I’ve sat with plants for over forty years.
Not as a botanist. Not as a forager — although that’s where it began.
Not as a shaman or a plant spirit practitioner or anything that requires you to believe something before you start.
Just as someone who kept showing up. Who sat with the same hawthorn, the same chickweed, the same moss on a Dartmoor rock, again and again, until something shifted that I couldn’t have predicted and can’t fully explain.
The practice arrived slowly. Through a Western contemplative tradition — Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way, the mystics, years of directed attention in ordinary life.
Through Goethe, who taught that perception isn’t passive — it’s participatory. Through an ethnobotanist called Frank Cook, who told me I needed to be teaching plants, and then died young before I could thank him properly.
Through forest dwellers in Southeast Asia and India whose names I’ve forgotten but whose way of walking I haven’t. Through Pauline Oliveros, who taught me that listening is more than hearing.
And through the plants themselves. Always through the plants.
I gave the practice a name. Not to own it — to share it. Domei.
Two Gaelic roots: Domhain (deep) and Éist (to listen). Deep listening, with the whole body — skin, breath, attention. The kind of listening that takes the living world seriously enough to actually hear it.
I am not a guru. I have no interest in making you dependent on me or on any system. My job, as I’ve always understood it, is to make myself unnecessary.
If you’re looking for a teacher to follow, this is the wrong path. If you want to be told what your experience means before you’ve had it, it’s also the wrong path.
What this asks is simpler and harder than any of that.