Sacred Datura
Exeter, California
2017
Sacred Datura, a.k.a. Jimson weed, is a familiar plant to desert wanderers and also readers of Carlos Castaneda’s book The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Reading that book while an undergraduate in Kansas in the early 70s was instrumental in my decision to apply for graduate school in Arizona. It was not the books treatment of the use of Sacred Datura that drew me to Arizona however; rather it was that the book (along with perusing various issues of Arizona Highways magazine) made me fall in love with the Sonoran Desert even though I’d never been there before.