For this ritual, I used several different crystals as mediums between plants. One was exclusively for indoor plants, another for wild plants, and another to talk between the other two crystals.
Indoors: The crystal was placed for several hours on the soil
of a potted plant, very near the base of the stem or trunk. I would
then hold the crystal in my left hand while taking notes for the poem. Then
I would whisper to the crystal to please relay the message to another plant,
and I would place the crystal in the next pot. When writing with the
crystal I could feel a conversation that was calm, concentrated on drifting
through the seasons. Their vocabulary for moving through time is
something I feel drawn to remembering in my body while I swing my arms and walk
with my reveries for the possibilities of this world. I also watched Kenneth Anger's INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME with the indoor plants.
Outdoors: This crystal moved between wild plants, meaning
only plants whose seeds were transported by birds, wind or some other natural
force. The guardedness I was feeling at one point while writing with
the crystal after it had been sitting with a plant did not make sense until I
realized that the meadow within a few feet of it had been mowed. How
had I not realized this straight away? There I was in my human body
not thinking that -- literally -- THOUSANDS of other plants had been freshly
chopped to their knees, their bodies were strewn everywhere, their strong odor
of chlorophyll pouring from their wounds in the hot sun.
In the past, I have used crystals to speak between trees and
other plants and animals, but with this one, I found a new relationship to
received languages for the poems. What I can glean from listening to
them in these writing sessions, the plants are telling me that their ability to
change carbon dioxide into oxygen is what is also transforming my words I
write. Maybe, in fact, a better word is translate, meaning the
leaves are a kind of translation device. It feels like a sentence in
the conversation comes back with one word changed, giving a completely new interpretation
to both the ritual and the resulting poem. The leaves are telling me
they are a mirror, but nothing like the kind we humans have any real experience
with. Most of this information came to me when I was holding the
third crystal, the one that I occasionally placed between the indoor and wild
plant crystals. While the outdoor, wild plant crystal had more
life-threatening circumstances, there was beneath that a similar vibration as
the indoor plant crystal's language for the movement of time, though more
urgent, a pulsing pressure running through my body. I placed the
crystal under my pillow for that song of time to enter my sleeping body and my
sleeping travel of dreams. Vegetables, sisters, brothers, unfurl a
bit more with me in the poem.
