While he's talking, he draws an owl-like creature with an enormous parrot's beak and a hexagram for a head. Imparting inspirational information, he smiles, is "the reason" he does interviews. Now he's whizzing through his black Macbook laptop for self-taken photos of desert snakes and lizards eating peaches, while writing down the words "The Secret Life Of Plants" [the 1973 book], "everything by Dale Pendell" [the American scientist, poet, writer and "ethnobotanist"] and the novel Mulaya by Miguel Angel Asturias [1967 Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, from Guatemala].
We're in a cluttered backstage room in Toronto, perched on a couch, Devendra the vision of a gypsy sooth-sayer, several feet of raven black hair bundled into a red knitted hat. Suddenly, he reaches out and fondles your shirt (the tart), a yellow-lime affair with a fawn floral motif. "Man, that's a beautiful shirt!
" he coos. "Have you seen desert roses? They're almost like these [prods shirt], beautiful, like petrified roses, they look like little Weetabix with frosting on top.
" He fiddles with a small, black circular tin, picks out a tiny tea-bag of tobacco and places it under his lower lip. "Snus," he smiles of the Scandinavian phenomenon, "would you like one?" And so we sit, chewing the baccy, like 70-year-old blues bums on a porch in Alabama in 1948.
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