Relationship with the Landscape

“I’ve come to accept the fact that developing and maintaining an authentic, living, intimate relationship with the natural world is, in fact, a revolutionary act in today’s world.”

— John Slattery

Our latest podcast features John Slattery — bioregional herbalist, forager, educator, and author. John is passionate about helping people develop deep and meaningful relationships with wild plants. In this conversation, we delve into the medicinal side of wild plants and hear about John’s personal journey along the plant medicine path in the desert southwest.

In this guest post, John takes us deeper into what it means to develop a relationship with plants and the landscape, sharing some of his own intimate experiences. “I’ve come to accept the fact that developing and maintaining an authentic, living, intimate relationship with the natural world is, in fact, a revolutionary act in today’s world,” he says. And for that reason and many more, read on to be inspired to reclaim your own ancestral domain of being connected to the natural world.

I wake up to the morning twilight appearing through the fabric of my tent. It’s cold, but I know it’s time to get up and get moving, maybe even take a cold plunge in the creek to get the blood moving.

Each summer for nearly 2 decades I’ve ventured to these mountains in search of medicinal plants, to learn from them, to listen for their voices, and now, to renew old relationships that have fortified my life.

*Arnica cordifolia | Photo by John Slattery*

Our relationship to the land is a reawakening to what resides within us, what has been passed down to us from our ancestors. It deserves our attention.

A scent on the wind, the angle of the sunlight as it composes a snapshot of a season before our eyes, the familiar Gestalt of a patch of emerald green arnica on the forest floor, the taste of a piece of coral root taken directly from the ground, the momentary touch of a mid-summer’s early morning breeze harkening the autumn season to come: each of these elements comprise an interwoven network of sensory memories, each of which potentially embedded with multiple layers of emotion, unfolding from within us and all around us, the landscape reflecting our awareness of ourselves back unto us, each moment an opportunity to remember who we are.

While becoming a bioregional herbalist, I was becoming more of myself, growing into myself, remembering my ancestors, remembering that they do reside within me, that they do care for me and watch over me, and that I must make mistakes, take chances, risk humiliation, and venture beyond what I thought was admissible, or possible, in order to come back to where I started, somewhere long ago in a distant land, a distant memory.

The landscape of my Sonoran desert home reminds me of these things. A drive through the summer landscape as the burgeoning rainy season approaches shows me that dormant life is life nonetheless, awaiting the conditions which allow it to flourish once again — as if the pause never occurred. Immersing myself in Nature, unknowingly, reminded me of these things, which I was led to believe that I did not know. I don’t recall being complicit in this. It just was. Reawakening to the vibrancy of Nature, the tremendous possibilities, was a path towards reawakening to the vibrancy, creativity, resiliency, spirit, and determination to exist and express myself that I, seemingly, had lost touch with.

That’s not to say that I walk the Earth “awakened & vibrant” with every step of each new day. There are days I feel connected and days I feel quite challenged. But if I take a moment to feel into the world around me, the natural living landscape that is my home (or wherever I may find myself), I know, in truth, that I am not alone. This feeling of interconnectedness, to be sure, comes from my relationship with the Earth, the natural world of the seen and unseen, just as much as any knowledge of self that I may have cultivated. In fact, it is this relationship with the natural world, and my plant friends, that keeps bringing me back around to authenticate my identity in a world clamoring to slap a ready-made identity right on me and get me marching to the tune of the day.

I’ve come to accept the fact that developing and maintaining an authentic, living, intimate relationship with the natural world is, in fact, a revolutionary act in today’s world. I knew this, deep down, when it began for me those dark nights of the soul, alone on the mountainside shivering in cold beneath the full moon many years ago. But I didn’t know it would be this challenging, continually. I thought the conviction, the knowledge gained through hard insights, would be enough to lift me up and keep me going. But the field has been leveled…again and again. And life calls me to be present each and every day.

I’m back in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where I love to be each summer. I travel up to 10,500 feet to visit some old friends and renew some pacts I made years ago. Kneeling before them in humility I attempt to cancel out the invading thoughts of judgement and doubt clamoring to take over my conscious mind and I zero in on what’s right before me and nothing else. I hold the tobacco in my hand, quietly attempting to settle. There’s a clenching intensity that grips my body as I release the thoughts — my mind seeking to grasp something as soon as I let go. Now I am forced to find the place of softness from within, then re-emerge in a settled place of being; equipped to be, at some level, present for what the plants have in store for me today, a lesson in the making. Show up, and the teacher will appear.

*Pedicularis racemosa | Photo by John Slattery*

I am kneeling before a small patch of parrot’s beak (Pedicularis racemosa) that is just coming into flower near a wooded roadside amidst an aspen grove maybe 30-40 years in age. As my mind begins to quiet enough to open and expand, I can feel myself becoming part of the landscape. I can feel myself softly reaching out into the landscape in communion with these lifeforms, and, in response, I am sent a message. A message of what I’m meant to see and feel right now and carry within me from this point forward. I have come to know and understand this routine (as Mick Jagger’s voice suddenly echoed in my head many years ago while walking, quite stunned, across a Guatemalan Highlands mountainside, embarking on an inward journey, by the assistance of mycological agents…: “…you can’t always get what you want…but if you try sometimes… you just might find… you get what you need!”).

Ah, yes…I’m not really in control after all they tell me. This was, and has been, one of the more powerful, and empowering, insights of my life — yet quite difficult to carry through my day-to-day.

Yet, I am more than I realize. It’s a matter of tuning into who I really am. ‘Get to know this place within yourself,’ they tell me, ‘from here you are unshakeable.’

Each time the plants conspire with the landscape to help me see more of the entirety of being, the more I begin to feel the immensity of this concept we have of “healing”. As an herbalist, and forager, I know this — deep within me. Yet our culture has very little accepted language and context in which we can express and relate to this. Yet the essential fluidity of Nature is continually reflecting this back to us in a way that it is undeniable.

Kneeling before these plants, I’m attuned, suddenly, to a feeling of who-I-am — it’s a feeling, not an idea, not an archetype. This feeling is good. It is not less or more than I already know, but it is quite often, nonetheless, difficult to accept and put into practice within the artificial framework of this world. I sit with it, hold the feeling, mark its signature in a way that I can come back to it whenever I bring the images of these plants before me back into my mind. But just as I had to let go to arrive at this point, I must once again let go of this image so that I can move forward, authentically, and embrace whatever is to come.

The beauty in all of this, all these experiences that I’ve had, is that the plants are continually present, encouraging, distinctly authentic, and unwaveringly bound to truth in a way which my heart only longs to participate in, fully.

The depth of complexity of these experiences makes communicating about them a rather difficult endeavor. But in doing so, over the years, I’ve found that it often speaks to what is in the hearts of others who’ve yet to begin to speak of it themselves, and, in this way, paves the way — as a sort of invitation — for them to begin to open more deeply to these experiences in nature and perhaps even begin to share about them more openly themselves, as I have attempted to do for several years now (after initially shutting that down within myself and holding it all in).

Although I began “teaching” about herbs in a way that had me always striving to be informative and accurate in my information, I can now see how limited my contributions were despite my honorable efforts. By keeping an essential part of myself locked away from the opportunities to more fully share my love of plants and my enthusiasm to interact and learn more, I was doing myself, and others, a disservice.

To share from my own intimate experiences with plants in an authentic and vulnerable way, I have come to see people grow and expand in ways that I could never facilitate while strictly emphasizing the facts and the rational approach. It’s really about an amalgamation of all that we are that will help us optimize our experiences on this Earth, I believe — not any one way over another.

It is this approach, I believe, that many hold deep within their hearts as they seek to make a change in the world around them, or to participate in the world in a new and inspiring way. Engaging with the natural world, I feel, is one substantial way we can all do this. Whether going for a walk in a natural setting, or engaging in foraging, wildcrafting herbs and mushrooms for medicine, hunting, fishing, tracking, birding, you- name-it, when we engage with the natural world with all of our senses, and open ourselves to being receptive to what is there in store for us, then magic happens and the world unfolds before us, from and within us, in ways we have perhaps only dreamed of.

So it is my invitation to you, today, to seek that relationship with the natural world, to reemerge as yourself, once again, perhaps as you’ve never done so before and become receptive to the immensity and grandeur that is before you, humbly, and challenge yourself to simply take it in. Be it, and let it flow through you. Then be honest, how challenging is that? Where do we find ourselves implementing control, or rationalizing profound instantaneous experiences away into the minutiae of our compartmentalized reductive learned mindset? Go out and challenge yourself to “be one” with your natural surroundings, even if only for 3 seconds. Give yourself permission to explore new territory, a territory that extends beyond what most of us have been taught about the world around us but is easily accessible to us once we put our hearts and minds there. It is yours, your ancestral domain to be one with nature and to experience this profound bounty and beauty, deep within your heart.

From my heart to yours, I wish you well on this journey. May we meet in good fortune somewhere down the long and winding road.

John Slattery

John is a bioregional herbalist helping people develop relationship with wild plants. Seeking out local traditional knowledge and fostering relationships with traditional healers John works towards keeping traditional knowledge alive while embuing it with new perspective gleaned through deep relationship with plants. He founded Desert Tortoise Botanicals, a bioregional herbal product company, in Tucson, AZ in 2005 in order to bring his wildharvested plant medicines to the people of the Southwest. He maintains his Vitalist clinical practice in Tucson, AZ and offers plant walks, foraging expeditions, field trips into Sonora, Mexico, and his annual Sonoran Herbalist Apprenticeship Program featuring multi-day field study excursions into the mountains of Arizona and Sonora. He enjoys traveling to new bioregions, learning new plants, and to encourage people to become bioregional in their approach.

John received training with herbalist Michael Moore at his Southwest School of Botanical Medicine, and at the North American Institute of Medical Herbalism.

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