Plants’ Alchemy: Manifestation

Mullein–Verbascum thapsus

One year I had a mullein plant put itself smack in the middle of my garden path, and it was a very narrow path! All summer I walked around it, not wanting to pull it out, knowing it had a message for me, but not taking the time to listen.

Finally I took the time to sit with Mullein and ask it what it wanted me to know. I received a picture of air and sunshine and leaves and… I have no words for the actual vision I was shown.

I had to translate it to human terms so I could understand what I was being told. The message was that plants take what is invisible, what is unformed and untouchable, and transform it into a tangible form, one that can be felt, touched, seen, is somehow solid. I found this amazing and awe-inspiring, invoking reverence for all plants.

I thanked Mullein for the message it had so patiently waited to give me and it finished its life cycle that fall.

Later I realized that what mullein was describing is photosynthesis. Plants take sunlight—ethereal energy that cannot be tangibly held, and transform it into leaves, flowers, stems, and roots—their very tangible plant bodies. So simple and so common, perhaps, something we learn about in school, something that happens all around us every day that we don’t even think about.

And yet the way I was shown that information helped me understand what a miraculous, sacred act it is for a plant to transform sunlight into matter. It is something that animals and humans cannot do, period, and which we must rely on the plants to provide for us. What would we eat if not plants, or animals that eat plants at some point? What would we make clothing out of if not plant materials, or wool from animals that eat plants? You get the picture.

But it is not just photosynthesis that was being explained to me. It was about the ability to transform, to manifest, to make something from “nothing”.

Since then I have felt that where plants fit in the vibrational scheme of this world is in the middle—somewhere between the dense energy of animals (including us humans) and the energy of the stars and the higher realms of Spirit (God, if you will). Plants are the intermediary between these denser and lighter energies. They help bring the lighter energies from the etheric realms into the physical, where we can connect with them.

In my humble opinion, plants are the first, and the truest, alchemists.