#21. How can we turn the straw of these difficult times into some kind of gold? 

Well, friends, when I started this “21 Questions” series back in January 2020, I had no idea that COVID-19 was going to hijack our lives—yet I knew full well that there was a lot of ill health (personal, political, planetary) and weak health care and social safety net systems worldwide. 

I did not know that George Floyd would be murdered and that his death would be the last straw, touching off sustained Black Lives Matter protests—but I knew that systemic racism and police brutality against people of color, especially African Americans, was a longstanding stain on the American social landscape. 

I could not have predicted, and yet it was no surprise when Trump started to undermine the scientists and government officials tasked with keeping Americans safe, or when he began experimenting with the use of the Department of Homeland Security as a private goon squad.  

I knew 2020 would be an important year, particularly from an American standpoint as it’s an extremely important presidential election year. But I could not have imagined just what a watershed year it would turn out to be. 

When those of us who survive 2020 look back on this year, we will see a clear turning point, the moment when it became unmistakable that change was upon us, like it or not. 

It is sinking in now, in this distressing summer, that we will be wearing our masks for a long time to come. The handshake and hug are going to seem like quaint customs from times gone by. Will we ever feel safe and natural about gathering together in groups of semi-strangers? Will we ever go back to our sports games, concerts, theatrical performances, street fairs; not to mention classrooms, offices, airplanes and other forms of public transportation?

Yes, our amazing online infrastructure is a huge asset. We can watch concerts, go to classes, visit with friends and family, even travel virtually online. 

In some cases this is a real improvement! I was able to teach a class this summer with students from several different countries, each of us clicking into the classroom from the comfort of our own home. 

We also know that Mother Earth has been heaving a great sigh of relief, as air traffic lessens and places like national parks and refuges, ordinarily over-crowded in the summer, have some peace and quiet for a change. 

I wish I had a crystal ball to see what will happen in the second half of 2020. Or what further changes will be rushing up to meet us in the coming decade. 

I can’t foresee the specifics, but it’s clear that we are at a crossroads of a year. 

2020 could be the year we finally got our priorities straight and began a concerted, concentrated effort to build local resilience all over the world, shifting from an extractive, destructive economy to a regenerative, life-enhancing economic relation with each other and our planet. 

Or 2020 could be the year when things started to seriously spiral out of control. 

Depending where you look, you can see both of these options playing out now in real time. Which will be ascendant? 

The answer to that question depends on you and me and the choices we make each and every day. We can’t always control the options in front of us, but we always have choices about how we respond. 

What I know is that the more we give into our fear, the more frightening our reality will become.  Conversely, the more we can sound notes of positivity in our day-to-day lives, the more joy we’ll be able to discover. 

I could keep this series going with a million and one questions, because there’s just so much we still don’t know or understand about all the things we’re experiencing in this crazy 2020 year. 

I’ll be writing more in Transition Times, for sure. But I want to end this “21 Questions” series by inviting you to try a simple but powerful practice that I have discovered through my work with purposeful memoir. 

In your daily life, through writing or other forms of creative expression, “salute the positive” by amplifying the qualities you want to see more of in yourself and the world. At the same time, “transmute the negative,” using the transformative power of your creative imagination. 

If you want to come give this a try, check out my upcoming workshop series, “Purposeful Memoir as a Path to a Thriving Future,” running live online August 2020 through May 2021. 

You don’t have to be writing a memoir, or even consider yourself a “writer,” to benefit from the contemplative journey of this series. 

Just come with an open heart, prepared to reflect on how we got to where we are today, individually and collectively; and how we can each work in our own lives to co-create the thriving future we want to live into.

I close with the famous quote by Rev. Howard Thurman: 

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what brings you alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs is more people who have come alive.”

5. Can sacred plant medicine help us overcome our alienation from the wisdom of Mother Nature, which we so need in this troubled time? 

As philosophers like Jeremy Lent and Andreas Weber have shown, when we humans became agriculturalists, we established dominion over land and animals, and women became property; the patriarchal religions taught human supremacy, a rigid hierarchical way of thinking about our place in Nature that was carried over into the modern religion of Science. 

Scientific philosophers like Francis Bacon and Charles Darwin reinforced the separation from Nature, not only in the human relationship to the outer world, but also within ourselves. Our “lower nature” was to be banished (a theory that dovetailed nicely with Christian ideas of sin and hell), while our intellect was exalted.

The so-called Enlightenment, with its accompanying savage colonialism and the spread of corporate capitalism, sealed the deal, setting up the fatal oppositions of Light/Dark, Mind/Matter, Man/Woman, Human/Animal, Culture/Nature, and establishing them so deeply in every human endeavor that for a long time we weren’t even aware of how they were conditioning our way of life on the planet and driving us down the road to ruin. 

Fortunately there have always been some stubborn independent thinkers who have refused to be indoctrinated into this way of thinking: indigenous peoples, pagans, artists, so-called geniuses—ordinary people who are open to new ideas. Many have worked in quiet obscurity. But every so often we get a genius like Einstein or Jung, who gives us a great leap forward, helping us see our selves and our world in a new way. 

In these early years of the 21^st century, such independent thinkers are few and far between. But there has been a sudden resurgence of interest in the wisdom offered by “sacred plant medicine,” which has been used for millennia as a sacrament among those scattered tribes that successfully resisted the onslaught of colonialism and managed to hold on to their age-old religions and customs. 

The late psychonaut Terence McKenna posited that sacred plants were basis for the Christian “tree of knowledge” in the Garden of Eden. In the Christian myth, humans were expelled from the Garden when their thirst for knowledge grew too great. But all over the world, many other people kept right on eating that apple—i.e., consuming the sacred plants and learning to work with the psychic insights and healing power they provided. 

McKenna goes so far as to hypothesize that the collective psychosis of the modern western world is a result of our outlawing, in the 20^th century, open access to sacred plants like psilocybin mushrooms and cannabis. This goes along with some other major 20^th century decisions that turned out to have serious negative consequences: investing in sugar, alcohol, oil, gas and cars, for example, rather than in healthier alternatives. 

Modern capitalism runs on speed and efficiency. The system needs us to be productive workers; we can’t be opting out and taking time for psychic explorations. We can get drunk on Saturday nights, as long as we’re sober in time for work on Monday. Most people limit their focus on the divine to a quick bow in church on Sunday mornings; and there is no time anymore for the lengthy explorations of psychoanalysis—just take a Prozac and get on with it, honey. 

But how many of us are satisfied by this workaday world? We are not ants or termites—we know ourselves to be more than simply drones. We want to understand more deeply who we are, why we are here, and how we can make our lives a positive offering to the world. 

Sacred plant medicine reminds us that we are not just cogs in the superficial capitalist wheel; that there is more to life than accumulation of wealth and the selfish pursuit of pleasure. 

Over and over, people who have tried plant medicine report back versions of the same message of divine unity: we are the world, and the world is love. That was the mantra of the 1960s psychedelic generation, and it’s coming back around again in the 21^st century, in a world that has only gotten more hostile and alienating during the intervening years. 

The powers that be are threatened by this message because it challenges the philosophical basis of capitalist civilization: the idea of our “God-given right” to dominion over the natural world. If we are all one, how can we continue to turn Mother Earth and her children into commodities, to be prostituted, bought and sold?

Plant medicine is emerging widely in the U.S. and other western nations because we so desperately need its wisdom now. Unlike alcohol, which numbs us and puts us to sleep, psychedelics wake us up—and this is a time when we need to be awake, alert, and cognizant of our potential to take an evolutionary leap forward and survive…or watch our civilization collapse, like so many others before. 

Psychedelics synthesize the wisdom of eastern philosophy, quantum theory and depth psychology, showing us in a visceral, direct way that reality is perceptual; that matter is energy; and that on an energetic level, everything is interconnected. Sacred plant medicines allow us to perceive the multiverses of the quantum, and voyage in the spiritual landscapes that open up in our psyches, beyond time and space. 

Science has refused to embrace full implications of quantum theory, and Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, accessed through the dream world, has given way to “cognitive neuroscience,” which ignores the psyche in its focus on the brain. But slowly the ripples are spreading out from the first few western plant medicine adventurers, like Terence McKenna and John Perkins, who learned from wise indigenous shamans about love as a force of nature, and brought this wisdom back to their western tribes.

Indigenous wisdom keepers have kept this sacred knowledge alive through the dark times that began with the so-called “Enlightenment”: the long period of alienating monotheism and capitalist, extractivist science and industry. Now, knowing that the suicidal tendencies of western civilization threaten to bring the entire planet into a massive evolutionary reset, they are offering plant medicine to westerners as a gateway to sanity and a livable future.

The Bioneers tagline points to the word LOVE hidden in the word REVOLUTION. Revolution also means a turn of the wheel, a new cycle. In the 21^st century, will we have the courage to step boldly into what Joanna Macy’s Work That Reconnects calls the “new and ancient story” that teaches us of the interconnection of All That Is? 

It remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure: this is a revolutionary time. It is not a time to be timid.