TAKING BACK AMERICA:
              What’s Herbal Medicine got to do with it?

We, The People, are ASLEEP and need to WAKE UP and take our Country back RIGHT NOW!

Let’s start by demanding paper ballots to count all of our votes. This shouldn’t be so hard. If there is no election fraud going on, what do those in power have to worry about? If there is systemic election fraud happening, as it seems there is, than we either have a lot to worry about, or a clear task in front of us. What difference will it make who is running in any election if our votes are manipulated? This is completely unacceptable in America. The answer to despair and worry is to choose a course of action and take it, whether you can devote a small amount of time to it, or every waking minute. Find out what’s going on in your district or state regarding demanding paper ballots and get involved. Write to your local newspaper. If there’s no local movement where you live, start one. Today.

Authentic herbal medicine is local and begins with healthy land and vibrant plants, followed by respectful gathering and preparation of those plants that are to be used for nourishment and healing. Working as an herbalist, whether professionally, or by growing or gathering herbal medicines for yourself and your family puts you in direct touch with the eternal, ongoing cycles of nature. These include the light and dark we call day and night, the turnings of the seasons from spring through winter and back around again, the gently or wildly fluctuating weathers that are commanding everyone’s attention right now. There is the waxing and waning of the moon, literally moving the fluids inside our bodies as it moves the tides; there are the acts of sowing seeds, tending new growth, harvesting mature crops, and then composting; releasing back to the earth that which by decaying, creates new life for the next cycle. Though many people may not think of it this way, when we take herbal medicines into ourselves, especially in the forms of foods and teas, they can help us connect with our own natural cycles and rhythms, including the ability to listen to the wisdom of our bodies, the cycles of filling and emptying, sowing and reaping that repeat throughout our own lives. Herbal medicine can help us find our way back to a deeper connection with our own natural instincts.

Our natural instincts are our best guides into the truth of what’s happening around us, even in the unnatural world of politics. People need to know that we can trust ourselves, especially our sense of what’s real and what isn’t, of what’s true and what isn’t. Herbs can help lead us back home to our instincts, which we can then develop into reliable intuition, as part of our internal knowing systems. Real herbal medicine, not pills and standardized extracts, but actual plant medicines, can help connect us not only to our own cycles, rhythms, and instincts, but also to our true wisdom. Though the central point of this essay is we, the people uniting and taking back our beloved country, what I’ve seen over the past 20 years as an herbalist is that nature is our intimate and ultimate guide to our power and our healing. By nature, I mean our true cooperative nature as human beings, and Nature, as what we consider an external force on the planet, but which is more truthfully, an expansive, beautiful expression of who we are.

The people ruining, I mean running our country’s government and much of the world, too, have revealed their true nature in New Orleans, and Alabama and Mississippi. Those of us who could already see this government’s true nature notwithstanding, what followed after hurricane Katrina has made their priorities painfully clear to everyone, even to those who support the (illegal, horrifying) war on Iraq.

Most so-called ordinary people are good, decent people. We come in all colors, shapes, religions, and sizes. We’re not daft. We don’t want to continue to poison our planet, leading ourselves and our great-grandchildren and the other creatures of Earth into epidemics of cancer and strange new diseases. We don’t want to drive numerous species into extinction. We really don’t want to be responsible for people in this country and all over the world continuing to live lives of miserable poverty so that a few citizens of Earth (us) can be more comfortable and a few more can accumulate untold wealth, hurting all of us in their rapacious process.

We don’t want to do any of these things and if we had community-led guidance and development, if we had caring leadership that evoked the best in us, our creative sparks would fly and we wouldn’t continue to do any of them. If we had inclusive, diverse leadership, particularly leadership that included the voices and visions of women, of our mothers and grandmothers and daughters, we would be helped to follow our best instincts, which are our most natural instincts. We would develop other ways to live and to distribute the earth’s precious resources. This is where herbal medicine can help. Using green medicines and eating wild plants can help reconnect us to the earth and each other, to our natural rhythms and relationships with all of Life.  But, we don’t have this orientation, and so we generally go along and don’t make too much of a fuss. We often don’t get too involved in changing things unless we are personally being directly affected. WE CAN’T KEEP THIS UP. THIS IS LAST CALL.

What is not clear to everyone yet, though a few respected mainstream journalists such as Bill Moyers have talked and written about it, is that our government has been taken over not only by corporations, but by a group of religious zealots who believe in the rapture and are bent on fighting to the death (of everything) other religious zealots. These are not true Christians as in Love thy Neighbor and Love thy Enemy sorts of genuinely spiritual Christians. They are not like Martin Luther King or Bishop Desmond Tutu, or ordinary kind-hearted people. Our so-called leaders are followers of Christ’s teachings in words only. Actions speak louder than words and their actions speak of an intent to bring about the “end times” when they will all presumably be “saved” and everyone else can go to hell and that’s just fine with our so-called representative leaders. The example our federal government has been setting is that might makes right and if you want something, do whatever you have to do to take it. Some of us, though not many, are happy to follow this brutal teaching.

Yes, it’s true as revealed so grotesquely in New Orleans, Louisiana and the other Gulf states; they don’t give a damn about black people. Frankly, it’s been evident for quite some time they don’t give a damn about anyone or anything except their inner circle of both adept and inept, greedy cronies. We, the people, are basically held in contempt. We, the good people, have been duped again and again. We may not like that, but we have to face it in order to change anything. And if you knew all along, don’t lord it over those who didn’t. Red vs. Blue is made up. It’s playing the game by their rules. Divisiveness rules. Good/Evil. Right/Wrong. Smart/Stupid. Black/White. Join forces across the dualities. Remember the old saying:“Divide and Conquer?” This is how we’ll continue to be dominated. How about “Unite and Challenge?” This is how we’ll cooperatively, creatively partner with each other to the benefit of all Life. It’s up to us, we, the people.

People, especially poor people, and more often black, brown, and red than white people, have been put to death in New Orleans, as they have been put to death in Iraq, and in numerous other locations. People have been condemned to die because of a lack of caring, a lack of valuing anything or anyone in a delusional world where their BUSINESS is considered far more important than any TRUE PLEASURE, even the PLEASURE of being alive and having a world to grow up in. Poisoning the Air, Fire, Water, and Earth in the name of short-term profits and so-called progress is like suicide bombing the planet and all its inhabitants. For this reason, I don’t understand why we the people in America claim to have felt safe before 9/11. Maybe we’ve forgotten the difference between feeling safe and feeling numb.

The Storm was Mother Nature saying People Wake UP,

Feel your Feelings,

Aren’t you are all seething within?

Churning...

Storming...

Over what is being done around the world, and to the world, in your Name?

Here I am, Mother Nature, bringing howling winds and rising temperatures and flooding waters. Here I am, revealing to you how you really feel. And so few of you remember the language we share.

You don’t realize I’m showing you your own Power.

All weathers of the earth reveal our emotional weathers...

Global warming is part of we, the people heating up, getting really uncomfortable in many places. The great human dramas of epochal changes are reflected in the earth’s weathers. We are the earth. People’s emotional energies stir up the weather.

The emotional weathers of animals, birds, insects, and so forth affect the weather, too, but more in their reactions to human emotions, actions, and their subsequent consequences.

The follow-up to the storm...

There are no words to describe how horrible it is...

How our country has treated we, the people with contempt, with indifference, with something akin to hatred.

The first-hand stories coming out of New Orleans and Mississippi and Alabama include every kind of story imaginable, stories of such love and heroism that you weep until your heart breaks open. There are also the deeply saddening stories of rape, murder, and needless loss, and you wail, inside or out loud, for the casualties of callousness.

This debacle may, just may, bring down the house of cards, the stacked deck that is this current administration. Well, this on top of all the other revelations. The Downing Street memo, the memo that clearly showed there were never any weapons of mass destruction to be found, didn’t do it. This war on Iraq was based on nothing, simply lies calculated to manipulate the opinions of the American and British people in favor of an illegal invasion. And just a few years ago it would have been unthinkable for the government of we, the people to survive the revelation that we are sending political prisoners to locations where they are tortured for us. This revelation, along with so many others, didn’t make the American people rise up in disgust and outrage either.

It occurs to me that if Dubya Bush and Co. had been more “successful” in Iraq and had been more careful to cover up their lies, hadn’t gotten caught outing Valerie Plame (yes, I know there have been no convictions, nor even indictments as I write this, but everyone knows the painfully obvious tit-for-tat truth, any school child could figure it out), than people might think the administration was doing fine! Until now, that is. We, apparently, want a John Wayne-type guy to be the big daddy who keeps us all safe and secure to drive our gas-guzzling cars and use up more than our share of the planet’s non-renewable resources, rather than owning our personal and collective power. We need to zestfully take on the challenge of energizing our world in ways that are healthy, efficient, and effective. We aren’t shown any true leadership, any political will to encourage us to move in that humane and logical direction. This is changing, however, and needs our participation to thrive. Many groups have developed and implemented working solutions, but these groups are marginalized.

For now we have Halliburton and other corporate and federal looters, other war and natural disaster profiteers getting paid huge amounts of money to rebuild New Orleans without any plans to consult the people who actually lost their homes. Government-sponsored mercenaries just back from Iraq and armed to the teeth were patrolling the streets of New Orleans! A few days after hurricane Katrina hit, and the levees broke, I heard there was talk of bringing Rudy Giuliani in to New Orleans for emergency management. Rudy Giuliani ran one of the meanest, most blatantly dishonest, corrupt, racist governments it was possible to run in New York City. He is a power/control-mad politician who is even more repressive on a regular basis than Mayor Bloomberg was when anti-Republican National Convention demonstrators came to town. Remember the innocent bystanders and innocent demonstrators being whisked off the streets and “disappeared” temporarily into chemically tainted West side lock-ups? We who envision and work toward a better world need to be careful not merely to ask that this administration be brought down because American people like to be managed, to be taken care of, and believe it or not, it could be worse than this recent and ongoing betrayal of we, the people. We could open the door to a more effective dictator like Giuliani, someone who “gets things done.” It could be the escalation into a true police state. That’s what we’re being prepared for now, using the threat of terrorism and our “need “ for oil as justification. So just bringing them down isn’t enough.

We, the people, need to be careful and caring enough to cultivate a vision of what we want and a plan of how to get it. I’m no expert on this, but I don’t have to be. We need all of us. None of us can do everything, but all of us can do something. There are town meetings where all voices are encouraged. There are elders and youth; myriad community leaders running progressive programs that work. We have visionaries who need to be given a wider forum in which to be heard. There are mothers who’ve revitalized their city blocks, teachers who’ve created programs that bring students into real-world transformative projects. There are alternative technologies for energy and design that are currently working in various locations around the world, such as forms of sustainable agriculture and aquaculture. We need to be ready to step up to the plate and take back our country when these people (who’ve lost their right to call themselves human as far as I’m concerned), come tumbling down. They’ve locked up their hearts and sold their souls. They are utterly irreverent toward the gift of life. In the name of the mothers and children of all species everywhere, I’m calling it as I see it.

Slow down. Listen to the plants and trees. To the wild birds and the animals. They will teach you the value of generosity and compassion. They help us return, somehow, to the Essential. It is vitally important that you return yourself to what is real. What is simple.  What is whole and holy: Your family. Your friends. Your heart’s truth. Your community. The land on which you live. The plants that feed and clothe you, that give you medicine. The water that keeps you in the life stream. The world family of which we are all part. Like it or not, we have one home to share, this gloriously beautiful, generous Earth.

I heard a hurricane survivor say something that spoke to me as a deep Truth. He said that what he observed was until people had food and water they were out for themselves and their family. As soon as people had the essentials for life, they reached out to band together and help their wider family - everyone and anyone who was in distress. Right now, to greater and lesser degrees, this is everyone on Earth.

Regarding hurricane Katrina (and then Rita) people everywhere have galvanized into action to help wherever and however they can. I know herbalists are down south helping out people. Feeding people. Doctors, rescue workers, teachers, police, and housewives have arrived. People in other states are opening their homes to complete strangers, to whole families. Federal and state-run agencies failed and are continuing to bog down in their bureaucracy, where smaller, community-based groups are succeeding. The so-called ordinary people are demonstrating their love and caring in thousands of ways every day. Even journalists have denounced the current administration, at long last.

Together, with the help of an aroused media and the internet to connect many of us, we, the people, can take back America, can’t we?

YES! And, 

If not now, when?

IT’S LAST CALL

With Healing Green Blessings of Love, Peace, and Justice to our World

©Robin Rose Bennett 9/05

Home Schedule of Events  2008 Products Articles Consultations Herbal Practice Days Apprenticeship Resources Weed Walks Special Events Book Reviews Lectures to hear Misc Info Links Contact Information