Community Medicine

Years ago, right before my initiation as a healer, during a VERY dynamic time of change... I had a dream.

In this dream the home of my birth was an Animist village of people living close to the earth. On top of the well box in the middle of my back yard man appeared dressed in black buck skins and bone jewelry.
The man was holding a sack and every one in the village turned to see him speak.
"I have stolen the collective medicine of your tribe. If you do not all give me your own personal medicine I will destroy the collective medicine of your people, dooming you all. You have until sun down."
The people knew what to do they went and gathered up their personal medicine and dressed in their finest regalia and set out to give this man in black their medicine.
I was outraged that my people would just surrender to this mans demands! I went into the house painted my face and picked up my ceremonial knife, took it from its sheath and ritually stalked the man...
As I walked around the out side of my house I saw that every one was preparing to give their medicine or had already done so. this fueled my rage. Not only was i enraged at the man who saw it fit to threaten my people, but I was enraged that they had allowed him to do so.
I was met at the back side of the house by a member of my own people sitting at a small table covered in cards. He was busy cataloging peoples personal medicine. Behind him was a room with another man in it, and the room was filled with box's of peoples medicine.
" Come to drop off your medicine?" the man asked.
"Yes...." I said, lying to him.
"What is it?"
This stopped me dead in my tracks. "I... I don't know."
"Oh well life is run by chance, so just pick one of these cards and that's your medicine."
I gave him a skeptical look and picked up a random card turning it over. on the back side was a picture of a wild rose.
"OH wild rose! That's allot like hawk medicine, wild rose medicine is wild love, that's a good one! Go ahead and drop it off inside."
The rage drained out of me completely... If my personal medicine was wild love then how could I kill this man in black. I walked into the room full of medicine in a daze, I was confused. Before me stood the man in black but now he was in a tie-dye T-shirt arranging boxes. He said to me while piling them up happily, "Oh just set it any where I will get to it in a minute..."
"I can not harm this man," I thought, " my medicine is wild love..."
I walked out of the room, muttering my medicine is wild love over and over again to my self, and out of my dream into a half waking dream, where information about what medicine was and its relationship to man and nature filled my now lucid mind.
I was shown what medicine is, and how one finds it within themselves through ones relationship with nature. I was shown that we all have a medicine to help heal all of the sickness in the world.I am currently in a college program about growing community. I took this coarse as a way to further my community development skills so that I could further assist in the development of bioregional animist communities. The night after my first class I could not sleep... the memory of the dream entered into my head and I could not stop thinking about it... I was exhausted but the memory would not leave me alone to sleep.
I had always felt the dream would make a wonderful community ritual there was so much meaning in it...
I saw that the dream could be made as a ceremony to teach about the collective medicine of a community. The man in black represented adversity and how adversity can threaten community. Every one had to give of their personal medicine to protect the community. Those that did not know what their medicine was would not understand this and would have to find out what their medicine was.
We all have medicine and our personal medicine is to be given away for the benefit of the community, not just the human community but the other-than-human community. Because all other-than-human-persons benefit from the authentic wellness on another, the other-than-human community gives its medicine to the larger community as well including human persons, it does so in such a way that shows us that our personal medicine also lays in nature that what is within us is also out side of us in the natural world and it show us this so that we can give of our medicine wisely to aid the whole of life.
As I lay awake trying to sleep fitfully I saw how small communities of human persons could enact this dream, and how it could teach them bioregional animism as well as about their responsibility to give back to life as life for the benefit of the community. I saw how it could teach about how communities can work WITH adversity, and the things that threaten community, and I saw how they could learn how ways of doing this could come from trans-rational ways of knowing, learning and problem solving, in ways that lead them to a deeper understanding of themselves through relationship with their larger community of human and other-than-human-persons.
As an example, if I was to do this with my class I would take a bag of stones for every member of the class and I would pass the stones out asking them to have an intention for the wellness of the community they are a part of in that class ( just as an example) and then blow their intention into the stone as a way of symbiotically putting their life force, their breath into the intention, animating it the intention, Giving it a life of its own...
Then I would ask the community leader to hold onto the pouch of stones and put it some where safe. At some point much latter down the line I would call the class together for a community "event" in which I or some one unknown to the class, to arrive dressed in black holding the pouch of stones. What would happen next would be an enactment of the dream. Many of the participants may not know their own personal medicine and the actual concept of "medicine" might be out side of their world view. So for ease, and to go along with the dream. Cards could be made covered with plants animals and forces of nature as well as types of places in ecological systems ( streams, lakes, ponds & mountains etc..) with their symbolic attributes added to them. Sources for making these symbolic cards could be taken from both Ted Andrews books as well as Jamie Sams. Though I don't fully approve of other-than-human-persons being viewed strictly as symbolic vehicles for human experience, other-than-human-persons can be related to symbolically, which does not make them symbols themselves. Something about this could be placed on the table with the cards. The participants could then give their cards the man in black who is now wearing colorful non-threatening colors and style.
After the last participant has given their personal medicine the community could gather and talk about their experience. After the discussion the dream as well as my interpretation of the dream and the foundation of the event could be shared to further show the importance of trans-rational cognition in the process of learning and growing and maintaining health in community as well as within ones sense of self.
This community ceremony empowers its members to find the medicine within themselves through the natural world, through trans-rational means. Showing them that they were all born with medicine to heal the sickness in the world, to mend that which is broken.
I participants were interested in pursuing this concept of personal medicine and community medicine deeper they could be encouraged to go out into nature and develop relationships with the other-than-human-persons in their larger bioregional community, and seek out their personal medicine or medicines through their relationships with

the ecological world. Through this relationship dynamic they could utilize various trans-rational methods comfortable to them to discover that the medicine is within as well as out side of themselves, seeing how trans-rational forms of cognition dissipate dualistic notions of inner and outer reality as well as self and other, cultivating altruistic action int he process as well as deeply grounded and centered personal growth based on place and the physical world.
I might add that the process of finding ones personal medicine as well as giving it to the community is an act of self healing as well as personal discovery, it can be painful as well as liberating and joyous, ultimately life changing
and requiring deep commitment and is not to be done with a half hearted attempt. This work I call a medicine quest, or medicine seeking. Often times one finds that the medicine they are seeking is in some way connected to the pain they hold within themselves and is one with adversity itself, that they might find it to be the poisonous parts of themselves or the world around them, and that they must actively transmute that poison into medicine before they can give it away... this can be a path of deep personal healing and growth. Thus requiring a deep commitment to wanting to help. Actively seeking this medicine themselves could be encouraged after the public event.

"How can you poison some thing so beautiful?"

"How can you poison some thing so beautiful?"

One night during a San Pedro long dance ceremony with a South American shaman I was sprayed by some perfume he had made during a dieta in the amazon, made with amazonian flowers.
In the perfumero curandero practice they take the perfume into the mouth and spray it on you in a mist from the mouth, the breath carries the and charges the intention to heal with the perfume. This is called Ch'alla, and is done primarily as a ritual action for cleansing.
I opened my self to receive the medicine. So many times healing is a painful process, cleansing is allot of hard work and I find my self resistant to it as I think many of get some times, this time I opened up, and "took my medicine".
I started coughing so hard it was like puking from my lungs! Once my lungs were cleaned out the scent of the perfume of the amazon flower people could find their way into my chest and deliver their message of healing to me.

I heard this very beautiful collective of voices say within me..."Why would you poison something so beautiful?"
I broke down in tears! A harsh question to be asked, I was racked with quilt for poisoning my body and at the same time feeling the message of the flowers telling me and affirming that I was a beautiful being, but I could not personalise the message completely. As the message expanded I saw how I was participating in poisoning the earth with pollution through damaging ways of relating to that which is around me and actually is me. The message expanded even larger and I could see that this was a question to my whole species.
Much of the work I am doing here is a response to this question, and a way to reciprocate and give thanks to the flowers of the amazon that healed my body and spirit that night. That night they showed me ways to not have to poison my self and my environment, showed me alternative ways of relating to the world, not out of guilt, shame or fear, but out of love for all that is.


Since that night I have been looking at the social and environmental impact of importation, out sourcing, and air travel. My partner is an ecology student ( go figure eh?) and allot of what I learn from her is very helpful. During one of her sustainability classes her teacher pointed out the immensely negative impact of air travel. A round trip ticket creates as much pollution as 100,000 SUV's driving for a full year. I began to look into it more feeling more an more drawn to bioregionalism I wanted to look at more and more reasons to embrace it. I found out that air planes dump the rest of their fuel from the air before landing to prevent explosions due to crash or some other potential landing problem, the chemicals in jet fuel are carcinogenic and mutagens, they have been found in nearly ever sample of breast milk in mammals as well as breast tissues, they are a major cause of breast cancer as is the same with PBDEs used as fire retardants in plastics. the chemicals can be found nearly every where in the world in water samples soil samples its unreal!

It is humbling and extremely scary to think wow when I eat a banana I am contributing to the poisoning of a mothers breast, to all mothers breasts, I am poisoning that which nurtures billions of babies, something beautiful.
Air freight is one of the fastest means of transporting food especially perishable fruits from other places in the world. When ever we eat a non local food that is out of season where we live, we can count on the fact that the majority of the time, it was flown to us. It is a horrible irony that the way wee feed our selves is killing us and others and not in the balanced cycle that life normally functions. The chemical found in the breast milk also keeps babies from gaining the immune boasting qualities of the breast milk, eating a banana makes babies sick... I have to hold my head for a moment and just allow the nausea to pass just from the thought....

I am in no means attempting to create motivation for change through fear and guilt. "My god look what your doing for shame!" I don't go for that I feel that with information like this we can make more intelligent decisions on how to live our lives and be motivated instead out of love then fear and guilt.
I think its more important then ever to attempt to look at what you have in your life, what you need and see if you can attempt to replace that with a local alternative do I need to travel by air? Why am I motivated to travel? Where does my food come from? Could I really fulfill my needs from local sources? More times then not we can! Though we do not have to work with just native regional foods and materials and life ways, we can work with what has been imported to our life places and integrate them and adapt them into our lives in a sustainable way.
The Polynesians for example have what they call boat plants that they took to Hawaii. Plants that were not native to Hawaii but were integrated to the ecosystems there. These plants were essential to their survival there, as was the pigs they brought with them.
With a knowledge of permaculture and ecology we can create natural holistic alternatives needing to import very little, working as a community, the development of cooperatives, collectives, and farmers markets in your local area can help immensely. Once systems of relationships are strengthened and old habits of relying on out sourced foods and other needs are changed, you will be surprised as to how much of a difference your making both socialy and ecologically. There is simply no need to import every thing we need. It appears so now but that's an illusion we are all going to have to face together, through working together to establish alternatives.The answer I give to the flowers of the amazon "How can you poison something so beautiful?" is..."I cant, I wont! Please show me ways to live advise me help me generate wellness for all. Aid us in finding alternatives. Be our allies?" If you ask the spirits of nature to help you in this way you discover they are more then happy to help! you can learn allot from a flower!

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Bio-Regional Animism in Five Minutes

Bio-Regional Animism in Five Minutes
By Fish bowl on tribes.net
This is a speech that will be given by Fish bowl at a local unitarian church in his bioregion this coming Sunday.


Spirituality is everywhere to be found; it unfolds with the peddles of a rose, and gurgles in the song of a creek, and in the canyons, and running through the forest. This is the experience animism is built from. It is the belief in spirit. It does not distinguish from the spiritual and the material; instead, they are one and the same.

Today, New Animism seeks to discard the dualism of modern society, where we divide into us, them and the other, to realize there is only everything. Instead, we seek a way of relating our modern culture to a spirituality based upon how we interact with ourselves, other human people and other-than-human-people that are the trees, rivers, mountains, animals, energies, and scientific principles, that we interact with daily. Nature is not seen as collection of resources for human consumption, but as equals to humans to be related to. This does not mean we abandon modern society, but to relate our lives to what is needed for daily sustenance. We have to ask ourselves how we are using, what we are using, and what are we contributing back to nature and the universe This forces one to realize the essential truth, that life is sacrificed to sustain life.

This way of thinking demands that we be environmentally, ecologically, and socially aware and to implement change. This shift of consciences brings empathy with our environment and to feel the reality of its state of being. Humans are not above nature but as much a part of it in everyway. However, our form of intelligence has lead to an irresponsible attitude towards the things we need to sustain our own lives, subjugating our environments to mere material and forgetting the spiritual nature of everything.
Our planet is a vast network of ecosystems that work in highly concentrated ways, unique to their immediate environment. These ecosystems have been surveyed for their resources and been divided up on the market to be bought and sold by piecemeal. Do you know where you food comes from? Do you know what is in it? Most likely you don’t.

Our culture has become so disconnected from our eco-systems through a homogeneous market that we have long lost the sacredness of daily life. Bio-Regional Animism is form of New Animism that re-cultivates the sacred relationship of humans and the eco-systems they inhabit. We recognize the values and lessons taught by animist cultures from the past and the present, but understand that is one way in which a specific culture related to a specific ecosystem.

Bio-Regional animism is not a new religion or a even a new tradition of neo-paganism; rather, it is a way of relating to our environment in a deeply spiritual way. For me I came to it through studying the history, culture, and mythology of the British-Celts. In time the pantheon lost its human attributes and revealed themselves to me as the rivers, mountains, forest, animals, and plants of the ecosystems where I was living in at the time. In this way its synchronism can co-exist with other spiritual systems and life philosophies, if one is open to the possibilities.

All one needs is to listen to their intuition and hear the needs, desires, and unique understanding of their ecosystem. This is not only done with improvisational ceremonies and meditations but through scientific study of their environment. Understanding where your water comes from, the medicinal value of indigenous plants and the social activities of local wildlife builds the foundation for relating to your ecosystem. Bio-Regional animism is not the path for those who seek predefinitions and structure; instead, it directly challenges these notions, leaving us with the very soil under your feet and sky above our heads, and that is what we work with to grow our spiritual relationships.