Silk Roads: China, The Middle East, and The New World

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Green Intimacies By Marja Eloheimo 

Where is nature?

 

Is it outside of you?

Is it inside of you?

 

Are you part of it?

Are you separate from it?

 

Do you walk through the seasons, with your senses alternately moist, shivering, parched and surrendered?

Or do you watch the seasons -- through -- the window?

 

Our identities are based on our intimacies.

 

We are our relationships. 

 

You know, the “you are what you eat” sort of thing.  What you nourish yourself – or “eat” -- with your mouth, your mind, your heart, and your hands – is what you are.

 

What are you close to?  How do you spend your hours?  That’s where your identity grows.  That is what you will more than “know,” that’s what you will be made of.

 

If you are musician, you’re made of melody; if a dancer, rhythm and grace.  If you’re a computer user, you’re made of screen bytes; a chemist, molecular arrangements.  If you are a movie watcher, you’re made of light image; a waiter or clerk or aide, of service; a counselor, sorrow and joy; a chess player, strategies; an athlete, muscle and nerve. 

 

This over simplifies things, but you get the idea.  And you can be made of many things. 

 

If you are a hiker, you will be made of mountains; a sailor, of sea; a cyclist, of wind; a painter of color; a writer, of words; a cook, of recipes; a gardener, of surrender; and an herbalist, of healing plants.

 

You can think of it the other way around too. 

If you are swept by the breath of high elevations and you become the mountains – you will grow the identity of hiker.  The same of the waves rocking your soul, then you become a sailor.

If the garden soil, and the shades and shapes of leaves and flowers, flood your days – you become a gardener. 

And if the aroma and personality and constituents of SOME of the plants call you to mate them with human need – you become an herbalist.

 

We are made of our relations. It’s easy to see this when we call ourselves daughter or son, mother or father, teacher or student.

 

Do we call ourselves human earthling? Do we call ourselves sister or brother to the forest and the weeds and the seeds and the soil?

 

That will be our identity only if it is our intimacy.  Only if we spend time with dirt on our hands or our feet.  With mist in our lungs.  With rain sliding down our backs.  With green staining us.

 

Have you grown an herb?  Harvested it?  Made medicine from it?  Nurtured yourself and someone you love with it? 

 

From the perspective of the lifespan of humanity, it’s recent trick that you think you don’t know how.  And especially that you think you shouldn’t know how to heal with plants. But it’s a very powerful, frightening trick.

Did you know that, between the years of out 1300 and almost 1700 AD, throughout Europe and the United States, somewhere between 200,000 and nine million – mostly, but not exclusively – women were tortured, tormented and killed – for healing people with plants?  100,000 burnings of those so-called witches, who were almost all herbalists, are well documented in Germany alone.  This is not fiction.  This is fact.

 

No wonder we do not grow up intimate with the healing plants.  No wonder we do not grow up with the identity of herbalist.

 

But still, from the perspective of the lifespan of humanity, this situation is a social and historical anomaly.

 

Knowing how to grow and harvest and heal ourselves and others with plants is our legacy as a human being.  Our birthright.  Herbalist is our identity.  Everyone’s identity.  Or, should I say, potential identity.

 

Or it used to be. 80% of the world still knows and uses the healing plants.  But just barely. 

 

If our identities are made of our intimacies. 

If our intimacies grow from our relations. 

If we can change and enrich our relations.

Then, we can become an earthling anytime, possibly one plant at a time.