~ Part Four ~
"Me teach a class in herbal medicine? Unthinkable! Impossible!
Absurd!"
"But you must," she insisted. I have found paradise and I
am staying here and so you must teach the classes for me."
"No, I can't." I protested. "How can I teach a class
about herbal medicine? I'm not a healer. And I hardly known anything
about herbs. You have to come home and teach the class. I simply cannot
do it."
"You know as much about herbs as I do," she countered, "maybe
even more. And I am not coming home. You have to teach the class."
My dear friend, my companion in the realm of herbs, was on the other
end of the phone, a thousand miles away, telling me she was not coming
back ( oh, alas, my heart is breaking) and suggesting that I teach her
herbal medicine class (oh, dear, I fear my mind is on the verge of collapse).
Unthinkable! Impossible! Absurd!
I argued some more, but at last conceded that I would teach her class
starting in September, just a few weeks away. " At least send me
your class notes," I pleaded. "I can't," she replied
with real sorrow. "They're packed in a box in my mother's attic
for safe keeping."
Me teach a class in herbal medicine? It still seemed unthinkable, but
now I had to think about it because I had agreed to do it. And the more
I thought about it the more impossible and absurd it seemed. I realized
I needed help ifI was going to keep my commitment to teach others about
herbs and healing.
So I asked my all-women's therapy group for help. I wanted to touch
the knot of frozen fear within me. But I didn't even know what I was
afraid of. I was teaching lots of other classes; I wasn't shy. What
was the problem? What was so different about this class? What was feeding
such intense fear that I felt unable to act?
With the help and encouragement of the group I expressed my fear, actually
my dread, of teaching about herbal medicine. "No, no, no, no,"
I cried, sobbing with genuine grief. And when I looked at my hands they
were the hands of a very small girl. And in those hands was a fluffy
yellow duckling. And in my head was the memory of the joy and sensuous
pleasure of holding that warm, soft duckling; and the voice of my mother
saying: "Be careful! Don't kill it."
"I will kill it if I touch it!" Now I cried with despair,
knowing where the dread lived and what the fear ate. "I Will kill
it if I touch it!" No wonder I couldn't imagine myself teaching
a class on healing --my touch could kill. I wasn't a healer; I was a
potential killer.
The laughter that bubbled forth was free and easy. The silliness of
it all! That I could let my life be controlled by the fears of a little
girl. After an, I was grown-up, while she was still small. I was capable
of making up my own mind, while to her, the word ofMother was the word
of the Goddess. Cradling the little girl in my mind, I reassured her
that she could learn to touch with care and consciousness. And with
great compassion, I told her that women have a responsibility to give
death, just as we give life.
I guess it was enough for her--and me--because I made it through the
first herbal medicine class and an the following ones, too. I even agreed
to teach another series of classes on herbal medicine the following
spring at the same community college. Soon I was teaching herbal medicine
at other community colleges, as well.
After I created and staffed an herb department in the health food store
where I worked, the first one in town, and one of the first in the Northeast,
my reputation was established: I was the"herbalist, the green witch,
the wise woman.
In the midst of all this my husband returned from his time in the federal
penitentiary. I still taught evenings and worked days, though, for he
had decided to go "straight" and to go back to school to get
his PhD. Our reunion was difficult, and our lives together grew more
difficult. I got pregnant and had a legal abortion in the city. Everything
seemed to be changing, or was it that I had changed? I had become so
used to living "alone" (with my young daughter), that it seemed
disruptive to have to spend all my time with another adult.
Eventually I realized that I needed time alone. I told him I had arranged
to live half of the week with him and our daughter, and the other half
alone, with or without our daughter, as he wished. "But,"
he protested, "Who will cook for me and clean up after me when
you aren't here?"
"I guess you'll have to do it yourself," I replied. "But
that's why I have a wife," he retorted. "That's why I support
you. If you don't live with me every day of the week then you aren't
my wife." "I agree," I replied. "If I don't take
care of you then I am not your wife. I don't want to be your wife. I
don't want to be anyone's wife, not now, not ever. I hereby resign completely
from the role of wife."
"Well," he said, resigned. "Let's make it legal. And
I want you to move. I don't want our daughter to think that men abandon
her. I'm staying here with her. You find another place to live."
As the fates would have it, there was a space available at an organic
homestead with dairy goats. The time I spent there was some of the strangest
of my life, but when I left, a few months later, I took with me a love
of goats, the skills I needed to tend them, and my starter herd: Rupa,
an irrepressible Nubian, and her capricious doe kid, Dawn.
My next home was deeper in the Catskills. There I was at last able
to produce almost all my own food and to move deeper into the realm
of the plant spirits and deeper into the physical substance of the plants
and the ways they have to change how humans perceive and feel and survive.
I tended my goats, morning and night, season after season, timing myself
with their rhythms and the rhythms of the moon and the sun. I tended
a large organic garden and wildcrafted all the medicinal herbs I needed.
And a year later, on the same land, I built a house with an all-women
crew and all hand tools, too.
I was living the life I had envisioned and I loved it. Perhaps I was
poor in money, but I was rich with delight and love and real food, living
the simple life in my own hand-built, wood-heated house without electricity
or telephone.
And then, all of a sudden it seemed, I lost my home and was "no
longer wanted" as a teacher at the community college where I had
taught for so many years. I was pushed into creating a new life for
myself. Once again, I had to find a new home, and now I had another
problem. I had to figure out how to attract students to my herbal medicine
classes without the help of the community college, which puts its catalog
into every mailbox in the county.
PART FIVE
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