By Paul Woodward When I was a Buddhist monk and the Dalai Lama visited us in France, there was a meeting of most of the Western monks and nuns in our community. At that time, the majority were living in a monastery and neighboring nunnery near Toulouse, but others were visiting from elsewhere in Europe,... Continue Reading →
Plants both as food and medicine continue to be an important part of my healing process. I like what Wendell Berry says about herbalism because it's very much in keeping with the "everything matters" meme I often mention. Everything matters because everything is in relationship with everything else in our environments and our lives. Systems of healing that include herbalism understand this fact. Indigenous and shamanistic cultures understand this fact. We need to return to our roots while embracing and safely utilizing all we've learned while we forgot about them too. Herbalism is based on relationship ~ relationship between plant and human, plant and planet, human and planet. Using herbs in the healing process means taking part in an ecological cycle. This offers us the opportunity consciously to be present in the living, vital world of which we are part; to invite wholeness and our world into our lives through awareness of the remedies being used. The herbs can link us into the broader context of planetary wholeness, so that whilst they are doing their physiological/medical job, we can do ours and build an awareness of the links of mutual relationships. ~ Wendell Berry
Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: 'He who loves community destroys community: he who loves the brethren builds community.' A community is not an abstract ideal. We are not striving for perfect community.
Community is not an ideal: it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we would want them to be. Community means giving them space, helping them to grow. It means also receiving from them so that we too can grow. It is giving each their freedom; it is giving each other trust; it is confirming but also challenging each other. We give dignity to each other by the way we listen to each other, in a spirit of trust and of dying to oneself so that the other may live, grow, and give. … [click on title to read and view more]
Years ago I showed a film to a group of men who were newly bereaved about how Tibetans once – maybe still – cared for their dying and their dead. When the film ended, the long silence was finally broken when one of the men said, “I feel like I come from nowhere.” And that seems to be what happens inside most of us when we see or hear of a people wholly at home where and how and who they are: we feel the shadowed hollow of our immigrant, refugee history, and our lack of ceremonial instinct and experience, or we try to fill it up by stealing something from those people who are miraculously still deeply, ancestrally, ceremonially alive. … [click on title for the rest of the post]
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