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What do you picture when you consider of medicament ? Pharmacy shelves filled with moldable bottles promising remedy to your every ailment ? A doctor ’s office ? Whatever you think of , you probably do n’t picture fields of medicative herbs or bookshelves covered in jars of gold - colored liquidness or trained hands drying leaves and cut roots . What if , at its core group , medicine is not about theproduct , but about theprocess .
( Organic calendula fields at Zack Woods Herb Farm , Vermont . Photo good manners of Jeff and Melanie Carpenter . )
I first recognize medicine as a process rather than a product at a trace - make shop in the mid-1990s . The unseasoned teacher show us a twist echinacea root she had drudge from her garden the previous day . “ It ’s easy to wash the source , ” she allege . “ Just apply a stiff hose . ” She demonstrated how to break the root into smaller pieces to remove dirt from the scissure . “ burn up the origin as small as possible , ” she added as she chop it into tiny piece . She excuse that the great the surface region that comes into contact lens with themenstruum — the solvent used to extract compound or constituents from the plant cloth — the more constituents would be extracted . She knock down the root bits into a Alfred Edward Woodley Mason shock , covered the roots with vodka , put a hat on the jar , and shake off . permit it sit in a glum place for six hebdomad , she said , then try off the liquid state , which is the medicine . The leftover bits of root , called the marc , can be composted .
Chopping freshly harvested valerian root before washing and processing at Oregon’s Wild Harvest, Sandy, Oregon.
Chopping freshly harvest valerian root before washing and processing at Oregon ’s Wild Harvest , Sandy , Oregon .
The demonstration lasted only ten minute . For the remainder of the hour - long class , the instructor tattle about the uses of various medicinal plants . I only half listened . I was still marveling at the simplicity of the medicine fashioning . It would be one thing if making a tincture was unmanageable or time consuming , but it is n’t . The process is a second messy , but it is well-fixed than making a patty , even a cake from a packaged premix . And yet I had never before considered the opening that I could make my own medicine . To me , medicine was what I bought at a pharmacy , what a doctor would order for me , not something trump up with roots and leaves and some vodka in my kitchen . Why had n’t anyone ever separate me how loose this was ? Or that I could do it myself ? In my own home ? With the root of a plant I could acquire in my own garden ? And that it was so cheap ? I was preoccupy by the cost and by another more confounding interrogative , which I had never considered before . When — and how — had medicine become a mathematical product to buy instead of a acquirement we could portion out ?
Restoring Balance
The following class I meet Deb Soule at a hideaway to envision an organization that would honor of the work of childlike - living advocates Helen and Scott Nearing . Deb course a little apothecary selling remedies prepared from herbs rise in her biodynamic gardens in Downeast Maine . She brew potful of tea from loose dried flower and leaves . I was used to my coffee stiff and my afternoon tea in base , and so I was curious . It taste a minute like grass . Deb tattle about her gardens and the music she made in her kitchen and the community clinic where she met with client . It all voice modest - scale and right - sized . She mention that she was buying some land up the route from her business firm to expand her garden and that I should amount visit .
afterwards that summer I did bring down . Deb and I gathered nasturtiums and greens from her garden for dinner . In her family , jar fill up every clear surface : counters , wooden shelves , tables by a futon sofa . Some jars were take with dried orange flowers or green leave , others with what looked like chopped solution soaking in a dark-brown slurry . Still others held a deep golden or cherry oil . A sticky banker’s bill on the oven threshold proved to be a reminder to see to it at heart before turning the oven on , because there might be medicinal oils within , being slow warm up by the pilot light source . Deb ’s star sign smelled earthy and slightly sweet-flavored , a light-green smell that is hard to key but which I recognized immediately in every herb warehouse I subsequently visit on my travels for the Sustainable Herbs Program .
When I was grow up , I never would have found medicative oil in the oven in our mob ’s kitchen . More likely it would have been Hamburger Helper or minute steaks on the stovetop . The salads of my puerility were a clump of iceberg lettuce with a dollop of hopeful orange French dressing from a bottle . Nestlé ’s chocolate chip cookies were as homemade as we find . This was n’t because my female parent was negligent or did n’t care . This was the 1960s in West Virginia . The hope of the modern era was for woman to spend less , not more , metre in the kitchen , and I was acquit into a social class where that shift was possible . What mattered about intellectual nourishment was that it was commodious and quick , not where the ingredients come from or how they had been swear out . I grew up thinking of my body as something to exercise and to fuel as needed , like a car . I depended on my body , but did n’t think much about how it worked . When I was a college scholar at Dartmouth , a tree or a plant was what I passed as I hike — or better yet , ran — up the trail to attain the top of the tidy sum .
Deb go away on walks , not runs . She drank teas that nourished her soundbox , not ones that maintain her awake . She feed the food she could uprise in her garden , and whole grains she could bray herself .
Being with Deb , I was remind of what I ’d experience in Nepal — in the path she talked , in the small things she noticed , in the tempo at which she worked . She did n’t have the hurry around her shift her rhythm . Her hands , like the hands of the cleaning lady in Hedangna , were rough from a lifetime of working the stain . And she utter about plant as if they were alive — as if they were the great unwashed with whom she could have a relationship , with whom she did have a family relationship .
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