Q: I am having trouble sleeping, can you help?

Waking, dreaming and deep sleep are three states of conciousness that reflect the process of death and rebirth. When you dream, your life-force leaves your body and plays on the astral plane. Impressions gathered in your waking life get revealed and you experience happy/unhappy states. This information is then brought back into your sleeping body to integrate and then hopefully percolate up as intelligence into your conscious wakeful body as intelligence. Simply stated, deep sleep is key in the integration of intelligence gathered while dreaming.

Deep sleep occurs at the origin of the heart, inhibitors to deep sleep are:

• wrongly digested food
• conflicting impressions and associations
• poor diet
• unhealthy use of the senses
• unsupportive relationships

obvious, right? But well worth the naming.

Start by looking at what you eat, patterns of thought especially in the last few hours before you go to sleep, folks you interact with during the day… in general what you introduce into your mind-body-spirit is probably what is at the bottom of this. As Hippocrates said: It’s more important to know what kind of patient has a disease than what kind of disease a patient has.”

In other words, What is the first thought form your mind grabs in the morning when it surfaces from the fluff?

The deeper mind/deeper heart is reflected in the life-force/waking self. You need to help the deeper mind complete its circuits so your life-force is free to flow.

I’m a fan of growing and foraging my own plants, but given the sense that plants are dormant in temperate climates in January, you will probably be supporting an herbal shop instead. However, all of the plants I recommend are easily grown during the growing season without too much effort and January is a good month to plan those guerilla plantings and fire escape gardens in SPRING!

These plants are naturally relaxing – some quite doping. They are listed in rough order from mild to strong:

• lemon balm (tea)
• chamomile (tea, flower essence)
• rosemary (food, scent, tea)
• lavender (food, scent, tea)
• catnip (tea)
• passion flower (tea, tincture)
• skullcap (tincture)
• california poppy (tincture)
• hops (tincture)
• valerian (tincture)

General blood tonics are good to integrate too – oats, nettles, and one of my best friends – dandelion!

But before you run off to mainline a bunch of teas and tinctures, I need you to ask yourself again: What is the nature of your hamster wheeling?

• Stressed? oats and lavender
• Anxious? skullcap and valerian
• Depressed? lavender and passion flower
• Insomnia? california poppy, hops and valerian
• Hyperactivity? red clover, oats and dandelion

So try this for a week: eat well, interact with more supportive people than not, connect to the generous and abundant, and before you lay your head down, set your intention to integrate what you gain from the astral plane, lay back and breathe into your deep play mind.

Out there, out of doors it’s between leaf and root time. It’s seed time.
In autumn plants put their efforts into reproducing themselves via seeds, both bare and covered with delicious flesh. Time to collect these offspring, juicy apples and pears for cider. Collecting seeds to save for intentional or uninvited sprinklings, to grow next years’ harvests and forages.

Weeds are all about vitality and abundance. And I was to bend your ear to foraging. Let’s not let our species’ hydraheaded scarcity issue overwhelm us convincing us we need more than we really do. That’s how we got into this mess called modern agriculture.

HOT & COLD

As you might of guessed, I don’t use bagged tea from a store or even rarely buy it in bulk as I enjoy foraging our urban lands and dry the plant material I forage in paper bags or hung upside down in small bundles in my dark and dry pantry. Drying medicinal weeds is all about allowing air to circulate around the leaves and protecting them from light. Paper bags are perfect for this as they will not trap moisture.

I want to share how to make an herbal infusion. Infusions are like concentrates –you want the full-on benefit from the plants you decide to put in your body. They will help you but only if you allow them.

When you collect from a plant, try to find more than a few and collect from them in a way that won’t damage them. Don’t rip or tear. (ouch!) Make clean pinches or cuts with a knife, your fingers or some pruning shears. This means only a few leaves/seeds/fruits or less than 10% of any individual plant. It is important that the plant you are collecting from is allowed to thrive and regenerate itself, even if it is considered a ‘weed’. Plants are by nature, generous with what they have to offer (as we also help them in all sort of unconscious and unintended ways) When you are done, thank the plant. Maybe give them a drink from your water bottle. Because that plant is going to help set your liver or blood or mental attitude right. And that is pretty generous of them.

When you’re ready to make an infusion, grab a healthy (no pun intended) handful of dried herb and put it in a quart glass jar. (glass is a must – it is stable and neutral). Pour hot water over it all until full and screw on the lid. You use a lid so volatile oils stay in the brew and actually enter your body to work their effect on you. (Though I do recognize that aroma is simply enjoyable and part of healing. Releasing them into the air will have your home or office smelling terrific.) You will need to do some research as some herbs have chemical compounds and minerals that require a longer steeping to get them to release into water. Roots and bark are two example of this.

With some herbs, cold water instead of hot water is used – this is the general rule for seeds and fruits and I also usually steep these longer, often setting my jar up the night before, having a nice sleep while my infusion makes itself and the waking the next day to drink it at room temp or warming it up with a low flame (stay away from that microwave, yuck!) or even drinking it iced.

a selection of SEEDS to look for (research their uses on your own) & collect before winter settles in:

• amaranth seeds
• burdock burs
• hackberry berries
• juniper berries
• kentucky coffeetree
• lamb’s quarters seeds
• rose hips
• queen anne’s lace
• yellow dock seeds
• sumac berries
• hawthorn haws
• aronia berries
• hazelnuts
• grapes
• pawpaws
• persimmons
• elderberries
• pears and apples…

WHERE DID I PUT THAT NUT?

Two years ago I was driving across country and stopped at this Piggly Wiggly to pick up some snacks for the road. I grabbed some yogurt, some chocolate and I was looking for nuts. And I couldn’t find them. I found the stock guy and asked him, ‘Hey, where can I find the nuts?’ and he replied, ‘Peanuts or Donuts?’ I paused waiting for some faint uncontrollable twitching or the slow crack of a grin. His face was blank. He was waiting for me to answer him. Stunned, I thanked him and left the store.

Who am I kidding? People in Kentucky know what nuts are and where they keep them. This happened on the northwest side of Chicago.

Every animal forages and everyone one of them aide in plants’ dispersal mechanism – the seed. Scratching the soil, knocking into them, eating them and pooping them out, carrying them stuck on their fur or muddy paws or webbed feet across distances they inadvertently or as is the case with a few animals intentionally plant them somewhere. Humans have been carrying seeds around in their pockets for thousands or years as they wander around and set up camp in different places. Wind, the jet stream, rivers and oceans help travel seeds widely too. That’s why we have so many weeds out there.

Squirrel’s energy seems to vibrate just below that of insects. Their seemingly erratic behavior might just be the animal reading the environment with their bodies faster or perhaps more honestly. Their strategy and impulses are not that unlike that of our weedy plant pals.

Squirrels are fantastic collectors and not very good archivists. No matter, as they can fill their self-interest no matter what the result of – whether forest with trees for nesting, playing, broadcasting chattering and eating, safety of for a snack now.

I am hoping I can convince y’all of the following: to travel/walk around with a nut in your pocket for a day. Just to feel it’s potential. Always of a talisman. To keep it in there until you are ready to release it into the earth. This is what squirrels are doing, carrying around acorns, walnuts, hazelnuts and tucking them into the earth. They do it quickly, furiously sussing out a place than scratching, fuddling and putting it in place and patting down the soil again in less than a minute, and whether later in winter they get the nibbles and look for these nuts they’ve stored and not find them is no matter as they are found by another or spring up as tree seedlings that grow into trees to nest in and chatter from which in turn produce nuts for future haphazard storage, snacks or again future trees. So if you can, find a nut tree or shrub and gently pick off a nut or risk going to a store and getting one not irridated. Chestnuts, buckeyes, oaks or walnuts are common in urban areas as street trees and in parks. Select one to act as a temporary talisman and carry it in your pocket like a battery.

…and know when you find that place to plant it, release it and by releasing it you activate it, you are ensuring a future store of nuts, providing shade and squirrel habitat, growing material to construct a ship, starting that forest that we all miss in our hearts.

Got nut, in pocket
Got a walnut and I’m going to use it
Intention I feel inventive
Gonna make you, make you, make you notice

The rocks here are amazing. The mountains are composed of giant piles of boulders. There are narrow chasms with unseeable depths between large slab rocks and boulders. There are caves and amphitheaters. The land speaks.

The colors of the red rock, along with the different lichens and green tints clinging to them, seem to shift my consciousness, things become more surreal. Spontaneous strange sounds from unknown creatures, depths of texture and color that have been buried and bulldozed in the mad-made linearness and mechanical simple infrastructure of our cities, are here present, and lead you on a different path.

There is really a simple way to grasp some of the differences between an industrialized human and an indigenous one. Picture what you are surrounded by and interact with every day. Are you surrounded by SOUNDS of cars, refrigerators, alarm clocks, car alarms, toilets, computers, human voices amplified by the hard solid walls of buildings, radios, televisions, recorded music? Or are you surrounded by the sounds of the different textures of wind, bird calls, lizards scurrying up rocks, nuts dropping off trees, the sounds of your feet on gravel, grass swooshing, rivers running, buffalo stampeding?

Are you surrounded by the IMAGES of bricks, cars, appliances, indoor spaces, fluorescent lights, words, signs, billboards, grocery store shelves, metal, plastic, glass, concrete? Or are you surrounded by the IMAGES of complex beings, who if watched or examined have some of the most psychedelic patterns, intricate and beautiful, or of expansive landscapes, of the infinite subtleties and hidden explosions of color and all of the movements – the slithing, the writhing, the surfing, gliding, coasting, inching, fleeing, running, jumping, slithering.

What do you SMELL? Do you smell the deep ancient smell of wet leaves and earth, of grassy must, of what is carried in the wind, of scat, of wild fruit, of rivers and fur and hide and tree bark and burning wood? Or do you smell gas, perfume, fabric softener, fresh packaging, the office, the upholstery, tar, car exhaust? Do you walk through different textures, varied surfaces, always watching, constantly aware of what is approaching around you and what you are moving through, or are you always on flat surfaces, sidewalks, floors?

--Helga

I feel life riveting through me this weekend – myself slowly relaxing out of the frantic urban pace, playing physically demanding and intense games with people in the open plain, running around freely, sitting around campfires hearing stories and poetry, hearing people’s struggles and pleasures, crawling up rocks, sleeping in caves.

In this context it seems almost absurd that in the worlds of psychology and philosophy, people are only starting to realize that as we have evolved for millions of years with certain patterns of existence, feeling natural environments and patterns and rituals in our bodies, in our language and culture and relationships, that it might actually be unhealthy and unsustainable to live in such radically unstable industrial systems that we have never adapted to and have only existed for a tiny fraction of the human experience.

To me this is not something to debate, because I can FEEL the difference so deeply, as I always notice too with the people who accompany me on my wilderness trips, and it makes me curious and confused about what great force or addiction must be compelling people to believe that indoor existence in cities – separated from the very processes and sources of life and other beings that make up the world – is desirable.

-- Helga