Bookmark and Share        

 

Becoming a Herbalist

by Susun S. Weed

www.susunweed.com

 

~ Part Five ~


What causes change? What moves through a life and changes it? Astrologers look at the transits of the planets to explain the change. My mentor Elizabeth Kubler-Ross lays it to the ever- changing chaos of the ever-lovin' universe. Followers of the Dao would say that since I had it all, the next step was to lose it all. Whatever the answer, I can only speak for the results: One week I was a teacher at a college, living with my daughter in the home we built ourselves, by hand, on an organic farm in the Catskills, the next week I had neither job nor home.

"But how could you be made to leave the house you built?" my friends asked in astonishment. Because I did not own the land I built it on. And the woman who did, who I thought was my friend, who said she was my friend, turned a corner in her alcoholic mind and our relationship shifted. Before she saw me as an angel, now she saw me as the devil. Before I could do no wrong, now I could do nothing right. If her dog killed and ate my chicken and got sick it was my fault that the dog was sick. If I spent an hour cleaning the rental cottage for her, I was spying.

I could have stayed. I could have insisted in remaining in my house. But I did not know how to live with her paranoia, her fear, her accusations. Having only just found myself, claimed myself, I was too easily pulled back into self-doubt and self-contempt in the face of her wrath.

I had no idea then what alcoholism was, or what it did to people. My relationship with alcohol has been distant and unrewarding: half a beer or a glass of wine makes me feel sick and woozy. What's the fun in that? I learned in college--where one had to partake--that I could nurse a vodka drink all night and not suffer the next day like I did after wine or beer. (It's one of the reasons I only use vodka for making tinctures. There's no point in making medicine from poisons like brandy and high-proof alcohol.)

I had heard about alcoholism, of course, but she clearly wasn't an alcoholic. She was never drunk and all she ever had to drink was a glass of wine (which was always full). I saw her porch filled with empty wine bottles, but I didn't understand that all that wine was being drunk by her, bit by bit, minute by minute, hour after hour and day after day. Until she turned on me and instead of letting me share my bliss with her, she insisted on sharing her hell with me.

So I left. I returned to the goat dairy. My daughter, my herbs, my goats, and myself moved into the basement of an old farm house, with a stream running through it. Really, a stream. Outside my window large willows arched into a big river that had been damned into a long lake and one of the tributary streams that fed it was allowed to go its way unimpeded through the basement where I now lived.

It was nice to be back in a place I knew and loved, living with people I knew and loved. I mourned the loss of my hand-made house. I envisioned picking it up with a helicopter in the middle of the night and moving it to some land of my own.

That was a new thought for me. Previously I had maintained that no one could really own the earth, so I would not own land. But now I had a reason to own land. I wanted to protect it. I wanted to protect myself. I wanted to create safe space. Safe space for me and safe space for other women.

We began to look for land, we three sisters, we three lovers, we three feminists, we three powerful women. And what adventures we had. We looked one or two days a week. We looked at barns and farms and houses with land. We looked for privacy and found it rare. We looked for land that had been treated tenderly and found it rarer yet. We looked not only at the buildings on the land but at the plants there too. It amazed the realtors that we were more likely to favor a place because certain herbs grew there than because the kitchen was modernized.

We looked and looked. We found one farm we thought might do, even though there were massive power lines running through the back acreage, even though the man wore a pacemaker and the women complained of chest pains. (EMFs can disturb the electrical activity of the heart.) But the Goddess made it clear that we were not to be there; so we searched on.

Meanwhile, I rented space in the nearest large town, borrowed $100 from my ex-husband, and printed up flyers offering herbal medicine classes. I was still working at the health food store in my small town. In fact there were now three health food stores in the small town and they all wanted me to run their herb departments.

There's a funny story I tell about that first class that I gathered and taught on my own, without the backing of an institution. There were only four students, all women. The second meeting, only three of them came. And the same woman was absent from the third class too.

I called her and asked if there was a problem. Was I a terrible teacher? She didn't want to answer, but I persisted. At last she relented. "You're a fine teacher, but I'm having an affair. I need an excuse to be away from home one evening every week, and you're it." How I laughed! Now when I see someone leave my class I chuckle and wonder who they are off to meet.

Teaching, working at the health food stores, looking for land, these things marked the measure of my days for a year. Then, in the winter of 1977, I walked past the realtor's office in Woodstock, the one town we had never thought to look in, since we already lived there! A property on a card caught my eye. I opened the door and went in.

What causes change? What moves through a life and changes it? How can it be that opening a door turned the wheel of my life and brought me to the hardest challenge of all?

PART SIX

Go to Archive

copyright: susun weed

Back