The relationship must be truly co-creative, each approaching the other, sharing of friendship and intentions for the highest good of all and two way communication; humans asking and listening and then acting upon the information they receive, plants in turn, responding to human needs with their amazing adaptability and ability to create what is needed for human healing and well being.

Dorothy Maclean describes in considerable detail how she communicates with spirit worlds and offers exercises for other people to develop their ability to do so. Every human brain is equipped with that part that is able to resonate with their own inner divinity, which in turn allows the attunement to the spirit consciousness of Nature and her component spirits. It is simply a matter of having the interest and spending the time to do so. Energy follows thought. We attract what we give time and energy to. For Dorothy Maclean, it took several years of a three times a day practice of attuning to the will of God in her life before she started getting communications that came as a "knowing“ which she then put into words.

The Findhorn gardens and the subsequent community that grew up around them were the result of three people, Dorothy, Eileen and Peter, asking God how they were to survive there, what they were to do. They were all without an employment income at the time. The answer for Dorothy came in the form of spirit guidance from a Being she called the Landscaping Angel, who was an overseeing Being for the area, who, in turn, encouraged her to contact the spirit beings of many different species and mentored her understanding of what was happening.

This Angelic Being told Dorothy that she was pioneering a new relationship of human co-creation with plant spirits. To bring attention to this important development, the individual plant beings would grow to super size for them. However, as Dorothy is adamant in pointing out, this growth did not happen by magic but took a lot of hard physical labour on the part of the people involved. They got detailed instructions from their spirit mentors on how to assemble compost piles and work with the land to provide the physical ingredients the plants needed to acheive this fantastic growth. They got instructions about what and when to plant, how to deal with pests and other problems that came up.

The amazing results were the demonstration of this fasdidious co-creation effort of the humans consulting the plant spirits, every step of the way.

This story became famous and people started to arrive in Findhorn, to see for themselves what was happening and to learn to experience the attunement to their personal intuition that fascilitated communication with the spirits of the natural world around them. Many more people were inspired from reading about what was happening at Findhorn, to practice such attunement and communication more consciously, where ever they were living.

Around this same time that Dorothy Maclean was communicating with Nature spirits in Scotland by simply connecting to her own inner divinity, psychotropic plants were gaining popularity in western culture. The initial wave of experimentation with „mind altering“ substances among the general populations did not distinguish between sacred plant medicine allies and laboratory created psychoactive substances. The amazing expansions of consciousness and altered states of perception stimulated by mind altering substances did not have any sets of instructions with them. Individual people ingested whatever became available to them and understood whatever they did about their experiences. Many were intrigued and entertained. Many others were frightened, panicked and traumatized. Mass mind society was scandalized and reacted with vehement declarations that this evil had to be stamped out, making no distinctions among the substances.

But in amongst all of those who experimented with what are called recreational drugs, there were some of us who ate genuine sacred plants and had transformational, healing experiences. Possibly due to a spiritual inclination to be honouring and respectful of the natural world, we were graced with the inspiration of the plant spirit of a sacred healing plant ally. The resulting experience was that of pure unconditional love and a feeling of intrinsic connection with the web of this planetary life and All That Is. When I was eating psilocybin mushrooms in the early 1970’s in Vancouver, I experienced being profoundly at home within myself and feeling indelibly interconnected with all creation that was vibrantly alive and full of humourful, loving spirit.

I simply accepted the gift of this, without needing to know anything else about it. Others with more curious minds and no doubt, promptings from their plant allies, started to travel to the cultures that still have wisdom keepers that have conscious traditional knowlege about these plant beings. As a result of these travels especially to the Amazon jungles of South America, a whole new understanding for english culture thinking has emerged about the sacred plant spirit teachers. The one called Ayahuasca is very much in the limelight at the moment. Many books have been written about the healing use of this plant preparation, and other traditional psychotropic plants that are always taken ceremoniously, in ritual ways. Many retreat centers, staffed by the local culture’s medicine men and women have been established in the jungles for people to go to partake of this healing. There are many testimonies about the miraculous healings and life transformations that have come about as a result of this.

My life grew away from that time and place, and the availability of the mushrooms, but my vision of what is home for me has always remained with me. Periodically, while meditating or out in nature or sponateously, I would feel this way again, as a profoundly interconnected unconditionally loved and loving piece of individual divinity. It was not until I started to do shamanic journeying, that I was able to access that home place at will, simply by using my creative imagination.