Hi and welcome, friends! I’m so glad you’re here. This week is all about bougainvillea—well, bougainvillea and mushrooms too. But it was the bougainvillea around my kitchen window many years ago that showed me something so precious that it helped change me for good. Helped me work my slow way toward a kinship way of living. Today bougainvillea plants again live right outside my door, which makes me very happy. Nobody dazzles quite like bougainvillea, as you can see in the photo below. What a treat to dwell so close to these beauties!
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I listened to a terrific podcast this week, a story about some religious leaders who went on supervised psychedelic trips. They were part of a study conducted at Johns Hopkins and NYU to see how taking psilocybin might affect pastors or rabbis or chaplains—people who were deeply involved in their respective faiths. Those who go on psychedelic trips often describe the experience as a spiritual one; would these people see it like that too? Would it enhance their faith? Or would it lead them to question it?
I was trained in religious studies, and I’m deeply interested in psychedelic therapy, so these questions are right up my alley. And I can tell you that this podcast is well worth your time. It appears at the Altered States podcast from September 23, an episode called “A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Muslim Get High.” You can find a link to it on Michael Pollan’s Substack, The Microdose. Pollan also wrote about the study in the New Yorker in the May 26 issue, an article that’s available on his personal website.
I’ll cut to the chase here: most of the participants found that yes, going on a mushroom trip did enhance their faith. For some of them it was a highlight of their lives, and for a few of them it was life changing. I enjoyed hearing them talk about the images they saw and what they felt during their trips and how they worked to integrate the experience afterward. How their lives changed. Like I say, it’s well worth your time.
But here’s the part I always miss in these stories. Now that psychedelic therapy has become popular, I’ve listened to quite a few people talk about their guided trips, and when they do so, they usually talk about it just like I’m doing here—like “going on a trip” or “doing psychedelic therapy” or “altering their brain chemistry.” People marvel that just taking a pill and watching the images that flood their minds for a while afterward can change their lives.
But something about this framing always nags at me. And the something nagging at me is actually someone. The mushrooms themselves. Because the psychoactive ingredient that changes people’s minds and hearts forever is made by a living being. A mushroom who lives on the forest floor.
Psilocybin comes from about a hundred different species of mushrooms growing around the world; they’re especially common in Mexico. These mushrooms bring a special intelligence to Earth. They know how to eat dead matter off the forest floor and turn it into chemicals that stimulate images in people’s minds. People have sought them out for thousands of years just to experience those images because the mushroom holds powerful medicine. When people eat it in a prayerful frame of mind—opening themselves to what the images in their minds might say—they often experience deep internal healing. They may learn more about themselves and their purpose in life. Mushrooms are powerful healers.
So Indigenous people in traditional societies usually take the next logical step and interpret the images they experience after eating the mushrooms as communications coming from the mushrooms themselves. In a traditional society people live in a relational world, a kinship world, where all beings are related and everyone can speak. It makes sense, then, that the images stimulated in a person’s mind by the medicine are gifts sent by the maker of the medicine. So people see the mushroom as a powerful guide, maybe a teacher or a grandmother—someone who watches over you and works for your well-being but who also gives you straight talk when you need it. In a kinship world, when people find that their hearts and minds have been changed, they turn directly to the being who provided the experience and say thank-you.
But here in the modern world, when people ingest the mushroom, and even when they are doing it as medicine for healing, they usually don’t frame the experience in terms of relationship. We don’t talk about what the mushroom showed us or communicated with us. We don’t take that logical step of acknowledging the mushroom as the giver of the images. We don’t turn directly to the mushrooms themselves to thank them.
I say “we” here because even though I have never eaten magic mushrooms or gone on a psychedelic trip, I too am steeped in the worldview that interprets such a profound healing experience in stripped-down, depersonalized terms. It’s the worldview of modern Western rationalism and materialism, and in this way of thinking, humans are the only species with mind. We’re the only beings intelligent enough to think up complex or nuanced ideas, and we’re certainly the only ones with the ability to communicate them.
The idea that images or thoughts could enter our awareness from another being or another person is anathema—even taboo. In the Western worldview it is simply impossible. The old mind-body split of Descartes still rules the modern world, and it teaches us that our own minds are completely cut off from everyone else—that each of us lives in a mental bubble produced by our own brain. We may experience a powerful inner realization—an intense dream or a deep experience in nature—but the Cartesian worldview teaches us to interpret that experience only as the product of our own psychology or our own life history or the quirks of our own brain chemistry.
We are telling ourselves stories of isolation, and we’ve been doing it for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.
The Western worldview is the loneliest place in the universe to live.
But in a kinship world—a relational world—mind or intelligence or spirit is a part of everyone and everything. Thoughts and feelings are not just neurons firing. In fact, neurons are not needed at all. In a kinship world animals and birds have mind, but so do plants and trees and insects and all the beings who live intelligently without brains. In a kinship world, mind or spirit is more like a field where everyone is gathered; it’s a game that everyone is playing. So mountains, lakes, and rivers, clouds, wind, and ocean are playing too. In a relational world, mind or awareness or spirit is just part of the fabric of life, built in to every being and every place on Earth. Everyone is participating, everyone producing intelligence in their own way. Everyone is talking, everyone communicating. In a kinship world, everyone can speak.
But how can beings who don’t speak a human language reach out to us? They use their own version of intelligence. Trees might communicate not just with the rustling of their leaves but in the thoughts or reflections that arise in our minds when we sit near them and listen. Birds might communicate not just through their observable acts, like the paths they fly through the air, but also through images we receive in our minds as we watch. And mushrooms might send their perspective through the ingenious path of a chemical they figured out how to synthesize out of dead matter on the forest floor, a chemical that stimulates images in our minds that work like powerful medicine.
In a relational world, images or thoughts arising in our own minds can be prompted by someone else. Because the playing field of awareness is big enough to include everyone. The language of the heart is a language that all beings can speak.
It takes a long time for a person raised in Descartes’s world to come over to a kinship point of view. Most of us spend years moving toward it.
I speak from experience here—I’ve watched my heart inch its way over many years toward this warmer, livelier way of interacting with the others of Earth. And I don’t claim to have arrived yet. Descartes and his dualisms still rule so much of modern life that it takes a massive effort to swim against that old and powerful tide.
And I didn’t even begin looking for a different worldview until disaster stopped me in my tracks.
I’ve told the story many times how, when I was in my early thirties, I caught a bad flu and spent four years recovering from it. During those years of fatigue and pain, the life I had known was stolen from me. Here I was, a doctoral student and a book editor, yet with a brain fog so thick that for long weeks at a time I couldn’t even read. And for days at a time stretching over months, I was too weak to do anything but lie in bed and stare at the ceiling.
To take a break from the bedroom ceiling, sometimes I lay on a small bench in the tiny backyard and stared up instead at the redwood tree across the backyard fence. And after doing this many times, I began to notice things I’d never paid attention to before, like how the shaggy bark of the redwood turned a different color from day to day. On overcast days when the sky hung low, the light scattering in the fog lit up that bark until it glowed bright rusty red.
And then other, more unusual things started happening. One day I was interrupted by strong images appearing in my mind of the birch tree who sat next to my parents’ house two thousand miles away from where I was living. I still remember how surprised I felt when the being of that birch tree rose up in my mind’s eye.
I say the “being” of the tree appeared rather than a “memory” of the tree because what I saw in my mind’s eye was more alive, more pressing, than a memory. Growing up, I had loved that tree. I had raked its leaves, had admired its trailing branches, had sat under them on summer afternoons to read.
And years later the tree honored our connection. I didn’t know at the time that during those months while I was sick, the birch tree had been infected by something too and soon would have to be cut down. But before that happened, it came to visit me, appearing in my mind to say goodbye.
For many years after that experience, I couldn’t fully embrace that way of talking about it. I felt shy about saying outright that the tree had come to say goodbye. Even fifteen years later, as I was writing the story in my book Kissed by a Fox, I didn’t use that language. I mean, all that academic training! It got in the way of acknowledging, in words, that trees can talk and that we humans can hear them and that images arising in the mind can be one of their languages.
I was reminded of that shyness again this week while I was working on the birch tree chapter in the audiobook. Listening so closely to the text of the book reminded me all over again how self-conscious I felt about saying that trees or plants can talk—even while I was writing a book to convince others that it can happen!
I hear that shyness especially in a story I tell about a bougainvillea that grew right outside the kitchen window of our flat in Oakland. At the time I was still very sick, and I was looking hard for anything that might help me get better. It was a few months after the birch tree’s visit, and that episode was definitely cracking my materialist worldview. I was beginning to acknowledge that there were other ways of interpreting the world, other ways of seeing.
So here is the story of the bougainvillea—and [in the recording] this is an excerpt from the audiobook:
Another plant that felt like a friend was a scarlet bougainvillea draping voluptuously around our kitchen window and coloring the white cabinets rosy with its reflected light. When, in late 1990, in the second winter of my illness, a severe frost hit the Bay Area and the bougainvillea’s leaves rotted, I felt joy depart from the kitchen. In January the withered tangle of woody vines had to be cut down. I walked outside to visit the stump at the base of the house, feeling sad. Then a thought occurred to me: The healer places her hands on your body, and you feel better. You could just place your hands around the stump. It was ludicrous. I refused. But I couldn’t make the thought go away. Glancing over my shoulder to make sure no neighbors were watching, I bent to the ground, acting as if I was just inspecting the plants there, and placed my palms furtively around the stump. I tried to quiet my mind, to not feel stupid for doing something so simple.
And into the middle of my arguing mind rose a sudden, sharp image—the stump with two green shoots poking out from it, a larger one on the upper left, a smaller one on the lower right. Amazed at the clarity of the image, and feeling now only slightly less stupid, I stood up, glanced around again, and returned to the house.
The rest of winter passed. Spring came, bearing pink buds on plum trees and purple hyacinths beside sidewalks. Yet the bougainvillea remained dead. Now I knew beyond a doubt that I had imagined the whole thing.
Weeks passed before I ventured out to that side of the house again. This time it was to retrieve the bird feeder, which had been knocked to the ground by hungry, nesting house finches. I stepped through a tangle of ivy to pick up the feeder, where it lay next to the dead bougainvillea stump.
My eyes widened. From the dead stump two green shoots were springing—a sturdy one several inches long on the upper left, a shorter one on the lower right.
So here’s what’s interesting to me now, fifteen years after writing this story—something that just underscores how powerful and sticky the Western worldview is, even when we think we’ve left it behind. Here I was, writing a book about relating to the others of nature as friends and kin because they’re animate beings, like we are. I was filling a whole book with stories of animacy, explaining how it makes sense and showing how being connected with a living Earth will change our relationships with each other too.
And yet even then I still didn’t see this experience with the bougainvilllea as the plant itself talking to me. There was the tiniest conceptual divide between the image I experienced in my mind and the bougainvillea plant whose stump I was touching when the image arrived.
I didn’t write, “The plant showed me it was alive,” because I wasn’t quite there yet. I thought of the mental image as arriving from some abstract hazy source rather than from the plant sitting right in front of me. I didn’t give the plant credit for sending the image.
In other words, when I wrote about that encounter I was still centering myself, interpreting the experience in terms of an isolated human mind rather than in terms of a relationship. It was a residue of anthropocentrism and the sense of separation that goes along with it—a feeling of separation that gets instilled in us so deep that it can take years to begin leaving the habit behind.
I didn’t yet fully see the bougainvillea as equally capable of playing in the field of awareness, equally capable of communicating, equally capable of reaching out to make a connection.
In a subtle way I was still disconnected from the plant in front of me, even in the act of writing a book about leaving that old worldview behind.
These kinds of experiences—what we often call the nonordinary kind—happen when we are connected to each other. When we feel love and joy in another’s presence. When they mean something to us. Our hearts reach out to them, and their love reaches back.
I loved that bougainvillea; I delighted in those vivid branches lighting our kitchen windows, and I felt sad when they died. But the bougainvillea reached out to reassure me in a quiet but unmistakable way that they were not quite dead yet. They would sprout again when they had gathered their energy.
Thirty years ago, when the plant and I were friends, I was so new to the relational world that I was a little freaked out by the experience. Especially seeing a mental image that turned out later to come true? It was a little too woo-woo even for me! And, as we’ve seen, fifteen years later when I was publishing the story I hadn’t yet stepped fully into the world of kinship. I didn’t turn right back to the plant to thank them for sending the update.
It’s taken thirty years, but today I can say thank-you to that bougainvillea without hesitation. I have come to know that the world of nature is far more intricate and tricky and mysterious and wonderful than we can even imagine. Every year the other beings of nature show me in deeper ways that they are ready and waiting for us to pay attention. They are ready to connect with those who show a little love, ready to communicate with those who listen for their messages.
And those messages can take the form of images arising in our minds. Because, when you stop to think about it, how else would a nonspeaking being communicate with us?
In the Great Heart of nature, apparently everyone can talk in images. Everyone can speak the language of the heart.
How do the beings you live beside touch you? Do they speak with you in the rustling of the heart? What have you learned from plants in your garden or your local park? When you listen with the heart, what do you hear? Share your stories in the comments!
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For digging deeper
Michael Pollan wrote about the study in “This Is Your Priest on Drugs,” New Yorker, May 26, 2025. On Michael Pollan’s Substack The Microdose, the link to the podcast is in the September 24 post, “A Priest, a Rabbi, and a Muslim Leader Get High.” The podcast episode itself is from Altered States, found here at Apple podcasts.
I’m interested in psychedelic therapy because people report experiences that are strikingly similar to what many people—including me—experience through engaging in spirit journeys (or shamanic journeys). A spirit journey involves sitting quietly, in an attitude of reverence or prayer, focusing on the images that arise in the mind without prompting them. It’s an experience of receiving images rather than thinking them up. And I know from my own life and from working with others that these images work powerful healing in people—and the images do this work without people ingesting any physical substances. So I’ve wondered for a long time if a spirit journey is like a cocktail without the alcohol—the same kind of experience, working the same healing magic, but without the chemical made by the fungus or plant. Then I found a study from the University of Michigan that suggests the two kinds of experience may be related: Emma R. Huels et al., “Neural Correlates of the Shamanic State of Consciousness,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 15 (March 18, 2021). You can read a short report on it by Laura Talley, “Shamanic Trance vs. Psychedelics,” Michigan Medicine, Aug. 4, 2023.
For an intimate look at my first year of engaging in spirit journeys, see my book Tamed by a Bear (Counterpoint, 2017). The bougainvillea story appears in Kissed by a Fox (Counterpoint, 2012). These links take you to Bookshop.org, where you can buy books online and support your local independent bookstore at the same time. These are my author referral links, which means that if you purchase using these links, I get a little bit extra—many thanks!
If you would like to sharpen your ability to hear the guiding voices of other beings of nature, I offer one-on-one sessions by phone. We can meet together to practice opening our hearts and listening to spirit together. More info on my website, priscillastuckey.com, at the Spirit Journeys link.
Bougainvillea vector image by Md Sujan Mia at Vecteezy.com.
