This passage spoke to my soul today. Perhaps it will move you too?
From the Afterword to Healing Lyme, by Stephen Buhner.
Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself. - Eric Fromm.
I remain in awe of the people who, infected with stealth infections, have refused to give up. They have struggled, often with little help or support, to find their way to health through an illness that, culturally, few understand. I am in awe of their courage and the willingness of so many to go outside the culturally accepted parameters of healing. Some, more than most people know, have turned to plants in that process. And many of those, as their healing has progressed, have, themselves, become people of the plant.
It is often like this when we are called to a new life path. Like so many of those who suffer from stealth pathogens, I found the world of plants over thirty years ago when I became ill and physicians could neither seem to diagnose nor help me. Oddly enough, a local herbalist had just that week introduced me to a plant on the land where I lived, one that was exceptionally good, she said, for intestinal cramping.
What I was experiencing was tremendously debilitating. If the spams hit away from a couch or bed, I spent a lot of time on the floor. So, in desperation, I dug the root of the plant carrying it with me, eating pieces of it from time to time. And little by little, the terrible intestinal cramping slowed and finally stopped. I was experiencing an extremely painful form of irritable bowel syndrome, though it would be many years before I understood that. After that initial treatment, the condition remained stable for over twenty years, when it did return, plants once again became my allies in healing, this time alleviating the condition permanently. (The secret? The fresh juices from a large slice of green cabbage and a few fresh plantain leaves from the front yard.)
Illness has a great many functions. It teaches us to be aware, to know ourselves, to understand how the world around us affects us each minute of our lives. It teaches us how to alter the fabric of our lives in order to become whole again ... and how to remain that way. Illness also teaches us about the darkness that each one of us must face sometime during our lives. In the process, we learn (though all of us would avoid it if we could) how to enter the darkness and endure it's touch. We learn about the territory of illness, the depths of depression that often accompany it, and struggle to face our own mortality. We acquire, often slowly and with great resistance, the qualities of character necessary to survive the journey. Personally, I would rather chew tacks. Still ... all of us must learn, sooner or later, to eat the meal set before us. We learn to eat darkness ... and eventually to be unafraid of it. (I don't remember getting information about all this in the owner's manual when I was born.)
There are few of us who spend much time in that kind of experience who do not end up, in one form or another, becoming healers sooner or later.
(...)
For many people, I suspect these words will have little meaning. But perhaps you are one of the ones who will hear them differently. If so, do as all people of the plant have done since time began ... follow the genius inside you, not the maps your culture has given you; listen to the world - it is always speaking to those who would listen - and learn to understand what it is telling you; remain childlike so you can ask the simple questions (which are the hardest, but most important, of all to find); seek the answers that you are uniquely meant to find; and find the work that is in you to do.
It is in our individual genius, all of us in our millions, that the way through the difficulties of our time will be found; it will never come from the pronouncements of top-down experts (as the stealth pathogens have taught us). Believe me, the journey is worth it.
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There is a song that in rare moments I can hear and feel. Often in an through nature. Being in a vast, covered forest, with the occasional ray of light coming through the needles of pines. My system comes to rest ... so that I am not longer the me I was. If I am anything ... in those moments ... it's the experience of that which I sense. And in the embodied processing of that experience I can know the other that's me. The tree I see in front of the little house in Green Bank, the sea from the vapur going to Burgaz, the sweet sight of the beloved, the smell of jasmine tea... In that mode of knowing is wholeness: perceived, processed, understood, acted upon, embodied, and exemplified.
There is a Buddhist teaching story ... novice monk comes to the master and asks ... what is the purpose of meditation? Master replies ... let me tell you a story:
When I came to the monastery, they took us to the meditation hall, and rang the bell and that was a sign that it was time to meditate. So day after day, I went into the meditation hall and the bell was rung, and I, sitting, would meditate. And then one day there was no bell, nor I, just the ringing ...
The mind, having come to rest, can play it's role in the larger system that contains it, and the ones that contain that by no longer having to be center stage. One experiences resting in a mode of being: outside. That is the experience I want to have access to the most.
To be frank, the mind is extremely useful. But, it's use is merely utilitarian ... a better means, to an end. (As an aside, the primary use is in the organisation of meaning and organisational relationships among sets of meaning, which are only useful if the meaning constructed is wellformed.) -> Systemic thinking for simple chaotic systems.
I've been trying to identify what it is that I most want to put my attention on. And this realization clarifies, what I want to attend to in realms of the mind too. To understand how systems thinking applies to nature in a wholistic way. To what end? To know (so as to recognize and apply) and embody (so as to live with, and demonstrate) the system's principles with which nature organizes ecosystems. Why?
