Sara Lewis Embodying Microcosms Begin by travelling to the plant index. Slowly move your awareness across the page, imagining that you are encountering new sentient beings, possibly new friends. Allow yourself to encounter the tapestry of color, shape, and lifeforms. With open awareness, notice if you become particularly drawn to one plant. Offer an embodied…
Don Lattin Psychoactive plants and fungi have long been tools to explore the mysteries of human consciousness. Now the visionary artists behind the Microcosms project have turned the tables on the plant kingdom, using high-tech tools to reveal the stunning beauty hidden deep inside sacred plant medicines. No hallucinogens required for this trip. Don Lattin, author of The…
Elisabeth Kugler Microscopy is a wonderful method to reveal worlds that were previously too small to be seen. As modern microscopes produce multidimensional data, we can create visual representations of nature and share them with everyone. In recent years, using visuals from microscopy has become a great tool to engage people across all ages, backgrounds,…
Rob Kesseler Meaningful Microcosms In her essay Picturing Ambiguity, the art historian Barbara Maria Stafford writes, “Magnification drives to the centre of a major aesthetic problem faced by all natural history description. What do you do with beings that are neither one thing nor the other?“1 Well, what you do is spend a lifetime exploring…
Richard Kay Microcosms works with layers of light. This is also how we at The Sentinel, through our plant-based medicine retreats, understand the process of the ever-expanding birth of consciousness. We may ask who is leading who in the symbiotic relationship between Plant-Teachers and humans with our pressing need to know ourselves. Like the waves…
Ben Kamm Confocal microscopy is a tool for botanical exploration the way the Hubble Space Telescope, or more recent JWST, is to astronomy. These “stunning revelations of hidden beauty” elate and vitalize us with “exclamations of rapture”. This is frontier work, our first static glimpse at phytogenic interiority–an eerily familiar and yet utterly alien facet…
Joela Jacobs The mesmerizing images of plant minutiae reproduced on the Microcosms website invite us to see the world at a different scale. A microscopic image of pollen grains, for instance, renders what we would usually perceive as a layer of fine dust into an artwork that seems to be teeming with strange, beautiful objects. Focusing in…
Rick Harlow I send gratitude and congratulations to Steven White and Jill Pflugheber for creating this beautiful homage to sacred plants of the Americas. I’m ensorcelled by the poetic beauty of your prose and images used in creating this essential website for a greater understanding of sacred plants and the interrelated history of art and…
Stephen J. Haggarty Commentary on Microcosms: A Homage to Sacred Plants of the Americas Toward a Digital Ethnobotany & Advancing the ‘Archaic Revival’ One rarely comes across a project of great merit, both scientifically and artistically, that makes original and significant contributions to both domains of creative pursuits. Yet this is the case with the…
Stephen Gray Microcosms is a remarkably impressive project on several levels. On the most straightforward and readily apparent level these “confocal microscopy” images of the inner life so to speak of sacred plants such as peyote, psilocybin, cannabis, and many more are stunningly beautiful. Beyond visual appearance, the images can open imaginative doorways to layers and hints of deeper meaning and multi-level…
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