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?

Wild Blackberries Need No Intermediary

Today, for the first time since I've returned home, I finally found time to reflect on my time with Joanna Macy at the Land of Medicine Buddah.  It was a very powerful experience, one that is continuing to have reverberations and aftershocks in my life as time passes.  I feel more present with the work that I have long felt called to do in this world: as an earth-priestess, as a healer doing the work of the Great Turning.  The threads that seem to be pulling me with the most consistency and passion are bringing me ever deeper into a life that is different from what I'd ever imagined I would want at 31, or 35, or 70.  I'm trying to be open to that, to simply let go -- let go and go to Pittsburgh for the G20 actions, or to Copenhagen for the Climate Talks, or to wherever this wild ride takes me.

All day, as I've picked wild blackberries and made homemade yogurt and read about herbs and urban foraging and been loving and open with Jason, my partner, I've continued to feel peaceful and joyous  like I did at the retreat.  There is a sense of Time Magic happening -- it started in those woods, at a Buddhist monastery steeped in ancient practices and silence and tall redwood trees, yet continues even now that I've come home to my little pad in Oakland, surrounded by invasive and elegant Eucalyptus trees and the California Bays that in spite of their lush fragrance point to recent environmental destruction in these hills.  Every moment seems to stretch out, to open up, like a blossom that closed in the harsh darkness of the Industrial Growth Society and is now unfurling, petal by petal, in the pink dawn of new possibility.

Earlier today, picking the blackberries that are so profuse at this time of year that I can hardly keep up with them (that in fact I need to will myself to stop picking, for it seems they go on forever) I realized that I was learning about abundance in a way that I have never in my life understood it.  No matter how my friends have tried to tell me otherwise, it has long been one of my core beliefs that one of the unavoidable facts of life is that we must struggle in order to live, struggle to "make a living."  I may have wished it and even said otherwise, but in my heart I bought the myth inherent in that phrase: that the basic experience of living is something that must be made, willed, constructed.  There may be loopholes here and there, lucky breaks, but those are the exceptions that make the rule.  I've even found a couple of those loopholes here and there in my life, but those experiences didn't have the power to change the overall belief that I've carried with me since adolescence -- one that my intellectual father posited over and over again in my young life, the creed coming through in his actions even when his words said otherwise.

The Industrial Growth Society is completely dependent on a pervasive Myth of Scarcity: we are kept in chains by our belief that at the end of the day our survival is contingent on having money to buy food, to have a place to live, having water to drink. 

A couple of months ago, I went to a talk given by the urban homesteaders that founded the Freedom Farm movement -- home gardens that provide enough food to live on, even on a small city lot.  It was hearing them speak that helped me make the connection between freedom and food.

My epiphany, though it felt mind-blowing and intense, was quite simple: "Oh, right.  They have our food."

They -- the corporations, the IGS, the landowners -- whatever incarnation "they" are taking at the moment doesn't change the predicament.   "They" have the things that are essential to our survival, and if we don't do what "they" want (like working for them), we won't be able to have those things, and we will die.

The wild blackberries tell a different story, one that I could sink my teeth into in a way that made the truth of it unavoidable.   Abundance comes from the earth; it is natural -- it is the way of things when they are in balance -- it is ripeness waiting to be realized, and when it seems gone or lost, that is only because it is being stolen, suppressed, or adulterated.  The earth, of her own accord, nurtures us throughout our lives if we open ourselves to the juicy fertility of her and surrender our stubborn ideas about what wealth is, what happiness and success should look like, what it means to be satisfied.  She does not need to be paid -- nobody needs to be paid in order for our most primal, essential needs to be satisfied -- food, shelter, water, sunshine, sex.  Abundance and diversity-- not the scarcity of the IGS -- is the quintessential nature of life on earth, and has been since life began on this garden planet.

Just as Time, freed from the confines of the IGS during the retreat, seemed to unfold and blossom before me, today I found that so too does abundance.  The earth herself provides the sweetness and sustenance of the blackberries and elderberries and the miner's lettuce in the hills all around me.  No corporate power acts as intermediary or granter -- it simply is.  No man pays me so that I may in turn pay another.  She simply Is.

The Shambhala Prophecy

from joannamacy.net...


Coming to us across twelve centuries, the prophecy about the coming of the Shambhala warriors illustrates the challenges we face in the Great Turning and the strengths we can bring to it. Joanna learned it in 1980 from Tibetan friends in India, who were coming to believe that this ancient prophecy referred to this very planet-time. She often recounts it in workshops, for the signs it foretold are recognizable now, signs of great danger.
 
    There are varying interpretations of this prophecy. Some portray the coming of the kingdom of Shambhala as an internal event, a metaphor for one's inner spiritual journey independent of the world around us. Others present it as an entirely external event that will unfold independent of what we may choose to do or what our participation may be in the healing of our world. A third version of the prophecy was given to Joanna by her friend and teacher Ven. Dugu Choegyal Rinpoche of the Tashi Jong community in northern India.
 
    There comes a time when all life on Earth is in danger. Great barbarian powers have arisen. Although these powers spend their wealth in preparations to annihilate one another, they have much in common: weapons of unfathomable destructive power, and technologies that lay waste our world. In this era, when the future of sentient life hangs by the frailest of threads, the kingdom of Shambhala emerges.

    You cannot go there, for it is not a place; it is not a geopolitical entity. It exists in the hearts and minds of the Shambhala warriors—that is the term Choegyal used, "warriors." Nor can you recognize a Shambhala warrior when you see her or him, for they wear no uniforms or insignia, and they carry no banners. They have no barricades on which to climb to threaten the enemy, or behind which they can hide to rest or regroup. They do not even have any home turf. Always they must move on the terrain of the barbarians themselves.
     
    Now the time comes when great courage—moral and physical courage—is required of the Shambhala warriors, for they must go into the very heart of the barbarian power, into the pits and pockets and citadels where the weapons are kept, to dismantle them. To dismantle weapons, in every sense of the word, they must go into the corridors of power where decisions are made.
   
    The Shambhala warriors have the courage to do this because they know that these weapons are manomaya. They are "mind-made." Made by the human mind, they can be unmade by the human mind. The Shambhala warriors know that the dangers threatening life on Earth are not visited upon us by any extraterrestrial power, satanic deities, or preordained evil fate. They arise from our own decisions, our own lifestyles, and our own relationships.
 
    So in this time, the Shambhala warriors go into training. When Choegyal said this, Joanna asked, "How do they train?" They train, he said, in the use of two weapons. "What weapons?" And he held up his hands in the way the Iamas hold the ritual objects of dorje and bell in the lama dance.
 
     The weapons are compassion and insight. Both are necessary, he said. You have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion to move. It means not to be afraid of the pain of the world. Then you can open to it, step forward, act. But that weapon by itself is not enough. It can burn you out, so you need the other—you need insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. With that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between "good guys" and "bad guys," because the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. With insight into our profound inter-relatedness—our deep ecology—you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern. By itself, that insight may appear too cool, too conceptual, to sustain you and keep you moving, so you need the heat of compassion. Together these two can sustain us as agents of wholesome change. They are gifts for us to claim now in the healing of our world.
     
    These two weapons of the Shambhala warrior represent two essential aspects of the Work that Reconnects. One is the recognition and experience of our pain for the world. The other is the recognition and experience of our radical, empowering interconnectedness with all life.

(scriptural source: the Kalachakra Tantra, 8th century AD)