"Anarcho-herbalism"? It's like a dream come true...

‎"The development of a new medical system, or the recovery of ancient models, will be another link in our safety net when industrialism fails. It will keep us alive and kicking out windows now in the system's last days when so many people have no access to industrial medicine. And it will reestablish our connection to the real medicine that is the Earth." 

THIS IS ANARCHO-HERBALISM:

Thoughts On Health and Healing For the Revolution 

by Laurel Luddite 

My medicine chest is a council of bioregions, with representatives gathered together as I make my way around the world west of the Rocky Mountains. The Coptis root was picked out of the churned-up scar left by an excavator, at the retreating edge of the Idaho wilderness. The tiny amount of Pipsissewa leaves came from an ancient grove above the Klamath River just feet away from where the District Ranger sat on a stump talking about his plans to cut it all down. I am drying Nettles from the California creek where salmon die in the silt left after a century of industrial logging.

Every jar holds a story (often a ghost story of dying ecosystems and places gone forever). I am honored to have known the plants in their home places and to have studied their uses as medicine. But for people not lucky enough to roam throughout the wilds, purchased herbal preparations such as tinctures may be the link back to this sort of healing.

Like so much in this consumerist society, it is easy to ignore the connections between a bottle on a shelf in some store and a living, growing plant out in the world somewhere. It can be hard to know if the plant grows a mile away or on another continent. There is much to be said for reconnecting, for educating ourselves about the herbs we use and gathering our own medicine when we can. That's how we will be able to build a whole new system of healing ñ one that can support our movement away from the corporate power structure that medicine has become.

The development of a new medical system, or the recovery of ancient models, will be another link in our safety net when industrialism fails. It will keep us alive and kicking out windows now in the system's last days when so many people have no access to industrial medicine. And it will reestablish our connection to the real medicine that is the Earth.

An alternative to "alternative medicine" The sort of herbal medicine popular these days (presented to us by the media and so-called green capitalists as yet another exciting fad) has brought with it very little thought of a new way of healing. The plants, reduced to capsule form or, worse, to their "active ingredients", are just new tools to work with in the same body-machine that industrial medicine sees people as being. They become no different than pharmaceutical drugs or a scalpel blade: something to pry into the body-machine with and use to mess around with the parts. Except of course much less effective, because the herbs have been taken out of the system of healing in which they have their strength.

When the marketers of herbal products get their hands on a new "miracle cure", it can mean extinction for the plant. This is especially sad when so many living creatures go into useless products or are wasted on conditions that they don't treat. (Has anyone else seen that Echinacea shampoo?) The classic example of this is Goldenseal, Hydrastis canadensis, a plant close to extinction in the wild. It has a couple of amazing actions in the human body but has mostly been marketed as a cure for the common cold, which it will do almost nothing to help. By the way, the largest brokers of wild-harvested Goldenseal and many other big-name herbs are multinational pharmaceutical corporations. Given american society's obsession with herbal Viagra, weight loss pills, and stimulants, most of the herbs on the mass market are being sacrificed to these ridiculous causes.

There is an alternative to "alternative medicine". Southwestern herbalist, author, and teacher Michael Moore probably said it best in one of his recent digressions from a lecture: "In this country, the herb business mostly revolves around recently marketed substances with new research, and it comes from them to us. Whereas we're trying to establish as much as possible (in this "lower level" if you will) the fact that we need to create a practice and a model that's impervious to faddism. We're trying to practice in a way that derives from practice rather than from marketing. Not from above to below but from below around. Bioregionalism uber alles. Keep it local. No centralization because centralization kills everything."

Herbo-primitivism 
So we need another way of looking at our bodies and the plant medicines. Seeing the two as interconnected and in balance is new to industrial culture, but in reality it is the most ancient healing model on earth. We knew it before we were people. Animals know how to use plants to medicate themselves. Their examples surround us, from dogs eating grass to bears digging Osha roots. Probably every human society has had some way of explaining how the body works and how plant medicines work in us.

One thing all herbalists know - dogs and bears included - is that a health problem is best treated before it begins. In more primitive societies where people have the luxury of listening to their own bodies it is easy to spot an imbalance before it turns into an acute disease state. This is where herbs are most effective. They work at this sub-clinical (and therefore invisible to industrial medicine) level of "imbalances" and "deficiency" and "excess".

This old/new healing system is subtle and requires a lot of self-knowledge, or at least self-awareness. It uses intuition as a diagnostic tool. Emotion, spirituality, and environment become medicines. The spirit and environment of the plants we gather affects their healing properties, and our relationship with those plants becomes very important.


Green Herbology 
When we take herbal medicine we are taking in part of the plant's environment. Everything it ate and drank and experienced has formed the medicine you're depending on, so you better make sure it gets all the best. When we are healed by plants, we owe it to them to look out for their kind and the places where they live. Traditional plant-gatherers often have a prayer they recite before they take anything from the wild. I usually say something along the lines of "OK, plant. You heal me and I'll look out for you. I got your back. No one's gonna build over you, or log you, or pick too much while I'm around." So this true herbal healing system has at its heart a deep environmentalism and a commitment to the Earth.

The bioregional concept is important to this model of healing. Plants' actions in our bodies are really quite limited by the chemicals they can produce from sunlight and soil. For every big-name herb on the market cut from the rainforest or dug from the mountains, there is most likely a plant with a similar action growing in your watershed. Some of the best medicines to maintain good health grow in vacant lots and neglected gardens around the world.


Anarcho-herbalism A society of people who are responsible for their own health and able to gather or grow their own medicines is a hard society to rule. These days we are dependent on the power structure of industrial health care - the secret society of the doctors, the white-male-dominated medical schools, the corporate decision makers with their toxic pharmaceuticals and heartless greed and labs full of tortured beings. That dependence is one more thing keeping us tied down to the State and unable to rebel with all our hearts or even envision a world without such oppression. With a new system of healing, based on self-knowledge and herbal wisdom, we will be that much more free.

Offering a real alternative health care system will help to calm some people's fears about returning to an anarchistic, Earth centered way of life. There is a false security in the men with the big machines, ready to put you back together again (if you have enough money). What is ignored is the fact that industrial society causes most of the dis-eases that people fear. Living free on a healing Earth while surrounded by true community and eating real food will prove to be a better medicine than anything you can buy.

What steps can we make now towards creating this new system of medicine? We all need to learn what we can about our own health. This can be through training in one or more of the surviving models of traditional healing and/or through self-observation. How do you feel when you're just starting to get a cold? What kinds of problems come up repeatedly, especially when you're stressed out? If you're a womyn, how long is your cycle and what does the blood look like? Understanding how our bodies act in times of health can help us recognize the very early stages of dis-ease when herbs are the most useful.

People who have some background in healing (in the traditional or industrial systems) can be a great help to those of us just learning. Healers who are working to form this new model, whether collectively or through their individual practices, should keep in mind that commitment to the Earth and a decentralized form are central to truly revolutionary medicine.

In these times of change, everything is being examined and either destroyed, rebuilt, or created from our hearts. Industrialism has affected every aspect of our lives - we are just starting to realize how much has been lost. Medicine is just one part of the machine that we have to take back and re-create into a form that works for the society we will become. Every herb, pill, and procedure should be judged on its sustainability and accessibility to small groups of people. We can start with ourselves, within our communities and circles, but should never stop expanding outwards until industrial medicine rusts in a forgotten grave, a victim of its own imbalances.

(this article was copied from Michael Moore's website. There's a wealth of herbal information there, for those who are interested.)

Nourishing the Revolution...

Today, I'm sitting in my kitchen, feeling joy and peace.  I've been back from my summer travels for a little over a week now, and although they were exciting and powerful and deep and everything else you could want from an adventure, I feel so happy to be home.  My garden is in shambles, but I'm working on it to turn it around again.  I'm starting to root down again, into my home and my work that's here in the Bay Area.

Right when I got home, there was a wonderful get-the-bay-area-pagan-folks-revitalized-into-activism barbecue.  The next day, Jason and I got arrested at the SF Stop Big Oil Action outside of the BP offices in San Francisco.  Which you undoubtedly want to hear more about, because folks are always so into the activism part of this blog -- especially the gritty things like arrests and tear gas and whatnot.   Well, you're out of luck.  You're going to have to be satisfied with these two pictures, because that's all you're going to get:

My arrest last week at the BP Action -- doesn't this totally look like some sort of drunken celebrity paparazzi shot?

Jason's arrest shot.  He's a whole head taller than the officers -- I wonder if that's why they get so nervous around him, or is it the broody eyes?

What's really exciting me right now is the herbal infusion that I'm drinking, courtesy of herbmentor.com.  I am frigging obsessed with this site right now, I can't even tell you.  The wealth of herbal information that's there -- as well as traditional nutrition and just good ol' community vibes -- is astounding.

One of their biggest pushes is to encourage us all to drink a nourishing herbal infusion everyday, which is essentially an ounce or so of a chosen herb (or herbs) steeped in hot water for 8 hours.  Today, I'm sipping my first of what I hope is many: mint, oatstraw, and licorice root.  Although oatstraw is noted for its calming and heart-focused healing powers, and mint good for the digestion, and licorice a deep immune tonic, I didn't choose the infusion for any of those particular qualities -- I chose them to taste good and nourish my spirit.

It feels like its working.  Being home, sipping my tea, looking at my disheveled garden -- I feel very nourished, very alive.

Drink your herbs!

Love,
Riyana

Herbs and Gardens

This week my marks the end of my first “What’s Your Tree?” group, which is a circle that I’m co-facilitating that meets weekly to help us clarify our purpose and find ways to act in the world that align with our deepest callings.  (It is not, however, based on some sort of Celtic Tree Oracle thing, as my friend Esse had thought when I first mentioned it to her.  It’s based off of the work of Julia Butterfly Hill, who became famous for sitting in Luna, an oldgrowth redwood tree, for over two years and thusly saved the tree from being cut down by Pacific Lumber).  Last week, we created collages for the future that we want to create, and rather than sit around and think yet again about the state of the world, I found myself drawn to images and words about the coming winter that I want to create for myself.

I’m the type that’s prone to the wintertime blues.  For the longest time, I had no idea what was going on – it simply seemed a fact that every so often, inexplicably, I would fall into heavy bouts of sleepiness, loneliness, sorrow, and an inability to concentrate.  It was my ex-boyfriend Jack, who I dated for seven years, who pointed out the connection with the seasons, which was a truly illuminating insight, however irritated and exasperated he seemed about it at the time.  But even after getting a sense of this, and learning that there was even a diagnosable name for what was happening to me (SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder), I still couldn’t figure out how to change it.

In the last couple of years, however, I finally realized that what I need to do to stay balanced and sane is to simply slow down and let myself breathe and be in the sun as much as possible.  Forget the weird “Happy Lights.”  What a SAD girl needs, at this time of year, is less commitments and more slow-cooked meals, naps, reading novels in bed, and movie-watching snuggled up with her lover.  That’s probably what we all need, really, but for the seasonally-affected it’s the only way to keep from spiraling down into what can feel like having PMS for three months instead of three days.

My collage was all about the desire, even the anticipation, of this slowing down: it began with “doing less creates more,” a clipping that came from a magazine article about a modern-day reworking of the ancient idea of the Sabbath; moving into an image of a chicly bohemian woman leaning against the doorjam of a farmhouse kitchen with copper pots hanging from the ceiling, to express my deep yearning for afternoons full of from-scratch chicken soup; but it was the illustrations of garden plans from Sunset magazine was the centerpiece of the whole thing, the crux of the issue.

And so plan we did.  This weekend, on a Saturday morning so early that even the farmer’s market was not open yet (can you believe how much I’ve changed?), Jason and I went down to Nomad Café in Berkeley and, over lattes, visioned and planned and dreamed and wrestled with the small square footage of the yard of the house we’re moving into at the end of this month, somehow managing to find room for vegetable beds, an outdoor dining area, a graywater from-the-washer irrigation system, a clothes line, and fruit trees.  Then, and only then, we hit up the Farmer’s Market and got ourselves our leeks and greens and pears for the week, even splurging for some grass-fed pork sausage and free-change chicken legs (just the legs, though – the breasts are too expensive).

That night at home, I was going through my favorite gardening book, Golden Gate Gardening, when I noticed Mallow, a plant we’ve been studying my herbal medicines class, in the chapter, “Growing Like Weeds.”  I kept flipping.  Chickweed, another one.  Dandelion.  Burdock. Curly Dock.  Plantain.  Wild Onion.  They were all there, every last one.

I’ve known for quite some time that some “weeds” are actually medicines.  It wasn’t until looking through this book, however, that I realized that almost all our weeds are actually medicines imported from Europe.

Suddenly, in a single breath’s time, a vision came to me: I saw an ancestors woman in a bonnet, on a ship moving across the cold waters of the Atlantic with her “pot herb” seeds carefully packed away, not knowing what her future held but hoping desperately that the medicines she was bringing with her would take root and grow in this new, unknown land.  She must have treasured those seeds, guarded them carefully against the salt sprays and the sun in the long months of the journey.  These seeds might be the only hope for her and her family in this untamed place, as essential as the food stores and seeds they brought with them.

Then another vision: a portly, middle-aged man is spraying Roundup on his lawn, cursing the dandelions that are growing there.  Inside, his young son (though no one will know this for a few years yet) has cancer.  The medicine that would have helped him strengthen his liver to be able to filter out the deadly toxins is just outside – also being killed beneath the spray.  Next door, another green, homogenous lawn.  And another.  All of the dreadful “weeds” eradicated by poisonous substances that can supposedly can somehow tell the difference between broad-leaf plants and narrow-leafed grass, between humans and animals cells and those of the “undesirables.”

Sometimes, I can’t even handle it…any of it, this whole messed up world.

Instead of ending with that thought, however, here’s another: in some indigenous tribes, an apprentice herbalist was only allowed to work with an herb once he had dreamed of it.  If that were the case for me, up until last night, I’d be two months into my program without learning about a single one.

But last night I finally dreamed of an herb.  In my dream, I was walking up a road in the hills where I lived, and came across a little white dog that was very wounded.  At first I thought it had been hit by a car, but then I saw what looked like massive puncture wounds or bullet holes in his third eye, his heart, and somewhere else (I can’t remember the third).  I took the dog up to the house, where my friend Ginnette – who has been appearing in a couple of these “animals in distress” dreams – was, and who incidentally is also in my herb class.  She was not nearly as worried as I was about the little dog, who seemed to be in good spirits in spite of its wounds, licking us and carrying on as little dogs do, saturated, concentrated little brainless bundles of love.  Then she, or someone or something else, said something about the herb Yerba Santa, which happens to be my herb of the week for class this week.

So, there ya go!  I wonder what the native herbalists would have said about such a thing?