She doesn't belong to me...

Exactly six weeks after our black cat Negra left the land of the living – yes, on a Wednesday -  I found myself wandering in a mystic trance under the canopy of massive hemlock trees in Killarney Provincial Park. The dappled low late-afternoon sunlight through the trees was beguiling. My fellow walker David sensed my need for space and contemplation. He said my feet danced over the ground as I stepped as if on air. As I looked up through the trees beyond the sinking sun to the blue sky above, a resplendent yellow-leaved trembling aspen glittered with a beckoning aura, surrounded by the towering hemlocks.

The ravens had come calling when time came for Negra to depart. Here, they came again, led me to this hallowed old-forest grove, releasing her spirit to the great beyond. As we left the forest and canoed back out into the bright light of the lake, a loon surfaced just ahead of us then dived into the depths once more.

When I got back home after our intoxicating, magical days and nights in the back-country of Killarney, the Naxos marble stone that I placed at Negra’s head above where she is buried had vanished. Another animal probably took off with it to furnish her den. That’s OK. After all, she doesn’t belong to me. She belongs to the earth.

Numen: The Nature of Plants

This original article was posted on www.Mercola.com on September 14, 2013. The points contained are a crystallization of my own belief in the vitality of plants and our synergy with them for our food, our medicine, and our soul.

By Dr. Mercola

Numen is the animated force in all things living, and this is strongly demonstrated, although often taken for granted, in plants.

Even our DNA contains much of the same material found in the plant world, which gives new meaning to the idea of healing plants.

It’s a scientific fact that is explored, fascinatingly, in the documentary Numen: The Nature of Plants. As Bill Mitchell, ND, naturopath and co-founder of Bastyr University stated in the film:

“You’re as much carrot as you are a kangaroo, as you are a bird. A lot of that DNA, that memory comes from the very origins of life.”

Herbalism Is the Oldest System of Healing on the Planet

The use of plants as medicine is one of the only forms of healing that’s embraced by every culture and ethnicity, and that has endured since ancient times and is still in use today in most areas of the world.

What makes this all the more intriguing is that how and why plants work is still largely a mystery. Modern science can uncover cells, molecules and atoms, but science cannot fully explain the healing nature of plants, or the intricacy and complexity of life.

One only needs to view the amazing time-lapsed photos of sprouting seeds and flowers blooming in the video below to appreciate this…

Herbs, Like Foods, Are Complementary to Human Health

In the past I have regarded herbs, in many cases, as an alternative to drugs, useful for treating various symptoms but not to treat the underlying cause. I have since revised my opinion on this quite significantly, and now realize that herbs can help support your health from a very basic level, just as foods do.

When I interviewed Donnie Yance, who is a clinical master herbalist, he explained that foods and herbs share quite a few similarities, including being pleiotropic - which means they produce more than one effect.

This is expanded on in Numen, which explains that the complex mix of chemicals in plants work synergistically to address underlying imbalances in your body that may lead to disease.

As herbalist Matthew Wood said:

“It is very seldom that herbs are strong enough to kill germs. A few of them can, but then they become drugs. Killing germs isn't how traditional medicine works.

It works instead by changing the environment, working to address imbalances in organ systems and tissue states, not targeting a specific bacteria with a single chemical extracted from a plant or synthesized in a lab.”

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, you could walk into a drug store and find hundreds of herbal extracts for sale. Upwards of 90 percent of the population at that time knew how to use the medicinal plants growing in their backyards to treat common illnesses and injuries; they had to, as this was virtually the only ‘medicine’ available.

With the rise of what is now known as conventional allopathic medicine shortly before World War One, herbalism slowly fell out of favor and became to be thought of as folk medicine. Rather than viewing nature as the source of healing, as had been done for centuries, people began to view drugs and other ‘modern’ healing methods as superior.

We’re Now Separated from Our Natural Roots

When you shop for food in a grocery store, you’re completely removed from the natural process used to grow your food. And in many cases, that ‘natural process,’ too, has been transformed into an industrial process that is at the heart of mass food production.

This is but one example of our increased separation from nature, a state that often leads people to feel significantly unbalanced. Said Ken Ausubel, CEO and founder of Bioneers:

“If there’s been a single disconnect in Western civilization, it’s this idea that somehow we’re separate or distinct from nature, when in fact the opposite is true… we’re connected to the ecosystems around us and we can really only be healthy when the land and the air and the water around us are also healthy. And if they’re not, it’s going to show up in our physical well-being.”

Now, with the US spending more on health care than any other industrialized nation, while at the same time experiencing soaring rates of chronic disease, it has perhaps never been more evident that our disconnectedness from nature is backfiring.

Environmental Pollution Is Poisoning Humans, Too

Infertility, immune system disorders, obesity, and other chronic illness are on the rise, and it’s becoming very clear that environmental chemicals are at least partly to blame. Yet, there is still a reluctance to acknowledge that when you poison nature, it is akin to poisoning yourself. The average American has 148 chemicals in his or her body, and this chemical exposure begins in your mother’s womb.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals, like phthalates and bisphenol-A, are interfering with hormones and linked to the rise in male birth defects and testicular cancer in young men. You’re exposed not only when you use products containing them, but plastics containing these chemicals are dumped into the environment, where the chemicals enter waterways, with unknown effects.

“At the molecular level we’re wreaking havoc, and then that cascades up to the cellular and organism and ecosystem level,” said Martha Herbert, MD, PhD, assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Healing Is About Wholeness, Not Parts

Modern medicine excels at treating emergencies and certain serious illnesses, like bacterial infections, yet often misses the mark when it comes to healing other more subtle, yet no less devastating, conditions.

Physicians often rely on lab tests and blood work over the patient’s own words, and may use this information as proof that nothing is wrong, when in fact the person still feels tired, foggy or depressed. Part of the problem is the breaking down of a whole person to a set of parts and evaluating each organ in isolation from the rest of the body. Another part is ignoring the bigger picture, which is that lab tests do not give the whole story of a patient. As Tieraona Low Dog, MD, said:

“I think the truth is many people have a kind of soul sickness, they have a soul pain, a spirit pain. And you can’t find it in laboratory values, you can’t find it in a scan, but in no way does that make it less real.”

Unfortunately, conventional medicine is not well equipped to deal with these types of emotional pain or other underlying conditions that modern medical tests miss. This is also evidenced by many physicians’ complete lack of attention to lifestyle factors that could be influencing their patients’ health, like sleep, stress, and diet… they don’t tell you that a trip to the farmer’s market for healthy food and perhaps some herbal preparations may hold the cures you’ve been searching for.

Nature Is the Source of Healing: Whole Plant Medicine

Most synthetic medications are based on compounds in plants. Scientists cannot create these substances but must, rather, try to make copies, But in their synthetic models they often end up with compounds that your body doesn’t recognize and doesn’t know how to handle. As Herbert explained:

“You target a particular chemical and you hit it really hard, and the system is expected to just have the response that you want it to have, but actually you have all these other effects… we call these side effects. They’re not side effects, they’re effects, they’re just not the ones you wanted.”

A plant, however, is a complex of thousands of biomolecules, many of which are countervailing, so if there’s one effective compound that may have a toxic effect, it usually contains a countervailing compound so that it doesn’t harm your liver, for example. It’s the interplay of chemicals that make the plant work, which is why you can’t study herbal medicine by isolating a certain element; you’ve got to study the whole plant. This is what conventional medicine is largely missing.

Of course, the ultimate ‘herbalism’ is the food that you eat on a daily basis. Dark green leafy vegetables, herbs and spices are excellent sources of antioxidants, anti-inflammatories and anti-cancer substances that can dramatically influence your health. Christopher Hobbs, clinical herbalist, put it well: “The real medicine is hiding in the produce department.”

You Can Feel the Power of Plants Every Time You Walk in the Garden

There’s a deep connection with plants that many people feel intrinsically when they walk into their garden. This connection continues when you use plants for healing, including when you prepare tinctures or teas from herbs, which you can do in your own kitchen. According to many herbal experts, this relationship with plants and nature is nearly as important as the herbal medicine itself.

As herbalist Rosemary Gladstar said:

“I think one of the most unique places about herbalism and modern herbal healers is that we still maintain that deep connection with the plants. We're not looking at just single components as being the magic bullets in our bodies. There's still a deep prayerful relationship, whether you go to the plants and consciously pray or you have awareness with them, or just the way you are with them when you're harvesting them or making your medicine or even giving the medicine. There's a deep connection with the spirit of the plants. It's not just that there is a chemical constituent that will cure your condition; it is the relationship that the plant has to us and how those plants have served as our healers for literally thousands of years.

For anyone who works with the plants, whether you're gardening, or just being with them, backpacking with them a lot, that experience of having a plant communicate with you in some way happens. It takes you by surprise at first, but the plants want a talk to us, they want to help us.

They work on so many different levels in our bodies. Yes, they can work just as chemical constituents, but that's the least potency that they have… when you develop a relationship with plants, that kind of sacred plant medicine will happen. Just by working with them, they begin to speak to you and you begin to hear them. It happens when you garden. You know, when people go into the garden, they transform. That's why so many people garden. They go into that garden and they begin to feel things and be different, and in a way that's plant spirit medicine at its finest.”

10 Steps You Can Take to Harness the Healing Power of Plants

After watching Numen: The Nature of Plants, you may find yourself driven to deepen your relationship with the natural world. If so, here are 10 tips to do so:

1. Learn to identify three medicinal plants you don't already know that grow in your region and learn their uses.

2. Add at least one of these herbs to your garden or to pots on your windowsill.

3. Make a tincture, tea, syrup, or salve. Or make one of each!

4. Harvest and dry mint, lemon balm, calendula, nettles, or any other plant growing in your region.

5. Find a plant to sit with quietly each morning for a week; draw the plant.

6. Identify one healing skill you would like to have but don't, and find a way to learn it—perhaps by taking an herb class, or re-certifying in basic first aid or CPR.

7. Make an herbal first aid kit.

8. Organize local healers for emergency response in your community.

9. With medicinal plants grown in your region, learn how to treat one condition that you and/or someone in your family struggles with.

10. Join United Plant Savers, which aims to protect native medicinal plants of the US and Canada.

True Love for my little Negra

Negra, February 2010

I have experienced true love with my dearest little black cat, Negra. We offer each other unconditional devotion and support and are rewarded by the sweetest joy life can offer - giving and receiving love. She plays, hunts food, responds to prompts, eats heartily, shows bounding energy, snuggles up beside us, sleeps long and sound.

Hope is all we have when a loved one is fading. It is a sweet comfort. The hardest thing, apart from juggling conflicting emotions, is abandoning hope, letting go. The mark of true love is - when the impending inevitable demands that we surrender - letting a loved one go on to the next world, released to the pain-free other side when their will to live drains away from them, or the pain of living becomes too much for them and you to bear. Deep empathy with another soul is surely the most tender, all-embracing emotion we can feel, one that brings us ecstasy and agony and everything in between.

As Dr. Meredith Galbraith expresses it so eloquently: “It is because animals bring so much to our lives that we feel such intense sadness when they die. The love we share is a prerequisite for the loss we feel - and often, the more intense the love, the more intense the loss. Yet it is a sad truth that love and loss will always go hand in hand. Every life is finite, every single one, and dying is as much a part of every life’s journey as being born. And since the richness of any life’s journey is in the connections and relationships fostered along the way, living fully means opening your heart to loving fully, even knowing there will be also be loss.”

On Friday, August 2, after many days of not eating and showing low energy, I took Negra to the vet. Poor little thing was so stressed that she panted and panted on what was just a warm day. The news was bad; she had a large growth in her abdomen, affecting either kidneys or intestines or both. The vet recommended putting her to sleep at the earliest opportunity, there being no long-term hope for her.

On the evening of Wednesday, August 7 at dusk, a coming storm announced itself with distant rumbles of thunder. Negra vanished stealthily, to be found up on the rise, lying alert in the middle of the gravel laneway, watching the storm approach. She loves the rain. As the rain began to come down in buckets, she scooted off into the long grass, re-appearing drenched through after it stopped.

A week later, in the late afternoon of Wednesday August 14, I was watering rows of greens that had been recently sown. And there she was, coming down and lying watching in the grass. I talked to her about how sweet and special this moment was, with her in her element, down in the field. After I’d finished watering, she moved to some longer grass and lay inhaling the breezy air and looking out over her preserve. Finally at dusk, she came home. I felt blessed to have witnessed her devoted attachment to this realm she inhabits with us. When she goes, she will take a lot of our happiness with her.

And now, seventeen days later, she has eaten all she can – raw grass-fed beef liver, raw ground beef, raw fish, tuna, yogurt and milk, with cake and ice cream as treats. Most of this is probably going to feed the tumour in her tummy. She has peed and peed but the poops seem to have dried up. Her belly is larger than ever, she now wobbles shakily and turns her prone body around restlessly. Excursions outside to breathe in the air and sit with us are an increasingly rare reminder of her devotion. Though we wanted her to reach the end of her days entirely on her own terms, following nature's course (just as she has lived all her life with us), we now think she is feeling too uncomfortable and we need to help her go and rest in peace. Last Wednesday, I felt the time was already nigh and went out to dig her a new and permanent home.

With Negra, it's always on a Wednesday. This Wednesday the house-calling vet will come and guide her on her way. Then she can move in, and we will have to move on. You’ll always be with us, little one. 

Negra, late August 2013

Wednesday, September 4 Update

Yesterday, as I was distractedly selling produce on a sunny breezy Riverdale afternoon, Gundi tells me Negra decided to venture out across the lawn at home to sit for a couple of hours inhaling the air, one last time. When I got home she was tired, sat on her mat but purring contentedly, perfectly calm. This morning, due to be her last wake-up, she is alert and still hungry for food and love. I just sat on the deck pondering if she is ready to go. A fluttering fanfare of goldfinches rose up to will her on her way. I wandered to the fields up the hill and clambered up on a large round hay bale. The alfalfa flowers in full bloom in the early morning low sun waved in the breeze shaking off the dew. Time is precious but short, they whispered. For good measure, I released a swallowtail butterfly from the plastic barrier of the greenhouse. She flew off happily and landed  in the greenery. My Dad was always drawn by the spirit of butterflies. To cap the list of good omens off, a cawing raven came to roost on the tall elm tree just before the vet arrived. He circled off, up into the blue distant sky, and the vet pronounced Negra more than ready to go.

Our little sweetie now rests in peace. She passed so trustingly, graceful to the end. 

Splashy Spring

Nature has put on quite a show this spring. She seems to be exuberantly flaunting her jewels. With extravagant displays of blossoms from apples, pears, cherries, lilacs, acacias, chives, caraganas, honeysuckles in our neck of the woods, all that we have been missing are the bees to pollinate them. We’ve never seen the locust trees blooming like this, suffusing the air with their glorious sweet scent. Some bumblebees have been doing the business, but wild bees have been very scarce. Can’t wait to see if they are around for buckwheat flowers when they come in a few weeks. They are traditionally all over them. We wait to hear from local beekeepers how their honeybees survived the winter.

Spring has been long and gentle, with intermittent rain and heat. The garden and fields seem to have responded to the moderation favourably. With the recent heavy two-inch rainfall, we look forward to some prolonged heat for crops to put on a growth spurt. At our farm, garlic, greens, beets, carrots are ready to roll in the fields, as are basils, tomatoes, hot peppers in the greenhouses.

Mad As Hell!

Peter Finch as newsreader Howard Beale in the movie Network, for which he won a posthumous Best Actor Oscar

Like many of my gender, I used to be an angry young man. In my more mellow middle years, I am generally not an angry man anymore. I find contentment and fulfillment in my personal life, my relationship with family and community, my readings, musings, listenings and explorings, my doings growing and selling organic food.

However, when I read of the increasing corporate and government control of things dear to me – food, liberty, nature, health, peace and quiet, income, due process, human rights – it becomes easy to slip back into a bewildered quiet rage and shake my head at the folly and meanness of those that lead so many into fear, depression, anxiety, panic, resignation, complicity. On the food front alone, our leaders turn a blind eye to enormous threats to our welfare: GMOs whose effects on human health have not been independently assessed receive easy approval of infiltration into the foodchain; wild salmon populations are jeopardized by lack of monitoring and regulation of fish farms; confined factory farming continues unchecked; corporations like Monsanto are granted immunity from prosecution; bees continue to be killed off by neonicotinoids and other pesticides; glyphosate and other chemicals, toxins and heavy metals continue to work their way into the water supply creating severe health hazards for humans, amphibians, birds, wildlife…

It becomes easy to sympathize with the television newscaster Howard Beale in the film Network, played by my namesake Peter Finch as he loses it:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s no one anywhere that seems to know what to do with us. Now into it. We know the air is unfit to breathe, our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in a house as slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller and all we say is, “Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster, and TV, and my steel belted radials and I won’t say anything.” Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot. I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crying in the streets. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m a human being. God Dammit, my life has value.” So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” I want you to get up right now. Get up. Go to your windows, open your windows, and stick your head out, and yell, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Things have got to change my friends. You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

Icestorm renders us powerless

Nature can pack a pretty wild punch in her weather delivery systems. Friday’s icestorm here was a case in point. The soft fizz of freezing rain falling and collecting on the damp vegetation was relentless all day. It was an eerily beautiful, somewhat surreal, sight. The forecasted rise in temperature that was meant to melt the ice accretion did not materialize, and the ice steadily thickened on trees, branches, twigs, and grasses. Many of each collapsed under the weight and pressure, sometimes like the firing of a gun as a huge limb snapped off and the ice cascaded to the ground. Budding branches at the apex were most exposed as treetops took a radical haircut. 

The dull grey of the day contrasted with the sharpness and clarity of the ice. With electric power cut off, contact with the outside world was over the airwaves of the car radio, so we took to the road, gasping at the widespread devastation. By no means universal, certain trees were particularly badly affected – wispy poplars, willows and silver birch which snapped into unruly pieces; and soft pine and cedar which often lay prone or uprooted. Power lines were coated in ice an inch or more thick. Icicles dangled from them in a sagging ribbon. Stunned residents scratched their heads at the sight of shattered old maples and spread-eagled shrubbery. Chainsaws cleared roads and paths, and the loud whine of generators filled the still air. Hydro reported that power would be out for a day or more. The outage for us lasted in fact three days, with power restored over candlelit dinner entertaining friends. In the meantime, no flushing of toilets, no showering, no refrigeration, no music or news. However, we could crank up telephone land line, woodstove heat, buckets of water from our full dug well, cooking on the gas-stove, boiling of water for tea and coffee, lots of strategically-placed beeswax candles, flashlights….

 

By the third day, we recognize our fragility and dependency on the power grid and wish for self-sufficiency from the type of residential-scale wind and solar-generated power that dinner guests Kevin and Jack enjoy. Extreme weather events such as this are a stark reminder that we are all live just a few days away from extreme discomfort and deprivation. Ah well, back to our smug complacency with restored power as today brings sunshine and temperatures in the mid-teens Celsius (mid-twenties in the balmy hoophouses where green shoots take on a growth spurt, oblivious to the commotion outside). My tractor has shed its icy mantle and will soon be called in to action. Spring is surely on its way now.

All Life Is Sacred

This past Sunday I gave a talk-cum-reading on my experiences as an organic grower of food. It was delivered to an audience of some fifty or so First Unitarian Church attendees in Toronto as part of a discussion on “Why Consumers Are Choosing Organics”. I was one of four speakers, the others being Sarah Dobec of The Big Carrot, Jodi Koberinski of the Organic Council of Ontario, and Tanmayo Krupanszky of the Toronto chapter of Canadian Organic Growers.

I really am unaccustomed to public speaking. Only truly at both my dear parents’ passings have I bellied up to do so, then too addressing mostly churchgoers. It is a measure of my passion for organics and the engagement of the public that I chose to take up Unitarian Allen Goldfeder’s invitation to speak at this event. I get nervous, would be more comfortable just reading from a prepared text, but – in the interest of conveying passion – prefer to talk directly to the audience whilst reading. This doesn’t come easy, especially when having to consider the proximity of the microphone and the steady drying up of the mouth. I am not a ready talker, preferring to read, listen, write, and inwardly mull.

Back in my comfort zone of the greenhouse this morning, fork turning over the moist thawing soil and extracting stubborn grasses around the perimeter prior to planting, insightful thoughts come to me. I confess to not being a churchgoer. However, there is something about the questing goodly spirit of those with faith that do worship regularly at the house of God that I admire. Tanmayo related her talk on organics to Love, Faith, and Hope, in turn. Nobody can argue with the value of these virtues.

I do find myself in life always casting around and digging for truth and meaning. I generally find it in honesty, ethical conduct, love, respect, and acting on these principles. In her primeval essence, it is Nature that is my guide. Some thirty years ago, Gundi and I were married by a lovely man called Dr. Dixon. At the time, he was a retired professor of biology at the University of Guelph and a Unitarian minister happy to come out to where we chose to wed. I always remember him saying that he believed that “Human Life is Sacred” and revered him for this. Over the years, it has become apparent to me that all natural life is sacred, in that we need to sustain living populations in all their wondrous diversity.

We, as humans, share this miracle of Life, this Planet with multitudes of other species, other beings that are alive for a short time on this Earth, just as we are. In the twinkling of an eye we are conceived, live our lives inhaling the swirling dynamic forces that have evolved here, then we evaporate into the afterlife, whose nature is full of promise, an unknown quantity, or an eternal void, depending on our faith. Whether we believe in one God, many Gods, or no god at all, it seems to me that our duty while we are alive in the here and now is to respect, honour, and love our earthly home and those we co-exist with, be they animal, vegetable, or mineral. Nature in whatever form will surely inhabit this planet long after our own species has driven itself also to the brink of extinction, and maybe beyond.