Pause, just for a moment.
Think about the most recent medicinal plant you ingested. It could have been in a cup of tea or a tincture or capsule or in the spices you used for cooking. Whatever it was, taste it on your tongue. Remember the texture, if there was one. See if you remember anything about how you felt as that plant entered your body.
And now, let your mind follow the plant before it came to you. What do you know about it’s journey? Did it come from your garden? A grocery store? Did you buy it online? What do you know about how it arrived at that place? Fill out the details as much as you can.
Follow it further. What do you know about where and how that plant came into that form, how it became mixed as a tea, extracted in a tincture or powdered for a capsule or spice bottle? Can you picture the factory? Can you imagine the people handling the products? Can you see the plants arriving at that manufacturing plant? What form were they in? Were they in sacks? Wrapped in plastic?
Keep going with this exercise, going all the way back to imagining where the plant grew, in a field or a forest or a meadow. What do you know about that place, if you even know where it is. Let an image take shape. Are there mountains around? Highways? Factories? Are there trees?
Do the plants grow in long rows or smaller fields of different plants? What is the quality of the soil? Where does the water come from and what is the quality of that water? What is the quality of the air?
Who is doing the work? How old are they? Are they men or women? What is the work that they do? What do you know of their lives, where they live? how they live?
Stay with this exercise a moment or two to really fill out the scene.
What Do You Know?
Now pick up your pen and write what you saw. Write what you knew and what you didn’t know.
Reflect on these questions:
How did you know what you knew?
What didn’t you know? Why not? Have you tried to find out and gave up because it was too difficult? Or is it something you had never considered before?
What would you like to know?
What would you do with what you might discover?
The Invitation
In his essay “The Invitation,” Barry Lopez describes an encounter with a bear while hunting with a group of Athabascans in Alaska. He was struck by the differences in how he and his companions described this encounter. To Lopez it was all about watching the bear. He didn’t pay much attention to the landscape or the events that led up to or followed the encounter. The Athabascans, however, were aware of the bear in the larger context. For example, they noticed signs indicating where the bear had come from and where it was going. They experienced the encounter not as an isolated moment but as an event unfolding in time.
Lopez concluded that unlike his experience, which was simply an isolated event, for the Athabascans the appearance of the bear was an invitation into the stream of life, “offered, without prejudice, to anyone passing by.”
The appearance of the bear is an invitation into the stream of life, “offered, without prejudice, to anyone passing by.”
Medicine of Place
Plants can be used as products, to address a specific condition.
Yet, like that bear, they also invite us on a journey that, should we choose to follow, brings us into deeper relationship with the world. They offer an invitation to connect with the medicine of place. With that connection comes a responsibility, a willingness to engage with the impacts of our choice to use those plants as products. But that engagement ultimately is the deeper healing they offer.