Bespoke Herbals @ Backyard Botanics

When I set out to write The Seventh Sister it was out of some sense of duty to a dear friend who had been a victim of domestic violence.
Fast forward about 6 years to today and the book has been published (albeit imperfectly). Her story is out … sort of. Lots of folks read the book, passed it around, told me they enjoyed it and finished it very quickly. It even got a write up on Good reads – all on its own merit, I like to think.

And lots of people have asked me if I made money … How many copies did I sell? The answer is some money, not much. And the book paid for its own production costs. But I did not do any marketing for it all. And here is why: It would have been wrong to profit on my friend’s story.

Although the book is a work of fiction it’s based on a true story. The main character is very real. In fact, all of them are. And so are many of the events the book describes.

This week my step daughter Gabrielle told me she really enjoyed reading the book and asked if I had a Facebook page for it.
No, I don’t have a Facebook page for it. But an idea occurred to me. What if I did? What if I gave any profits that sales of the book make to a non-profit that combats domestic violence?

So that’s what I’m going to do. I am going to create a page for the book on Facebook and give proceeds from its sale, if it sells at all, to the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence. (http://www.nhcadsv.org/) …
Wish the book luck!
I am hoping that Eva, knowing this, would smile and say “well, at least something good came of it all…”

http://www.nhcadsv.org/

September is late for basil. My patch, still fragrant, overflowing now with flowers, is finally abandoned by the bumble bees who spent the summer cheerfully denying me access to it. When I bend down to breath in the summery scent, though, I can see the bottom-most leaves spotting, turning yellow.
And so, it is time to trim the leaves, make the pesto, and freeze it for winter…

In the last Quarter of a lunar cycle those of us that pay attention to lunar cycles plow under our psychic crops. We shed what we can no longer use, those things that are vestiges of past growth, using it for compost in our next cycle.

Leo, the sign the moon is currently in, is the sign of ego, the sign of who we are, of where we find our strengths and express our selves.  Leo rules the heart.

… so Leo in the third quarter is a good time to notice who you are under the activities and facades you’ve tried on over the past weeks or months. Perhaps you won’t find you have a choice in the matter – you might find your self foisted back on you, if you aren’t paying attention.

The Rider-Waite Fool

The Fool is the first – or, if you like, the last – card of the Tarot’s major arcana.  Bearing the number zero, the fool represents the spirit, the soul in search of experience, connecting the end with the beginning.

The fool is the dreaming self – the filmmaker – of our dreams.  His Associations are many:  the jester, the god of the grape and divine revelry Dionysus, the beggar, vagabond, the wild-man, the eye of the dreamer dreaming secretly.  Perhaps you are acquainted with him.

Traditionally, the Major Arcana is a map of the journey through life, through life’s mysteries, through cycles of growth, through becoming, to self-realization.  Each card is an elaborate portal to the mysteries, and the Fool is the journeyman.  He is each of us; he is the representative of our divine selves journeying through life.

If you draw the fool in a reading, know that he is pointing you toward some new experience, likely one that mixes up the everyday world with the world of imagination and creativity.  Having the power to see through the accouterments of the material world to what truly inspires, the fool points toward meaningful abandonment, or perhaps folly, if the cards surrounding him are ill-aspected.   Whatever company he is keeping in your reading, he represents your inner journeyman pointing to an experience your heart desires.

A suggestion associated with this card:  Be open to and respectful of your heart’s desire.  Explore your deepest desires lovingly, with care and humor.

Once in a younger-years dreaming state I saw

great dark pillars, mountainous clouds from the window of an airplane

Grown high, endlessly high

from a puffy and senseless cumulus cloud

into dark towers that reached farther into the heavens than I could see from my airborne seat.

Ominous, foreboding, supernatural.  Like the castle of Malificent.  Floating fortresses of doom.

Dad called them thunderheads.

They were obviously full of villains, angry gods, lightening.  And Thor.

Made harmless because when I was with my father nothing could ever hurt me.

Just to be sure, I put on the red cowboy hat Dad had bought for me at the airport.

The engines of the airplane droned on.  My father patted my hand.

The towers became giant figurines in my mind.  Powerless against my father.

If only he were here.

In all my years of contemplating people, their sameness, their differences, their common experience of emerging from a womb, I had never truly developed a philosophy that allows me to accept people as I find them when I find their values at variance with my own.  This failure has always been a source of anxiety for me.  My ideal for myself is to cultivate some form of equanimity.  And I’ve known for a good long time that going about my life in a state of annoyance with other people – and with myself – was somehow falling short of the mark.

The whole point of studying comparative religions was to arrive at an understanding of people, despite differences of belief, perception, and culture.  And yet I had to own up to a failure to achieve even a simple understanding and acceptance of people who I share a society with but can’t sympathize with religiously, politically, or ethically.  I tried to look at things from other people’s perspectives but found that ultimately my beliefs were my beliefs.  As green as it sounds I believe in fairness and honesty, in generosity and decency, in tolerance, in manners and kindness, and was finding it increasingly difficult to forgive the blatant violations of those values I saw around me.  And I wasn’t very happy with myself, either, for not only failing to develop a working philosophy but for my own lack of patience and skill.  Where was my equanimity?   I was – and I knew I was – calcifying.

Until I read – really read and digested – the Dalai Lama’s book.

The first thing I learned:  Everyone wants to be happy.  In that way we are all the same.  I may believe that a person’s motives and actions are “wrong,” but I can accept that we are the same in that we both wish to be happy and I cannot fault a person for wanting the same thing that I do.   Well I could, but it wouldn’t make much sense to.

I found that idea helpful because this thought helps me to refrain from being judgmental.  I have an obnoxiously judgmental frame of mind.  I can barely stand myself.  Without meaning to, I evaluate and pass judgment on every little thing that comes under my nose- including myself.  But with this new lesson, when I feel the urge to condemn someone for unkindness or greed or selfishness I remind myself that their wish is to be happy, no more or less than myself,  and this pacifies me.  Conversely I forgive myself for my wish to be happy because I am like everyone else in this respect.  At least temporarily, the judgement goes away.  This was a HUGE leap for me.  Before attaining this little weapon of the mind I would remain offended with people’s behaviors or stew over my own failures.  But the thought that we are seeking happiness – however misguided I may believe us (others or myself) to be – allows me to dismiss my judgement.

This goes a long way toward helping me cultivate patience.   I am still working on remembering this principal in critical moments. But eventually I do remember it, even if I’ve already set my head on fire with some annoyance or other, and I manage to calm myself.

The next thing I learned was that I can cultivate happiness inside my mind, quite apart from the circumstances I find myself in.  This has a huge potential for happiness.  For years I have chased happiness in the form of creating situations or accomplishing tasks.  But none of the situations I’ve created or tasks I’ve accomplished have succeeded in bringing me happiness.  Satisfaction, yes, perhaps … but not any sort of lasting happiness.  Masters degree, marriage, kids, home, garden, career, novel … pah.   And yet, a simple act of self forgiveness and releasing judgment inside of my mind has brought me more happiness than any of my most hard-earned accomplishments.  Not that my calcifying mind was putty in my hands, but the prospect of creating happiness within the confines of my mind is better than setting off on another achievement adventure.  They say the definition of insanity is repeating the same behaviors and expecting different results.  So I deemed the change of direction a promising thing.  Which brought me knocking at the door of compassion practices, as a matter of course, according to the Dalai Lama.

The Dalai Lama writes eloquently about compassion and its many practical virtues.  I will allow those to speak for themselves, but a cursory and simple application of his principals led me to several much happier days – all in a row – and to open a book that claims to elucidate the path of Thibetan Buddhism …

The afore-mentioned opens with a prayer:

I take refuge in the buddha, the dharma, and the spiritual community

until I attain the state of enlightenment …

By then it was an easy and natural step to the concept of refuge because I found myself wishing to take refuge from my own thoughts, which I had become aware was causing me to feel unhappy and anxious.  A steady stream of thought chatter – mostly vapid, from what I could tell –  which I fancied resembles a group of monkeys taken together in a fit of excitement, was not contributing to my ability to empathize with other people or to relax.  It was not enabling me to accomplish my goals.  And I wanted to turn it off.

So I took the Dalai Lama’s advice again, and I took refuge … which led me to another door.

It’s been 8 years since I wrote a thesis exploring models of reality as presented by a then-controversial 2^nd century Gnostic Christian and an important Buddhist thinker who was his contemporary.

All the while, books exploring the nature of reality, the nature of the mind, treatises on the human condition and meditation, religious texts, and religious philosophy from Buddhist, Islamic and Christian perspectives rested, undisturbed, on my book shelves.

As a matter of habit I explored spiritual training in esoteric fields, blending the study of goddess-based spirituality with my role as a mother.  I’d always had a strong leaning toward earth-based religious philosophy for its vividness and common-senseness.  I’m an avid environmentalist – at least in principal if not always in action – and found that the philosophies of wicca were a natural match for me, values-wise.  But somehow I wasn’t reaching into myself, wasn’t improving, and wasn’t feeling peace.

I gazed longingly at my book shelves.  During my studies I’d been fully immersed in an ocean of religious philosophy, metaphysical philosophy, and inquiry into devotion and ritual practice.  My immersion in that place ebbed and flowed all around me, pulling me here and there, keeping me always available to and eager for the next revelation. It was an endless place of exploration, my peers fellow travelers and explorers in that place.

The book shelves proffered up a book that wasn’t purchased as part of my studies.  But it seemed to be calling me.  A little book I’d purchased in Cambridge at a small Tibetan shop years earlier … The Dalai Lama’s Book of Transformation…

Surprisingly, I took it from the shelf and read it, devoured it.  And something really magical happened.