Of Kathleen Harrison’s essay “Women, Plants, and Culture,” Nina Simons remarks, “Somewhere deep in our bones, or in our lineages, we understood how to commune with the plants, how to read their signals, and how to live in mutuality with them. As an ethnobotanist, Kat Harrison has lived and studied with many cultures, relearning how to bridge the languages of people and plants in time-honored, wise, and sensitive ways that will hopefully inform us as we move forward. As an artist, Kat has learned the great value of stillness and observation, which her leadership style embodies. Her quiet dignity and gentle nature reflect a strength through a softness that’s accessible to us all.”

Kathleen (Kat) Harrison is an ethnobotanist, artist, and writer who researches the relationship between plants and people, with a focus on myth, ritual, and spirituality. She teaches for the California School of Herbal Studies, Arizona State University, and the University of Minnesota, specializing in tropical field courses. She has done recurrent fieldwork in Latin America for the past thirty-five years. As co-founder and director of Botanical Dimensions — a nonprofit foundation devoted to preserving medicinal and shamanic plant knowledge from the Amazon and tropics around the world — Harrison has helped support indigenous projects in Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, and Costa Rica.

Harrison’s essay (below) was excerpted from the book “Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart,” edited by Bioneers president and cofounder Nina Simons with Anneke Campbell. “Moonrise” contains more than 30 essays exploring the flourishing, passionate forms of leadership emerging from trailblazing women on behalf of the earth and community.

I have worked many years in the realm of people, plants, and plant medicines. In the 1970s, I spent quite a while in the Peruvian Amazon working with healers who used a spectrum of plants from the most subtle to the most powerful. Then I came back into my life in California and worked on many other botanical projects while raising a family. It was only in 1993, when I went back to the Amazon, that I completely got the idea of plant spirit. In fact, it was no longer an idea; it became a reality and got under my skin and changed my life substantially.

Since 1995, I’ve been able to spend time most years with a traditional healer’s extended family of Mazatec Indians in the mountains of Oaxaca in Mexico. I’ve also been able to learn more about the indigenous Native Californian relationship to nature and plants. I see wonderful parallels in these nature-based societies in which everything is viewed as animate, and every species is a being. I think we too need to develop an intrinsic perception of this hidden reality to make the medicine that we grow, are given, or even that we buy more effective. Our culture has become extremely reductionist and materialistic in its worldview, so we need to learn from models that can help us understand spirit in nature and spirit in medicine.

The word spirit comes from the Latin for breath, so what we’re talking about when we say a plant or a species has a spirit is that it draws energy from the universe and expresses it in a particular form. An ancient notion of many indigenous cultures around the world is that there were primordial beings on Earth before we came along. They interacted and had relationships, love affairs, conflicts, and exchanges of all sorts, and each of those beings became a species.

According to those creation stories, we humans, as complex and differentiated as we may seem, are one being, and each of the plant species that we use as medicine is also one being. I’ve learned from my native friends to talk to the spirits of those plant species. Whether you’re ingesting a plant or growing it in your garden or passing it in the forest, you learn to speak to it as though it were a being you are meeting for the first time, or greeting it in such a way that indicates you know each other already. In its genes and in its form the individual plant carries a constellation of qualities, actions, and ways of interacting with us that we need to speak to. To know about it is a step, but to speak to it and listen to it is really what makes the medicine work, because then we are creating a relationship.

That’s why in many parts of the world it is women who carry the knowledge of plants and who gather the medicines. Women are good at relationship. Like all female mammals, and most particularly female primates, one of our roles is to be nurturers and doorways for life. When children come through us, they are not ready to be in the world, of course, by themselves. In some species they are, but not in mammals, so we have to give them a deep level of attention and read their needs in a way that goes far beyond the verbal to help them survive and grow and thrive. We women have to be able to sense on all levels the needs of the beings around us.

We have this innate ability, no matter what or who we apply it to. These skills translate well into gathering plants. We can look back through the entire history of hominids and see that we survived and thrived by using our senses of taste, smell, touch, and sight to make clear distinctions between one plant and the next, between safety and danger, between all the different ways that the elements present themselves to us, and it was mostly women who perfected these skills.

I think it’s important for women that we recognize and appreciate the inborn skills we have at paying attention to the natural world. These are the skills that allow us to call nature in through our hands to be food, to be medicine, to be magic, to be whatever the many forms of partnership are between the plant world and human women. Language itself can be an obstacle in this quest. It can be a sort of screen we get trapped behind, separating us from the multileveled reality on the other side of it.

I love words, but our culture has bought into the idea that there’s an objective reality, and it’s important to remember that this very objectivity is, in many ways, a cultural construct. I think we’re becoming braver about showing what we know and not being held back by the inner judge that says, “Objectively speaking, that sounds crazy.” Women are often more willing to trust their subjective experiences, dreams, and intuitions and are therefore more able to develop a relationship to the plant world that is spontaneous and deeply authentic.

I’m encouraged by what I’ve been seeing as a teacher. For years I’ve spoken at herbal conferences and taught at herb schools and in college classes focused on ethnobotany. Perhaps three quarters of the attendees and students are young women who are studying to be herbalists or who are called to work with plants in some way, often seeking a way to heal themselves or others. These young women give me heart because they’re starting farther along than many of my generation who had to work through old cultural baggage just to begin to trust our instincts, to begin to know nature, to begin to rediscover that our roots were in the Earth too. Now I see many women coming in with the assumption that they have the ability to be healers. I want to encourage this new generation to learn to listen to the ancestors and to the voices of all the species around us, however humble and subtle.

I’m a champion of subtlety. The subtler something is, the more you have to pay attention, and that’s a good thing. Remember, it’s not always the big, loud species that are the best teachers. Sometimes it’s the little, quiet, humble ones.

Plants have the ability to transmit energy. Plants draw in and transform earth and water and nutrients and light and make their bodies out of them. The plant beings are manifestations of these forces being woven together, and we humans have relied on them to sustain us from the beginning of our evolution. In cultures that are close to the Earth I see a recognition of the power of plants to hold and draw energy in a situation and to move it along, thereby changing it in a healing way. The plant world is constantly whispering to us, if we can hear it. There’s been a long partnership between plants and, significantly, women around the world, who know how to take plants with offerings and with prayers, and to use them to move energy. This is part of all our ancient traditions, and we’re gradually returning to these ways.

These concepts are rooted in the way that native people—worldwide, those who are still close to the Earth—live daily. In relating to the natural world, one of the most basic principles that they abide by is reciprocity. When, for instance, you meet a plant and you wish to take some of its body for medicine, you ask its permission and you explain why you need it, and then you give it something back. On this continent the ritual has long been to give tobacco, the most sacred traditional spiritual plant of the Americas, domesticated thousands of years ago by indigenous early Americans. I’ve thought about what is most valuable to people in our contemporary culture, and I think it’s time.

Time is the thing that we feel we have the least of, that we value, so we can offer a plant our time if we want to ask something of it. The way we can offer it time is to learn about it, sit with it, and maybe grow it. But even if you’re just purchasing some of it, try to learn about that plant’s world—where it grows naturally, what it looks like, what it’s related to. When we use a plant, we’re communicating with the entire chain of experience of that species through its evolution.

Medicine, in the traditions I’ve worked in, is not just about chemistry. It’s about that which heals. Many cultures talk about the songs that come through the plants. If you listen well to a plant that you have solicited as medicine, they say that you can learn its song, and that its song will be as effective a medicine as the plant material itself. That’s when you’ve taken that plant in as your deep ally: when you can invoke its medicine without even necessarily touching or finding the plant. At that point you have access to the spirit of the medicine.

It has been part of my work to go to cultures that use sacred visionary plants in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru and learn their mythology and sometimes their ceremonies. These traditions and these sacred plants have to be met with total respect. I ache when I think of any of these sacred plants becoming mere commodities in our culture. The commodification of spirit is really dangerous territory. We’re generally not wise enough and openhearted enough to take that type of medicine on our own, for casual use, without a teacher or a healer who can show us how it really is medicine. But I can certainly grow a beautiful little peyote plant, and it can be a teacher to me, even if I just watch it flower and act as its guardian. A tiny little delicate plant can have a very powerful spirit.

Our culture still has a strange relationship to plants. For example, it’s interesting that finally, after a very long period of denouncing cannabis, we’ve opened the dialogue enough to talk about it again as medicine, as it has been for thousands of years to many people, and little by little money has come forth to do studies. Formal studies have validated thousands of personal anecdotes in concluding that it actually relieves pain. There are so many receptors in the human brain for the active principles in cannabis that it is uncanny. When used with intention and gratitude and awareness, it can be a multifaceted medicine. It is our sister and ally in many ways.

I try to keep my eye on the big picture and observe how cultures vacillate in their appreciation and rejection of powerful plants and how fear and denunciation cycle around again to an appreciation of these plants. We’re in a time of such fierce denunciation of tobacco right now that we find it very hard to talk about its holy and sacramental properties. A plant is in itself not evil or good. Its effect depends upon how we use it and how conscious we are, and that’s true of all medicine. Unconscious use of anything is damaging, and conscious use of anything can make it medicine, and this goes for food and all the other substances that we love and hate. Still and all, we seem to go through periods of demonizing aspects of nature that we don’t understand.

Chocolate is another fascinating psychoactive plant. Chocolate pods are filled with beans that have been used as offerings; in Mexico they still are. People give them and other plants and seeds to the Virgin Mary or to the spirit of a mountain or the local gods. They give them things that they know will please them, and how could chocolate not please them? Some plants they burn as incense, and some they just lay in sacred places where water wells up out of the ground. They don’t necessarily bring flowers or spectacular-looking things but often more subtle gifts. You bring nature to nature because it shows that you have paid attention and understand reciprocity. You don’t take without giving something, and then you’re always grateful for what you get. That’s medicine.