Posted to the Eugene Permaculture Guild listserv March 16, 2009.
	Got Snot? Part I.
	Here, the first chapter of a three-piece e-article. -- I took a solid mugging from one of the bronchial viral beasties doing the local rounds last month as, it appears, did many. At the time, I thought I might share some helpful hints about how I was dealing with the oogies, herbally, in the hope that a tell-all might be of use to others herbally-allied and, indeed, that some of the knowledgeable greenworlders who lurk around this listerv might also feel inclined to chime in. Well, eek, one thing led to another and before I knew it, what began as a brief aside about dealing with lung-crud morphed into a sweeping meditation on a gardener's quest for meaning. From snotty hankies, great boogers grow. The usual caveats apply, of course. For all the highfalutin phytomedicinal schtick that follows, I'm neither trained as a professional herbalist nor do I have any ambitions in that direction. Question me about dealing with the vast majority of chronic complaints, for example, and the most you are likely to elicit from me is a compassionate shrug and a confession that I am utterly clueless. Disclaimers aside, I do however have a very strong incentive to tackle ailments peculiar to my own constitution, inexpensively and effectively, using plants - even as I'm all for complementary approaches, for-profit medicine of any shape or form is simply beyond my extremely modest means. Necessity, therefore, the mama of invention. As it happens, one area of illness I've taken a particularly keen personal interest in through the years relates to tackling bronchial snafus herbally. I have a pronounced susceptibility to respiratory infections. Given half the chance they grab me tenaciously and resist all but the most persistent eviction efforts. Living as many of us do, in the good ol' phlegm-spittoon of the S. Willamette Valley, our incentive to explore herbal approaches to respiratory health is perhaps a bioregional forte. (Did I read somewhere not long ago that Eugene-Springfield has one of the very highest lung cancer rates in the country? I wonder if off-gassing by the wood-products industry plays a role?) Before I get into the nitty-gritty factoids of my own response, a quick digression. Not long ago, a friend untrained in herbalism but enthusiastically faithful to its potential, emerged from a brutal three-week health ordeal proudly claiming that herbs had fixed her. With no small measure of concern, I'd witnessed her self-care regimen through this utterly debilitating haul. I have difficulty remembering a more (confidently) misapplied use of herbal medicine. Which is not, of course, to say that her chosen course of treatment and its role in her extended illness, wasn't exactly what the Doctor ordered. For all the talk in contemporary healthcare of mind and body and treating the whole person, there seems little emphasis on the absolute depths of human life. Broadening the perspective - especially once we move past the crippling limits of scientific and religious fundamentalisms, those blind lunges towards simplification ("the downward reductionism of the mechanists and the upward reductionism of the spiritualists" - Thomas Berry) to embrace a truly transcendent sense of things, we recover the means of appreciating the full range of connection between meaning, emotion, and our physical state, and the place of illness within life. The question becomes not what did my friend want, but rather, what was wanted at a level beyond and beneath her conscious awareness. No matter the intentions and needs of her surface mind, no matter how 'self-created' her suffering, there was nevertheless an ultimate knowing dwelling within her complex and confusing depths - the kindliness of her soul-expression you might say - that was clearly asking for the experience of illness and ordeal, and in precisely the particular shape it took. It is, of course, challenging, often immensely so, to meet the alchemy of heart-mind refinement with compassion, especially when it manifests 'self-centeredly' in others in ways which directly touch our own lives in a manner we find disturbing or 'avoidable.' I recall, for example, about a decade ago, helping a stranger who chose to be fully in touch with an agonizing passing, die. Her indefatigable decision to dispense with all meds that might have 'allayed' some of the harrowing anguish of her death, and the burden of care that decision placed on her immediate nurses, spoke, in part, to the Quintessential Asshole in me. After long days with little sleep, I recall being awoken, yet again one night, at about 3.00 a.m. by her screaming, the seconds I lay in bed, seething, refusing to rise. It was about that time I encountered a Tibetan teaching to the effect that one of the four great fields of activity in which compassion is born lies in denying oneself sleep to help others. Others had obviously passed this way before. I came to learn much with Kit about defending the right of people to suffer and die as they choose. Such is the paradoxical landscape of authentic healing and transfiguration we must stretch our hearts to embrace. Sometimes, only the deepest suffering brings us into rhythm with our destiny. If, on the other hand, after (just) two days of treating yourself herbally for a Hiccup such as influenza, you aren't experiencing a notable shift in your condition, consider seeking more experienced counsel. If the conventional route ain't your thang, trained herbalists at Mrs. Thompson's or Sundance, among other key locations, will provide basic, reliable, cautious herbal counsel for free. I use 'em. If you are isolated but webbed, consider putting a question to this very listserv. Simply around the critical issue of dosage alone, you may save yourself and those around you a great deal of trouble. In my experience, lay herbalists such as myself benefit immensely from the engaged presence of experienced clinical/scientific herbalists - and we are blessedly rich in them hereabouts. I have a couple of buddies who keep me from straying too wildly off their beaten path, who provide me with an occasional herb growing too wildly off mine, and who can address simple questions I have no inclination to go to school to learn the answers to, such as, "Is this herb water-soluble?" or, "Is there anything else I can do?" Their questions come my way, too. Living close to the ground at an organic farm, eating seasonal, freshly-harvested food year-round, complete with a broad array of storage veggies and fruit, mostly grown within 200 yards of my table, and sourcing animal products from local friends wherever I can, even card-carrying healers have a tough time matching my self-care regimen. From day-to-day, I simply don't have much use for medicinals, internally. Kind, fresh, locally-grown fruit and veggies such as apples, carrots, pears, chard, brassicas, beets, potatoes, winter squash, garlic, mustards, spinach and so on, rather than herbs, are my primary preventative mid-winter flu-fighters, for example. If I have the vaguest sense of a susceptibility to infection in the offing, I'll move immediately to expunge dietary sins, sharply pick up my intake of fresh, proximate greens, mix myself an immuno-stimulant tea or two, perhaps throwing in an herb and/or delivery vehicle with a particular affinity for the body system feeling most threatened, and I usually have to think no more on the issue. For some years now, typically, I haven't fallen to oogies. On the rare occasion I have, the encounter has been brief. Which isn't to say that I'm not in a constant, daily dialog with herbs. I am, you see, an herbal gardener. The space immediately surrounding my trailer at the farm ('Zone 1' in 'permiespeak') is now packed with them - I have consciously brought my pharmacopoeia closer in, in recent years. And because I both live and work in my garden-home, I spend most of my waking and sleeping hours smack dab in the teeming midst of a dizzying array of annual and perennial herbal ecologies in constant, interactive flux. It is a co-evolutionary dialog I attend to intimately. On that note, some of you may recall an article I penned for Permaculture Activist magazine back in '05 around the integrative ontology of healing-in-place, of beauty "twice-realized" in the singular communion of deep medicine-making's inner and outer ecologies. Since then, I've been putting further micro-flesh on the macro-bones of the principles I outlined there, settling into my own little demi-Eden in north Springfield. Being a settler hasn't been easy for me. Constitutionally, I struggle mightily to transcend the wall standing between my mind and the primal immediacy of native experience. I'm perhaps not altogether untypical in this regard. For all the psychological weight we moderns put to concepts such as deep ecology, environmental awareness and respect for the natural world, and for all the pious mantras we proffer in tribute to the dolphins and birdies and the winds and foreigners and family of the One Presence, and so on, such perceptual logic is categorically not the same as actually living the interconnectedness of our landscapes, its resources and associations, as deeply as we individually can. It is one thing to enthusiastically study, document and affirm the tenets of holism: wholly different to embody them - to make the word flesh, so to speak. The ontological distinction is subtle but total, and for the most part explains the immense disconnect between the largely synthetic lives and civilization we strain to inhabit and a more natural way of being we are all being urgently called toward. To those as yet uninitiated, a life reliant upon indigenous patterns and rhythms - which can be explored only by actually inhabiting local resources and associations - is not yet experienced and remains, therefore, simply unseen. Lost in the labyrinth of absence, our dominant pedagogies appear especially susceptible to the abstraction of blind artifice in this regard. At the U of O this past fall, a friend and I were collecting acorns off the ground (to store and eat) when we were approached by an environmental philosopher-in-training. "I'm writing a paper about sense-of-place," she said, "Can I take your photograph?" A defining cultural conundrum is perhaps not what to teach, but how to educate. Perhaps because it is a locus where the quest for meaning reaches at once most outwards and most inwards, so the healing impulse at the heart of deep gardening meets the Real in a particularly revealing guise. Indeed, as I have moved closer to an unmediated relationship with Nature through the years, I have finally begun to understand why, in many indigenous cultures, drawing a distinction between a specific act of healing, and living and dying well in place, would be considered preposterous. Questions such as "what medicine do I take for...?" or "how do I cure...?" stand revealed, fundamentally, as pointing to a crippling cultural perception of the nature not only of medicine, but of life itself. In such cultures, medicine-making is experienced as inseparable from the wisdom of inner and outer rhythm - the sense of truly belonging that accrues to a dynamic intimate, reciprocal, balanced relationship with the larger ecology of which we are an integral, co-evolutionary part, over time. It is the nature of indigenous communities that everybody within them embodies such equilibrium to some extent. But the shaman-healer or medicine-person is the exemplary voyager in this regard. Here's David Abram in Spell of the Sensuous: "Countless anthropologists have managed to overlook the ecological dimension of the shaman's craft...Only those persons who, by their everyday practice, are involved in monitoring and modulating the relations between the human village and the larger animate environment, are able to appropriately diagnose, treat, and ultimately relieve personal ailments and illnesses arising within the village...Hence, the traditional magician or "medicine person" functions primarily as an intermediary between human and nonhuman worlds, and only secondarily as a healer. Without a continually adjusted awareness of the relative balance or imbalance between the local culture and its nonhuman environment, along with the skills necessary to modulate that primary relation, any "healer" is worthless - indeed, not a healer at all. The medicine person's primary allegiance, then, is not to the human community, but to the earthly web of relations in which that community is embedded - it is from this that her or his power to alleviate human illness derives... Mimicking the indigenous shaman's curative methods without knowledge of his or her relation to the wider natural community cannot, if I am correct, do anything more than trade certain symptoms for others, or shift the focus of disease from place to place within the human community. For the source of stress lies in the relation between the human community and the living land that sustains it... Only in reciprocity with what is Other do we begin to heal ourselves." However exotic the shaman's abilities or role may appear, it is precisely this territory we explore 'in miniature' as urban deep gardeners. It is one thing to scour the aisles at Walgreens, hankie in one hand and wallet in the other, seeking a purchase to wipe out illness, like underarm odor. Illness enters the marketplace. It is an altogether different experience rising from a sickbed, reaching for a favorite digging fork, stepping out upon a cold, grey, fogbound morning, to gather fresh roots from plant allies in a garden we have spent years stewarding and being stewarded by. It is precisely in this mutual dependency, or 'reciprocity' as ethnobotanically-alert anthropologists describe it, that we step into a dimension of healing which lies, literally, beyond the reach of therapeutic modalities divorced from the genius of place. So how do such high-sounding phenomena translate into the mundane specifics of dealing with lung crud? What of the wotnots of snot? More, I hope, to follow... Got Snot? Part II. Exiting the whole Shebang
	July 3, 2009