Teasel and La Santa Fe.
Usually the only time I start writing is when I am afraid…and now I am petrified with bone crushing fear, oh well. Wretching puking my guts out fear, horizon to horizon fear, along the central meridian of the milky way fear, grateful and afraid fear. Wretched but blessed, blessed and pressed, open to divine providence. I want to go home, to have the strength to have a place to meet the remedios.
I want to focus on the weedy, invasive teasel, Dispacus fullonum remedio. It grows as tall as my head and the flower heads shine like diamonds when the winter low horizon sun sling shots from its secretive spot on turtle island. The sun hops like a bob cat, stick legged with halting steps up the staircase margins of the sky. The sunlight is pouring a creamy jersey cow milk yellow light, thick with butter on their frozen brown thistle spiny, pineapple artichoke heads. So I am writing, venting.
Everything is in the hands of El Senor Jesuchristo and Maria Santissima. Everything is equally in the hands of Jesus and the hands of Mary Mother of God Most holy, equally in both their joined hands together. The everything that is everything includes everything. We go to Mass on January 1st and celebrate the Maternity of Mary the Mother of God, one of the readings recently was about woods, trees and fields rejoicing. “Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad, let the sea be moved, and the fulness thereof:the fields and all things that are in them shall be joyful. Then shall all the trees of the woods rejoice before the face of the Lord, because he cometh:” Psalm 96:11-13
The notion that plants are important keys to us for wellbeing as a people in our place is a kind of common sense with an enormous question mark that makes my skin crawl, so I pray continuously and take deep breaths. Conversely, how could plants be trivial, irrelevant random to our wellbeing as a people in our place? That is probably the central question premise. The plants are made trivial only at our peril. The plants are made trivial to our wellbeing precisely because in an unnamed narrative, I hate the word narrative, includes the fundamental, small letter, truthed concept that you are not a people. The place is likewise not yours, and spraying roundup for our manicured lawns is a swell groovy idea, oh well. I am trembling afraid feeling a little better lately, writing. Angel found the watermeter, thank you Angel. Finally there is an opening. The nine day novena to Mary La Senora produced fruit,
Nothing happens but for the grace of God. Everything happens by the grace of God our heavenly father. I know my every heartbeat, every breaths and every step are all numbered, counted, finite, all under the grace of God. I have studied this extensively as a random case study. I have seen many marathon runners, ultra marathon runners, alcoholic smokers, live roughly the same amount of years as their related genetic kin because at a certain point a death gene, kill gene, done gene says, ‘Time's up.’ A person is born with a limited finite number of breaths, heartbeats, eye blinks. I imagine I do as much as I can to extend, conserve and cherish my portion, my life. The effort to prepare and postpone death is mostly arrogant self importance of no consequence. Nothing happens unless for the will of God which ordains it and all else to be, sustains it to be, and allows it to be. God allows me to be me, above ground for a time in the world of flowers, of sunshine. I have done nothing to deserve this beauty, nothing. John 3:16 God loved the world so much he gave his only begotten son to walk under the same sun we walk, so we shant perish, for life everlasting abundantly, but not everlastingly here. The logic of freely given everlasting life is the theology of flowers. That is why weedy waste flowers like teasel and the miracle of life and abundance are fundamental to everything. I give thanks for this fabulous creation. There is divine providence with things. I don’t have time to hate because hate requires energy which I simply do not have. Hate is a luxury for the very young, the very old and the very stupid. Do what you must do free from emotional sentimental attachment.
God creates and God heals. So for that reason going home is accepting this process of hills and walking mountains with the capacity to rejoice and be glad. God the Father creator of heaven and earth creates and heals. Everything and anything is arranged through this man Jesus, who was whipped, beaten, bloodied and abused then humiliated on a tree. Our Saviour stapled to a tree like a sheet of plastic house wrap surrounded by criminals, lunatic regime soldiers. All the people who were so into him, now suddenly gone, accept for John and a coterie of beautiful Mary’s, including Mary most Holy the Mother of God. For that reason we light candles, kneel before statues, all by the grace of God who is also God Jesus, along with Mary the mother of grace and mercy, his son our Jesus, the angels and saints. The power of God is the only factor that activates healing. So our job is to unclutter the body’s intake of junk and garbage and allow it to rest, do its own thing long enough to heal itself by God’s grace. Unclutter not only junk and garbage food. We must unclutter and strip junk ideas, garbage values. We can nudge a little here or there but we can not budge the process by bullying it, threatening a disease process with medicine. God has his own laws and his own time frame, seasons and schedule. His own reasons and explanations are beyond our understanding, putting a word salad mantra of explanation on body processes does nothing to change or transform those processes into healing. There is nothing new or original here. That there are trees of the wood rejoicing before the face of God, is a basic fact beyond argument which you may discover at will by walking in a forest of trees. These rejoicing trees and herbs are the remedios from the flower world of Eden. I said you may discover at will rejoicing trees, which is the mercy of God by walking in a forest. The key point is walking under your own power in the forest. The body in most chronic disease states like advanced chronic lyme for which teasel is a remedio is a body stuck, paused, halted cold with poor circulation of vital fluid. So herbs like teasel root, encourage warming sun into the essentially cold stuck condition. The spirochetal organism, Borrelia Burgdorferi, carried by and transmitted via tick bite is in the same family as syphilis. Lyme is spread as a vector of transmission by a tick bite. After the initial transmission, even after treatment with appropriate antibiotics, it tends to in some people, for not clearly understood reasons, go into a dormant quiet phase hiding within structures of the immune system such as white blood cells, spleen and lymph nodes. Movement of vital fluid within the lymph system is a vital part of the immune system and requires physical movement of the actual musculature system. The lymph system can be understood as a pathway of sero-sanguinous fluid vital to all aspects of the immune system throughout the body similar to the veins and arteries of the circulatory system through which blood travels in the body. The Lymph system however lacks a transport system of muscular arteries and a central pump like the heart. For the lymph fluid to circulate irs vital component of fluid it requires the continuous movement of the arms, hands, legs, feet, upper body torso, diaphragm. Tracing the paleo genetic history of this system, it is easy to understand that the near continuous movement of the human body was a predeterminate to human existence throughout the paleo genetic history of the body. For all of our human history there were no such things as the labor saving technologies that define human existence today. People have inherited a vital organ lymph system that requires continuous muscular movement, only the muscles have stopped moving in the modern era and so when the body requires the lymph system to operate the immune functions of the lymph system, it simply can not. An essential aspect in all healing is vigorous physical movement. The body deprived of physical movement rapidly declines. Often the actual mental, psychological and physical symptoms of any human disease process has more to do with lack of movement rather than any specific disease process.
Here is where we find teasel, called a useless invasive weed by those on the outside, marking boundaries of highways, railroads and fence lines, much like the round upped dandelion in a perfect manicured lawn. Teasel is not only the dangerous invasive weed, teasel is also a remedio which was used by people in Asia, Europe and going back as far as we have record in written herbal history in China, Korea, Greece and Rome as an herbal remedy.
Everywhere I look I see miracles. Here I would say, train yourself to see miracles and blessings. Being above ground alive and breathing is a blessing miracle. The most horrible ugly development is equally as much a blessing as joy. There is blessing in joy and sorrow. The processes of life are as in the Pater Noster, on earth as it is in heaven. The Pater Noster also indicates an earthly body and a heavenly body which is composed of celestial heavenly pollen and is also known as the sidereal body of the ecliptic. So healing happens when we get out of the way and allow heaven to occur and unfold in the earthly body. At the miracle of Christmas for the Epiphany the three wise men followed a heavenly star seen in the east. This heavenly star they followed pointed to the sidereal body of Christ flowing in the celestial band ecliptic. For the miracle of Christmas, Para La milagro de la Navidad, for every tender kiss and every embrace. It all started on the south fork, Isawah trailhead, her saying yes like Mary said yes, like every springtime is yes, and every tear is a yes. We are saying yes to on earth as it is in heaven.
https://youtu.be/oeIVTwSiJWA?feature=shared
To describe this healing process is quite symbolic and theatrical. For this reason the church is set up facing east, with an altar, statues and incense because we enter a symbolic theatrical space, on a regular schedule. We need to enter a symbolic space where we can have the courage to declutter the body as a space. The idea that explaining and categorizing, intricately naming and dissecting a situation is solving a situation is untrue. Knowing, identifying some process as occurring is not the same as allowing the healing process to acquire traction and sort itself out to our long term benefit. Taking a pain pill may seem like a good idea short term for a condition. Though more importantly is understanding that pain is a portion of the healing process, as in many cases fever. When you have an acute tissue trauma situation, taking a tylenol may slow down the healing process because the pain is not so much a symptom but evidence of events occuring in the body mobilizing healing forces within the body. When we look outside and see leaves moving, tree branches swaying then we know wind is blowing, atmospheric movement. The authority in the situation is God, perhaps our explanation agrees with the mind of God here and there, perhaps we are way off. The most basic level of what occurs is movement, flow. Our job is not to impede and block the flow. Our ideas may be useful but a lot of the process is addition through subtraction. People create words to understand a situation yet each situation needs to be understood face to face. Inflammation in the body, tends to be understood according to its word origin, inflame, as in burning, warm, red, hot burning painful. The first response is to put out the fire. Anti-inflammatory. The first face to face experience of inflammation is experiencing the body’s inherent nature of righting itself, correcting itself, mobilizing healing to a specific area. So dousing the flame time and time again pushes the deficiency deeper and deeper. People at this point will say, “Yes that’s true, but”, more antibiotics, more pain killers, more anti-inflammatories and so on.
In both eastern and western states there is the tick carried disease called Lyme disease. Although people may take antibiotics for a tick bite, and recover. Others report long term health issues following both the tick bite and conventional treatment with antibiotics. Other people get a tick bite, reporting no symptoms of consequence. So there is a wide range of possibilities. In people with long term symptoms the current understanding of the etiology of tick borne disease transmission is multi-layered and nuanced. To simplify the lyme tick disease. The tick is an insect which during the spring and summer seeks out mammals for their blood in the process of the ticks life cycle. Ticks are found in grassy woods, and the wetter the woods the more ticks you will find. In a wet warm year from Washington, Oregon, Pennsylvania to Maine ticks emerge in spring and seek out blood to reproduce. Deer found in the woods of tick filled woods can be found covered with blood engorged ticks. Likewise dogs or any mammal breathing will be exposed to bloodsucking ticks. In tick filled woods in springtime a wet forest will be teeming with ticks. In people, a person walking will meet tiny nearly invisible ticks. The tick crawls on the shoe, crawls up the leg, fixing itself on skin further up anywhere there is skin. The tick bites, punctures the skin, and begins to suck blood. The bite is painless and not detectable in any way. But after a few hours to days, the tick swells from the size of a grain of rice, to a small raisin filled with blood. The tick may or not be infected with a spirochete bacteria called Borrelia spp. Spirochete bacteria are so called because under a microscope they present a corkscrew shape. Spirochete bacteria are responsible for syphilis, leptospirosis and intermittent recurring fevers. Lyme disease from tick bites start with a bull eyed sized circle around the tick bite on exposed skin. Due to people’s various pigmentation and skin color, the rash will be more difficult to detect in African American, native american or hispanic people of color as opposed to white light colored skin. It may be mistaken for eczema or a bruise, rash and not be identified as the bull’s eye lyme rash. It starts with flu-like fever and joint pain. Later the disease process involves bouts of fever, which tend to resolve then return, bone pain and inflammation of joints. In addition to these flu-like symptoms the lyme disease can in some people turn to something resembling syphilis with brain fog, cognitive changes resembling dementia, tremors and other CNS central nervous symptoms. In some more urban areas familiar with lyme, the best thing is to remove the tick, according to protocol and save the tick, and send it to a competent lab or in some areas, send it to a public health agency who will test the tick for presence of Borrelia spp spirochete bacteria. There is no way to know whether a tick carries lyme unless the tick is tested.
Lyme disease treated at the initial tick bite stage, in young healthy individuals tends to resolve with anti-biotics, the disease can be cured. However in older people, or in people with compromised immune systems, with tick bites and even with people treated at the first indication with appropriate antibiotics, can suffer long term symptoms that are the nature of the spirochete bacteria presenting itself. The spirochete bacteria has an ability to disguise and hide from both the antibiotics and the immune system in body tissues. Months or weeks later the symptoms return. The spirochete bacteria actually hide in parts of the immune system, like the white blood cells, spleen and nodes producing swelling in the lymph gland centers such as the groin, armpits, throat causing non-differentiated swelling. Lyme can produce a sustained exhaustion and low energy level with low metabolism resembling a sluggish thyroid. All these problems can trigger the body to go into psychological depression mode. Although initially a typical malaria like intermittent fever complex may be most noticed, later the lyme disease in a more advanced entrenched cycle goes deeper and tends to be a cold, lowered temperature, low metabolism presentation. At this point it may present similar to advanced chronic COPD or altitude sickness with lowered oxygen level, tiredness, and impeded flow of vital energy within the body. So at this advanced entrenched lyme stage herbs like skunk cabbage, teasel root, japanese knotweed and supportive herbs typical of chronic cold damp conditions ginger, cinamon, cayenne, turmeric, and well known joint herbs such as frankincense, myrrh, boswelia. Likewise herbs used to encourage lymph flow such as alder bark and red root. In short a generalized non-specific supportive approach to the symptoms.
I spent a long time with hedondilla, la gobanadora. It looked so green, like crayola forest green crayons were melted on the wrinkled wrapped, layered lizard branches. The leaves looked rubbery or like plastic flowers placed at a grave, resembling flowers with festive strange colors not seen in nature. I am never sure if I love the plants for what they are or love them for their relationship to Creator and how that relationship is all. The plants have to be everything. If people talk about movies or elections, or wars I will just nod my head and and listen to their voices like their voices are dogs barking, or pantomime theater with sound and gestures meant to explain their place in the social order as trustworthy or courageous. I have no clue what is happening in the big world they are animatedly talking about, as if the latest world stage, best friend villain or hero had just walked down the aisle at walmart and was walking out to the parking lot. I admit it is a world to me like Mars or a fun to play video game, a place I have never been and a game I have never played. If there are televised events and picture shows, I can’t be bothered.
I am looking for signs of dried, round, yellow passion fruit. Maybe I’ll be able to see it now that all the leaves have dried and fallen to the ground. Now there is space between the trees were before there was none. Maybe the elm trees all took a step back, take a step back, take a step back. I say the rosary and look for passiflora fruit hiding in the forest empty of summer leaves where all the leaves are brown, gone, and the sky is grey as I ride my bicycle along the rail trail.
I try to understand modern names, people’s formal names which to me resemble childhood nicknames. These are names you would use for someone you are on the most intimate friendly terms, or a small child. I try to understand the names today but tend to go conspiracy darkmode. “Tree-nah”, “Mee-ah”, “Trass-ley”, “Mer-teek-ah”, “Baily”, “Stay-lee”, “Daily”, “Haley”. No matter how I try to spin it they don’t sound like names to me. Yet I want to honor their names and respect their experience. Then I remember I am old and worn out and lucky to be standing on two legs. I have started to use hiking poles to walk in the mountains. I need to be careful on these 20 mile bicycle rides I don’t want to get run over and thrown in a ditch to rot and be fertilizer for teasel, have my eyeballs picked out by crows, chicken mcnuggets for raccoons, great horned owl snacks, meals for gimpy straight legged bob cats, coyote puppy chow. I guess there could be worse things. I remember reading that the indians named their children after the first thing they saw after the baby was born. “Fog on the mountain.”, “Many kills”, “Summer wind”, “Sunrise”, “Elk bugles”, “Muddy river”, “Big bear”. The indian names were observed events of significance and beauty. I don’t know a single culture that named their children, their offspring, their future with pleasant but meaningless sounds that refer to no virtue or person existing previously. The only thing I can imagine is that the choice they are making to name their children cute word salad sounds devoid of meaning, breaking with the history of their people is an acknowledged awareness, and acceptance of the defeated. Maybe it’s something else, being old and worn out everything new is part of the end. Maybe I only stare into a glass darkly, only seeing my own end. Seeing my own death in unfamiliar names, criticizing people’s names who had no power to pick their name. Is my name Paul a better name? I remember my father, an opera singer calling Frank Sinatra, ‘a crooner, not a singer’, because he whispered into a microphone to project his voice volume. Opera singers could fill a whole theatre without a microphone using the power of their voice. Consciously throwing away family heritage culture and embracing a future of random nothingness as a conditional bargain for a disavowed existence within a cultural matrix of non-being. Meaninglessness is not a value that can be sustained because it is rooted in chaos. Meaninglessness is imposed over what are meaningful relationships not by random events but instead by a disempowerment for the purpose of wealth redistribution within a social context of change, directed change, not random cute change. Randomness is a curse not a virtue to be cultivated. When a tornado, earthquake, flood or hurricane occurs and imposes non-being and randomness over an human ecosystem in the bioregion it is a tragedy. If a damn is built that floods an area where people have lived, we would not say the damn was a random unplanned event and be surprised that it disrupted the life of the people living there. The damn was planned probably decades ago and the human disruption was rightly or wrongly assigned an acceptable outcome, a trade off for the benefits the damn provided to that human community. People within a culture, courting, marrying, having families and naming their children is not a random chance event and the names given children are not sudden unexplained occurrences. In a effective culture families are planned and for that reason naming children is not and can never be a chance, haphazard occurrence. These new names are to me basically pleasant musical sound jingles that are rooted in violence because they mock the person named, reducing them to trivia. Combinations of near meaningless sounds may be ok as names for a parrot or dog but not for a son or daughter born for a lineage of destiny. These names are generic invented words referring to nothing, and would work just as well for an energy drink, or pharmaceutical pill, or a restaurant chain. “Mer-teen-nah”, beat type 2 diabetes with Merteena. For chicken wings game day it’s never too late, Merteenahs has you covered. In the relative recent past the names of people were specific words in the greater category of human names of other persons. Names were never in any way meant to be original, with innovative experimental spellings and pronunciations, unless you were a carnival performer dancing half naked in your underware, spinning on a rope, swallowing swords. You were named for a person who lived before you: an uncle, grandmother, aunt, cousin, father, aunt or sister, a saint, a virtue or ideal form. Joy, John, Patience, Isabel. Diane, Elena, Helen, Thomas. Now the person’s name is what? You are telling me through these names that the Sex Pistols refrain, no future, no future is truth and we are to offer no resistance. So the idea is to be light hearted, carefree, always universally seductive, intimate, with a lobotomized, have a nice day smile, superficial, empty of all concern. Everyone on the edge of spontaneous hysterical cackling laughter.
Out of desperation I run to the plants telling them everything. I was told that if you spoke your intention to water, flowing water, the intention would travel, floating like a message in a sealed glass bottle, on the waves of the sea, and someone could understand the message spoken. The same way with eastern cedar and western red cedar, sagebrush and creosote brush. Our thoughts travel through the roots of cedar, artemisia, la gobanadora across vast distances. Like the smoke of incense drifting upwards to angels, to God. So that someone five hundred miles away could grasp the cedar, smell its fragrance and hear what you said, understood what you felt. When they met you your words and ideas would follow. It doesn’t matter where I go. Even if I am in church and look at the cross I imagine what kind of tree it was that Jesus was nailed. I see the hawthorn, Crategeous and imagine the white flowers in early spring and how I need to gather the flowers and early leaves. I can see Josepth of Arimathea with the virgin Mary in a boat rowing towards Britanica, England, going to the tin mine. I can smell the scent of the flowers which some people say smells like dead rotting flesh, which becomes sweet as they dry, like yellow clover. I agree it's a scent, you wouldn’t immediately link to the flower. Once the 5 petaled white with pink speckled flower petals fall to the ground, the leaves that emerge shortly don’t look like they belong to the rose family hawthorn tree. The thorns of the hedge belong to roses. The fruits resemble apples. You have to remember to keep the flowers, dry them in paper bags, and then come back months later, when the days are getting shorter for the fruit, to make the hawthorn tincture heart medicine. I wonder what kind of hyssop was brought to Jesus’ lips as he was hanging weeping in pain. Lala Lama Sabuctani, my God my God why have you forsaken me. I was in the elm, walnut forest and would splash my water bottle, imagining it blessed holy water on the elm trees because it has been so dry, all their leaves had fallen. I pray the rosary.
Snow had fallen, melted followed by rain and fog over a few weeks time. The clouds had opened up a view to the foot hills of Sierra Blanca peak in back of Ruidoso. I was in the lowlands looking towards the peak soaked in blankets of drapery curtain clouds and snow. There was a purplish tone to the clouds, dark grey and black like the purple cloth covering the cross and statues during lent. I was traveling the south route because an early winter storm would make Emory pass a snowy white Christmas card slippery switch back joke. It looked like the sun was buried in the mountain snow shining upwards illuminating clouds and swirling snow, shadow rorshack composite prints to explore. A road runner was making its throaty call. The road runner’s call is a mix of a higher pitched screech owl sound, with a slight articulation of a duck squawk at the beginning of the sound, in five or six ‘hookach, hookah, hookach, hookah’. Correcamino raises the feathers on the top of his head into a tilted crown. He lifts and lowers the feathered crown like the hoodoos, and standing rock mesas towards Hite Utah. I was for a moment near Blanding looking at Paradox, driving up past Hite, Natural Bridges, Tickaboo and the Henry mountains. These mountains store the scent of sage, wormwood and up in the hidden Aspen meadows, the whole story of the Neanthadal ice age were still being told. There were still a few mountain goats, up past the Jarbidge, those mountains near Jackpot, like the elk near the deer house at Ancha. The elk bugling endlessly with the first snow of the madrean islands. Remnants, these remnant places with angelica root groves, valeriana, just before the red slick rock took over there was a grove of ancient remnant ponderosa pines in the desert with indian rice grass, old man sage Artemisia filofolia, in the spring May 22nd like clock work cycles cliff rose blooming so sweet the fragrance felt heard, smelt miles away. The roadrunner spoke about all these things with me. Roadrunner takes a few steps and leaps into the lower branches of a mesquite and rocks forward and back on his legs, turns his head, tilting it side to side. He raises and lowers his feathered crown. He is looking at me, acknowledging I exist and my journey although inexplicable to mostly everyone is valid, worthwhile and he knows I am peaceful, not a threat. The only revolution I seek is a revolution of kindness and flowers. Roadrunner looking listening into the distance and makes the call again. Both of us looking and listening. I too was listening and looking at the mountain going back and forth in light and shadow. La gobernadora scented desert was overwhelming me. I have other memories. These are my memories. Memories of slickrock. Of Beba and Papa, Chuck and Sheila, Howard and Irene sitting on the front porch. Maybe Donna and Dale Fawcette will be drilling wells and fighting about water with Tony Chelewski like Mike Windsor with a trophy wife, Sally and Bill, Suzanne and Steve with Mert, all finally making peace. For 25 years I have been trying to go home again. I want to walk with Eileen and Josh, Zane and Chia in the eternal flower world of orange globe mallow, indian rice grass, root beer verbena flowers, that flower world together.
The roadrunner call was an intention, an affirmation of this desert creosote smelling like rain, sulphur, alkali salt flats, dry dust, cryptogramic soil, with diamond light swelling up from the mountains, teasing with snow and shadow, revealing the bluest sky, then back to clouds and winter snow, through layers of fog, shooting star dust pollen, angels and holy beings, back to spring in an instant. I could hear tsu’gah tsu’gah the name he told me, and all the stories. Up there further north, it was ts’ah blue big sagebrush above the cockscomb monocline. Smelling like rain, west and drifting down, mixed with cedar and rabbit brush, and cow and deer shit. I could see Eileen’s nipple of grey chinle mixed with bits of petrified wood. Eileen's lips in my eyes. She was close enough to hear her breathing, whiffed with utah one seeded juniper smelling like cat piss and the ts’ah, a wormwood, really an artemisia but sweet like sage after a rain red slick rock desert. I would squeeze sage brush and artemisia fillilolia, old man’s sage, slick rock cedar and pinyon pine pitch and gave them to Joshua to smell and remember. Here there was this sweet, resinous, sticky winter female rain tsu’gah from the gobernadora. I squeezed it and the leaves were sappy, sweet, bitter, brand new and stuck to my fingers. https://youtu.be/KiSyRxgcxRo?feature=shared
To describe this healing process is quite symbolic and theatrical. For this reason the church is set up facing east, with an altar, statues and incense because we enter a symbolic theatrical space, on a regular schedule. We need to enter a symbolic space where we can have the courage to declutter the body as a space. The idea that explaining and categorizing, intricately naming and dissecting a situation is solving a situation is untrue. Knowing, identifying some process as occurring is not the same as allowing the healing process to acquire traction and sort itself out to our long term benefit. Taking a pain pill may seem like a good idea short term for a condition. Though more importantly is understanding that pain is a portion of the healing process, as in many cases fever. When you have an acute tissue trauma situation, taking a tylenol may slow down the healing process because the pain is not so much a symptom but evidence of events occuring in the body mobilizing healing forces within the body. When we look outside and see leaves moving, tree branches swaying then we know wind is blowing, atmospheric movement. The authority in the situation is God, perhaps our explanation agrees with the mind of God here and there, perhaps we are way off. The most basic level of what occurs is movement, flow. Our job is not to impede and block the flow. Our ideas may be useful but a lot of the process is addition through subtraction. People create words to understand a situation yet each situation needs to be understood face to face. Inflammation in the body, tends to be understood according to its word origin, inflame, as in burning, warm, red, hot burning painful. The first response is to put out the fire. Anti-inflammatory. The first face to face experience of inflammation is experiencing the body’s inherent nature of righting itself, correcting itself, mobilizing healing to a specific area. So dousing the flame time and time again pushes the deficiency deeper and deeper. People at this point will say, “Yes that’s true, but”, more antibiotics, more pain killers, more anti-inflammatories and so on.
In both eastern and western states there is the tick carried disease called Lyme disease. Although people may take antibiotics for a tick bite, and recover. Others report long term health issues following both the tick bite and conventional treatment with antibiotics. Other people get a tick bite, reporting no symptoms of consequence. So there is a wide range of possibilities. In people with long term symptoms the current understanding of the etiology of tick borne disease transmission is multi-layered and nuanced. To simplify the lyme tick disease. The tick is an insect which during the spring and summer seeks out mammals for their blood in the process of the ticks life cycle. Ticks are found in grassy woods, and the wetter the woods the more ticks you will find. In a wet warm year from Washington, Oregon, Pennsylvania to Maine ticks emerge in spring and seek out blood to reproduce. Deer found in the woods of tick filled woods can be found covered with blood engorged ticks. Likewise dogs or any mammal breathing will be exposed to bloodsucking ticks. In tick filled woods in springtime a wet forest will be teeming with ticks. In people, a person walking will meet tiny nearly invisible ticks. The tick crawls on the shoe, crawls up the leg, fixing itself on skin further up anywhere there is skin. The tick bites, punctures the skin, and begins to suck blood. The bite is painless and not detectable in any way. But after a few hours to days, the tick swells from the size of a grain of rice, to a small raisin filled with blood. The tick may or not be infected with a spirochete bacteria called Borrelia spp. Spirochete bacteria are so called because under a microscope they present a corkscrew shape. Spirochete bacteria are responsible for syphilis, leptospirosis and intermittent recurring fevers. Lyme disease from tick bites start with a bull eyed sized circle around the tick bite on exposed skin. Due to people’s various pigmentation and skin color, the rash will be more difficult to detect in African American, native american or hispanic people of color as opposed to white light colored skin. It may be mistaken for eczema or a bruise, rash and not be identified as the bull’s eye lyme rash. It starts with flu-like fever and joint pain. Later the disease process involves bouts of fever, which tend to resolve then return, bone pain and inflammation of joints. In addition to these flu-like symptoms the lyme disease can in some people turn to something resembling syphilis with brain fog, cognitive changes resembling dementia, tremors and other CNS central nervous symptoms. In some more urban areas familiar with lyme, the best thing is to remove the tick, according to protocol and save the tick, and send it to a competent lab or in some areas, send it to a public health agency who will test the tick for presence of Borrelia spp spirochete bacteria. There is no way to know whether a tick carries lyme unless the tick is tested.
Lyme disease treated at the initial tick bite stage, in young healthy individuals tends to resolve with anti-biotics, the disease can be cured. However in older people, or in people with compromised immune systems, with tick bites and even with people treated at the first indication with appropriate antibiotics, can suffer long term symptoms that are the nature of the spirochete bacteria presenting itself. The spirochete bacteria has an ability to disguise and hide from both the antibiotics and the immune system in body tissues. Months or weeks later the symptoms return. The spirochete bacteria actually hide in parts of the immune system, like the white blood cells, spleen and nodes producing swelling in the lymph gland centers such as the groin, armpits, throat causing non-differentiated swelling. Lyme can produce a sustained exhaustion and low energy level with low metabolism resembling a sluggish thyroid. All these problems can trigger the body to go into psychological depression mode. Although initially a typical malaria like intermittent fever complex may be most noticed, later the lyme disease in a more advanced entrenched cycle goes deeper and tends to be a cold, lowered temperature, low metabolism presentation. At this point it may present similar to advanced chronic COPD or altitude sickness with lowered oxygen level, tiredness, and impeded flow of vital energy within the body. So at this advanced entrenched lyme stage herbs like skunk cabbage, teasel root, japanese knotweed and supportive herbs typical of chronic cold damp conditions ginger, cinamon, cayenne, turmeric, and well known joint herbs such as frankincense, myrrh, boswelia. Likewise herbs used to encourage lymph flow such as alder bark and red root. In short a generalized non-specific supportive approach to the symptoms.
I spent a long time with hedondilla, la gobanadora. It looked so green, like crayola forest green crayons were melted on the wrinkled wrapped, layered lizard branches. The leaves looked rubbery or like plastic flowers placed at a grave, resembling flowers with festive strange colors not seen in nature. I am never sure if I love the plants for what they are or love them for their relationship to Creator and how that relationship is all. The plants have to be everything. If people talk about movies or elections, or wars I will just nod my head and and listen to their voices like their voices are dogs barking, or pantomime theater with sound and gestures meant to explain their place in the social order as trustworthy or courageous. I have no clue what is happening in the big world they are animatedly talking about, as if the latest world stage, best friend villain or hero had just walked down the aisle at walmart and was walking out to the parking lot. I admit it is a world to me like Mars or a fun to play video game, a place I have never been and a game I have never played. If there are televised events and picture shows, I can’t be bothered.
I am looking for signs of dried, round, yellow passion fruit. Maybe I’ll be able to see it now that all the leaves have dried and fallen to the ground. Now there is space between the trees were before there was none. Maybe the elm trees all took a step back, take a step back, take a step back. I say the rosary and look for passiflora fruit hiding in the forest empty of summer leaves where all the leaves are brown, gone, and the sky is grey as I ride my bicycle along the rail trail.
I try to understand modern names, people’s formal names which to me resemble childhood nicknames. These are names you would use for someone you are on the most intimate friendly terms, or a small child. I try to understand the names today but tend to go conspiracy darkmode. “Tree-nah”, “Mee-ah”, “Trass-ley”, “Mer-teek-ah”, “Baily”, “Stay-lee”, “Daily”, “Haley”. No matter how I try to spin it they don’t sound like names to me. Yet I want to honor their names and respect their experience. Then I remember I am old and worn out and lucky to be standing on two legs. I have started to use hiking poles to walk in the mountains. I need to be careful on these 20 mile bicycle rides I don’t want to get run over and thrown in a ditch to rot and be fertilizer for teasel, have my eyeballs picked out by crows, chicken mcnuggets for raccoons, great horned owl snacks, meals for gimpy straight legged bob cats, coyote puppy chow. I guess there could be worse things. I remember reading that the indians named their children after the first thing they saw after the baby was born. “Fog on the mountain.”, “Many kills”, “Summer wind”, “Sunrise”, “Elk bugles”, “Muddy river”, “Big bear”. The indian names were observed events of significance and beauty. I don’t know a single culture that named their children, their offspring, their future with pleasant but meaningless sounds that refer to no virtue or person existing previously. The only thing I can imagine is that the choice they are making to name their children cute word salad sounds devoid of meaning, breaking with the history of their people is an acknowledged awareness, and acceptance of the defeated. Maybe it’s something else, being old and worn out everything new is part of the end. Maybe I only stare into a glass darkly, only seeing my own end. Seeing my own death in unfamiliar names, criticizing people’s names who had no power to pick their name. Is my name Paul a better name? I remember my father, an opera singer calling Frank Sinatra, ‘a crooner, not a singer’, because he whispered into a microphone to project his voice volume. Opera singers could fill a whole theatre without a microphone using the power of their voice. Consciously throwing away family heritage culture and embracing a future of random nothingness as a conditional bargain for a disavowed existence within a cultural matrix of non-being. Meaninglessness is not a value that can be sustained because it is rooted in chaos. Meaninglessness is imposed over what are meaningful relationships not by random events but instead by a disempowerment for the purpose of wealth redistribution within a social context of change, directed change, not random cute change. Randomness is a curse not a virtue to be cultivated. When a tornado, earthquake, flood or hurricane occurs and imposes non-being and randomness over an human ecosystem in the bioregion it is a tragedy. If a damn is built that floods an area where people have lived, we would not say the damn was a random unplanned event and be surprised that it disrupted the life of the people living there. The damn was planned probably decades ago and the human disruption was rightly or wrongly assigned an acceptable outcome, a trade off for the benefits the damn provided to that human community. People within a culture, courting, marrying, having families and naming their children is not a random chance event and the names given children are not sudden unexplained occurrences. In a effective culture families are planned and for that reason naming children is not and can never be a chance, haphazard occurrence. These new names are to me basically pleasant musical sound jingles that are rooted in violence because they mock the person named, reducing them to trivia. Combinations of near meaningless sounds may be ok as names for a parrot or dog but not for a son or daughter born for a lineage of destiny. These names are generic invented words referring to nothing, and would work just as well for an energy drink, or pharmaceutical pill, or a restaurant chain. “Mer-teen-nah”, beat type 2 diabetes with Merteena. For chicken wings game day it’s never too late, Merteenahs has you covered. In the relative recent past the names of people were specific words in the greater category of human names of other persons. Names were never in any way meant to be original, with innovative experimental spellings and pronunciations, unless you were a carnival performer dancing half naked in your underware, spinning on a rope, swallowing swords. You were named for a person who lived before you: an uncle, grandmother, aunt, cousin, father, aunt or sister, a saint, a virtue or ideal form. Joy, John, Patience, Isabel. Diane, Elena, Helen, Thomas. Now the person’s name is what? You are telling me through these names that the Sex Pistols refrain, no future, no future is truth and we are to offer no resistance. So the idea is to be light hearted, carefree, always universally seductive, intimate, with a lobotomized, have a nice day smile, superficial, empty of all concern. Everyone on the edge of spontaneous hysterical cackling laughter.
Out of desperation I run to the plants telling them everything. I was told that if you spoke your intention to water, flowing water, the intention would travel, floating like a message in a sealed glass bottle, on the waves of the sea, and someone could understand the message spoken. The same way with eastern cedar and western red cedar, sagebrush and creosote brush. Our thoughts travel through the roots of cedar, artemisia, la gobanadora across vast distances. Like the smoke of incense drifting upwards to angels, to God. So that someone five hundred miles away could grasp the cedar, smell its fragrance and hear what you said, understood what you felt. When they met you your words and ideas would follow. It doesn’t matter where I go. Even if I am in church and look at the cross I imagine what kind of tree it was that Jesus was nailed. I see the hawthorn, Crategeous and imagine the white flowers in early spring and how I need to gather the flowers and early leaves. I can see Josepth of Arimathea with the virgin Mary in a boat rowing towards Britanica, England, going to the tin mine. I can smell the scent of the flowers which some people say smells like dead rotting flesh, which becomes sweet as they dry, like yellow clover. I agree it's a scent, you wouldn’t immediately link to the flower. Once the 5 petaled white with pink speckled flower petals fall to the ground, the leaves that emerge shortly don’t look like they belong to the rose family hawthorn tree. The thorns of the hedge belong to roses. The fruits resemble apples. You have to remember to keep the flowers, dry them in paper bags, and then come back months later, when the days are getting shorter for the fruit, to make the hawthorn tincture heart medicine. I wonder what kind of hyssop was brought to Jesus’ lips as he was hanging weeping in pain. Lala Lama Sabuctani, my God my God why have you forsaken me. I was in the elm, walnut forest and would splash my water bottle, imagining it blessed holy water on the elm trees because it has been so dry, all their leaves had fallen. I pray the rosary.
Snow had fallen, melted followed by rain and fog over a few weeks time. The clouds had opened up a view to the foot hills of Sierra Blanca peak in back of Ruidoso. I was in the lowlands looking towards the peak soaked in blankets of drapery curtain clouds and snow. There was a purplish tone to the clouds, dark grey and black like the purple cloth covering the cross and statues during lent. I was traveling the south route because an early winter storm would make Emory pass a snowy white Christmas card slippery switch back joke. It looked like the sun was buried in the mountain snow shining upwards illuminating clouds and swirling snow, shadow rorshack composite prints to explore. A road runner was making its throaty call. The road runner’s call is a mix of a higher pitched screech owl sound, with a slight articulation of a duck squawk at the beginning of the sound, in five or six ‘hookach, hookah, hookach, hookah’. Correcamino raises the feathers on the top of his head into a tilted crown. He lifts and lowers the feathered crown like the hoodoos, and standing rock mesas towards Hite Utah. I was for a moment near Blanding looking at Paradox, driving up past Hite, Natural Bridges, Tickaboo and the Henry mountains. These mountains store the scent of sage, wormwood and up in the hidden Aspen meadows, the whole story of the Neanthadal ice age were still being told. There were still a few mountain goats, up past the Jarbidge, those mountains near Jackpot, like the elk near the deer house at Ancha. The elk bugling endlessly with the first snow of the madrean islands. Remnants, these remnant places with angelica root groves, valeriana, just before the red slick rock took over there was a grove of ancient remnant ponderosa pines in the desert with indian rice grass, old man sage Artemisia filofolia, in the spring May 22nd like clock work cycles cliff rose blooming so sweet the fragrance felt heard, smelt miles away. The roadrunner spoke about all these things with me. Roadrunner takes a few steps and leaps into the lower branches of a mesquite and rocks forward and back on his legs, turns his head, tilting it side to side. He raises and lowers his feathered crown. He is looking at me, acknowledging I exist and my journey although inexplicable to mostly everyone is valid, worthwhile and he knows I am peaceful, not a threat. The only revolution I seek is a revolution of kindness and flowers. Roadrunner looking listening into the distance and makes the call again. Both of us looking and listening. I too was listening and looking at the mountain going back and forth in light and shadow. La gobernadora scented desert was overwhelming me. I have other memories. These are my memories. Memories of slickrock. Of Beba and Papa, Chuck and Sheila, Howard and Irene sitting on the front porch. Maybe Donna and Dale Fawcette will be drilling wells and fighting about water with Tony Chelewski like Mike Windsor with a trophy wife, Sally and Bill, Suzanne and Steve with Mert, all finally making peace. For 25 years I have been trying to go home again. I want to walk with Eileen and Josh, Zane and Chia in the eternal flower world of orange globe mallow, indian rice grass, root beer verbena flowers, that flower world together.
The roadrunner call was an intention, an affirmation of this desert creosote smelling like rain, sulphur, alkali salt flats, dry dust, cryptogramic soil, with diamond light swelling up from the mountains, teasing with snow and shadow, revealing the bluest sky, then back to clouds and winter snow, through layers of fog, shooting star dust pollen, angels and holy beings, back to spring in an instant. I could hear tsu’gah tsu’gah the name he told me, and all the stories. Up there further north, it was ts’ah blue big sagebrush above the cockscomb monocline. Smelling like rain, west and drifting down, mixed with cedar and rabbit brush, and cow and deer shit. I could see Eileen’s nipple of grey chinle mixed with bits of petrified wood. Eileen's lips in my eyes. She was close enough to hear her breathing, whiffed with utah one seeded juniper smelling like cat piss and the ts’ah, a wormwood, really an artemisia but sweet like sage after a rain red slick rock desert. I would squeeze sage brush and artemisia fillilolia, old man’s sage, slick rock cedar and pinyon pine pitch and gave them to Joshua to smell and remember. Here there was this sweet, resinous, sticky winter female rain tsu’gah from the gobernadora. I squeezed it and the leaves were sappy, sweet, bitter, brand new and stuck to my fingers. https://youtu.be/KiSyRxgcxRo?feature=shared
Rambling on Teasel, Dipsaucus fullonum during last December and Christmas time, around December 15, in the season of adventus or the parousia of an Ice fog full moon in the tropical zodiac sign of the twins known to us as Gemini, near winter solstice. Adventus or advent comes from the roman latin word which means the season of arrival, as of the formal arrival of the emperor of Rome. For us the first Christian of importance was not Paul the apostle, it was the Roman emperor Constantine who saw the miraculous sign at the Milvian bridge on 28 October 312AD. Just as we are taught that without Mary there could be no Jesus, without the emperor Constantine there would be no Senor Jesuchristo, no santa fe and no santa cruz, no Christians, no holy faith, no holy cross. It was blessed Santa Elena, the holy and perfect mother of Emperor Constantine who found and returned La Santa Cruz, the holy cross to us.
From the writing of Nicolas Culpeper Herbal circa 1650 , entry on Teasel: “It is so well known, that it needs no description, being used with the clothworkers. The wild Teasle is in all things like the former, but that the prickles are small, soft, and upright, not hooked or stiff, and the flowers of this are of a fine blueish, or pale carnation colour, but of the manured kind, whitish.
Place.] The first grows, being sown in gardens or fields for the use of clothworkers: The other near ditches and rills of water in many places of this land.
Time.] They flower in July, and are ripe in the end of August.
Government and virtues.] It is an herb of Venus. Dioscorides saith, That the root bruised and boiled in wine, till it be thick, and kept in a brazen vessel, and after spread as a salve, and applied to the fundament, doth heal the cleft thereof, cankers and fistulas therein, also takes away warts and wens. The juice of the leaves dropped into the ears, kills worms in them. The distilled water of the leaves dropped into the eyes, takes away redness and mists in them that hinder the sight, and is often used by women to preserve their beauty, and to take away redness and inflammations, and all other heat or discolourings.” -from The Writings of Nicolas Culpeper circa 1650 Nicolas Culpeper Herbal
Using the cold weather stuck frozen times on turtle island to explore under the auspicious guidance of Nuestra Señora Guadalupe madre de Dios y madre de nuestra, Madre de El Salvador Nuestro Señor Jesucristo. “The star that they had seen in its rising went ahead of them until it stopped above the place where the child lay. At the sight of the star, they were overjoyed. Entering the house, they saw the child with Mary, his mother, and bowed to the ground in homage to him; then they opened their treasures and offered him gifts: gold, frankincense and myrrh” (Matthew 2:9–11). The star of the Magi is also known as the Epiphany connected to the sidereal body composed of heavenly principles. The Magi reported back to king Herod but were instructed in a dream to be deceptive in communicating with Herod, as Herod’s intentions were not life affirming to the Christ child and the Holy Family. As the Holy Family Jesus, and the Massacre of the Innocents, Mary and Joseph fled from these maleficent forces pursuing their peril. On their endless road of flight, Mary and the Holy Family Jesus, Maty and Joseph found shelter and stayed a few days with a farmer who at the time was just beginning preparing his field for planting. The wheat was just planted. As the Holy Family Jesus, Mary and Joseph were refreshed, they prepared to leave the shelter of the good famer, Mary said to the farmer, “When the soldiers of Herod come after us, they will ask of you, if you have seen us. Answer them, ‘Yes I did see a family like you describe.’ The soldiers of Herod will then ask, ‘Tell us, farmer, 'When did they pass this way? Herod the king wants to find the child and offer homage.’, ‘Answer them, ‘They came by this way when I was just planting this wheat.’ When the soldiers came by, looking for the Holy Family, the wheat was tall, high with wheat berries ripe and ready to harvest. Just as Mary foretold the soldiers of Herod asked the farmer, ‘Tell us farmer, When did they come this way?’. Before the Holy Family left the shelter and sanctuary of the farmer, Mary Joseph and the Christ child Jesus performed a miracle. The wheat the farmer planted overnight grew magically to full height which would take 3 months to full maturity in a single night . So the soldiers turned back because of the wheat miracle, the soldiers thought it had been months since the Holy Family Jesus, Mary and Joseph passed this way, and it was no use searching for them here.
The heavenly star the magi followed heralded the arrival of the supreme remedio, Nuestro Señor Jesucristo and the magi brought with them gifts of gold and two desert tree sap remedio hierbas, frankincense and myrrh. It is no accident we burn the copal resin of encencio and elephant trees to accompany our prayers. We know Nuestra Señora Guadalupe in 1531, during the same December time, 500 years ago came to San Juan-Diego in a divine appearance at the hill Tepeyac. Side Note: It is important to recognize that these apparitions of María Santísima Madre de Dios have occurred for 2000 years and began with Santiago, saint James in the year 40AD, when Nuestra Señora appeared to Santiago in Zaragoza Spain. Just as St Maria Agreda came to New Mexico, with the blue Bonnets, visiting the new world and teaching. And so immediately the Christian faith belongs to the european people. Our faith came without a book, it came through the mother goddess there as Mary. St James is the apostle of Jesus and went immediately to Spain. Santiago is the apostle of Nuestro Señor Jesuchristo, who traveled to España, Spain shortly after the Ascension. These apparitions of Mary the mother of Jesus are one of the essential determining factors of the Catholic faith, La Santa Fe. The faith arrived first well before the book was set down in written form.
As our teacher has said, “Without La Señora Maria Santisima there is no Christ.” For nearly 2000 years many Christians were illiterate peasants living a pastoral life. The written bible was important as a symbol of the spirit of God, Christ, Mary, angels and saints active in the world. We worship the book like the same way we worship statues of Mary. Even though they have tried to put her in a corner, she is still in the center. After all Mary was a woman and women always are the center of attention. They give birth. So whatever there is in the way of stuff, people, cultures it’s the woman who hatched those eggs. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Obviously the hen who completed what was forgotten by the rooster. The idea that the La Santa Fe is found and justified by proof of words in a book, a sola scriptura is a foreign concept applied many centuries later to wrestle the faith in a medley of the scientificos. The word of John as the logos was not a phonetic sound or series of phases written in a book. We who live La Santa Fe today go not to the written bible for a virtue signal to appease. Just as before we go to the rosary, scapular, the holy latin tridentine mass, the sacraments, knowing that as science which supports us, not the science of the scientificos, but the science of history, the science of familia, the science of Santa Fe.
The genes of the baby are composed of 50% father and 50% mother’s genes. There is something of the father in the mother’s brain, held there like a virus that crosses the blood brain barrier. In La Santa Fe we believe in La Santa Fe traditional tridentine Mass traditional, the bread and wine are transformed by magic. Without apology or explanation, magic beyond the grasp of human understanding, passed in an unbroken lineage from El Señor Jesuchristo, through direct apostles like Santiago into the flesh and blood, Corpus Christi of El Señor Jesuchristo, who being the son of La Señora Maria Santisima, means that the sacrament of “El pan nuestro de cada día dánosle hoy”, which we recite in our rosary, as the Our Father, Pater Noster is composed not only of the divine El Señor Jesuchristo but of 50% or equal parts La Señora Maria Santisima, Mary, Maria as well as the Holy Ghost, who fathered the child El Senor Jesuchristo. As Jesus was born of the virgin Mary, conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, when we take the sacrament of the tridentine mass within La Santa Fe, the bread is composed of Jesus, Mary and the Holy Ghost. We are told to sign every activity so we, “Do this in memory of me.”“Por la señal (✝) de la Santa Cruz de nuestros enemigos (✝) líbranos, Señor (✝) Dios nuestro. En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo. Amén.”
In the old stories of the middle ages there is the stag, the antlered elk of europe which is Senor Jesuchristo and ourselves also. The elk bounds and leaps, struggling through the lowland thorny rose bushes, haw thorn, raspberry, blackberry. Further up on the mountain there was stony cat claw and mesquite thorn scrub desert, thick with cholla and ocotillo. The courtly country lady sounds the horn and the hunters release their hound dogs which were kept in cages in pickup trucks. Like JJ Romero still does up near Reserve, to tree bear and lion. If you watch JJ hunting he gets word of a bear or lion. The dogs get the scent of the lion and off they go screaming , howling and barking. The dogs tree the lion, with the lion up the tree and the dogs at the bottom in a pack. "The dogs that she held leashed in the woods Dame Ignorance has set loose after the stag; they are Desire, Rashness, Overconfidence, Who, filled with worldly pleasure, make him take many a leap.” Our ancestors living so long ago saw these tapestries and in these pictures of the dogs, the stag, the huntswoman blowing the horn, the antlered stag was ourselves. The two antlers being the cross. The stag, bull elk, being both ourselves and all the human situation of suffering, “Then Old Age mounts an all-out assault
That drives him from the lake
And unleashes upon him Pain and Doubt,
Cold and Heat, and thus brings on
Care and Trouble to seize him.
And Age with wrinkled flesh
And Heaviness make him flee
Toward Sickness, the dreaded one.”
The woman who we know as Guadalupe and through a mystery also the mother of Christ, as an apparition of the angels and saints, come from the world of flowers. Then she returned to the world of flowers. The flowers are actually left behind by Mary the mother of God. We know Jesus was deeply involved with trees. He died on a tree creating salvation where there was none before. Placed in the ground like a seed, he rose again, year after year, every spring Easter he rises again. This is the meaning of, 'Do this in memory of me'. Guadalupe asked San Juan Diego to climb to the top of the hill at Tepeyac a half century, five hundred years ago, to gather herbs, flowers and remedios. Again none of this is found or do we need to find it in the bible. When we take the remedios of St Peter, San Pedro of the flower world we take into our bodies the Holy Eucharist of Santa Fe being both the body and blood of Senor Jesuchristo and Maria Madre Santisima, the mother of God, Madre de Dios, y Madre de nosotros. There is not a single moment when we turn to virtue signal power in a spiral imposed by the dominant culture upon us within their narrative. Guadalupe taught San Juan-diego about the plants he was instructed to use to heal. When we pray and say, “Mother of God and nuestra”, this is the signal in the limpias and signing. We do the same. We climb hills and enter the flower world of Santa Fe, Holy faith, where everything is possible, because without faith we are like leaves, fallen from trees, blown about, lying haphazardly on the ground. Without faith there is no possibility of family because the deepest aspirations come from beyond the grave. We voice the aspirations of remedios from the flower world. Yet both the remedios and the aspirations are beyond personal ambition. We can no more own the aspirations, the remdios or the world of flowers because we are caretakers based on the reality of death. Death creates the sacredness of flowers, of remedios, of flowers. Even though many families were destroyed and within the narrative negated. The Sagrada Familia, Holy Family, exists both within the biological family and in the circle of love by adoption, for those open to its mystery. Our aspirations are not so much from heaven but more from the earth, beyond the generation who stands before us. Without faith there is no possibility of using the roots that go deeply into the ground like mesquite roots that hold the sand from devouring everything into dust. Because we are more than leaves. We are trees and our wood builds the benches and doors of the church, our wood is the beams holding up the roof of the church in which we pray, and the church in which we pray is the home and family .
From the mother of grace we are gifted the plants to heal self and others, to do some good as best we can with tequila and cebadia. Psychology is correct. Those first years with our parents, mother and father lead to many things. Many issues occur between the mother and father. For that reason we invoke San Jose, Saint Joseph the protector of Mary and Jesus, El Senor JesuChristo and the Holy Family. In our homes, even if we have no home we have what serves as altars with statues, santos, rocks, stones, leaves and roots. If we have no one to sleep with, we sleep with the statue of the virgin Mary, Nuestra Senora. If we have no churches, no priests we still maintain the Santa Fe, the holy faith, by wearing the brown scapular, the miraculous medal. We find our milagros de La Navidad. Some are gifted the knowledge of their ancestors. Some only have the dreams that come when we close our eyes. When we smell la gobernadora’s sticky sweet, salty, bitter leaves of rain.
It is truly a blessing that some can speak to their living father and mother, making things right and go on their way. For many though they have sketchy shadowy knowledge of their father and mother. Their father or mother may have died. Many are not completely sure even who their mother or father is or was. There is a blank space that is a loss, an incompleteness, a fundamental uncertainty that they carry with them wherever they go. Because we are tool using social animals everything is doled out in a hierarchy of established group and family bonds and obligations within the social world. To those made fatherless and motherless, less or little is given. So there is this fundamental lack that compromises everything. Divine providence teaches us that what is can not be argued. What is and who you are follows you like a shadow cast in brilliant sunlight. We can pretend what is, is not. Yet it’s like a pebble in your shoe, you have to accept the pebble in your shoe because with every step there is pain. Yes it is true, pain for us is to endure. Yet we do not cultivate pain, it’s there and deal with it. We remove the pebble, and continue on. This is especially true to the new orphans of the industrial, and even more so the stark dystopiana of the new new-world internet of generational accelerating AI. If you have this lack, there is nothing to explain, no one has to tell you about it. There are no faithless found in foxholes that endure.
For this reason the lessons from flower world are important. Here it is understood the sun is father sky, and the moon is mother earth. The sun shines on everyone, likewise the rain and snow. It is what is. We work on resolving issues in this way, through spiritual means. We work on resolving issues through spiritual means by calling on Jesus, Mary, the angels and saints not because we are fundamentally more spiritual than others, but because we are less spiritual, more angry, more jealous, more broken, more in need of mercy. This need is the baptism of desire as Archbishop Marcel Lefebrve said. We pray as best we can. For some people their mother is there on the telephone, for us we have to use the rosary, Maria Santissima, Mary, the act of contrition, los remedios. When we say the Holy Rosary together we have in that circle our family, when we say ‘Holy Mary, the mother of God and our mother’, ‘Santa Maria, Madre de Dios y madre de nosotros.’, we mean these words. Other people can go to the doctor, they have health insurance, walmart prescriptions, deductibles, we have nothing, only the remedios, only the rosary, only the faith of desire. Desire becomes our law of longing. If we have no priest to hear our confession we confess to stones, and not always the stones of mountains. We confess to the stones of asphalt, concrete and barbed razor wire, of rusted factories and dissolving, turning back to mud, bricks and melting adobe blocks. For us that faith in the materia medica dispatched by the angels Raphel. The Holy virgin becomes the everything and everyone. It is not so much we have faith, instead faith has us. Faith possesses us. We can not escape faith because it our destiny to spread the remedios. We choose to live from will. That willing to live is refusing to go dark. Something compels us to say yes, to live, to give birth. This was the fiat of Mary. Some would say Mary made the choiceless choice of yes, and her yes is our yes. The yes of the flower world. While it is true we use the traditional remedios, apple cider vinegar, marrubio, yerba del negrita blooming at winter solstice becomes our milagro. Though more often than not we work with weedy prickly weedy plants like teasel. We work with the plants they ban, burn and spay.
Teasel, Dipsaucus or teasel is observed everywhere. You don’t have to look hard to see it. Frequently forming dense thickets along fence lines and road sides. It is a tall big biennial plant, whose flower heads last through the winter into the following spring. When you meet teasel you won’t have to crawl, or use a 10x loupe to see the flowers. It meets you eye to eye, face to face head tall, often six feet tall or more.
Teasel in Asian Chinese TCM is called Xu Duan, which fixes what is broken. Because we are broken, we use the broken. We rescue things, rescue places. We go to where no one wants to go, like teasel. Teasel, being the common name, comes from the Old English word, taesen, to tease, in the sense of teasing your hair. Like women from the 1980’s 45 years ago with giant hair do’s, beautiful, striking, teased teasel. Here being meant to tease or card wool, in the sense of raising the fibers. Old wooden boards are found where the dried teasel flower heads are attached with a handle, and make a brush to tease the wool.
Dipsacus fullonum is also known as the older scientific synonym Dipsacus sylvestris or another local invasive Teasel, known as D. laciniatum. Dipsaucus fullonum, or Fuller’s teasel has upward pointing curved spiny pointed sharp bracts, which form a spiny cup which are noticed on the base of the dried flower heads vs D. laciniatum, whose bracts point outward more or less straight or downward. On this turtle island, teasel is a widely seen weedy plant we place into our herbal lens of focus. We advocate, talking plant story and verbalize, speak for these plants, to the glory of our Queen and the benefit of people so that these teasel plants as remedios, may take a role similar to another Dipsacus spp plant used in Asia, TCM.
Yet it is not only Asia which has embraced teasel Dipsacus, as an herbal remedio ally. Our own traditions likewise have used teasel. A study of pollen in the sedimentary level has revealed a sharp uptake of Dipsacus pollen in and around the Abbaye de Montmajour near Arles France dated to the high middle ages of the 11th and 12th century, where teasel was used in the carding of wool fibre. Hildegarde of Bingin living at the same time, familiar with both teasel’s use in processing wool and its herbal actions, wrote that teasel drove poison from the body.
Nicolas Culpeper in his English Herbal and writings in 1650 wrote, “It is so well known, that it needs no description, being used with the clothworkers.
The wild Teasle is in all things like the former, but that the prickles are small, soft, and upright, not hooked or stiff, and the flowers of this are of a fine blueish, or pale carnation colour, but of the manured kind, whitish.
Place.] The first grows, being sown in gardens or fields for the use of clothworkers: The other near ditches and rills of water in many places of this land.
Time.] They flower in July, and are ripe in the end of August.
Government and virtues.] It is an herb of Venus. Dioscorides saith, That the root bruised and boiled in wine, till it be thick, and kept in a brazen vessel, and after spread as a salve, and applied to the fundament, doth heal the cleft thereof, cankers and fistulas therein, also takes away warts and wens. The juice of the leaves dropped into the ears, kills worms in them. The distilled water of the leaves dropped into the eyes, takes away redness and mists in them that hinder the sight, and is often used by women to preserve their beauty, and to take away redness and inflammations, and all other heat or discolourings.” -from the writings of English herbalist Nicolas Culpeper Herbal circa 1650
In TCM teasel is called, Xu Duan, ‘restore what is broken’, as in broken bones, and fractures, nourishing the sinews being the soft connective tissues holding the bones together. Not only exactly that, or those things, it is an herb that tonifies yang. It’s taste is bitter, acrid with sweetness, slightly warming, working through kidney and liver meridians. Yang is understood as the bright light warmth of sun in terms of this sun-force inside our bodies. Yang is the bright sun shining. Because it tonifies liver and kidney it activates principles in the body that strengthen sinew and bone, hence the ‘restore what is broken’. Tonify means to address a deficiency. So we may ask, ‘What does liver and or kidney deficiency look like?’, or. ‘ How do these lacks appear or present?’. If some one crashes on a bicycle and fractures their wrist, or a backpacker carrying a heavy load tweaks an ankle, or if a 15 year old volleyball player damages the knee tearing the meniscus, or a wide out on a football team catches their cleats during a tackle and goes down with radial meniscus tear, these we could call acute strong ki youthful injuries. There is a working on what is broken but it’s different than a person in their 50’s, 60’s or 70’s who has chronic osteo-arthritic knee, shoulder or joint pain injury, yet this herb would have a place in the treatment of both. So there is a chronic long term, vs sudden acute presentation. Although there is the factor of youth, we also have to ask why one specific young person suddenly has this specific presentation of acute injury.
Liver and kidney deficiency in general presents with what we call traces or tell tale signs, these traces or anecdotal symptoms when viewed isolated mean we may very well miss the individual trees when viewing the forest. These signs and symptoms might mean very little but together presents an idealized portrait picture. In the same way as a classic sculpture might not be an accurate photographic portrait of any specific person yet somehow captures the inner essence of everyone. All classical herbalism schools take serious the internal vitalism that animates the person, thus doing no harm based on a morality of respect for the life process’ ability to right itself through nourishment, even though the exact process of the restoration maybe unknown. With sore lower back and knee pain, stiffness and crackling sounds like grains of sand in the joints with movement, the joints are dry, in general the legs are weakened, and the walking gait lacks fluidity, urine tends to dribble, rather than a gushing stream. All these things point towards kidney and liver deficiency.
Used long in european herbalism EUROPEAN:
1. Warms the Kidneys, Strengthens the Bones and Joints:
-Arthritic and Rheumatic complaints
2. Externally:
-Wounds, Trauma
While in TCM CHINESE:
1. Strengthens Liver and Kidneys, Strengthens Sinews and Bones:
-weakness or pain of the lower back; stiff joint
2. Prevents Miscarriage, Calms the Fetus:
-Uterine Bleeding
3. Used for Trauma:
-Bruising and Trauma, especially of the Lower Body
Dioscorides in his Materia Medica 64AD mentioned using the root prepared in wine as a creme or lotion applied topically for hemorrhoids. Hildegarde 1150AD used the root powder mixed with lard for rashes and described it as warm and dry with a detoxifying effect with the ability to drive poisons from the body. In addition to the root, the first years growth of leaves is used of this naturalized biennial.
It was widely spread far and near by people using it as a plant grown for the seed head top, used as a raking comb for its ability to card wool clothing. Even being adapted to mechanical implements for carding wool.
There are quite a few interesting useful plants growing nearby such as Urtica dioica, Sorbus aucuparia, Galium aparine, Fallopia japonica, Eupatorium perfoliatum, Ceanothus americanus, Artemisia spp used along with Dipsacus for healing long term illness resistant to conventual treatments.
Anyway, oh well the journey will continue only by the grace of God. Angel in some miracle found the water, so it was going to be the Kneeling Nun and the Chino mine. Above ground in the flower world I….
