notageek

Cutting down weeds with the same pocketknife that was in my arm last saturday.

Poll: favourite flower?

When I’m not ranting these days I feel oddly at peace, as if I’ve finally figured out what I need to do.

Wyvern and I went a block or so up Hwy 1 to a vacant lot and he watched me cut down a fistful of grass, which was really oats in milk. “In milk” is when you squeeze a seed with your fingernails and it spurts out a white fluid, and is traditionally the best time to cut oats for use as a medicinal herb. Tomorrow I’m going back for more, because I don’t know where I’m going to be in three months.

Following in the thoughtsteps of a great many herbalists, I am slowly conceding that the best medicine is often exactly where you are. The nettles I pick grow in the creek, a block away. The oats, the very same thing that goes into oatmeal, are an invasive weed. Oatstraw herb and cut, sifted, freeze-dried nettle are both availible in the health-food store a block away, but at what cost? Seventy-five cents an ounce, and the healing gained from Doing it Yourself.

Wherever the oatstraw comes from, its nutritional profile is about the same. It will still be a nervine, a gentle rejuvenative, a tonic and antispasmodic. But if I had not gathered it myself, I would not have seen the oat seeds bobbing in the afternoon sun, not have been able to test each plant to make sure it was in milk, not have been able to thank each plant as I cut it down. I would not have seen plantain growing in the wheeltracks of a tractor, or the fuzzy black catepillar crawling across it. I would not have seen my boyfriend picking mustard blossoms because he remembers the spicy broccoli taste from when he was little, or laughed at him falling down and wallowing in oats that nobody will never eat.

Some plants are everywhere–nettles, dandelion, yellow dock, burdock, chickweed, plantain, oats. All of these, and many other common weeds, are also powerful medicine. No, they won’t stop your heart attack. They are subtle, gradual. They don’t fix conditions; they allow healing. There is a great joy in having both the power and the knowledge to heal yourself. To relegate herbal medicine to bulk freeze-dried Frontier Natural exotic herbs, and worse, powdered capsules, is to deny people both that power and that joy.

Sometimes I’m perversely grateful for my depression. Well, not for my depression, but for the depth of my healing that resulted from it. I still hurt, but I know myself far better than I did before, and I am far stronger. How many people have bounced through life in the emotional never-land that antidepressants can bring? How many people never experience the healing after the pain? How many people are never given, or never take, the knowledge of how to become whole again?