Three weeks since the last update.

The mother plant – Salvia divinorum, ska María Pastora, She of the Shepherdess, the diviner’s sage – has been transplanted from a 3-gallon into a 5-gallon fabric smart pot. She’s been with me since 2007. She almost didn’t survive the move from the redwoods to this flat above Chinatown. She almost didn’t survive me not surviving. The conditions were terrible. The light was gone. The humidity was gone. I was gone. And something in that root system held on anyway and said not yet.

She’s under two grow lights sixteen hours a day now – mimicking the dappled, indirect light of a cloud forest canopy. She is photophobic. Direct sun will scorch her. She recoils from it the way she recoils from fire. And that’s worth saying – the people who try to smoke her in a joint are breaking the statutes of the plant. Combustion destroys the salvinorin A. She won’t give up her medicine if you set her on fire. 

Around the same time I took three cuttings from her. Clean cuts below the node, lower leaves stripped, set in water glasses with sandwich bags tented over the top for humidity. Changed the water daily. Talked to them the way you talk to anything you’re asking to live.

All three showed good root growth. But only one was ready.

Today I transplanted the first baby into a half-gallon fabric smart pot. Fox Farm Happy Frog soil amended with extra perlite – she does not like her roots sitting wet. She wants moisture, not saturation. She wants what the cloud forest floor gives her -damp air, damp soil, drainage underneath. The fabric pots are perfect for this. No plastic coiling the roots around and around in circles going nowhere. The fabric air prunes them. The roots hit the edge, the air stops them, and they branch. They develop a tight strong root ball instead of a tangled mess looking for a way out. She’ll stay in this half-gallon pot for about six months.

The other two cuttings are still in water. They’re not ready. I’m not rushing them. Some things root on their own schedule and your job is to change the water and wait.

If you’re looking at the photos and thinking those leaves look soft – they are. Velvety. That texture is the trichomes. Fine plant hairs covering the leaf surface, similar in structure to what you’d see on cannabis under a loupe but different in chemistry. These trichomes are where the salvinorin A lives – the compound that makes this plant what she is. It’s not an alkaloid. It’s a terpenoid. A diterpenoid, to be specific. It doesn’t work on serotonin receptors the way psilocybin does. It works on the kappa-opioid receptors – a completely different doorway. There is no other plant on earth that does what she does through the mechanism she uses. She is singular.

She grows wild in the cloud forests of the Sierra Mazateca in Oaxaca, Mexico. Partial shade. High humidity. She almost never sets viable seed – she spreads the way she survives, by breaking. Her stems are brittle. A branch snaps, falls to the forest floor, roots at the node where it touches soil. That’s her propagation – she drops pieces of herself and they take hold. She doesn’t seed. She doesn’t naturalize in new territory. She spreads by falling and starting over. Generation after generation of Mazatec hands have tended her alongside this. And now mine.

I mist her several times a day along with the staghorn ferns. She is labor intensive. She demands attention the way any sacred thing demands attention – she is alive and aliveness requires witness. I am up for it. I have been up for it for almost twenty years. The seasons where I couldn’t tend her – when grief laid me out, when the blinds were down, when I could barely keep myself alive let alone a plant from a cloud forest in a flat with no humidity – she held on anyway. I don’t know how. I don’t know what was in that root system that said I’ll wait. But she waited. And now there are three new ones coming up behind her.

I am in disbelief that she is alive. There were years – years – where I did not open the blinds. Where I did not water anything, including myself. Where this flat was a cave and everything in it was dying quietly in the dark and I was dying with it. She had no light. No humidity. No one misting her. No one even looking at her. And she is still here. She is pushing out new leaves in a 5-gallon smart pot under a grow light in Chinatown. Some things survive for reasons the science doesn’t cover and the only honest response is to keep misting and shut up about it.

This means more to me than I can say to you cleanly. So I’ll say it the only way I know how – she is the last living thread between the life I had and the life I’m in. Everything else from the farm is gone. The cabin. The dogs. The trucks. The redwood canopy she used to grow under. The man who helped me water her. All of it. But she’s here. In a 5-gallon smart pot under a grow light in Chinatown. Still pushing. Still making leaves. Still asking to be misted one more time before I go to bed.

Salvia divinorum is fully legal in California.

Part 1 of She of the Shepherdess is HERE