Herbalism

Planet Earth – what a beautiful and bounteous world to call home. The more we turn our attention towards the nature of our relationship with the environment, the more profound become the insights into the close embrace we share. Whether on the global scale of our effects upon climate and the climate’s effects upon us, or at the biochemical level of plants as medicines, the connections revealed are powerful and very real. Of the many ways in which our ecological inter-relatedness shows itself, the art and science of herbal medicine is for many people the most unexpected.

Above all else, herbalism is the medicine of belonging, the direct experience of the whole healing the part. Our world blesses us with herbs, with leaves of life. In the face of the blind abuse and rape of nature, we discover remedies that can help us survive the impact of humanity’s mistakes. To heal ourselves we must know ourselves, and ecology, spirituality, intuition and common sense tell us that we are all one. If our world is sick and poisoned then so are we. If the forests are being destroyed, then we die a little with each felling. Every whale that is respected and allowed to live to blesses us. Each river cleaned and renewed flows through our veins and renews us.

Humanity is being faced with the realities of a shared planet. This may take the form of a drought caused by the Greenhouse Effect, pollution-induced birth defects or the purgatory of human overpopulation. On the other hand it may be the dawning recognition that the intimate embrace of our world is a healing force moving humanity towards a transformation of our relationship with the Earth, ourselves and each other.

The Gaia Hypothesis proposes an illuminating context within which to place herbs and humanity. First postulated by James Lovelock, it has been developed by many people, bridging the worlds of science and spirituality. Gaia was the Greek goddess of the Earth, consort of Uranus and mother of both the gods and the Titans. There are variations of spelling and pronunciation as the name is from Ancient Greece with its subtly different alphabet; Gaia, Gaea or Gæa are all used. Lovelock has suggested it as an appropriate name for the complex ‘being’ that is the whole of planet Earth. ‘We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.’