The Erotic Flowering of Wild Innocence

Sometimes the medicine of a plant is delivered by its mere presence:

Coming across a Pink Lady's Slipper in the forest there is a sharp, involuntary intake of breath and a sudden warmth that begins in the chest and spreads out throughout the body.

There is the awe of the presence of the sacred -- but something else as well:

an ecstasy tinged with astonishment felt not just by the spirit but by the body too.

At once. One and the same. A bliss of the embodied spirit taking pure delight in the sensual pleasure of the gorgeousness of the flower.

The experience is erotic in the truest, purest sense of the word. Terry Tempest Williams writes:

"Erotic means 'in relation.' Erotic is what those deep relations are and can be that engage the whole body - our heart, our mind, our spirit, our flesh. It is that moment of being exquisitely present."

Precisely the kind of engagement and presence we are jolted into by the haunting beauty of this delicate orchid blossoming in the New England forest in May.

And this is the response which the flower evolved to elicit.

The beauty of the flower exists for the purpose of seduction -- drawing in bees whose wings and bodies are dusted with the pollen of another Lady's Slipper, that will fertilize the ovum that will become the seed in autumn.

Our biology is not that different from that of the bees. We too are seduced by pink blossoms in the forest, and are ravenous in the presence of beauty -- held back from consuming it only by our reverence and awe.

Kate Gilday writes that Pink Lady's Slipper flower essence aids us in "Releasing shame" and finding "delight in our sexuality, opening one to a deeper level of intimacy."

I believe that it accomplishes this by bringing us in direct contact with our sexuality in a way that is unmediated by the language and stories of our culture. Aspects of our sexuality that predate the evolution of mammals.

The human female reproductive system is a variation on a flower. Vaginal fluids are a kind of nectar, that keeps the petals moist and draws in the tongue of the lover with its scent and taste.

The human male reproductive system is a further variation on the same theme -- and our misnamed "semen" is akin to pollen. Stephen Harrod Buhner writes:

"Semen is Latin
for a dormant, fertilized
plant ovum --
a seed.
Men's ejaculate
is chemically more akin
to pollen.
See,
it is really
more accurate
to call it
mammal pollen.

"To call it semen
is to thrust
an insanity
deep inside our culture:
that men plow women
and plant their seed
when in fact
what they are doing
is pollinating
flowers."

Present to beauty we can't contain in words, we move outside the lies contained in our language, beyond metaphor and back into visceral memory.

To the place where our erotic desire is as innocent as the desire of the bee for the Lady's Slipper.

Knowing that truth doesn't undo the lifetimes of trauma endured in a society where sex has become a weapon. And it doesn't in an instant erase all the lies we have believed about our own sexuality.

But it points us in the direction of possibility, allowing the healing to begin.

Sweet Birch: The Green Man in Spring

Birch is the youthful Green Man in spring, sweet sap rising fervently.

Birch is Beith, the first letter of the Celtic Ogham alphabet, marking renwal and beginnings. In the medieval Irish Word Ogham of Cú Chulainn , Beith is associated with the phrase "Maise malach" -- "Beauty of the eyebrow." In facial diagnosis, thick eyebrows indicate vitality and fertility.

There is a lusty fertility to young birches -- one of the first trees to come back after a fire or a clearcut, shortly after the Quaking Aspen. But their virility is not strictly heterosexual -- in far northern climes birches reproduce without pollination.

Birch saplings's bodies are marked by the lithe, supple, androgynous strength and grace of adolescence.

But to me there is also an urgency to the energy of young birches that reminds me of boys at the edge of manhood and men just past boyhood.

So its fitting that Darcey and I should venture out on Easter Sunday, the first warm Sunday in spring, to gather Sweet Birch (Betula lenta) twigs and buds in Robin Hood Park.

The sun was shining brightly, and the trees along the path were mirrored in the still waters of vernal pools where frogs and salamanders bred.

At the top of a hill ringed by White Pine, Sweet Birch saplings sprouted up between ancient glacial erratics.

The new growth on the saplings was red -- hinting at the way the tree's medicine stirs and cleans the blood in springtime.

The buds have a marked stimulant action and are somewhat warming -- after eating several I felt alert, energized, and slightly aroused, in part I think because of the medicine's tendency to move blood to the periphery..

The instant welling up of copious clear, thin, sweet sap wherever we cut off a twig suggested the way in which the tree's medicine moves fluids up and out -- both as a blood mover and as a diuretic.

This tendency may also explain the marked expectorant action I felt a few minutes after first tasting the buds -- something not accounted for in any of the sources I've read. The expectoration was surprisingly gentle for such a stimulating medicine -- just a single gentle cough that cleared my bronchi and throat.

The sweetness of the Birch masks its astringency -- delayed but pronounced.

There is a seeming paradox in the fact that this stimulating medicine is also a potent analgesic -- birches have abundant methyl salicylate. Doubly paradoxical because while the overall medicine of the tree is warming, methyl salicylate is cooling. Herein lies the tree's poison as well. Think of the adolescent romanticization of death as a warm sleep without pain.

In its own death, like the mythic Summer King, the Sweet Birch gives life. As Birches near the end of their life cycle, they become host to Chaga, a fungus with powerful immune modulating and adaptogenic qualities that may help the body fight some cancers, particularly those associated with radiation. (Chaga is abundant near Chernobyl.) And when they finally die and lay down their bodies, Birches enrich and sweeten the soil so that it will nourish the Maples and Oaks and Hemlocks that have sprouted in the shade of the Birch grove.

As much a sign of renewal in its dying as its birth, Sweet Birch connects us to the wild fecundity of the forest, the ecstatic desire of life to burst forth wherever a new opening is made.

Skunk Cabbage: New England Bear Medicine

This post is part of the March Blog party hosted by Karen Vaughan at http://www.acupuncturebrooklyn.com/

Thanks to Shannon Donahue of the Great Bear Foundation and to Georgia Stillwell for information used in this post.

__________________________________________________________________

Black bears dream all winter, listening to the songs the plants sing underground while waiting to emerge back into the world.

Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus/Dracontium foetidus) is the first of plant to poke its head through the ground in the swamps of New England, budding just before the first bears come out of their dens. It melts the ice and snow around it by generating heat through a chemical process remarkably similar to that used by hibernating animals to raise their temperature as they rouse from sleep.

Depending on how many acorns are left on the ground, Skunk Cabbage will make up from 50% - over 99% of a black bear's diet in this part of the world.

To the extent that Skunk Cabbage is known today as a medicinal plant, it is known for the effectiveness of the tincture or decoction in treating respiratory conditions including asthma, tuberculosis, and whooping cough. But the plant's association with bears provides a useful framework for rediscovering other aspects of its medicine.

The Micmac use of a decoction of the root to treat diabetes (sometimes in combination with Lady's Slipper) suggesting that the plant may have some impact on regulating blood sugar or general metabolism. The Haudenosaunee ("Iroquois") peoples used the plant to rid children of parasitic worms. And Skunk Cabbage is somewhat diuretic. These actions may suggest some of the roles Skunk Cabbage plays in the bears' spring diet

In more southern climes, black bears eat a lot of Willow catkins. Like Willow, Skunk Cabbage contains high levels of salicylates, which partially account for its analgesic (pain relieving) and diaphoretic (reducing fever by dissipating body heat) qualities. According to Daniel Moreman, many peoples use a poultice of crushed Skunk Cabbage leaves topically to treat pain -- a use I dreamed about long before I read this. The fact that Skunk Cabbage is also powerfully anti-spasmodic may make it a superior topical remedy to other salicylate bearing plants for throbbing muscle pain -- I've used the root tincture internally for this indication, but massaging the tincture directly into the affected area may be effective as well . Some women report excellent relief from menstrual cramps from taking 5-10 drops of the tincture at 15 minute intervals.

(A note of caution before we proceed -- Skunk Cabbage contains high levels of calcium oxalate crystals throughout the plant, making the raw plant potentially deadly in high enough doses. Heat and drying will break them down. NEVER use Skunk Cabbage roots that have not been dried. After drying, tincturing will slow the deterioriation of the relevant medicinal compounds. Untinctured dry Skunk Cabbage root is only good for about a year.)

Like many root medicines associated with bears (Angelica, Osha, Spikenard, etc.), Skunk Cabbage promotes a dropping down into the openness and receptivity that mark the parasympathetic nervous state. Our cultural conditioning makes us think of the parasympathetic state as lethargic and the sympathetic state as alert. But in reality the sympathetic state is marked by a narrowly focused awareness best suited to evading a single immediate physical threat, while the parasympathetic state is associated with broader sensory awareness to everything in one's surroundings.

Many Native peoples in Eastern North America use Skunk Cabbage as a medicine for "calming the nerves." William Cook wrote in 1869 that the plant had a reputation as a narcotic, but that he viewed it more as a nervine "of the most innocent and effective soothing character" --a description that very much matches my own experience. Its combined nervine and anti-spasmodic qualities likely account for its historic use in the treatment of epilepsy (first by the Haudenosaunee and later by the Eclectics.)

Stephen Buhner reports that the powdered root of the plant's western cousin, Lysichiton americanus, also known as Skunk Cabbage, taken as a snuff, immediately initiates the user into the warm and deeply open state that he associates with the centering of consciousness in the heart. Interestingly, our eastern Skunk Cabbage is used by the Menominee to treat "weak heart" and by the Passamaquoddy to treat various heart conditions. I plan an experiment this spring to see if our Skunk Cabbage has the same quality Buhner has discovered in the western species.

Another quality that Skunk Cabbage shares with other bear medicines like Osha and Angelica is an affinity for the female reproductive system. The flower is shaped like the uterus. Mooreman reports that the Haudenosaunee use "a compound decoction of upper parts and seeds for 'falling of the womb'" (uterine prolapse?) and a decoction of the stalks as a douche for "displacement of the womb." He also makes the mysterious and intriguing note that the Haudenosaunee "pass [the] seed over the genitals to bring about childbirth." This is an uncanny confirmation of information I've received directly from the plant about uses in inducing both abortion and childbirth that it is not ready to reveal in greater detail until I have worked with Skunk Cabbage for many years.

Skunk Cabbage seems to want to re-emerge as a medicine for our culture and our times much like a bear emerging from its den in spring. Tomorrow I go to dig the first Skunk Cabbage roots of the year. We'll see what lessons this season's harvest brings.

NOTE: Since writing this, I've heard from an herbalist whose family has been harvesting Eastern Skunk Cabbage roots in summer for several generations. Apparently drying the roots in an oven will eliminate enough Calcium Oxalate crystals to make the roots safe to use in a decoction.

Never the less, I do still think early Spring is the best time to harvest the roots -- the plant's energy remains concentrated in the roots at that early point before flowering.

Wendy Snow Fogg tells me that William LeSassier taught his students to harvest the roots in early spring by putting a knife into the center of the spathe.

Stirring the sluggish body and spirit

This post is part of the January Blog Party: Warming Herbs hosted by Yael Grauer at http://www.dirttime.org

I love the beauty of New England winters, and the rich dreamtime the darkness brings, so I have always been reluctant to think of myself as suffering from seasonal depression.

But the reality is that cold, damp weather tends to slow the body down -- and for us kapha types that can mean both physical and emotional stagnation that very easily lead to depression.

In recent years I've found that several gentle warming herbs have helped me tremendously during the winter months:

Holy Basil (Ocimum sanctum) -- Warm and aromatic. David Winston suggests Holy Basil for the treatment of "Stagnant Depression." I find that Holy Basil can prevent stagnant depression as well -- for me it quite quickly dispells mental and emotional fogs before they can set in too deeply. It is also a great upper respiratory decongestant which is important to me because I tend to store emotion in my lungs, and dispelling mucous and maintaining clear airways helps to prevent that. Holy Basil honey is particularly nice on a cold day.

St. John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) -- St. John's Wort's usefulness for relieving seasonal depression is well known, but tends to be attributed to the fact that the plant is such a wonderful nervous system tonic. Supporting healthy brain function is certainly one way St. John's Wort helps. But to me it is not the most important.

Kaphic seasonal depression often has a strong hepatic component -- exacerbated by the tendency to eat so many sweet, heavy foods in the winter, especially around the holidays. St. John's Wort is wonderful for gently stimulating bile production in the liver.

Two cautions here: First, if you are taking a prescription medicine that is metabolized by the liver, St. John's Wort may dramatically alter the level of the medicine in your bloodstream.

Secondly, when doing anything that might speed up the body's natural detoxification process it is very important to make sure you have clear channels of elimination to allow freed toxins to exit the body efficiently -- otherwise they can build up in the bloodstream. Constipation and slow bowel transit times can be significant issues for people with a kapha imbalance. I usually take Triphala and/or Chaga when I am taking St. John's Wort to keep things moving in my lower digestive tract.

Elecampane (Inula hellenium) -- Because I tend to hold emotion in my lungs, this warm, stimulating expectorant has helped me tremendously when deep depression and deep lung infections have hit me in winter. In Chinese medicine, the flowers are used for liver stagnation, and I find that the root has some benefit in this manner as well. Next year I hope to experiment with a whole plant tincture.

Eleuthero (Eleutherococcus senticosus) -- Eleuthero gives me the boost in energy and stamina that I need to get and keep my body moving in winter. "True" (Panax) Ginsengs tend to be too hot and too stimulating, and can be jarring to my system and make my heart race -- but Eleuthero gives my body just the nudge it needs to exercise when the cold and dark make me think I want to stay still.

Why I don't participate in the "health care system"

NOTE:  This essay no longer reflects the full reality of my thinking or my life -- October 2012


"Whatever people say they believe in terms of spirituality and religion, what they do when they are sick and in need reveals the true basis of their belief system."

-- Matthew Wood, The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism


When dogmas reach a certain level of acceptance they begin to be treated as self-evident facts beyond questioning.

So it is with the notion that "people without health insurance cost us all money" because "everyone will eventually need to go to a doctor, a hospital, or an emergency room."

The idea that health care is a service that we receive from doctors is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it is impossible for most people in our culture to imagine anyone choosing not to participate in the "health care system."

In order to understand why I refuse to participate in that system its necessary to understand its history and its nature.

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In traditional societies around the world everyone knew some of the medicine that the world around them provided.

The art and science of medicine were practiced by witches, shamans, midwives, herbwives, medicine men and women -- people who were responsible for maintaining the soundness, wholeness, and integrity of all things. The health of the individual, the health of the family, the health of the village or tribe, and the health of the land were inextricably linked.

Knowledge and technique were passed down through oral tradition. But the medicine itself came through direct interaction with the living world. It was deeply relational.

The healer was responsible for making all things sound. And the community supported the healer.

This approach to healing and medicine continued to prevail throughout rural Europe well into the early modern period until it was systematically suppressed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (It is still the primary approach to healing in poor communities around the world, including parts of the U.S. like the rural south.)

But in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, new social and economic forces caused knowledge to become a regulated and privatized commodity.

The Catholic Church had already made some attempts to suppress these practices because of their ties to traditions that taught that the divine was present everywhere and healing grace was abundant and freely available. As Starhawk writes in Dreaming in the Dark:

"The Catholic Church had for centuries served for a model for an approved body that dispensed approved grace. Many of the charges against Witches and heretics can be seen as charges of dispensing 'Brand X' grace, one that lacked the official seal of approval"

But while this ideology held sway in the cities, in rural areas where people continued to work the land together, older beliefs still held sway. And many feudal landlords looked the other way, seeing old customs, old beliefs, and old festivals as outlets for energies and impulses that might otherwise feed rebellion.

But other forces began to come into play. Over farming and over grazing (a result in part of pressures on the countryside to provide food of the cities) were leading to diminishing returns on the land at the same time that the infux of stolen gold from the Americas was causing massive inflation in Europe, leading landlords to break up and sell their holdings. The Witches who were both healers and priests to their communities were responsible for the rituals that reinforced peoples' ties to the land. And so they were persecuted.

At the same time, the urban market economy was expanding into the rural areas. With its spread, Starhawk writes, "Knowledge itself began to be an 'intangible commodity.' It was something to be sold only to those who could afford to buy it." It became the property of licensed professionals. And medicine was one of the first professions to be licensed. Just as the clergy had been the guardians of the soul and sanctioned dispensers of grace prior to the Protestant reformation, in the newly emerging and more materialistic society, doctors were the guardians of health and sanctioned dispensers of medicine. Licensure was the legal instrument by which they established their monopoly.

The story we are told is that this is the point in history at which medicine became a science and it became necessary to have means of certifying that practitioners were sufficiently well versed in the appropriate knowledge. To say this is to belittle the richness and complexity of the body of knowledge and wisdom passed down from practitioner to practitioner throughout human history prior to the 1600's.

There is no evidence that the licensed physicians of the time had better results in treating their patients than the unlicensed herbwyfes, midwives, and witches who they condemned.

As Starhawk writes, citing the work of Jean Baker Miller:

"Licensing is supported by the premise that it protects the consumer of services from incompetents, charlatans, and unethical practitioners. In reality, licensing protects those with approved credentials from competition by allowing them to limit their own numbers and raise their fees. It is one of the primary ways in which 'functions that a dominant group prefers to perform . . are carefully guarded and closed to subordinates.'"

In the case of medicine, the system of licensure led to the criminalization of traditional healers and the marginalization of their methods and knowledge. Fortunately the fact that women's work in the kitchen was largely invisible and innocuous to the powers that be allowed some traditional knowledge to continue to be passed on from woman to woman.

In North America, the mingling of kitchen witch traditions with Native American and African healing traditions led to the development of rich healing traditions in many rural areas which in turn informed the rise of the Physiomedical and Eclectic medicine in the nineteenth century. These threats, along with the emerging threat from European homeopathy, was dealt with through the establishment of the American Medical Association which successfully lobbied for the passage of new licensing regimes.

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Well into the first half of the twentieth century, no matter how mechanistic their model of healing was, physicians used plants as the basis of most of their medicine. Healing was still about a chemical and electromagnetic conversation between living beings.

But after World War II, doctors began switching to pharmaceuticals made from synthetic chemicals primarily made from petroleum products -- the long decayed bodies of ancient plants and animals.

The biochemistry of plants is remarkably similar to the biochemistry of our own bodies. Plants create medicines to address their own chemical imbalances and to support the healthy functioning of their own systems. When we ingest a plant medicine, our body recognizes its structures, and over time can begin to imitate them. Subtle medicines can bring profound healing over time.

But ecause of our limited understanding of the chemistry of life, synthetic pharmaceuticals act at a very crude level, stimulating or suppressing a particular chemical reaction in our bodies.

This can have a host of unintended consequences. Our bodies can become too dependent on these outside stimuli, allowing our natural feedback loops to atrophy. And turning one reaction on or off can have a cascade of consequences elsewhere in the body.

Bacteria and viruses quickly learn and pass on new responses to these simple chemicals, setting off an escalating arms race between the chemists of the pharmaceutical industry and the infinitely more innovative infectious microorganisms that grow resistant to each new generation of drugs.

And since our bodies don't recogize these chemicals, we excrete most of them and they end up in our wastewater. They are taken up throughout the environment with often devastating results -- excreted Prozac in the waters of the Gulf of Mexico is altering shellfish mating patterns and excreted synthetic hormones are altering the sexual development of fish, amphibians, and possibly humans. (See Stephen Harrod Buhner's The Lost Language of Plants for an in depth exploration of these issues.)

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I spent much of my own life dependent on asthma medications that kept me breathing but taxed and weakened my body.

In the winter of 2006, I was introduced to Elecampane, an herb that would help my lungs release everything they were holding onto.

Mischa Schuler, the herbalist who introduced me to Elecampane, also introduced me to the possibility of learning directly from the plants, transforming my sense of the world as alive from an abstract belief to a literal reality.

Over the next few months, the plants began speaking to me more and more directly. They healed and transformed my body in profound ways.

They also transformed my sense of myself -- I had believed my body to be a broken machine in need of constant support. I came to see it as a living entity just like the forest capable of regenerating itself given the right conditions. That transformation required faith in my body's ability to heal and faith in the plants as teachers.

That faith was tested dramatically in June of that year when I contracted Lyme disease. Most of the people in my life were telling me that I risked debilitation and even death if I did not take antibiotics. Instead, I opted to put my faith in my body and the plants, and immediately began a complex herbal protocol that spared me from the dire consequences my friends and family predicted.

My relationships with the plants around me deepened, and I spent a lot of that summer walking in the woods alone, listening. By the end of the summer it was clear that I would spend the rest of my life deepening those connections. And it was clear to me as well that I could never again take the synthetic pharmaceuticals that had created such dangerous imbalances in my own body and the body of the living Earth.

Many herbalists I respect greatly continue to use pharmaceuticals themselves for various reasons -- and I don't think any less of them as a result. I am in no position to place judgement on anyone else's relationship to medicine.

But the integrity of my own relationship with healing plants and with the living Earth requires a radical trust. That includes trusting death's place in every life, and knowing that the time will come when it is time for me to die, and that I would rather die in right relationship with the world around me than prolong my life through methods that violate the sacred trust I have placed in my plant teachers and allies.

As an herbalist, I place myself firmly in the tradition that sees the health of the individual, the health of the community, and the health of the land as of a piece. I cannot justify trying to heal my body with chemicals that will damage the forests and fields that provide my medicine any more than I could justify digging up ever Lady Slipper root in the woods around me. Either would represent a betrayal of everything my work is about.

And I will not comply with any law that insists that I pay money to health insurance companies with a vested interest in maintaining a model of health care that insists that we cannot heal ourselves without poisoning our planet.

Consider me a conscientious objector. I will not obey.

LISTENING TO THE WILD: AN ONLINE WORKSHOP

Six Weeks Beginning January 11
Sliding Scale -- $40-60

The world is alive and speaking to us. All we have to do is remember how to listen.

We are all born knowing this simple truth, and begin our lives in a world rich with meaning. But in our culture, the voices around us are quickly drowned out by electronic noise, and we are taught to ignore the bits of song we still hear on the wind or risk insanity. Eventually we reach a point where we no longer trust our own senses.

But for some of us the vibrant memory of the world we knew as children is stronger than the fear of madness.

The wildness of our souls can be recovered, just as a forest can grown from an abandoned field.

For poet and herbalist Sean Donahue, that process of recovery started when he began listening to the voices of the forest -- voices that guided him on a journey of healing, discovery, and transformation.

In this six week online workshop, Donahue will lead participants through an intense process of connecting with the living Earth and awakening the wildness within themselves.

Through reading, writing, meditation, and direct experience of the natural world, we will explore:

-- Our personal, familial, and cultural histories of relating to the land we live on and the beings that inhabit it
-- Engaging nature through engaging our senses
-- The use of the heart as an organ of perception (drawing from the work of Stephen Buhner)
-- Developing and deepening relationships with the plants that grow around us

Participants will share their experiences with each other and build community through an e-mail discussion list.

To register, please send an e-mail to seandonahuepoet@gmail.com before January 1.

The class will be limited to 20 students, so please register today.

Early Succession

The Quaking Aspen is one of the first trees to come in, behind the raspberries and the sumac, reclaiming abandoned fields, heralding the forest's return.

In the autumn wind, the Aspen's leaves seem to tremble with desire to return to the Earth, giving themselves over to become the soil that will feed the Maple, Oak, and Pine that follow.

Sometimes I think this is the role I was born to -- to make the fertile soil where the forest will grow again.

In this generation, we are witnessing the end of a civilization that seemed poised to make the world unlivable just before it began to collapse under its own weight -- like an old barn separated from its foundation and caving in on itself.

My home is at the edge of the field behind the barn, where the wild begins to creep in again. In the soil where I plant my roots there is still the memory of the forest that came before, It is enough to begin calling it back into being.

In this life time, in this body, I may never know the damp fullness of the deep forest, or the luminescent green of its lichens and mosses.

But I will know sunfire and rain and from them make a trunk and branches and leaves. My sap will run in spring time, making me supple and strong. And in autumn I will know the bliss of surrender, letting parts of me fall and feed and become Her fertile darkness.

And my descendants will know sweetness because I lived here, celebrate me in the scarlet passion of the Swamp Maple in October.

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I wrote these words long before I admitted to myself that the world is alive and speaking to me. Fourteen years later, they take on new meaning:


I apprentice myself
to the quaking aspen,
setting down roots
in thin soil
at the clearing's edge.
Here in bright sun,
autumn brings
pale yellow
resignation.

Someday,
sweet darkness
will bring forth
maple red.

Hanover, NH -- 1995