by Sally Short (Sand Dollar)
When a new practitioner named sb posted to alt.religion.shamanism asking about journeys involving trees and plant spirits, the thread drew a quiet reply from Sally Short, who signed herself "Sand Dollar." Her two encounters stand out for their specificity and their emotional register: the first cheerful and communal (a cluster of singing tulips with a practical message), the second intimate and unsettling (a single pansy who speaks of mutual extinction). Both experiences date from earlier in her practice. She posted them in February 2008.
The Singing Tulips
On my very first journey, I encountered blue tulip-type plants with a white edge around the top. The moment I saw them, they began to sing and started swaying back and forth. This was two or three clusters of about twelve plants each. The song was the most beautiful I have ever heard. As I walked past them going toward the river, I remembered that flowers can talk. I leaned over and asked them where my power animal could be found, as all I had seen so far was an American Indian ghost and a brown turtle on the side of the bank by the river, looking at something across the river. The tulips sang in unison, swaying back and forth, that I had to go down river a quarter mile to find my power animal.
The Pansy
The second encounter was on another journey where I saw a very small single pansy-type flower, the only one where I was walking. It started talking to me first, telling me that it — the flower — was going extinct. Then it told me that I was also going extinct. I wonder then if the flower meant as a species, or because my family tree is almost gone and I am almost the last too. Most flowers that bloom are females.
Colophon
Posted to alt.religion.shamanism by Sally Short (Sand Dollar) on February 18, 2008, in the thread "Answering 'The White Tree' Attn. Bosco." Message-ID: [email protected].
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original spelling and voice preserved.
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