We didn’t get anywhere beautiful. It was a holiday without a hero. I remember thinking it would have been more interesting if the car had careened down the embankment and exploded.

There I was again, ten years later, things still not playing out as I thought they would, dying, not as a villain or a hero, but as an end to a thread. But an end is also a beginning, depending on which direction you go. And therein lies the beginning of my eventual intelligence — the extension of my human psyche into the realm of plants. Yes, me, the guy who couldn’t even grow herbs to cook with. The guy who longed to nurture life but inexplicably never did. But in death I was given a gift — a key to another form of existence. Some are born into royal families; others commune with the paranormal; some can find water using sticks; others whisper to animals. There is a grand design embedded in humans that precedes the collection of cells we steward during our short lifetimes. Of the three entities my mind kept track of just before I died, the snarling creature understood this best.

To my surprise, my time on earth did not end. It extended. I emerged from the soil alive, albeit in different form. Trees grew from the clawing fingers of my right hand, each possessing a unique intelligence that would slowly be distilled through my remaining essence.

Ordinary in life, extraordinary in death. Thank God. 

While my entire left hand withered away into food for worms, a small baobab tree grew from the thumb of my old piano-playing-looking right one. My childhood memories — set in a small, rural South African farming town — are full of baobab trees, those rotund, colossal sentinels of the African wild that grow for thousands of years until they look like petrified hurricanes. Even as a child, I sensed something of distinction about these trees. We climbed them, swinging from the wrought-iron stakes driven deep into the trees’ monstrously thick bark, showered in them after they’d been hollowed out and turned into caves, and searched for them when we’d wandered too far. The largest baobab known to man when I was a child was 150 feet tall and only twenty minutes from our home. They’re known to be some of the longest-living specimens on earth, standing tall for thousands of years while civilizations rise and fall around them. Entire human family trees are born and die while the baobab endures. The ancestral knowledge embedded in my new plant DNA rose to meet my psyche like a blooming flower. I knew it was there, all that knowledge harvested over thousands of years, but it took decades for me to decipher it, as if reading fossilized tea leaves buried deep in the earth’s core. My human ego, the remnants of which haunted my second age, initially felt threatened. If the seat of consciousness were cell membranes and not the brain, a theory already postulated by scientists while I was a living human, perhaps this plant dinosaur would eventually supersede my human thoughts. It had survived, fulfilling the primary function of any species, and thrived while not decimating anything around it the way my own species had. The Japanese maple that grew from my index finger seemed to resonate with my growing suspicion that language and the ability to create complex societies do not, or should not, define progress.

I will likely never know why a Japanese maple sprouted from my index finger. It had never been the object of my focus, even if I did admire them the way I admired most plants for their beauty. I’d also been grateful for their ability to break the green wall of hedges and evergreens in the Hamptons, New York, where they’d often been placed to striking, albeit overused, effect. Most of my thirties had been spent in New York, and many New York aspirations are built on owning a home out east: a shingle-style, green hedge dream with a Japanese maple sticking out somewhere. By the time I left New York, after living there for twelve years, many of the hedges and trees were underlit, and even the most expensive homes looked like variations of each other. In Japan, maple trees are known as Kaede (“frog’s hands”) or as Momiji (often interpreted as “baby’s hands”). The maple tree holds deep symbolism and spiritual significance in Japanese culture. It is often associated with autumn, a season of change and reflection. The changing colors of the leaves symbolize the impermanence of life and the transient nature of beauty. My only ingrained memory of a Japanese maple is of a chilly autumn day on Shelter Island, where I lay happily watching a wall of yellow leaves rustling right outside my bedroom window. I was fully present, and fully lost. Perhaps the maple came to me in my second age to remind me that my seasons had all been beautiful, even if some had felt hollow. I often felt, in those New York years, that I was a master of nothing. I made good money, had successful friends and a wild sex life, played tennis on Mondays and bridge on Tuesdays . . . but something was missing.

Alignment.

In those days, walking past a man selling his own handmade jewelry on the side of the street in Soho or hearing a busker masterfully playing Beethoven in the subway could rattle me. I could feel the energetic signature in their work. A cold, internal voice would remind me that I still hadn’t committed to passion or purpose, and that time was marching on while I remained moving through the world unconnected to myself and the vast lifeforms around me. Nothing was preventing me from making real change, yet I never made it.

The Japanese maple is different. It embraces change every season, constantly emerging as beautiful in the next incarnation. As I rustled in that desolate Greek landscape as a maple, I felt a calm sense of tranquility, knowing I was right where I was meant to be.

That an Ayahuasca vine grew from my tall finger, directing itself past the maple tree and curling around the baobab like an affectionate snake, was no surprise. Working with plant medicine in Costa Rica in my mid-thirties deeply impacted my life, not because of any half-jaguar, half-eagle visions, but because of the energetic cleansing it facilitated. I witnessed firsthand the power of the Shipibo people, who have worked for centuries with plant medicine, and how they wove our collective pain and wonderment into a net capable of holding us all. We were all there for different reasons: one woman for her bulimia, another for her alcoholism, a father for his desire to connect with his family, a sanguine Mexican woman eager to see her creator again, some for creative inspiration, one older man desperately seeking answers to why his mother had killed herself, and me, wanting to understand why I’d dated a con artist for two years when I’d always known how false our interaction was. Something needed to change — that much I knew. I’d heard about Ayahuasca ten years prior to trying it, dismissing it at that time as the last frontier for recreational drug users.

They say it calls to you when you’re ready.

Becoming a shaman is an arduous journey that often begins in adolescence. The apprentice must shadow an experienced shaman to learn about medicinal plants and rituals. It includes an extended period of isolation in the jungle where the apprentice consumes specific master plants, follows a restricted diet, and abstains from social interaction to purify his body, mind, and energy. The shaman fosters a deep connection with plant spirits, particularly with Ayahuasca, through this rite of passage.

What if I’d spent my human life fostering a deep connection with something? What gifts, if any, did I leave buried? After witnessing the energetic casting of the Shipibo healers in Costa Rica, those questions followed me around like a puppy wanting all my attention.

I’d committed myself to four ceremonies at an eleven-day retreat, not knowing too much about the program other than the fact that the project had been endorsed by one of the world’s leading trauma therapists.

The day after the first ceremony, one of the sixteen participants in the sharing circle remarked with venom, “I never signed up for World War III.” I couldn’t have agreed more. My first ceremony was a feverish affair because I desperately wanted to relinquish control but was plagued by doubt when at the brink of doing so. I could not forsake my Western God or the belief that my mind was the seat of consciousness. I heard guttural sounds coming from other participants as obtrusive and greedy, laced with sexual undertones and curdled pain. I had no visions or epiphanies. Two Americans complained bitterly that they could not connect with the medicine at all. We’d all heard stories of people running through jungles howling at the moon and scratching at tree trunks, and yet here were these participants…feeling nothing.

Like all traditions, there are subtle differences in how Ayahuasca ceremonies are performed worldwide. Some people prepare for weeks before trying Ayahuasca, following the dieta and other rituals with intention. Others fly to California overnight and take a dose strong enough to guarantee a reaction. The participants who felt nothing other than physical discomfort during the first ceremony had to contend with a fear they had not anticipated: that they were entirely cut off from an unknown source, a source they initially only feared being overwhelmed by.

By the second ceremony, the sounds darting across the maloca seemed less foreign and disturbing. My focus eased into the inner realm, slowly revealing caves and ruins — geodes of emotion that something was guiding me to unearth. We’d been advised before the first ceremony that we might be confronted with images or feelings we don’t recognize and that we didn’t need to psychoanalyze them all; after all, Ayahuasca carries deep memories and DNA of the land it is grown in; that is to say, a South African-born child who later immigrates to America doesn’t necessarily need to lean into Amazonian plant language where it’s too sophisticated to decipher. Go towards what you suspect is important for you, they advised, even if you fear it. Feel your way forward, organically, with resonance, not with control.

By the third ceremony, I was fully immersed in the work, blissfully exploring the cities of my inner world. The desire to remain in control had stepped aside, not in defeat, but in collaboration with my body, which had gently reintroduced long-buried fascia and meridians, and with my emotions, which were learning to run again. I revisited and reframed decisions I’d made long ago, allowing me to see the angles I’d missed and what that had cost me. After coming out to my family twelve years prior, at twenty-three, I never sat with the related emotions for long, determined not to waste more time than I already had. The plant medicine never admonished me for the haste but reframed it by showing me myself as a young boy, maybe fifteen, but straight, lying on the couch with my mother, my head in her lap, my face beaming like a happy, young, unguarded child. After being shown what might have been, I was able to fully appreciate, emotionally, not cognitively, the sense of loss and grief that still clogged my heart valves. I lay there on my mat, sobbing quietly and happily, relief trickling out the corners of my eyes.

In this same ceremony, I decided to confront a sinister figure that had been taunting me since the first. I’d only seen it briefly during the first and immediately opened my eyes to sever the connection to the medicine. I kept my eyes closed and steered away from it mentally when it showed up in the second. The last thing I wanted to discover about myself was more ugliness. But when it showed up strongly in the third, smirking, almost emboldened by my unease, I resigned myself to facing it.

Features began to take form. Malice oozed from its chapped lips. Hate glowed in its almond-shaped red eyes. A bloodlust radiated from its core; I could feel its desire to stand over me and watch my eyes dim. I followed it into a dark room, where it eventually turned to stare at me, daring me to come closer. On the floor beneath its feet lay a heaving, pulsing body of cancerous flesh that repulsed me. Heat radiated from this flesh in a way that resonated with my actual physical self; the eczema on the insides of my elbows had gone berserk by this stage of the retreat despite eating clean food daily.

Each step I took towards this sinister being felt like a mistake.

But a part of me did want to die.

I’d had suicidal thoughts once, in my early twenties, but I’d never made any serious attempts, and it had not been a recurring theme for me. Still, my fascination with the afterlife always lingered. Die here, I thought. Let it kill you. Something must change. The Lord knows your heart, you know your heart — leverage your authenticity; it’s now or never. By this stage, I also trusted the plant medicine enough to know that death, however it was carried out, would not manifest in the physical realm.

The snarl of the sinister being grew in satisfaction with each step I took, as if readying to pulverize my flesh when I got too close. When it finally rushed at me, I just let it, but when it was right in front of me it suddenly turned to sad stone, all its evil dissipating within seconds. I looked into its sunken eyes, recognizing something about the forlorn stare it returned. Then, it began to walk with an aimless gait, exiting the room and leaving me alone with the pile of sick flesh on the floor. As repulsed as I was by it, I wanted to understand what the flesh was. I bent down to get a closer look, only to realize it was me, hugging myself in a fetal position. The sinister force was me. I had beaten myself into a pulp using my own self-loathing as a whip and club. Perhaps I gasped out loud in the maloca, perhaps I did not, but I remember opening my lungs in desperation for new breath — to clear the air, to find the words to say I’m sorry.

My final ceremony took me away from my past and into my present. Images of plant life sprouting from the walls of my arteries began to unfurl. There was an alien element to it, but it also felt as if the cavalry had arrived. Perhaps we are all hosts to other sentient life within us but can only communicate with it under certain conditions. From environmental sensing, where plants adapt to environmental changes, to electrical activity in vascular tissue, plants communicate in their own way. Most of my final ceremony was a peaceful affair spent dwelling in a lush inner sanctuary. I lay there in wonderment, thrilled by the beauty I could conjure, relieved that this inner sanctum not only still stood but could still be found. It took a plant to help me understand my own machinations. No book, words, or humans had been able to do that. And in my second age, the Ayahuasca plant distilled its knowledge as if it were a library for matters of the heart. The emotions of the landscape I died in were revealed to me in wavelengths of quantum communication, allowing me to plug into living networks of viscoelastic and piezoelectric knowledge absorbed by the earth over thousands of years.

A tamarisk tree grew from my ring finger, fanning out in the opposite direction from the other plants. I’d admired these trees since I first saw them in Greece. Their resilience in the face of highly saline conditions makes them stand out like green lighthouses, drawing the gaze of those looking for signs of life. I’d napped under one many years before I died, wishing I could paint it, wishing I could paint.

Instead, I became it, growing as a windswept ode to time, leaning into the Aegean breeze and basking in the sun-drenched azure sky day in and day out. My new consciousness adjusted to this bliss, the effects spreading through my newly formed cosmos of cells like a concertina. Human memories of sunblock and freckles began to fade like old sunburn, paving the way for a sun creature to emerge from the shed skin. I’d always wanted to be beautiful…and now I was. In a way that didn’t feel transient. In a way that didn’t feel tortured. Whereas I’d been disgusted by the human body’s secretions and functions, I felt in synch with the photosynthesis and pheromones of my romantic reincarnation. I trusted and embraced every heat-drugged cicada that rested on my branches, every crab spider that traveled across my leaves. My beauty was connected, natural — tethered to an equilibrium that neither expands nor collapses.

Nothing grew from the pinkie finger of my right hand. Hordes of army ants and maggots reduced it to nothing while a griffon vulture collected the bone for its nest.

The few hikers who stumble across the unusual amalgamation of life I now embody are all spellbound by what they see. In search of isolation, here they find teeming life in a barren landscape. Some sit before me and stare, bewildered by the warped trunks bending and curving to survive. One hiker sank her fingers into the soil as she sat down and allowed her head to hang backward. Her cells began to radiate at a frequency I could feel, as if a portal between the plant and human worlds was slowly opening. She sought only to be close to me, to the world, as it is — as close to the world as entities with the power to exercise free will can be. Another ran his hands along the Ayahuasca vine, familiar with the vine but shocked to see it in Greece nestled among the most unlikely formations. I could sense him, too, his curiosity, his thirst for unity with source. A child hiking with her parents picked a leaf from the maple tree and gently put it in her shirt pocket.

If a human touches me for long enough, and if their cells have retained a modicum of purity, their internal landscape slowly begins to reveal itself. For no other purpose than to communicate. Perhaps it is through one of these humans that I come to you now.

Creation moves forward through vessels and death. My hand in the afterlife was the one I never took when I lived — the one I should have extended when I could.

Now, every root that takes hold props me up.

Each drop of rain that I absorb washes me clean from within.

The sun is my friend.

And it is enough.

                         To be.

                                        Me.