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Becoming a Herbalist

by Susun S. Weed

www.susunweed.com

 

~ 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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