Stirring the Cauldron

New Moon Newsletters from Jessica Prentice

New Wort Moon

July moondark kitchen notes
from Jessica Prentice

The moon is new! We have moved into the lunar cycle known as the Wort Moon in 16th Century England. The herbs (worts) of healing are ready to be gathered, dried, tinctured, fermented, or infused. It is the time of year for assembling the medicine chest that will help nourish and heal the community through the winter and into spring.

I am not an herbalist, nor is herbalism my calling, but I can't deny that I feel a strong, deep, and abiding affinity for the traditions that herbalists keep alive. I use herbs as my primary form of medicine (just as an estimated 75% of the world's population does), and I have long felt that the traditions of herbal healing represent something much deeper and more fundamental than simply an 'alternative medical approach.' They embody a whole different way of approaching life -- a profoundly different paradigm from the one we modern Americans are so thoroughly steeped in.

The herbalist who perhaps most clearly articulates this paradigm shift is Susun Weed. I have long known about Weed's work -- I have even written for her newsletter. But I only recently picked up a copy of her classic book, Healing Wise, and sat down to read. In it, I found a wealth of wisdom that shed light on my frustration not only with the allopathic, scientific worldview, but also with much of what I find in the alternative "holistic" worldview.

According to Weed, both of these approaches can be dualistic and oppositional in nature. The scientific tradition views disease and death as an enemy that we must fight and seek to eliminate. What we usually call alternative medicine, Weed calls the Heroic tradition, which sees disease and death as the result of toxins that we must cleanse out and purify.

Weed proposes that a third, more ancient tradition is that of the "Wise Woman." In it, disease and death are not enemies at all, but rather allies for transformation. Curing is a process of nourishment, not purification. Rather than being on an ascending path to enlightenment -- where we should be constantly learning from our mistakes and improving -- in the Wise Woman tradition we are on a spiraling journey that includes and even embraces all that is messy, tragic, and inexplicable. As Weed puts it:

I must admit that I breathe a sigh of relief when I read this. You mean I don't have to strive to be perfect? To exemplify glowing good health and vitality in every moment and feel like a failure when I don't? That I may choose to do certain things in full clear consciousness even knowing they are not the healthiest choice? What freedom! What compassion! What a relief!! To be perfectly honest, the obsession with wellness annoys me sometimes. It often feels narcissistic and narrow. Using wellness as a benchmark for goodness or even rightness can be a self-referential loop that gets you nowhere.

Recently a woman I was cooking with asked me about mercury in fish. We ended up going online to research the source of mercury in the water and the reasons why it biomagnifies as it moves up the food chain. Reading about it lead her to ask in frustration what we should eat that won't poison us.

It is an important question on one level, but on another level it is beside the point. We might spend a lot of energy avoiding putting those poisons in our bodies, but they are still out there affecting other creatures in our ecosystem. Isn't that the real issue?

To see our food system as a labyrinth of right and wrong choices -- poisons and purefoods -- that we need to navigate our way through is common among alternative health advocates. We want so desperately to know what we are doing "wrong" so that we can make it "right." We want so badly to be "well." But Susun Weed asserts that, in the Wise Woman tradition, "we are both sick and well at the same time." She goes on:

This sense of interconnectedness and web-like structure fits well with my own worldview. It is also part of why I have had a bit of a heavy heart lately. Two women who I don't know very well, but have met, have suffered terrible tragedies in the past month. One, at fifty years of age, was full of joy to be getting married for the first time in her life. Then, suddenly, and just weeks before the wedding, her beloved fiancé died of heart failure. The other woman, who is about my age, gave birth to a son, her second child. Her husband went for a bicycle ride after the birth and, in a freak accident, flipped over the handlebars and landed on his head. Despite the helmet he was wearing, he fell into a coma. He died a few days later.

Chaos, permeability, and nonsense sometimes mean tragedy.

Even though these things didn't happen to me, personally, I am holding them. I want to hold them. I choose to hold them. Because if they had happened to me personally, I would want others out there to help me carry them. They would be too heavy for me to hold alone. I do not think, "Whew -- thank God it didn't happen to me." The possibility of suddenly losing my partner, the love of my life, to death, is very real to me. It is a true story, a story that happens, a story that is part of all of our lives. It is one of the ways we meet chaos face to face, and know in every cell of our being that love is real. It is as real as loss, and inseparable from it.

There is no amount of insurance we can buy, rules we can enforce, or pills we can take that will protect us against the tragedy of loss in life on Earth. So let's keep our choices in perspective. Let's embrace our interconnectedness with other people and creatures and plants on the planet. Let's not get too obsessed with how to keep our personal bodies free of the seemingly endless poisonous substances that are present in our environment. Let's not get too freaked out about our own health challenges and what lessons we need to learn to "fix" them. Let's ask instead how we can contribute to the planetary healing that absolutely and unconditionally includes us, but every other thing as well. As Susun Weed reminds us:

On the Wort Moon, I send up a prayer that we all feel the threads of connection that hold us up in this web of life on earth. I keep in my heart those who are in the midst of grieving deep losses, and invite them to rest there, and be nourished. It is that same rest and nourishment that I will one day seek out myself, in loss and grief, as surely as night flows from day, as new moon flows from full moon. Because there is no escape from grief. It is absolutely and unavoidably a part of life. As is joy.

Love and loss; life and death; peace and angst, grief and joy -- all of it, ALL of it, is holy. Let's hold it, and bless it, and thank it, and keep on moving.

click to: book summary

Full Moon Feast Food and the Hunger for Connection by Jessica Prentice Full Moon Feast invites us to a table brimming with locally grown foods, radical wisdom, and communal nourishment.