photo by Mark Pilkington

Here’s a snippet of wisdom thought from botanist-poet Dale Pendell, speaking informally at the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, Switzerland in March 2008, courtesy Gyrus’s always provocative and thoughtful Dreamflesh blog:

“[T]he people who have lived close to the earth for a long time seem to respect these rites and rituals. They feel a sense of gratitude. God, even Nietzsche said, ‘A sense of gratitude is seemly.’ Our existence here rests on many lives who have gone before us, generations of people. And not only people; all sorts of beings that have lived, and suffered, and died, and micro-organisms creating even the air that we breathe, and the topsoil, and all of it. So every day of our lives is a gift of countless generations that have provided it, for our benefit. So a sense of gratitude is right, and it is good to give something back. It’s good to take a moment to place an offering, or a word or something. Ultimately I don’t think we can prove this. But I say, the other side can’t prove their way either. It comes down to a wager. And I put my wager on a green square, and to do these things, to find a way to move in beauty ourselves, does change the world. It’s the only way we can change the world.

“So, that’s a long way of saying that that’s the ultimate basis of my magic.”

Read more here.