This is Anarcho-Herbalism

This is Anarcho-Herbalism
Thoughts On Health and Healing For the Revolution
by Laurel Luddite
Text on this page can be freely reproduced

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--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 Herbalogy

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.

To know

The etymology of shaman means to know.


Everyone has the ability to know.
And knowing doesn't belong to one culture or people or tradition.
You don't need a rite of passage to know, and you don't need the approval of others to know.
You don't need a drum to know, you don't need a teacher to know as some people are born knowing.
You don't need to die and be reborn to know, though some say it helps...
you dont need to be born a boy to know or a girl to know or both or neither genders to know.
You don't need to belong to a certain tribe to know.
You dont have to live rural to know, though you might because you know better....
You don't need a certain skin color or to speak in a certain language to know...
you don't need to be dirty poor or wealthy to know.
You don't need to read a book to know, though some do, and can talk in magical circles... But you dont need to walk and talk in magical circles to know either.
You don't need to know it another way then how you know it.
The way you know and what you know is unique and rare and has never existed and will never exist again in the history of this universe, revel in that... If you know how to revel.

'The Skys Gone Out.. ' by Si Matta

The fog lingers in silent moss. A stillness between the storms and the rain.. Oh.. the RAIN! Born from this I am… Moss and webbed feet. Born of this Pacific Northwest. Born of this Landscape of Volcano and Vulnerability, of Majestic Peaks and Ancient Forests and Mighty Rivers. Firmly planted in mud, I can't seem to leave…. the tractor beam of Cascadia is in my Blood… Literally.

The Birds take their chance to sing as the Sun peeks its strangers head into the wet Forest canopy… Alive in a glow of Green from Douglas Fir and Cedar…. the air fresh and wiped clean. A Sense of DEEP Belonging Grips me… as I choke back the tears… I BREATHE in the essence of this space and let the air fill my lungs…. as if for the first time.

What is 'Place"? Is it not the essence of Now? The moment where Your feet stand planted on the Earth….the moment that has created and shaped Energy. I sit and watch the Sun play and dance with the clouds blowing in from the West.. completing cycles. In this Now.. I see snow capped giants who stand Citadel on the Crest of our Vision. I hear the sound of the breeze as it ruffles the Cedars and Firs. I hear voices in that wind. A faint whisper from time long ago when the Medicine Was the Land. In this NoW. I feel the Essence of Space.

I Am Watala/Cascade and I Am the Great Great Great Grandson of Chief Tumulth. I Am from the Heart of a Mountain Range. I Am stumbling around in an Alien world. One made of disconnection and chaos. I was born into the 21st century to learn. To remember. To Honor and to Rebuild. I am Proud and I Am Lost. I yearn to know the Old Way but know nothing of its practice. Its a fragmented puzzle with many esoteric and profound teachings. 
The only Teacher left is the Land. The Spirit of Place. The Old Teacher of my Grandfathers and Grandmothers. The only Teacher Left is also fading in the back wash of Suburbia and Apple Pie. Columbus has rearranged Our Skies and I shape shift inside my pale skin. My blood quota memorized and cataloged on Plastic. Sovereign in a lost battle- I am searching for my Voice.

I breathe in the Spring and taste the memories of my Ancestors DNA. A strand that Spirals the Ladders of Time. and like the Raven discover a New Creation Story.

All Our Relations.


"Where You Go, there You Are."

Service

Recently on the Evolver network, I read a comment on someones blog asking the Evolver community how they make money so that they can raise enough capital to enjoy the shamanic spiritual lifesytle... There was talk of investment profiles and such, and I felt my already high blood pressure start to boil. Its very disappointing for me to see these sorts of posts in spiritual communities. I know its there, Ive been to Toas, and Ive met the wealthy spiritual seekers, and Ive been to enough weekend warrior shamanic retreats to still need a good shower to cleanse myself of it.

Why the disconnect? Why the desire to serve the self over others? Why is it so difficult to see that shamanry and living as an animist does not require affluence?

My greatest spiritual advice has always been to be homeless for a little while... I wonder if they have homelessness spiritual retreats you can pay for these days?

People not products

Ive been a huge fan of perfumes ever since a south american ceremonialist spit some in my face and I could hear and feel the spirits of the plants speaking to me and healing me, after breathing them into my chest cavity. Maybe its my wolfyness like makes me obsess about smells and communication through scent, as well as the medicinal qualities of scent. Or maybe its that I like little bottles all around my house filled with mysterisous potions that mystify all of my house guests. I defintely do love going to antique stores and finding ancient medicine bottles!

There is somthing about the alchemy of distilling, of extraction that has always fascinated me as well. My contemplations have always gone from macro to micro, and the interconnectedness of all things from those levels is always so fascinnating! But the notion of essence, and of liberating an essence from a plant for example to make a perfume or oil is incredible. Even extracting a chemical from a plant whether its useing hot water to make a tea or some more advanced method is intriging and some what of a taboo subject among animists I know. But I often think chemistry just confuses people, and that its peoples intentions with chemistry that really bothers them. That aside the simplicity of distilling has really become a love of my life as of late.



Most perfumes are made with an essential oil. Distilling follows natures rules to the tee in the most amazingly simple ways, and heats up the essential oils releasing them into the steam and condensing them back into a fluid with cold. Smuding or burning say sage or cedar works on the same principle of evaporating the plants essential oils, or out and out burning them, releasing them into the air. An oil or hydrosol, which is the water released during steam distillation, can be worked with in a perfume, or alone and there are beautiful shamanic traditions around the world that work with them in ceremonies.

This has been a real passion of mine for years now as you can tell! But ive been really wishing to levae my current proffession and move into wildcrafting natural products and selling Hydrosols and Oils from local plants. How does one do somthing such as this as an animist? Holding to our values. Well from the start, the ethical wildcrafting of plants is very important, asking permission of the plants and the land, giving offerings of humble gratitude is important. Working with pure water from a good place is important as well. But how do we work with this notion of product, of selling a product? What is a product any way?
Product:
1. Something produced by human or mechanical effort or by a natural process.

2. A direct result; a consequence: "Is history the product of impersonal social and economic forces?" (Anthony Lewis).
3. Chemistry A substance resulting from a chemical reaction.
4. Mathematics
a. The number or quantity obtained by multiplying two or more numbers together.
b. A scalar product.
c. A vector product.

In this respect I can understand working with the word product, but as an animist I cannot help looking at the word suspiciously...
I was produced or the product of human effort and a natural proccess. Human people are thus products?  Yes they are... But they are not products in the orther use and defintion of the word.

Product; Noun~
1. Commodities offered for sale; "good business depends on having good merchandise"; "that store offers a variety of products"
Its hard to sell and buy people. Just as its hard to use people, as Ive always mention in regards to the concept of a tool. Human beings have for some time now looked rather pourly on the idea of buy and selling people, human people that is, and do not see people as commodities, ( though this could change in todays economic climate I'm sure) as a matter of fact seeing someone as a product that you could buy and sell some what unethical, and would be considered nearly patholigically anti-social and abherent behavior by todays ethical standards. Yet as an animist, we look at Salmon, and we look at Pine, at lemon, and Cabbage, and we see that we buy and sell people constantly. People are products, both litterally and in the sense of them being a commodity, but they are not human people. 
How traditional animists worked out this detail when it came to hunting, gathering, farming, herding, and trading is always extremely complex and unique and it tends to revolve around reciprocity and respect as being the priorities to observe in the dynamic and exchange. 
My challenge is how do I design a way of living in this society that adhears to my ethics and way of life as an animist? 
For one What I want to do, is get people to unstand the importance of bioregional economies, to see the relationship between ecology and economy. I want to show people how much they can love what is local so that they will strive to protect it and work with it in a way that inspires pride in place and care in how we work with place and people of place. Bioregional economies or "domestic" "products" build strength in communities, where as globalized economies weaken local communities. When we see the value a local tree has to us, we appriciate it, protect it and develope a relationship of intimacy with it. 
 

I see that producing hydrosols as a way for people to learn about this, I also see that the scents are the way that plants communicate, attract, as well as defened and heal themselves. The exchange of monies for these hydrosols would be to support the plants in reaching out to people for that communication, healing, and defence of itself. It is supporting the travel of these plant people. They would not be commodities that are owned or bought or sold, but given an oppertunity to work with others. They would be people not products and they would not be bought or sold but moved and supported.
I would put a picture of each plant and eco-region I harvested from including the GPS coordinates for each plant so that people could go there, and meet the spirit of the place. I would NEVER focus on consitancy of "product" but focus on the uniqueness of each extraction, the place, the time of year, the phase of the moon, the weather that day the reason for this, being that each scent will be unique and an expression of the personality of a plant, place, and community, driving the notion of other than human person of place home. I would not take the plant material from the eco-region but distill the plants there allowing them to re-enter the food chain of that place, once they had been distilled, reducing the carbon foot print. All of these things I take care of and care for because that is reciprocity and respect and working in an animist way.
 
It is possible to work as an animist. You do not have to sell out or drop out to be or not to be an animist in this soceity, and your efforts as an animist will create some of the changes we need to see in this world today.
 
Hopfully I can get this off the ground, and help the genii loci get their voice heard over greater distances!

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