The Plant That Spoke : A Childhood Shamanic Encounter
I grew up in the countryside and, by the time I was nine or younger, I already understood that certain plants could open a channel. I had copied the image of old farmers in blue denim overalls and straw hats chewing grass, and in the fields near home I found a particular grass that, when I chewed it, told me it contained something capable of expanding awareness into shamanic dimensions. The spirit in the plant was direct. It said there were other substances that affect perception in similar ways. It did not need to be explained to me as a theory; the communication arrived as knowledge.
I was already used to the idea that my mind was an arena in which other spirits could speak if I ingested the plants that carried them, or simply listened to their voices if they visited, and that they could show me things. They did. One thing they showed me was that most of the people around me would never register any of this. I thought that was terrible and asked whether I should try to teach them. The answer was clear: it was their path, not mine to decide. Humans and animals have interacted with plants in this way for as long as either has existed; the generation living around me would not be the first or the last. It happens naturally, as it did with me. The animals that eat those plants regularly occupy that mental space more often than most members of my species. They do not need literature or ceremony to enter it. They simply eat, and the relationship continues.
The same plant told me that later I would meet a different plant that would affect me differently, but that it would be more greedy, addictive, because there is a trade-off. When cannabis arrived, the prediction held. For a time it relaxed the nervous system and sharpened intuition in the way older accounts describe for assassins or sniper. The experience was real. Eventually the experience left and only the dependence remained. I quit. The original grass never behaved that way. I had known its spiritual quality even before I ingested it, because it called out to me that way. It is not psychedelic in the modern sense. It is spiritual. It is not addictive. It is actually healing; physically, spiritually, mentally, emotionally.
Jim Morrison’s lyrics later renewed an interest I had carried since childhood in shamanism as a living practice, but the first conversation had already happened in a field. No intermediary was required. The plant spoke, and I was still young enough to listen without needing to translate the experience into someone else’s framework. That early registration remains distinct from every later substance relationship. It was not about getting high. It was about recognising that other intelligences move through the living world and will communicate when the conditions are met.
When the High Leaves and Only the Addiction Remains
I smoked cannabis and tobacco from the age of fourteen to twenty-eight. By the time I quit, it had been half my life. I stopped for health and for money; I was spending every spare bit I had. For years the substance had delivered something useful. Relaxation that made intuition clearer, a steadiness that helped me through dark periods. Then the experience stopped arriving. What remained was dependence. I was heavily reliant on something that no longer even got me high. Quitting became the only reasonable choice. The alternative would have been to move on to harder drugs to chase the effect; that was not a decision to make while still inside the addiction.
The literary culture I had grown up with romanticised the opposite choice. Huxley, Burroughs, Cocteau, and later Morrison presented frequent intoxication as a route to special knowledge or heightened life. That culture pulled me in as much as anything else. Once I was inside the habit, the social world reinforced it. What made us feel special was that we got high as often as we could. Pride in the addiction sat alongside resentment of anyone who was not addicted. When I quit, that resentment became visible. Some of the people I had smoked with lost interest the moment they realised I was serious. Others turned hostile. The judgment that followed, attempts to grind me down so they could feel better about themselves, was less about my actual life than about protecting the story that the addiction was not a problem, or that stopping was somehow lesser.
It is a peculiar part of the psychology of an addict: the need to see people who have left the habit as somehow diminished, so the comparison does not threaten the identity built around using. Friendships held together only by the shared substance dissolved or soured once the substance was gone. The ones that survived were never primarily about the habit. Twenty years later the pattern still appears. Someone still using will occasionally step into my path and try to reassert superiority. The reminder that works is simple and factual: I stopped; they have not. The high left years ago. Only the addiction remained, and I declined to keep feeding it.
The early plant relationship had already shown me the difference. One plant communicated and did not demand continued use. The other eventually offered nothing but the compulsion to continue. Recognising when the second pattern had fully replaced the first was what made quitting possible. The resentment from those who never made that recognition is predictable. It does not require my participation.