Douglas Fir as a Plant Totem















20 thoughts on “Douglas Fir as a Plant Totem

  1. I love this! You know my totems are more plants than animals. My experience coincides with yours, regarding the focus of plants being a little different, in general, than animals.
    Thanks for sharing this!

  2. At the risk of being airy fairy, I swear I hear the trees screaming along this stretch of roadwork every time I pass by. It’s gotten quieter with time, but it still hurts to pass.

    I like trees and plants, though I’m not very good with them. I really appreciate and enjoy learning about the secret lives of plants. Especially their means of communication. I should probably work with them more, find a piece that calls to me to work with, but I need to do a lot more work with a lot of things… I went through a lot of real life stress lately and slacked off on my spiritual wellness.

    Anyway, I greatly enjoyed this article and hope to continue to see more posts from you about neglected and often overlooked totems. They help me at least to adjust my focus/perception.

  3. It seems to me that plants think purely chemically, rather than electrochemically like animals; and their reactions, like their habitual actions, involve growth and chemical production rather than moving about. This makes for a strange access to consciousness, slow and sedentary, alien by human standards. But they are very old, not a “lower” form of life, just a different one. Some scientists think that plants use dedicated quantum computing to optimize photosynthesis.

      • Plants “fight” each other and compete for resources, but as they are doing this by using growth and chemical production, it isn’t obvious. And there are plants that use fungal networks to intercommunicate chemically (last I heard, the largest known living thing was an underground fungal net, the runners-up being “groves” of trees that are actually sprouts from huge common root systems). Many people have attached electrodes and such to plants to investigate plant consciousness, but I think most of them misinterpreted their results. If you attach plant electrodes to a sound generator, and when you cut the plant the generator produces a scream-like sound, the sound may just mean that you’ve changed the plant’s electrical resistance slightly, even if the plant is indeed perceiving the cut and starting a healing response. It’s tricky, because on the one hand the internal structure of plants looks to us like uniform and inert blobs of stuff, their pressure, chemical, and light -sensing properties not at all obvious; and, on the other hand, when we do become aware, through those electrodes or through time-lapse photography, that the truth is more complex, we tend to interpret things in human terms. Anyway, you might find this article interesting:

      • I really have to wonder how much we’re cutting ourselves off from, knowledge-wise, by being so anthropocentric in our research. Granted, there are a lot of potential confounds in the above experiment, but we’re only really getting to know things like the extent of the intelligence of ravens; how long will it be before we really look at plants that way?

  4. Over a lifetime involvement with Coastal Redwoods as magical allies (I am reluctant to call them “totems,” although they may be), I have discovered that large trees that once dominated great swathes of land speak to us slowly. As is appropriate to their scale and long life spans.

    In my case, from the period of several years when Redwoods began to communicate with me until I, a human, realized that such communication was taking place took something longer than a decade. I needed all that time for guidance from the Redwoods to sink in, get processed, get translated into notions I could comprehend, and re-surface in my awareness.

    Let me add with some emphasis that this communication began with as an aspect of the coastal forest’s response to human activities like logging that had harmed and continued to disrupt the forest community, Obviously the Redwood trees, but the whole ecosystem, too.

    Redwoods have assuredly transformed me over the years, and I believe for the better.

  5. Wonderful post Lupa! I got much closer to the plant (and to some degree the fungi) kingdom(s) upon becoming an herbalist. The plants do seem unassuming until you pay attention. You may have to wait but once it opens, it opens! Their spirit is also more “collective” rather than individual, so if I were to communicate with a dandelion, it would be like ALL dandelions, not just the one flower. Trees do seem to have more individuality, but it is different than the way animals express it (and I cannot quite find the words to explain the difference). One thing is for sure – plants have been around MUCH longer than animals have, and even longer than people have! In many ways they are like our “elders” and yet their energies are often so loving that many really wish to help humans heal and live the best lives they can (and even the poisonous ones, if approached with respect, can be immensely educational). They have had lots of time and due to their “rootedness” (and not being able to run away from predators), they are the best chemists ever! No wonder most medicines we have are either plant-based or chemically modeled (crudely that is) after plants! I think Douglas Fir fits you at this time! 🙂

  6. Wow. I feel much the same about my ally, eucalyptus.

    A lot of it was planted here in California after the redwoods were chopped down. It’s acclimated quite well to the land and local flora and hasn’t really taken over anything – mostly just filled in the gap left by other hardwoods. A bunch of assholes want to chop down the eucalyptus, even though it’s not causing any harm, because it’s not native.

    Hey, guys. How many of you were born here? LET’S KILL EVERYONE WHO’S NOT A NATIVE CALIFORNIAN!

    • Some people do want to try to return ecosystems to their older states, though how effective that is can vary. Some newcomers are pretty destructive, though, like holly and ivy here in Oregon. Oh, and Himalayan blackberries, even if the fruit *is* pretty tasty.

  7. Trees call to me more so than anything else, except perhaps the crows that walk about like they own the place (and they sort of do).
    When the wind blows in the trees, it moves me to tears, and the most spiritual revelations over the past two years have only spoken to me through the trees.
    I too have felt as though I could hear the trees crying and screaming as they get murdered.Their almost stoic nature and that of being rooted firmly, but dancing in the wind, taking in the poisons of the world… the ultimate living sacrifices, clothing us, feeding us, sheltering us… makes me feel often that they are the highest earthly evolution.

  8. Several years ago I walked to the store and passed through a Christmas tree lot. I noticed that I felt depressed, sad, angry, confused, and upset. I then walked over to a tree that was in a pot, still alive and growing. As I stood there I felt hopeful, more peaceful. and more alive. That was the year I insisted, against the wishes of my family, on getting a “permanent tree.” I have often wondered why I have so much trouble with Christmas. Besides the materialism, expectations, and Christian focus, there seemed to be some deeper reason for my antipathy about this holiday. Now maybe I understand. I have always been fascinated by the Douglas-fir. When my husband and I returned from a year on the Navajo reservation, I had him stop at the first available place so that I could hug and cry with my friend the douglas-fir. Also, I don’t really like cultivated flowers so much, but I love wild ones. The trillium is another plant I bond with.

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