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Sunday 24 April 2016

Nettle, Queen of Plants


“So, what’s this whole thing with Nettles” asks Magical Horse, as she pulls another young Hawthorn shoot from the hedge. I tell her “you do know Hawthorn is good for the heart don’t you? And the flowers, especially, for heart break”. “I just like the taste” she mutters, between bites “and get on with it, about the nettles. Stop showing off. Remember, part of being sick and old is giving up the need to be the expert”. This, with a look over the top of her half rimmed glasses. Nothing like a horse to un-mask one. "I'm only a bit sick now, and not that old" I retort. "Well, if you were a horse, we'd have called the horse ambulance ages agoand you know what's in a horse ambulancenothing apart from a twelve bore shotgun" 





“And why do you always call her Mother Nettle, not just nettle”

“Because she told me that’s what she is”. She is a Mother plant. Her roots go deep into the soil, pulling up innumerable minerals, cleansing the soil as she goes, healing the Earth. She has light transmitting silica in the tiny hairs on her leaves and stems, thus bringing in light and energy from the Cosmos and outer planets. This last from Steiner. Nettle was the only soil preparation he didn’t sheathe, and he saw her as the main circulatory plant for the earth. Say that again....The-Main-Circulatory- Plant- for -the -Earth.

She is the plant to turn to if you need cleansing, building up, and healing from just about everything. Rich in chlorophyll (vital if you want to clear heavy metals from your body), protein, 

This from Susun Weed, http://www.susunweed.com/herbal_ezine/October08/healingwise.htm one of my favorite Herbalists. “Nettle is amazingly rich in protein, vitamins, and minerals, especially the critical trace minerals: anti-cancer selenium, immune-enhancing sulphur, memory-enhancing zinc, diabetes-chasing chromium, and bone-building boron. A quart of nettle infusion contains more than 1000 milligrams of calcium, 15000 IU of vitamin A, 760 milligrams of vitamin K, 10% protein, and lavish amounts of most B vitamin.
There is no denser nutrition found in any plant, not even bluegreen algae; and nettle is much more”.

 Ask respectfully, (Please Mother Nettle, may I gather you, and thank you) and she will help you build good blood and bones, strengthen your kidneys, guts, lungs, help you detoxify and bring you vavavoom. If you are pregnant or breast feeding, she will nourish you and your child, prepare your body for birth, boost your milk supply.

Magical Horse rolls her eyes in boredom. “I never touch the stuff myself”. “Well” I reply “I’ve seen the native Polish horses on the heath digging up Nettle root to eat in the winter”. “Oh, them” she sniffs, looks down her nose. 



“Maybe you need to give up the need to be Egyptian Arabian aristocracy” I mutter "and, do you realise it costs a small mortgage to keep you here in horse heaven". Shudders and closes her eyes "Hasn't even got a spa dear….". She turns her back on me and busies herself with the hedge again.... “Do you know who I am...” (This is the kind of ego inflation which results when your registered name is Seraphim)

Nettles were one of the Anglo Saxon nine sacred herbs, and a herb of Thor, associated with fire and lightening. She grows on the boundaries, and knows the boundaries. She’ll teach you boundaries if that’s what you need. Here, at my house, she has placed herself at every doorway. An honour. She’s my personal bouncer. She grows either side of the front door, and people have to pass between her and through her cleansing aura before they enter. Much more subtle than smudging visitors with sage. Anyway, we have enough of our own crap to deal with, without more coming in! I did have to relent last year and cut her back a bit, after Lovely Man pointed out the postman was contorting himself and squeaking in the effort of safely reaching the letter box. 

She is also known for “stinging people into action”. There are times when she wants to go to your heart, quite literally. Place her there, when the time feels right. Press her to your chest, breathe through the pain, keep her there until that spreading warmth and vitality comes. Watch your dreams over the next few days, when there will be times you feel her “reactivating”. After I started doing this, I read in Steiner's agriculture course (no I can’t understand most of what he writes) that “Nettle should be around everyones heart”. 

Trained as a herbalist, I grew used to saying “we use this herb for blah” . Now, a horror of “using” when actually they are helping us, I am trying to train myself out of this. Imagine saying you are “using” your mother for babysitting. So, if you would like Mother Nettle to help you, approach with respect, but not with sentimentality or a grovelling (we awful humans destroying the earth etc) attitude, but with simple appreciation. Find out what she likes. For me, she likes to be stroked. I sit often on the front doorstep and stroke her. She almost purrs. For you, it may be something else.

She will willingly be cooked in dishes where you would normally use spinach, gaily leap into hot water for tea, fling herself into juices, be dried and crumbled into horse feed (err, actually MH you are having nettle in your feed) and for chickens too. Glossy coats and good condition result. She lasts much longer than cut flowers as a table centre piece (how she glories in that), and if you have gathered strangers energies when out in the world, she will gently sweep them away if you swoosh her over your head, or better still leave her on your head for a while.

Finishing with a quote from Hatfields Herbal, from an interview with an elderly lady in Essex.

 “Great emphasis was placed on keeping the bowels open and the pores closed and of cleansing the blood after the rigours of winter, and so in spring we were sent to gather young nettles. Nettle tea we had to drink to purify our blood, Grandpa (unwillingly) for his sciatica and Aunt Rose for her pleurisy. I wondered how it knew which it was supposed to do”


She knows alright, Oh how she knows. (And I love the bit about "bowels open and pores closed". So frightfully British)

Sunday 17 April 2016

Egoic Banana Skins

Magical Horse is convalescing after having her “wolf” teeth (no, the equine denist doesn’t know why they’re called that either) removed. Bored, the Magical Horse has taken the opportunity to look at my CV. Thinking this may be a breakthrough for us, I watch with anticipation as she flicks through the pages. ?Heath visitor, specialist nurse, HIV/Aids trainer....she wrinkles her muzzle and crosses her hooves, leans back. Senior NHS manager, clinical coordinator with post grad course in medicine....she yawns, starts doodling with a piece of hay. 

?Degree in herbal medicine in my forties, whilst running family home, teenagers and managing enormous vegetable plot, Herbalist, has run two businesses, ....uncrosses her hooves and crosses them the other way. “Well?” I prompt. Magical Horse yawns again, says “The thing is, this all looks like very predatorial behaviour to me, whereas you forget I’m a prey animal who already has a boss mare”. She’s quite right. Any worldly achievements have come from engaging my male energy, which in her eyes makes me a predator. “What about being all those power point talks I’ve given to two hundred plus people”...starts chewing her tail, rolls her eyes “I haven’t seen much evidence of confidence, or leadership frankly”. Farts and moves off towards her lead mare in the herd. 

This natural horsemanship method requires, above all, presence and clarity. Awareness of ones energy, of every glance and slightest movement and knowledge that Magical Horse is monitoring every single bit of energy in every single moment. It may have been easier to take up sitting meditation. 

Thanks to my friend, Julie and her flower essence remedies, the confidence, quite badly knocked during this bout of illness, is returning. And the gift of illness always being to learn more about oneself. For instance, my ridiculous difficulty in asking for, no, damn it, even knowing what I need. Allowing myself to be vulnerable and needy (cringe..even to write it!) and to ask people for help.

This got me in trouble the night I came home from the intense two day, total of eight hour dental surgery and crunching out of jaw bone infection, legacy of the sixties “drill and fill” dental ethos.  Arranged at short notice, we couldn’t cancel Lovely Mans’ work in time, meaning he went abroad, and I came home alone in a taxi. I failed to tell my adult children to keep their phones on. Result,  with extreme pain and swelling that night, and unable to get hold of a Doctor, taxi, kids, friends or even ex-husbands various, I ended up driving myself to A and E at two am, high on codeine and in my pyjamas.

My mother would have deeply disapproved of the pyjamas. A sweet woman who role models were Princess Grace and the Queen, she had her hair newly set for the last time, twenty three years ago, in blissful unawareness she’d be
dead by teatime the next day. Having also changed into best clothes before the Doctor called, she then slipped without fuss into a coma, managing to arrive in the resuscitation room elegantly dressed and hair beautifully coiffed.

In contrast, not only was I in A and E in some cruddy top, pyjama bottoms and slippers, with hair stuck up in a point, but they were my christmas reindeer pyjamas. With snowflakes. Intense pain and codeine will do that to a person. Laying across at least three chairs, I was reminded also how much my mother disapproved of the Greenham Common women, “It’s so unfeminine, all that lying down in the road”. 

Having seen a kind young Doctor (yes, I've reached the age where doctors and policemen, and all authority figures are now young enough to be my children) and attempted to reassure him I was fine to drive (whilst speaking through the codeine at a third of my normal speed), I wasn’t sure how the hell I would get home. I went through the whole process again of trying and failing to get hold of kids, friends and ex husbands various (amicable relationships with previous husbands should surely allow for the occasional collection from hospital in the wee hours?), the got in the car and drove home.

Presenting this ridiculously competent, non needy facade to the world for fifty six years, means you will manifest precisely all that goes with it, as above. Family, mortified, rallied round the next day, bringing pain relief, taking me to yet another emergency dentist for continuing pain, feeding me, but I’m very aware that on that night, I manifested what I’d put out.... ‘ I’m supremely confident and competent, don’t ever really need looking after, I am the rock everyone can lean on”. 

Oh the marvelous banana skins our ego creates for us.......

PAKHET, STANDING IN FOR HATHOR, AMONGST THE NETTLES (GREEN MILK)



NOT QUITE (DIDNT HAVE THE TOP) BUT WORRYINGLY SIMILAR

Ferments

Fermenting food is on trend right now, and I’m relatively new to it. I’ve been making Kombucha (fermented sweet tea) and milk kefir (fermented raw organic jersey milk) for about a year. Why? Because they’re so darned good for you, especially if you are trying to “heal the gut” as its so delicately called. Whilst in the West we are feeling the effects of too much processed food, we have mostly forgotten old ways of processing food, practiced for hundreds of years (home made wines, sourdough bread, ginger ale, cider, unpasteurised cheese).

This is why I’m starting the day wiping bright orange brine off the utility room walls. Opening my first attempt at Kimchi (a hot Korean ferment of cabbage, hot peppers, carrots and garlic) means encountering her full feistiness as she launches forth, creating a Jackson Pollock over an impressive distance, in about a second flat. My milk kefir is like a delicate tangy thin milky yogurt. I was glad to have her on hand when first trying the kimchi. An instantly more-ish addictive flavour, but searingly hot! Racing to the fridge, I plunged my tongue into the kefir and disappeared in the hot steam rising. 

Learning.

Alive food. Very alive. With whole townships of beneficial yeasts and bacteria willing to help us humans restore our downtrodden guts, in return for a warm home with walls for artistic expression (preferably newly decorated). Bacteria are going to save the planet and us. Already learning how to digest plastic for food, biofilms will be the ones to mop up the toxicity we created. And Japanese knotweed (removes copper from contaminated soils) star of soil remediation plants, nettles too of course.

What started as something to help me heal autoimmune hypothyroidism and the concomitant chronic fatigue etc (I’m forcing myself to identify myself this way here y’know...it doesn’t come naturally) has led to a new fascination with fermenting. Disliking labels, but wanting to be honest, for whatever reason (karmic, past life, emotional, spiritual, antibiotic led, mercury toxic, gut dysbiotic) I’ve been ill. In some ways there’s no point looking for why, except to touch briefly into it, lift out what may help and do that. The task to re find my instinct and follow her. 

Fortunately I’m not working, so I can Focus on this healing, and learning to weave gently with it, let it flow towards me, not march out and try to wrestle it down. As with Magical Horse, any attempt to push and shove doesn’t work. The more alarmed I become when really unwell, the more I’m apt to research, then purchase an array of supplements, to which my body simply digs its heels in, like the mare. I could start a health food shop with the stuff out the back, thrust back in boxes, in deep frustration. 

So, a gentle rhythm has emerged, which means necking some kombucha with warm water first thing, followed by whizzing raw organic jersey whey powder in rice milk, then a wonderful wander in the garden with big basket gathering fresh nettle tops and cleavers to juice with organic beetroot and some organic apple juice (this whole shebang supports the liver and gut). I have a deep love relationship with Mother Nettle, who took me in eight years ago, long into my work as a herbalist and has been teaching me ever since. I always ask the plants every morning before picking them, however “established” my relationship with them, thank them, and ask them to heal me. That last bit has been the hardest, asking, asking for me. But its getting easier. 

This all topped off with milk kefir....then breakfast.


I’m getting better, the sun is shining on me, and nature is healing me in the way my body finds acceptable. Whoever you are, whatever you need, for whatever healing you are seeking, I send you blessings for the journey. 

KIMCHI

NETTLES AND CLEAVERS READY FOR JUICING



GREEN TARA AMONGST THE CLEAVERS


Thursday 14 April 2016

Wet Hen day

We have thunder and heavy rain, wet hens huddled in the woodshed, and Nettles drinking it all in. They seem to almost vibrate with vitality. For me, it's a "two steps forward, one back" day. I have dropped my thyroid medication too quickly, so whilst the anxiety and shakes of too much, have gone, they are replaced by the slipper shuffle I have come to know so well the last three and a half months. 

The dogs rejoice in a "sofa day", two Jack Russells, brother and sister, Boy Dog is particularly well suited to his role. He likes a bit of a death bed. 

I am starting to trust all this a bit more though. I have always trusted the Divine to get me through, but probably not myself. Those who have had thyroid, or chronic fatigue issues will know well the terror of slipping into that again, not knowing if this time you'll get out of it. Not knowing whats wrong and how to "fix it" too, are a big ongoing stress. 

I've had a few bouts of this in the last seventeen years. This blog is part of fessing up to that, and not ignoring. Mostly I've been well (as long as you don't count the total of about three years with thyroid, mercury, Lymes…). I've had this image of the venus fly trap. You know, when you feel like the fly thats just been caught and is slipping inexorably into the bottom of the plant. The joy though when you start to escape, improve, get better, climb out of the fly trap.

But this time, its a big healing I feel, deep in my soul. I did a lot of Ancestral healing work, which resulted in Blessings, which resulted in plunging into the Venus fly trap again (thought: maybe illness is really the Venus love trap, the trap of lack of self love). This time though, I feel I have got to the bottom of things. That may be a rash statement. Thus, it is a healing. 

This all started with teeth. Bad management of by Dentist. Say no more. Seventeen years later I have had specialist work done to remove root canal tooth, all wisdom teeth, a lingering mercury amalgam (even though supposedly they were all "safely" removed by another dentist sixteen years ago) (mercury is not my friend) and about five areas of jawbone infection crunched out. 

It's not been a quiet spring!

But as soon as the work was done, I could feel a big shift. So, I'm on the up, trying to stabilise my thyroid and recover my strength, energy and stamina.

What's helping: The love and support of my man and family, dogs, good friends, NATURE, SUNSHINE, sleep, tiny walks, avoiding most supplements, good whey powder, raw milk kefir, kombucha, juicing Mother Nettle, Beetroot, Cleavers and Lemon Balm, decoctions of ribwort, ginseng, oat tops, sarsaparilla, echinacea, milk thistle. Strong chicken bone broth, celtic sea salt as a sole in spring water, probiotics, past life therapy, crystal and sound healing, shamanic work

I was well enough to go and see magical horse the other day. Fortunately she is looked after by someone, so I haven't had to worry about her. She, of course, was not particularly pleased to see me. I haven't had her long enough or done enough with her to establish that bond yet. 

All of November last year, full of energy, I worked with her most days, learning the Natural Horsemanship Parelli way. The idea is we'll develop a partnership, and that was coming. Now, we're back to square one it feels. Fidgetting , and stamping her back hoof (her preferred way of letting me know she's unimpressed) and generally having a "f*** you" attitude. She knows. She shoots me a look that implies "weakling" and she also knows I'm ridiculously intimidated by a person at the yard, resulting in me giving off pathetic victim vibes. This intimidation victim thing hasn't happened like this since I was about six. More lessons for me. 

Sometimes I question if I did the right thing, getting this young Arabian mare, un-backed the wrong side of fifty five (me not her)(she may be fifty five before I get this right). Sometimes I think this Magical Horse and me thing is never going to come right. Mostly deep in my core I trust this. She and I are going to work it out, and I am going to learn a lot through her. Thats the script anyway at the moment. 

She's only six and not been handled much before, so we'll see. She has to have "wolf teeth" out this week….if its not me, its the horse…. bloody teeth!