green Rush have done a disservice to us all by pitting us against each other, by having us always on the razor’s edge of survival. When you’re fighting just to survive, it’s more difficult to fight for better ideals. But this is where we still do have a choice to choose the seeds that we wish to sow, hence why we are celebrating Latinos in Cannabis this issue, putting them front and center. But it’s not just this issue. You can expect to see Skunk Magazine in the new era, highlighting consistently all of those who have been unsung, unseen, and unheard for too many decades. The time is now for us to sow the seeds of the future, for my part, I wish to see a future with the entire human race activated and empowered, healed and nourished, with all of us banding together to no longer be a parasite on the Earth, but to be stewards, protectors and those who seek in their work to regenerate the Earth and their communities in all that they do. We can do it. The power is within us. They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.
