A Tribute to Two Great Men
Jul 08, 2026
Dear friends…
This post is a tribute to two great men. They were great in different ways, but both had a profound influence on the course of my life. One was world renowned, the other locally famous; both were loved and respected by those who knew them. Their passing has left me reviewing their role in my own life, and considering how I can continue to fulfill and share the blessings they shared with me.
Tenzin Robert Thurman
Robert’s passing on June 16th was known throughout the Buddhist world. His accomplishments and legacy are vast, and I was greatly honored that he brought me into the sphere of his work for many years.
My connection to Robert was the Medicine Buddha: on my side it was the publication of my book In Search of the Medicine Buddha, on his side it was Menla, the Medicine Buddha retreat center he created and operated in the Catskills.
Robert enjoyed my book, gave a warm endorsement for it, and invited me to teach several times at both the retreat center and Tibet House in New York City. I had the pleasure of walking with Robert through the forested valleys of Menla, discussing herbs he could cultivate to be used in the Dewa Spa that he was starting. He gave me the opportunity to lead my own retreats at the center, and joined me onstage in front of the massive Medicine Buddha thangka for animated discussions about the healing plants and Tibetan medicine.
The greatest invitation was the opportunity to speak on a panel with the Dalai Lama, at an event titled Ethics and the World Crisis, which took place in September of 2003 at New York’s Town Hall. I was the least known and most inexperienced of the presenters on stage, all highly accomplished luminaries and celebrities from various fields, but the presence of the Dalai Lama was calming to the entire audience of 3,000 people. I presented my naïve utopian vision of the role Tibetan medicine could play in replanting the global garden, a garden represented by the Medicine Buddha’s pure realm. The Dalai Lama gently concurred, the audience was thoughtful, the event was broadcast globally to millions of people, and I had my 15 minutes of fame.
I will remember Robert as gracious, funny, kind and brilliant; he invited me to stay in his home in Woodstock, and to dine with his family at the Black Bear Restaurant. After my visits and events at Menla, we stayed in touch periodically, and he generously accepted my invitations to be a guest on the Plant Medicine Summits I was hosting at the Shift Network.
Robert was a great man, who played a great role in my own life.
You can learn more about Robert’s work and legacy here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Thurman
https://menla.org/
This is a video of Robert teaching during the In the Garden of the Medicine Buddha retreat, a collaboration between Menla and Floracopeia, in October of 2013.
Dante Bolcato
I met Dante in the Ecuadorian fishing village of Porto Lopez in August of 2006, while on a teaching tour of South America. Our connection was the Palo Santo tree, and our meeting came about from a remarkable sequence of synchronistic events.
Dante had been a psychotherapist in Italy, and very successful, because he had a remarkable ability to help people stop addictions simply through power of suggestion. But he couldn’t help himself, he told me: he smoked heavily and became ill from overwork. He took an early retirement and moved to Ecuador to start over, where he met the Palo Santo tree. He described his first encounter as a religious experience that saved his life, which he then dedicated to protecting and replanting this endangered species.
When I first met Dante, he had been building his home and distillery, and was just starting to distill the Palo Santo oil from salvaged deadwood. When I returned to California, I imported one of his first liters of essential oil, and Floracopeia became one of the first companies to introduce it to the U.S. Our work together was dedicated to replanting the Palo Santo trees, and Floracopeia gave him a percentage of its profits for that purpose. During that time, Dante became the world’s foremost ethnobotanical expert on the species, and the first to propagate its seeds in a nursery.
I returned to Porto Lopez again in 2012, and spent several weeks with Dante, his new family, and his thriving distillery. We spent every day together discussing his life, his philosophy, the tree and its oil and its culture and history and magic; our conversations became my book Sacred Smoke. The most memorable part of my visit was a walk through the Machalilla Park to a hill overlooking the ocean. When we reached the top, Dante raised his walking stick and pointed east to the green mountains rolling away in the distance. “This is the forest you have planted,” he said. It was a unique moment in my life.
I did not have much communication with Dante after my last visit, but I knew his health was declining. Some friends discussed bringing him to California to share his knowledge and legacy, but soon he was too weak to travel. I was greatly saddened to learn of his passing, which happened on February 2nd.
Dante was a man with a great heart, a mystic, a shaman, a healer and an ethnobotanist; I felt a deep friendship with him, and he was much loved by all who knew him. He supported many local families financially through employment at the distillery; he replanted thousands of Palo Santo trees; and his work brought the tree’s healing power to countless people around the world.
You can learn more about Dante’s legacy in this video I made during my last visit in 2012:
You can read the story in my book Sacred Smoke here:
