Nightshade Ruminations

I’ve grown black nightshades for the past few years, but in a desultory way. If they grew, fine. If they didn’t grow, fine. Usually they grew, but not all that well. They bumped along, lanky and scraggly, but always pumping out some berries, usually at the top of an almost bare stem, the result of insufficient light and water.

This year I decided to make a serious attempt to grow them because of the success I had last year growing ground cherry. I know they are merely in the same family and not that closely related, but I figured if I was lucky with the fruiting of one, I’d be lucky with the fruiting of the other. So I started the varieties I’ve posted about, and they’ve grown very well, with a good amount of leafing out, and they are now flowering.

But they’ve also begun to turn up throughout my garden in places I never planted them. The fruits don’t seem to be favored by any animal, so I’m not sure if they could have been spread that way. The squirrels and birds, even the pigeons Old Man Sevin attracts by throwing crackers on the ground “for the birds” (and the skunks and the possoms and the woodchucks, etc.)  have no interest in them. They just hang on the plants, waiting. Eventually, they fall on the ground in disappointment. So how they got from one end of the yard to the other, and in great numbers, is a mystery to me. But given how insistent datura was in this way, coming up repeatedly in ragged formation through the cucumbers, through the peas, through the brassicas, and given my experiences with Datura Spirit, I think that black nightshade is trying to tell me something. But what is it saying? I am not at all sure.

Datura Spirit was pretty direct. It literally spoke to me in dreams, although its speech was not exactly straightforward. In contrast, I have not had any dreams of black nightshade’s spirit (although I recently had a bad one about an inoperative demon). That might be because the plant hasn’t decided that I am worth it, or maybe it is waiting for some reason. Perhaps it communicates in a different way, by guiding one’s activities or interests. Along those lines, before this season began, I had read some about the edibility of the berries. Believing them to be edible only after cooking, I made up my mind that I would try to make some kind of anointing tincture for wine out of them. Since then, I’ve learned a lot more about this plant and now have come to consider it in terms of prepping: the leaves are supposed to be edible, the berries edible not only cooked but fresh or dried, and it is a weed, which means it is tough and persistent. It doesn’t need the coddling of our spoiled domesticated vegetables, although it clearly appreciates some care, as my garden specimens show. I’ve got a big patch of self-seeded plants that are about hand high versus the small patch of transplants complete with soaker hose that are closer to two feet high.

Given that information, I have wondered if perhaps the sudden ubiquity of this plant was intended by it as a warning–”get ready for TSTHTF.” Ominous. Last night as I sat reading the new book of Chumbley essays, the back of my mind kept turning this issue over, and it occurred to me that perhaps this was about hiding in plain sight vs. putting onself forward.

Such an idea has a couple of implications. One is for magic workers and how we relate to our surroundings. Some folks have the luxury of being all magic all the time–they make their living from magic and so being stealth is not an option, for the most part. Others, like me, have an online presence but in the neighborhood or town they might well be stealth.  And many more are stealth all the time, except perhaps with friends, and maybe even stealth with them unless they are also magic workers.

Should we experience  social disruption, sooner or later minorities will become targets. All kinds of minorities have been the focus of violence in history–and some targets haven’t been minorities at all, like women. We all know that magic workers have been scapegoats in various societies–or perhaps more often, people have become subjects of violence and then were were accused of being magic workers. Relative to black nightshade, I wonder if the plant is not advising us to hide in plain sight as the plant itself has done up to this point–or on the contrary, whether it is advising us that now is the time to be out front, to push ourselves forward, so that our value might be recognized, or at least we won’t be seen as threats.

One thing has struck me about this, and that is the utility of this plant and how that utility is greatly augmented by its ubiquity. Recently I was watching a film version of the Donner Party disaster. People were stranded in the high mountains and engaged in cannibalism, even murdering the fellow travelers in order to eat them. As I watched the film, I looked at their surroundings and thought “They were in the middle of all kinds of food and didn’t see it as such.” The bark of fir trees, the needles, and the seeds of cones can be eaten. Perhaps these are not as tasty as “meat” but they certainly carry a lot less moral baggage. I kept being hit by how they did not recognize what they had as food and so they felt forced to violate a great taboo. Their own ignorance of their environment and their willingness to think only one way about their surroundings and their food–meat as the only “real” food–meant their choices were seriously narrowed. In a sense, when they chose their dominionist perspective and their ignorance of their natural world, they chose to be cannibals.

In connection to this, I wonder if black nightshade is not saying that in order to survive without doing wrong, look beyond your assumptions,. starting with stuff as basic as food. It has made me think a great deal about other food-growing possibilities, like wild-crafting that involves planting, tending, and harvesting more-or-less wild plants in “disturbed” or “waste” ground, as it is often referred to in books about wild plants–places like roadsides and vacant lots, for instance, not prime growing land, which we are constantly being told is in short supply, but subprime growing land. And that has greater implications too. Nobody needs to own their own land in that scenario. You only need knowledge and a certain amount of work to help these wild plants spread. That has fit in with other conclusions I have reached about social disorder. You can lose your cache of food, your guns or your gold, if that’s what you’re into, and your home, but your knowledge and skills cannot be taken from you. That is why although I do store food and am working to increase my food skills and other preps, I have been focusing more on building my knowledge of herbs in terms of growing them, preparing them, saving their seed, and using them medicinally as well as magically. I had not thought to focus especially on wild herbs. On the contrary, I have mostly grown cultivated herbs this year, even seeking varieties especially developed for high essential oil content that I might harvest the seeds.

Still, it occurs to me that the first three tinctures I have done this season were of plants that grow as weeds here: ground ivy, plantain, and motherwort. That does seem to emphasize looking to one’s own surroundings for help, seeing what is there, rather than counting on special “rare-earth” type stuff like high-octane varieties of herbs or even rank-and-file garden veggies, much less MREs.

I am not sure how to read all this. I think it has something to do with connecting to one’s “native” environment. Even the datura that chose to speak to me is a native of this particular area of North America and was in the past used in initiation rites by a tribe who lived here. Oddly enough, you never see it growing in the woods here, and in fact I got my seeds from a customer in Italy. I have since done my best to spread this datura all over the world. Re black nightshade, I am hoping that if nothing else, once the berries form and ripen and I harvest them, that ingesting them will lead to some answers in terms of my own practice and/or in terms of this plant’s relationship to our society in general, what it’s got to teach us. I can say that ever since I first conceived of the idea of having my own land, my own patch of woods, I knew I would name it “Nightshade Farm,” so some connection to this plant has been there for a long time without me realizing it. This also makes me see my own yard differently. Its possibilities for growing are not so limited as I had thought.