On a recent trip to Mexico, it was a pleasure to visit the small town of Copala.

It is always worthwhile to visit a new place. The Dalai Lama once said:

"Once a year go someplace you've never been before.”

While in Copala, I was on the roadside buying a locally made, hand painted hat, when I met a fellow named Ken who invited me into his house and showed me around his lovely place.

Ken is a lover of plants and showed me all the various ones all over his property.

This was most interesting to me because recently I had come across the work of Luther Burbank. 

Burbank has an entire chapter dedicated to him in the famous book called "Autobiography of a Yogi", by Paramahansa Yogananda.

Luther Burbank—A Saint Amidst the Roses - is chapter 38 that is a must read.

Luther taught that the secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love.

“While I was conducting experiments to make ‘spineless’ cacti,” Burbank once said, “I often talked to the plants to create a vibration of love. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ I would tell them. ‘You don’t need your defensive thorns. I will protect you.’ Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety.”

If only we would see all humans as plants as Luther Burbank did. 

Burbank did just this with his own adopted daughter.

“She is my human plant.” Luther would wave to her affectionately. “I see humanity now as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillments only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection. In the span of my own lifetime, I have observed such wondrous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimistically to a healthy, happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living. We must return to nature and nature’s God.”

He had no children of his own. In a speech given to the First Congregational Church of San Francisco in 1926, Burbank said: I love humanity, which has been a constant delight to me during all my seventy-seven years of life; and I love flowers, trees, animals, and all the works of Nature as they pass before us in time and space.

As I walked around the property and spent time with Ken it was so easy to drift into happiness and bliss.

Ken just had a way of making me feel calm.

My sense is that Ken thinks a lot like Luther Burbank.

“Sometimes I feel very close to the Infinite Power,” Burbank would confide shyly in his talks with Yogananda.

What a lovely day in the countryside of Mexico.

Sherman Dahl
The Emily Dahl Foundation