This is the Social Innovation Secret that stands out for me, as it is the one I've felt the most profoundly in my own recent experience.
I was doing a 5-day intensive focused on Plant Medicine, and our exercise was to go out and be in the presence of a plant, while listening to the perceptions and observations of our 'inner child'.
Well, I ended up sitting with a plant,
Spreading Dogbane, that I knew was used as a fiber plant by indigenous peoples. So, already, my grown up mind had the idea that this was not a medicinal plant.
What my inner child perceived of this plant was a vision. I was seeing the plant as a very large insect, with its head in the ground, and the most noticeable thing was how it was biting at the dirt with its pincers (which were like an ant's pincers). This action felt very intense, getting straight to the heart of the matter. That there was a meaning in this about the plant's medicine I was missing, and regarded the vision as saying something about the plant's ecological function, i.e.breaking the dirt up in disturbed areas (it was growing in a sandy spot at the side of a road).
A few months later I was reading a Herbal by Matthew Wood,
"The Book of Herbal Wisdom", and he had a chapter on Dogbane, which he calls 'Werewolf Root'. Well, what a surprise, to see that for him one of the most outstanding signatures of this plant is its relationship to... pincers! He was referring to the way the pods form on the plant, which look like the pincers on the masonic symbol. He also shared that this plant is used in the 4th degree of the Grand Medicine Society, and from his and others experiences, it has an intense, initiatic action. It is also related to the African plant
Iboga, used as an Initiatic and for healing through (rather intense) Spiritual experiences.
My inner child was very perceptive! I am so appreciative of this experience, and see the wisdom in allowing for our child-like nature to perceive, to envision, and to create. With this awareness we are able to learn about our world in ways that are off-bounds to the analytical, reductionist mind, and can discover solutions to the challenges created by our technocratic and conservative ways.
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