So much to do, so little time

I feel like I have neglected my audience. I have spent a lot of time in the garden, started selling herbs at the Farmer's market, Walked at my Commencement ceremony for my BS at OSU, and have been working very hard on my Grad school work with little time left to ponder and write and share with you. This week I had an assignment that  I do want to share, it was a thoughtful one, and I was able to relate to it with information from my current reading selection, Invasive Plants Medicine, by Timothy Lee Scott. I promise to post more in the upcoming weeks as the plants grow and I do more harvesting and medicine making.

I was brought up in a Catholic family, very much indoctrinated into the church and accepting God. It never added up in my head, I have always been a child of Nature. Throughout my life, I have evolved my own understanding of what God and Nature are and how they are intertwined. I think that many of the stories and lessons and virtues that are shared among the world’s religions are universal and that many of them also contain a fair share of perversions to the original intents, put there throughout time by people wishing to have control and power over the masses. I reject those parts of religion, while finding my interpretation of the famous stories and sayings and virtues to be true and legible. I believe that God is equivalent to Nature, or the power and energy that are in all of us, shared universally through all living things. When I use the term God or Goddess, I am referring to the dichotomy of masculine and feminine qualities in the Life Force, in the Creator, and in Ourselves as the Holy Spirit, God, and Living Beings. I have no deities, no image of a humanoid ruler in the clouds, and no name to focus on. It is Namaste, in my own way, and it is the way I live and experience Life on this planet that I Love so much.

                That being said, I don’t believe that Nature is always kind or forgiving, I don’t think Humans are the top of the food chain and I don’t believe that plants and animals were put here to “do what we wish” with. The story of the Garden of Eden can be interpreted in many ways, my favorite being the interpretation shared in the book, “Ishmael,” byAuthor Daniel Quinn. I have read this book numerous times and every time I learn something new. It warns you at the beginning that it is a life altering book and you will see your life as before Ishmael and after Ishmael. It is true, once you have read it, there is no going back to understanding our lives the way we once thought we did. It is transformative and the center of that transformation comes from the interpretation of the greatest story ever told, the story of Creation. In Ishmael, you learn that the tree of Knowledge represents the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die, marking the beginning of the agricultural revolution when humans decided to take upon themselves the power to grow and monitor the food, choosing who had rights to it and exterminating anything that got in our way or holding this power. I have never been able to let go of this interpretation, it is so unarguable, it makes so much sense and has come to be the way I see truth of the history of mankind. I see myself as trying to get back to the Garden.

                The Gaia Theory maintains the idea that the Earth is self-regulating and has the power at all times to correct any harm that is being done to Her, in an attempt to achieve homeostasis, the same way all living things on this planet do in order to survive. These systems of regulation include the salinity in the ocean, our atmospheric oxygen and the surface temperatures. This is a wonderful theory that drives some scientific movements in order to try and predict what changes might occur to counter balance the effects of the inorganic changes that have been made due to human destruction of the environment.  It validates the Mother Earth theories that many Native and Natural cultures believe in, the types of ideas that conquered my mind as a child and adolescent that drove me out of the Church and into the Forest.

                Recently, I bought a book called, “Invasive Plant Medicine,” by Timothy Lee Scott, hoping to learn about using the ever present and abundant “invasive” plants for medicine. What I have learned from this book is so much more and is definitely along the same theories of the Gaia Theory. Scott writes about the healing properties of these opportunistic plants, not just for people to use as pharmaceutical treatments, but healing the soil, ecosystems and filling a niche where man has disrupted the Natural order of things. You find these “invasives” where ever we have walked, drove, dug, or built. We find them where our actions have removed topsoil, added acid to the rain, opened up the sunlight, exposed dirt, in areas where the biosystem is changing due to the way we are altering the habitat, even the indirect effects of air pollution, contaminates, and the ever looming problem of temperature changes in our Climate.

 He explains the perspective changes from when the plants were first introduced to North America through Europeans, when the Presidents encouraged people to plant “helpful” plants. Scott de-romanticizes the love we have for corn, grasses, and other species that are equally as invasive as the dandelion, yet we spend millions of dollars to grow it, introduce herbicides and pesticides and GMO crops to maintain, further wreaking havoc on environments, while only creating habitat and conditions that the ill conceived “weeds” thrive in. While we introduce new poisons to the planet to try and manage the undesirables, we are actually making them stronger, giving them more opportunity, while weakening the “natives.” The War on Weeds is akin to the War on Drugs, we don’t fund the truly helpful initiatives and instead, create propaganda based on non-truths, non-science based beliefs and ignore the evidence hitting us straight in the face. Money is spent on legislation, weapons, and brainwashing, meanwhile, people, animals, insects and land suffer, and we sleep through the consequences. This phenomenon is akin to the Gaia theory, the truth that Life, Earth, Nature will continue at all costs, and the more we pollute and push, the easier it will be for Mother Earth to be rid of us when we ruin the habitable space. However, the life that will come after we are gone will be rich in adaptable qualities and heal the spaces we have littered. It won’t take long. We weaken ourselves with poison, cancer creating agents, and lose the abilities to adapt while Nature is just gearing up and waiting to come in and clean it up, like weeds taking over a construction site and starting life again.