the spirit of the yuca

i am 3/4ths through the botany of desire, this most recent chapter dealing with the human desire for intoxication, profiled through cannabis. herein quoted is a bit of the conclusion:
"the garden is a place of many sacraments, an arena--at once as common as any room and as special as a church--where we can go not just to witness but to enact in a ritual way our abiding ties to the natural world. abiding, yet by now badly attenuated, for civilization seems bent on breaking or at least forgetting our connections to the earth. but in the garden the old bonds are preserved, and not merely as symbols. so we eat from the vegetable patch, and, if we're not paying attention, we're recalled to our dependence on the sun and the rain and the everyday leaf-by-leaf alchemy we call photosynthesis. likewise, the poultice of comfrey leaves that lifts a wasp's sting from our skin returns us to a quasi-magic world of healing plants from which modern medicine would cast us out. such sacraments are so benign that few of us have any trouble embracing them, even if they do sound a faintly pagan note. i'd guess that's because our bodies, at least, remain linked in such ways to the world of plants and animals, to nature's cycles.
but what about our minds? here we're not so sure anymore. to take a leaf or flower and use it to change our experience of consciousness suggests a very different sort of sacrament, one at odds with our loftier notions of self, not to mention civilized society. but i'm inclined to think that such a sacrament may on occasion be worthwhile just the same, if only as a check on our hubris. plants with the power to revise our thoughts and perceptions, to provoke metaphor and wonder, challenge the cherished judeo-christian belief that our conscious, thinking selves somehow stand apart from nature, have achieved a kind of transcendence.
just what happens to this fluttering self-portrait if we discover that transcendence itself owes to molecules that flow through our brains and at the same time through the plants in the garden? if some of the brightest fruits of human culture are in fact rooted deeply in this black earth, with the plants and fungi? is matter, then, still as mute as we've come to think? does it mean that spirit too is part of nature?"

michael pollan writes well from an explorer's stance, assuming nothing about his readers yet drawing us to consider it all. i will probably seek out omnivore's dilemma after i finish this one.
next order of business: I GOT A CELL PHONE TODAY. which, if you have tried to be in contact with me for the past month or so, you might be as happy as i am. but probably not. i posted the number on my facebook, but email me if you want it.
i am currently boiling yucca, which i enjoy most out of the whole root vegetable family. i paid over a dollar for this particular bulb (?) of yuca, a travesty compared to caribe prices. heck, back on the farm, we would just go at the ground with a machete and some leverage and eat yucca for free. every time i wander around the mission (the largely hispanic neighborhood of s.f. & the one that most reminds me of philly--double points!) i always buy something just to practice my spanish. even if the cashier or server greets me in english, i respond in spanish. even if they respond back to me in english, i continue on in spanish. even if i can find nothing of interest to buy, i ask pointless qustions just to get my fix. it's a fun little funny thing i do, and really the only reason why i find myself in yucca, constant horchata, tacos, and peruvian earrings.
did i mention that i finally got a cell phone today?