Here is a little project I did, inspired by a recipe I found in Ascent Magazine. Following my research on the medicinal qualities of  plantain, I wanted to learn more about using the plant topically. It served as the perfect subject for my first salve experiment. This salve I created helps heal and cool the skin when used for cuts, burns or inflammations.  Chickweed and any other medicinal herbs could also be used in the same way, to create a skin salve.

I started by collecting as many plantains leaves as I could find. Ironically, I had to go on a fieldtrip to the city in order to find the fresh green leaves, as the winter had already killed much of the plantain near my house. I harvested the weeds while keeping in mind some appropriate advice from Dan Reigler’s article, “Helping Herb”.

Dan suggests that you:

>study a plant before you pick it, get to know it
>keep your mind quiet as you harvest the plant
>pick only as much as you need
>harvest only a few plants in a given area
>try to harvest as a form of pruning so you don’t inhibit future growth
>return unused herbs to the earth with a “thank you”

After packing a couple of jars full, I filled them with olive oil and stirred until I had “a nice mush”, as Dan Riegler writes. I then let the jars sit, uncovered, for a few days, stirring them once or twice daily.

Next, Dan recommends placing the mush in the oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. Instead, to save the gas for our oven, I placed the mixture on the wood stove for about an hour and a half, which should have brought it up to about the right temperature.

After the mixture cooled back to room temperature, I strained out the leaves with cheese cloth- quite a messy process! You can then add vitamin E, which is important for the healing of skin. Dan recommends using 4 capsules of 400 IU of vitamin E each- 1600 IU in total. I was only able to find the liquid vitamin E in dropper form, which contains 340 IU per millilitre. After some math, I figured that a millilitre is equal to about 15-20 drops, which means that I needed to add about 60 drops per jar of oil. You can also add essential oils like lavender, chamomile or tea tree adding a soothing aroma and additional medicinal properties. Lavender, too, is great for soothing and healing the skin.

Now is the best part! To thicken the plantain and create a salve, you add melted bees-wax. After heating the oil in a double boiler- be careful not to mix oil and water or get ready for an explosion!- I added about one cup of wax for each mason jar- also heated in a double boiler. I basically added the wax until a drop of the mixture on the counter would cool to the right consistency.

After cleaning up a giant mess, I then poured the mixture into little jars and containers, et voila! presents for everyone.

R

Today, I started to toss around the idea that perhaps this ‘off the grid’ lifestyle, in the middle of nowhere, is too much for my only housemate and I, right now. We are quickly realizing that living here, dealing with all we have to take care of, is a lot for only the two of us, with very little support and resources. Things have been especially difficult lately, as we try to prepare for winter. We are wondering if at least taking the cold season off from the mountains of Quebec, might be a more realistic plan. To think about the possibility of leaving this place is very sad and relieving at the same time.

As my schoolwork is deeply connected to this place where I’m living and the lifestyle I have chosen to lead, I feel a need to look for connections within this new evolution. I thought that there must be words of wisdom for me in this book by Gregory Cajete I’ve been reading, Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependance. I skimmed ahead, finding a chapter called “A Sense of Place”. This title instantly brought tears to my eyes.

Having a sense of place has been an ongoing desire in my life. I have never felt really connected to one place, one home and one community. A large part of this, I believe, is due to a lack of a deep relationship with the land where I live. Quoted at the beginning of this chapter, are the very wise words of Aldo Leopold. He describes ‘land’ as “not merely soil; it is the foundation of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants and animals.”

I certainly have felt a connection with this energy, at times in my life. It flowed through the forest near where I grew up and through the ocean around Cape Breton, where I biked, last summer. What has been missing is the establishment and maintenance of a consistent dialogue and respectful relationship with this energy.

This relationship with place or land is what I hope to develop, or at least begin to, through my studies of Native sciences, medicinal and edable plants, my health and the health of the natural world, this semester. In fact, perhaps this development works the other way around. According to Cajete it was through “this mindset [of ecologically respecting the place you live] and these relationships with various environments that Indigenous peoples accumulated ecological knowledge” (Native Science, p.178). I do feel it is only through settling into a place and developing relationships with the land, plants, animals, people and energies there that I will ever really have a sense of place. It is also only then that I can really feel I know my ecological environment.

After only four months, I feel a great loss when I think of leaving my home here. I can’t imagine the devastation of the European colonization of Native American land, to a people who had established and valued such a relationship with and philosophy of respecting the Natural world. Cajete writes, later in this chapter, about the Native psychology of place and how land is not at all separate from the soul of the people who live there. “Relationships between Native peoples and their environments became so deep that separation by forced relocation in the last century constituted, literally, the loss of part of an entire generation’s soul” (p.188). I often feel as though I have left pieces of my soul in the places I have connected with and then parted with. I’m sure bits of my heart and soul will always be in British Columbia, where I grew up, and in Nova Scotia, where I felt so at home for the first time. I also feel that the things that I have learned from a place- it’s land, animals, plants and people- start to fade as I disconnect from them. Relationships are difficult to sustain at a distance. It is evident that the loss of their land, among so much more, has threatened Native American peoples ability to hold on to and pass on their ecological knowledge and the relationships they have developed with the land.

Although I am relieved at the realization that I can let go of the struggle to be ready for something- ready for winter- too quickly, I feel so sad at the thought of uprooting once again. I feel I am only beginning to develop relationships with this land and this place. I know there must be other ways for me to be connected to the land here in the Laurenciens, while I am not able to live there. Perhaps this is not the best way for me to connect, right now. Letting go of this project, for a while, may help me to put my time, energy and resources into coming back to live here when I’m ready and have the support and energy I need, or to prepare for something different.

Not only do I want to have a place to live that is sustainable for me but to live in a way that is more sustainable for the environment. It has been disappointing to feel so unsettled and overwhelmed where I live that I can’t live in a way that fully respects the relationship I am developing with the land. An obvious example is the system of electricity here- not being able to afford investing much time or money into alternative systems of power, we are relying on a gas guzzling machine to generate most of the electricity for our computers and phones. Our small 30 watt solar panel just doesn’t cut it.

Depressing realities like this one have become more apparent as we’ve lived there for over three months and haven’t been able to make much of an improvement. Meanwhile, the generator is disturbing the peace in our wooded surroundings and filling the air and all other surrounding things with exhaust and fumes. We are also supporting the overuse of two of earths most unsustainable resources- oil and gas.

Though I never saw this as a permanent part of the picture here, I am realizing how important the present is and how I can’t rely on situations changing as quickly as I may want them to. When you don’t know a place very well or know much about living a certain lifestyle, it can be easy to cause harm to that environment while scrambling to survive. I was drawn to this place because of the beauty and magic here and the amazing possibility that I could live in such a place. It is sad to think that this is probably how the first Europeans who saw the Americas felt when they discovered this rich landscape, hundreds of years ago. Though very different in some ways, our move seams too dangerously close to the story of my white settler ancestors. In this chapter of Native Science called “A sense of Place”, Cajete creates a clear picture of the way “the first Europeans saw America as wilderness, an obstacle to be overcome through settlement and the use of living and non-living resources” (p179). Although I hope I am far from seeing the land where I live only in terms of material objects and resources to use, the situation and nature of our move to this land brings dangerous pressure to the way we go about establishing ourselves here and developing a relationship with the woods, rivers, animals, plants and things already established in this place.

Of course, another essential element to feeling a sense of place is feeling a sense of community. A proper relationship with ones place includes a proper relationship between humans. I’m curious about communities. I haven’t ever felt a part of one particular community, other then perhaps the church I grew up in, as a kid. In my schools, neighborhoods and now living away from humans altogether, I have felt support and cooperation with individuals but never a sense of being at home with a particular group of people, sharing our lives and sharing an experience of a place. It is this more holistic sense of community that I’m curious about. As someone coming from a western contemporary cultural background, a run-away British Columbian and member of a family that has spread throughout the continent, I may never have a chance to experience this, though.

I’m curious about Native communities and especially the Native peoples that lived in this area of Quebec where now mostly white, wealthy, Canadian families come to vacation and hunt. I can imagine there is quite a difference between the way this area of Saint-Donat is lived in and used now and the way Native communities lived with and related to this land, years ago. The difference between Native and non-Native use of land and it’s resources is, in Cajete’s words, “that Native cultures have traditionally aspired to live in accordance with an ideal of reciprocity with the landscape, guided by cultural values, ethics, and spiritual practices” (Native Science, p.183). What this means to me is that in order to live in harmony with a place, the members of a community must first establish a sense of wholeness between themselves, coming together guided by values, ethics and spiritual practices that acknowledge the living reality of a place.

It may be time for my housemate and I to step back and re-evaluate the reality of this place we live in and our vision for this community. The current living reality of our home in the Laurenciens seams to be that it takes more then two strong willed, strong hearted, adventurous people to sustain life here through the winter.

-R

The most involved project I have so far taken on has been the harvesting and use of Bulrush or Cattails. They are one of the most easily recognizable wild vegetables and grow extensively in the marshy area where we live.  I’ve always wanted to harvest Cattails but was never quite sure what part of the plant to use and how. I found a great excerpt in the book “Wild Green Vegetables of Canada”, put out by Adam Szezawinski and The National Museum of Canada, about the Common and Narrow Leaved Cattail- the variety that lives throughout Quebec and Ontario.

I discovered that most of the plant parts are edible, including the young shoots, stalks and male flower spikes, but only harvested and eaten in the early spring (Szezawinski, p.65). I remember picking and attempting to cook cattail stalks in July, one year, and discovering how fibrous and dry the layers were. Not having tried this wild vegetable again, since then, I was encouraged to read that the rootstocks and rhizomes are also palatable in the fall and winter seasons!

So a few weeks ago, when my mother came to visit, we went for a walk to the lake on a unusually warm afternoon. I couldn’t stop myself from wading out to the cattails to see what I could dig up. Using my toes, I started loosening the mud around the base of the stalks and pulled one up out of the water. It was so exciting to find the large rhizomes that grew out among the roots, which looked as though they might provide a substantial amount of food. As I continued loosening the roots with my feet I noticed a few little white shoots floating up to the surface of the water. Feeling brave, my mom and I tried one each and couldn’t believe how sweet and tasty they were.

That evening we ended up having to race off to Montreal to deal with car troubles- one of many regular escapes to the city for supplies or errands. I didn’t have time to even make diner before we left and had to abandon my cattails, hoping that they would survive in the fridge.  Our entire visit in Montreal, I couldn’t wait to get home and cook the cattails. I’d never been so close to harvesting my own vegetables from the wild.

When we arrived back in the mountains, we had firewood to chop, beaver “damage” in take care of and a hole to our basement to fill, so the suspense continued.

Finally I dedicated what became hours, to washing the cattail roots, separating the small, hairy roots from the rhizomes and then peeling off their tough skin. You can imagine my disappointment when I stood back to admire a tiny collection of white, fibrous strands. I tasted the little roots, hoping I could make something of them but found no substance or taste to them at all! What was left of the rhizomes, except for a few delicious little shoots, was dry and stringy.

Desperate to put all my efforts to use, I read through the passage by Szezawinski, again. I was happy that he mentioned that the “pure white, succulent growing tips and side-shoots of the rootstocks are a special treat if enough can be gathered (p.67)”. I had already eaten the few that I could find! It was finally through reading about “Natural Starches” in Alyson Knap’s Wilderness Harvest, that I had a brilliant idea. Knap also writes about the supposedly “tasty” rootstocks but mentions that Native peoples used them by drying and grinding the rhizomes and making them into flour.

Slightly disappointed at the quantity of food left, after all my peeling and trimming, I through them in a baking pan on top of the wood stove, half expecting to find the same mushy strands in the morning. I shouldn’t have been so surprised to, instead, find a beautiful pile of dried rhizomes- glad to learn that a wood stove is the perfect de-hydrator. I spent the next few hours cutting them up with scissors, grinding them by hand (saving some electricity), and mixing them into the most delicious pancakes I’ve made in a while!

I’m sure my imagination helped me to enjoy that meal more then any other pancake breakfast, with regular flower. I don’t know if it would be worth the effort to go through all that for pancakes, again. It is astonishing how much time it takes to try and “live off the land”. Things like learning to use less electricity, heat the house by fire, and grow my own tomatoes and herbs for tea seam to take up way more time then I have to enjoy the results. I see it is true, now, that living this lifestyles can take a commitment of all of your time.

Now that I’ve harvested cattail rhizomes once, I’m sure the process would happen a bit more quickly but I would rather wait and put my time into enjoying the whole plant, in the spring. I could even make my own cattail down comforter, as the Blackfoot Indians once did (Knap, p.99).

-RH

As mentioned in my last posting, “Talking with the Trees”, I have been curious about strawberry plants and how they might help my digestive system. For most of my life I have had sensitivities to foods and, at times, my body has had extreme reactions to what I eat. These times tend to coincide with certain emotional difficulties in my life or periods when I’m not able to connect with my emotions through spiritual practice or other methods of processing. I see a direct link between emotional digestion and the digestion of foods. At some point I learned that strawberries are good and soothing for upset stomachs, and found this to be true, but I never explored the subject any further.

Now that I’m living in an area where wild strawberries run ramped- creeping into my garden from all sides and covering every clearing in the forest- I am curious about the ways I can use this plant. The most exciting discovery, so far, has been that its green leaves, which are much more numerous than the berries themselves, are edible and highly beneficial. According to Bradford Angier’s Field Guide to Medicinal Wild Plants, strawberry leaves are rich in vitamins- especially vitamin C (p.232). Maybe this is part of the reason why strawberries and their leaves aid in digestion, as citrus fruits that are high in vitamin C also do.

According to Angier and many of my other resources, the leaves and berries have been used medicinally for various different illnesses, by many Native and non-Native peoples. They’re thought to be effective against worms, diarrhea, bladder gravel, gout, eczema, kidney difficulties and, of course, scurvy. Strawberry is not only used for internal sicknesses but is said to be effective for many skin and mouth issues such as sunburn, ulcers, reddened eyes, and problems of the teeth and gums. Angier didn’t go into much detail about why this is but I did some research online and found that this amazing plant is also an antiseptic (Plant-Life.org, Wild Strawberry). This website mentions briefly that the leaves were used by The Okanagan-Colville and other Native peoples as a disinfectant for open sores (Plant-Life.org).

Before I had finished reading all that Angier had to write about strawberries, I had picked a handful of leaves and started to boil water to infuse them in. Remembering something Thomas Elpel had written about the most effective way to ingest the medicinal properties of a plant, I chewed on a strawberry leaf for the first time! I didn’t notice much of a taste to it and wondered if it might be one of the eastern varieties that, as Elpel writes, are nearly flavorless (Elpel, Botany in a Day, p. 101). After following Angier’s instructions on steeping overnight, I had a relatively strong tea that did taste like strawberries. It reminded me a bit of raspberry leaf tea, which I have also been using regularly. It wasn’t so surprise to discover that like raspberry, strawberry leaf tea encourages the flow and regularity of menstrual blood (Plant-Life.org).

It’s difficult to know how much of an effect my strawberry leaf tea had on my stomach. Luckily I haven’t had much of a problem with my digestion, since I have been living here. I’ve been more active, connected to my body and in touch with my emotions, helping my body to process things more easily.

I will have a chance to test this remedy, though, if the beavers continue to flood the area around our water well. Soon we may be drinking strawberry tea three times a day, to help with our ‘beaver fever’ stomach aches.

-RH

Goldenrod

Identifying goldenrod on the land, where I live, was not difficult in the month of September when it’s yellow flowers decorated the driveway to our house. The only challenge was not confusing it with the look-alike, I mentioned in an earlier post.

Since identifying goldenrod, I have learned about some of the medicinal benefits it is believed to have. The plant contains many chemicals that are unfamiliar to me but are, according to Thomas Elpel, seen as beneficial to humans like saponins, tannins, bitters, and flavoids, as well as it’s essential oil (Botany in a Day, p.172). Overwhelmed by the information I’ve found on these chemical properties, It will take me some time to dig deeper into what exactly each of these are.

The dried leaves and flowers have often historically been used to stop bleeding (styptic) and as a tea to ward off strong infections like colds, flu, bronchitis (Meunick, Medicinal Plants of North America, p.12).

Goldenrod is also considered an excellent kidney tonic (diuretic), I learned, and used in Modern day for kidney and bladder stones (Meunick, p.12). This is probably due to it’s aquaretic qualities, which causes an increased flow of blood to the kidneys and an increase in urine (Wikipedia, Miller and Murrey, Herbal Medicinals: A Clinician’s Guide, p.147). Having suffered from kidney stones twice in the past few years, I’m very curious about the use of goldenrod to prevent the creation of stones in the kidneys. I found western doctors and medicines completely unhelpful in this regard, only treating the pain and sickness that I was having at the time. Perhaps this herbal tea can help prevent these painful stones from ever forming in my kidneys again! The dried herb is also used widely in Europe as a relaxant (spasmolytic) and anti-inflammatory (Meuninck, p.12).

It is probably a good idea to read more about Goldenrod before I try to treat myself or drink it regularly. I have picked and dried a few bunches of leaves and flowers so that I can use them as tea over the winter, after I know more about it.

-RH

To start, the guest speaker introduced the topic by giving a bit of history behind thought about “the public’s” role in the world of science. It was interesting to hear about the western, academic, white, American philosophies of writers like John Dewey and Walter Lippmenn. The speaker discussed the dualistic debate between these two writers and political commentators- basically the idea of striving for an “omni competent public” versus a knowledgeable professional representation of the public in the field of scientific awareness and thought. This brought out an interesting discussion about scientific authority, science in education and the media. I noticed, though, that our understanding of “public” was never mentioned or questioned, and that the speaker never addressed the cultural blinders that I feel he had up around the topic. What notion of science are we talking about, who is the public and what have writers and commentators of other cultural backgrounds had to say about the topic? The conversation was dangerously stuck in what one might call a type of scientific fundamentalism.

Unfortunately there was not much of a cultural diversity in the group of people who attended. It wasn’t until the question of “what is science?” was raised that we began to expand our discussion outside of the limits of a western, contemporary scientific view.

Fortunately, I was able to bring some of my thoughts and reflections from my studies, to the table. I shared that I feel strongly about the idea that science is an understanding of how we, as individuals, relate to the world and that the best authority over science can only be ourselves. I believe that an individual scientific understanding is essential to the life of each person and to the survival of humanity. I introduced some of Gregory Cajete’s ideas on this topic, and regarding our relationship with science, as humans. I love his imagery of, what most people know as, the “butterfly effect”. He uses this to describe our place in the massive creative systems and patterns of our universe. Cajete believes that human “butterfly power” resides in our understanding of these creative systems and our place and power as creators ourselves (Cajete, Native Science, p.18).

It is a very western, contemporary view that science and art are two separate things. I was excited when a young man at the cafe discussion stressed that art is essential to understanding science. His angle was that science is boring when taught strictly through “scientific technologies” and that art can make the topic more accessible and exciting to certain people. I would go even further to say that art- as our expression of changes in our environment, the chaos of the universe, and the energy and matter that surrounds us- is science.

There were couple of comments that came out, near the end of our discussion, that I particularly liked. Both regarded Dewey’s ideal of the “omni competent citizen “, one pointing out the impossibility of such an idea saying we should strive more towards being a “omni curious citizen”, asking questions and maintaining interest in the field of science. The other image was of an “omni competent network” in our communities and societies- that we, as humans, are more powerful when we come together like a whole swarm of butterflies.

-R

This week I had a beautiful encounter with a wolf, as I was running on a path near my house. The night following that meeting I had a dream about this same wolf- it’s beautiful golden and white fur glowing in the sun, around a corner. In my dream, after meeting this wolf, many other wolves showed up until I realized that they were not wolves at all but dogs… pets. They jumped up and down around me but I was disappointed that they were not wild. The dog lover in me still loved them and wanted to keep them but was disappointed again when it became obvious that an old woman on the path was their owner.

This dream came partly out of my subconscious disbelief that it was really a wolf I had seen and not just a stray husky. It also represented, for me, the awe I have of the wild, curious yet unsure of what I might find, while feeling tired of and disappointed by domestication of nature and, in this case, animals. I wanted to be close to the wolf, just as I want to be close to the wilderness and the wild in me, yet I seem to find my own domesticated self around every corner. My instinct to want a dog, which has been a reality for quite some time, appeared in my dream because of my desire to have control over and tame the wild. Is it only human nature?

These and many other lessons I have been learning through my dreams have come straight from my own self conscious mind, free to unwind as my rational mind takes a break. I can’t think of a better teacher to learn from then my own deep and intuitive experience of life.

-RH

The roots of all living things are tied together.

When a mighty tree is felled, a star falls from the sky.

Before you cut down a mohagany, you should ask permission

of the keeper of the forest, and you should ask permission

of the keeper of the star. - Maya

There is a giant pine laying amidst the lettuce and onions in the garden, today… smack dab through the beaded garden gate. It’s a good thing that we took notice of the cold weather and had picked all of the green tomatoes the day before. I now realize that, when sawing down this massive tree, we forgot to take the time to ask permission, to really notice it and, well, how it was determined to lean in the opposite direction from where we wanted it to go.

I had a dream last night, I just remembered, about my garden. In this dream it was growing wildly, intertwined with the land where I was. As I walked into the woods, through a doorway in a fence, two giant red peppers caught my eye, hanging down from a vine above. I was excited to see such healthy ripe produce as I thought nothing had had the time to ripen before fall. It’s as though my garden had taken on a life and agenda of it’s own, becoming wild and bridging that gap between garden and forest, agriculture and wild-harvesting.

It is part of traditional native cosmology that each plant has it’s own energy, destiny and will, just as animals do (Cajete, Native Science, p.109). The notion of the “will to live” or as Gregory Cajete puts it, “life seeking life”, is the most basic law of nature. It is this idea of plants taking their own power and will to find what they need, that crept it’s way into my dreams. It is obvious to me now that the key ingredient in the challenging concoction of gardening is my relationship to the plants and my understanding of how they seek life. Like the gate through the fence in my dream, the intersection of plant and human nature is integral to my ongoing drive for life.

This is true whether I live in New York City, rural Vermont or the wilderness of Quebec. Living in the city of Montreal, I felt my disconnect from the plant world, foods, tools, and technologies i used. It is obvious to me, and most people, that we humans rely extensively on plants and other living things, to survive and live our lives, but yet we perpetuate an ignorance to and disrespect of that relationship, in our contemporary western society.

Cajete points out that “this instinctual relationship and part of our nature is largely submerged beneath our intellect” (Cajete, Native Science, p. 108). I have been learning that the only way to reconnect with my natural instinct to relate to plants physically, psychologically, and spiritually, is through experience and surfacing these tides of intellect I often feel I am drowning in.

It is obviously just as important, or perhaps more, to open up to understanding and communicating with these powerful trees I am learning to use. I was certainly present with the pine tree as it began to sway and fall towards the house, just missing it by a few feet. Being present enough to notice their instinct and will to seek life is the least i can do.

-RH

Finding a balance between my own survival and respecting the rights of all other things and beings around me sometimes seams a difficult practice. My house mate and I, for example, live amidst a vast and vibrant community of beavers that live up to their name as one of the busiest creatures in Canada. As the fall rolls in they are starting to prepare for winter by flooding as much land as possible. The “Great Wall” of their many hundreds of dams happens to slow the flow of the river traveling right under our pathway and bridge up to our house. As they scoot around packing mud and sticks in all of the drainage pipes and build their dam higher and higher we are warned by the “land owner” that if we don’t put a stop to it our road will be flooded and bridge destroyed by spring.

When I first heard this news I felt so torn- sad that I had watched the beavers working hard to survive and been inspired by them to get working for winter. I felt they trusted me as I sat on the bridge every morning. I couldn’t imagine how frustrated they would be to find their dam destroyed. When I finally realized, though, that the only entrance into our house and our ability to survive the year was in jeopardy, the need for a democratic compromise became clear. I was in denial, thinking that it was unnecessary and unfair to intervene, leaning perhaps too far away from a human-centric view of the situation, into a beaver-centric cosmology. It is true that we humans do not own this land, or any, but neither do the beavers…

We happen to live here in this place together and I’m thankful for that. They created this beautiful ecosystem of wetlands and lakes, filtering the water with their dams and making space for other animals and plants to live and prosper. As my wise friend and house mate pointed out, though, they have dammed and inhabited much of this two-hundred and sixty acres and have many other nooks of the river to build their lodges in. We only have one road.

It still makes me sad to think of destroying what seamed to us like such a sacred creation, only a few days ago. This culmination of beaver power and human power- a crossroad and meeting place on the path to where we live- is very sacred. I understand when Cajete explains the significance of “space and place” to Native people. He writes of the importance of understanding and honoring life and the places they live- “sacred sites”- so we may preserve and perpetuate the ecology (Cajete, p.77). But, according to Cajete’s outline of Native science, it is also all about “mutual reciprocity… a give-and-take relationship with the natural world” (Cajete p.79). I hope that our understanding of these animals and the place they live is accurate enough that no serious trouble will come to the beavers as a result of what we take from them- their impressively high water level. They are wise and industrious creatures. I have faith that they will also find balance in the situation… or else perhaps out-smart us and get their way.

-RH

As I break down my fear of lack of knowledge and develop my own sense of knowing, I also gain a wider perspective on authority. In Native Science, Cajete explains the importance of being your own authority- that it “resides in individuals and their direct experience rather than from “some social establishment” (Cajete, p.70).

I`ve learned a great deal about being my own authority through reading Thomas Elpel`s book, Botany in a Day. In his section on Knowledge and Knowing, he explains how we are born with the innate ability to make healthy choices nutritionally, for our bodies and that we only lose this sense of knowing as we grow up and are told what to eat (Elpel, p.194). Although it`s good that adults taught me to eat my veggies and not waste the food on my plate, I think I began to lose some of my own authority over what my body really needs as i was told how to eat.

We also lose the innate ability as we grow up to learn language and logic, and attempt to put pieces of knowledge back together to recreate what we have lost (Elpel, p.194). Elpel dissects this search for knowledge by stating:

“Unfortunately, it is impossible to reassemble the whole by picking up it`s pieces. Through knowledge we can achieve life in balance and harmony with nature, but it is very different from the experience of our ancestors. It is still a path of fragmented knowledge” (Elpel, Botany in a Day, p.194).

So although I am certainly seeking knowledge of the wild edible and medicinal plants where I live, I am focusing on information that will help me to develop my own abilities to know how to care for my body and relate to the plants i encounter in the woods. For example, in learning to identify a certain chemical presence in plants by chewing their leaves and noticing the effect on my mouth, I can judge for myself what this plant might do for or to my body. Tannic acid, which has an astringent effect- binding proteins and drawing water out of the cells- will create the sensation of “cotton mouth” and a loss of saliva when chewed in a leaf (Elpel, p.196). In becoming conscious of these types of sensations, i can begin to experiment with plants safely, on my own, and eventually feel the medicinal and nutritional effects they have within my body.

Because I am so lost in the dark woods of wild plant identification, it has been helpful for me to study the basics of family groupings and how to recognize them. There are several wild flowers and plants that are hard to differentiate from their look-alikes. An example is the golden-rod I did find growing along our driveway, and another very similar yellow wild flower that i thought was the golden-rod. Luckily the veins in the leaf of the look-alike didn`t seam to match up with Elpel`s description in the “Aster Tribe” section of his book, or the stem with the information on identifying stems of Golden-rod in Jim Meuninck`s book Medicinal Plants of North America: A Field Guide .

I`m also aware that identifying poisonous plants is very important to the process of experimentation. Knowledge of plant families can be very helpful when trying to learn safely. For example, in a short workshop I attended at Goddard College, given by Eva Swindler, I learned that all the plants in the mint family are completely edible but that one should be very cautious of the parsley family because of the many poisonous wild plants that are easily confused with enables, like water parsnip or wild carrot. Although plants may be interconnected by their family trees they may have very different things to bring to the world and to other living things in the web of nature.

-RH