The Laral Value of a Thing
On Why I Began Following Plants
I began to study herbal medicine with Rosemary Gladstar after returning from eighteen months living in a village in northeastern Nepal where I had conducted research for a doctorate in anthropology. Rosemary's vision of herbal medicine reminded me of what I most loved about rural Nepal: a sense of limits, an understanding of the earth as something more than a resource to exploit, a recognition of the spiritual and cultural dimensions of healing.
After beginning her apprentice course, I began to grow a handful of medicinal plants in my garden: echinacea and calendula; mints, motherwort and lemon balm on the side where they wouldn’t take over. I put chamomile tea bags on my eighteen-month old daughter’s pink eye and drank nettles from a mason jar each day. I gathered red clover from fields and tried, without much success, to dry it so the dried flower stayed pink instead of turning brown. I made echinacea tincture with roots harvested from a friend’s garden and a salve with St. John’s wort collected from a nearby meadow for my sister to use while giving birth. I liked making remedies even more than I liked trying to grow my own food.
Each month on the evening of the full moon, I gathered calendula, peppermint, lemon balm, petals from whatever edible flowers were blooming at the time, with my daughter, placed them in a beautiful bowl that we then filled with water and an object: a ring, my moon necklace from studying at Sage Mountain, a necklace or ring from my daughter, and placed the bowl outside to steep in the rays of the full moon. In the morning, we drank the whole bowl first thing, before doing anything else, drinking in the mystery of the night sky and then wearing that mystery around our necks and on our fingers.
Working with these plants was something lovely to do with and for my daughter. I felt like I was filling her not only with nourishing teas, I was also filling her with memories of moments with her mother, moments that, to me, were like a prayer, that I can go back in time to remember even if for her, they are always only something like a dream. And so herbal medicine was always much more to me than a tea or tincture. It was a way to connect with the plants, with the land, and with my daughter. It offered me a way to come home from Nepal while keeping alive all that living there had awakened.
Finding the Healing Power of Herbs
And yet, though making medicine was fun and felt productive, at the time of my apprenticeship, I was skeptical that anything I made could actually heal. And so, when it came to needing something for more severe ailments, like bronchitis, I turned to the herb and supplement aisle in my local natural food store. Suddenly, instead of being in a garden or meadow among the plants, I found myself staring at floor to ceiling shelves lined with bottles of echinacea tincture and echinacea capsules, three different brands of gingko, all in slightly different forms, endless shelves of every herb I could imagine. I stood for what seemed like hours, paralyzed by the variety and the cost, wondering which bottle might contain the vision and the values described so eloquently by Rosemary on the mountain. Did any healing force actually make it to these shelves? If so how was I to find it?
I usually left empty handed. And so, in addition to spending time in my garden, I began asking more questions about the products on the shelves, about where they came from and how they were made. As I began to look more deeply, I not surprisingly discovered that the national and international business of herbal medicine was more complicated than I had imagined. I began to be less interested in studying to be an herbal practitioner and more curious about the production of herbal products, especially in understanding the relationship between how medicinal plants were sourced and processed and the efficacy of the finished product.
More than any other commodity, plants are ‘busy intersections’: entanglements of meanings about healing and medicine; colonialism and capitalism; nature and wildness; reductionism and wholeness. They are commodities but they aren’t only commodities. They are also living entities with which we enter into a relationship. The heart of herbal medicine, the real strength and why it offers something different, is its promise of wholeness: treating the whole person - body, mind and spirit - with the whole plant. In its broadest sense, this idea of wholeness includes the environment and world as well and holds the belief central to ecological medicine that we can’t be well until the planet is well.
Yet, in scaling up and meeting the requirements needed to produce products for large numbers of people, this wholeness has become fragmented, the threads weaving together commerce, culture and spirit have unraveled. Herbal products have become separate from herbal traditions and both from the plant spirit healing of more shamanic traditions. Few herbalists at the time spoke of this unraveling. In herb classes and at conferences, they spoke of healing and nature, of chemical constituents, and of making efficacious medicine. They talked about how calendula and turmeric worked in the body, but didn’t talk about the huge conventional farms where these plants are now grown like wheat and corn, like any other commodity on the market. And they talked about nettle as Nettles, a tonic for the liver, not as nettles wild collected from the once communist lands of eastern Europe and how those were different from nettles grown by young farmers on an organic farm in northern Vermont. They didn’t talk about what it took to get those plants to us. Or the economic terms of those relationships and how they had been set years ago when plants were the first commodities shipped across the seas.
I hadn’t thought of politics and economics when it came to herbal medicine before. Herbal medicine had been what I grew in my garden and what I prepared in my kitchen. It was about digging roots and steeping leaves and flowers in a mason jar. It was reclaiming the medicine of my homeland, knowledge I didn’t learn from my grandmothers because they never learned it either, but that in learning connected me to the place that is now my home. Herbal medicine was green. It was about connections, about health and wholeness and nature. It was the sun, the rain, the earth, about reweaving the web of life, building a future for my children on the landscape of my home. I had been grateful at last to have found a way of knowing and a wisdom that wasn’t borrowed - or stolen - from a far off place.
None of what I discovered was necessarily surprising information about an industry, organized like any industry, around making a profit. Yet both because of my initial enchantment with herbal medicine and because of the idealism of the herbalists who started these companies in the 1970s and 80s - an idealism that set very high standards, I felt especially disillusioned. The values that drew me to traditional herbalism: the importance of the relationship with the plant, where the plants came from, how they were harvested and by whom, the connections that to many herbalists are inextricably connected to the efficacy of the medicine, seemed to be lost as the plants became commodities. Not only that, these values, which seemed to make herbal medicine something different, something more than just a product on a shelf, were often invisible to the average consumer. As disturbing as all the rest, to most consumers, that invisibility did not seem to matter.
The Laral Value
In the essay, “What is a House”, professor of literature Robert Pogue Harrison draws on Rainer Maria Rilke to talk about what he calls the ‘laral’ value of a thing. Laral comes from lares, the Roman word for the everyday gods who guard the house and hearth. The relationship with the gods is reciprocal - good fortune, health and wealth in exchange for offerings of wine and food and prayer. “Laral values are not real estate values,” Harrison writes. “They are quite valueless in themselves (like poetry, which is fundamentally gratuitous and for that reason testimonious of the cosmos.)”2 The laral value of a thing is the share of our own lives which we put into it - it is the care that passes from us into the object that makes that object something, Harrison says, that we can “live by.”3
Though our economic system suggests otherwise, any object is what it is by virtue of its relationship with the world around it and no object can be fully understood without understanding those relations. Plants show this more than anything else. The shape of the stem, the length of the roots, the chemical content of the leaves, all depend directly on the soil in which a plant grows, on the amount of sunlight and rain, on how warm it is or how cold. Not only does the plant, even after it is harvested, carry the qualities of the place where it grew, how it is harvested and handled impacts what and whether the constituents needed remain present as it travels from source to finished product. The quality of any product made from that plant is directly connected to its life-story, not only in biological terms, but its cultural and economic and political story as well. That we imagine this to be otherwise has to do with what we have been taught to see - or not see - in the world around us. Not because those relations don’t exist.
In an industry governed by the logic of capital, a logic that depends on severing objects from this nexus of relations, do some products maintain this more-than thingness, in other words, their laral value? How do we know when that aliveness is there or what difference it even makes? How do we tell when it is lost? Most importantly, perhaps, how do we know what we have lost when that aliveness is gone?
Herbal medicines are sold and marketed as products of nature. Part of the medicine they offer is a reconnection with nature and with place - a relationship that ultimately is only meaningful in its specificity: a connection to a Himalayan meadow or an Appalachian forest, even as the concept is marketed as an abstraction. Yet, the journey plants make to market is one of losing this specificity. I wondered what would happen if I went the other way, following the plants back to their source, making visible the people and places behind the objects we consume. This is important, as Wendell Berry says for any object, but it especially seems important with plants.
What would I discover if I put those plants back in place, countering the journeys of forgetting the life stories of the plants with those of remembering?