Seeing the antidote
Part of our daily routine is to walk the dogs on a nearby camp road that cuts through a swampy area with gravel ditches on both sides. It’s the worst kind of soil you could possibly imagine, yet every single foot of the roadway is covered with medicinal plants. Coltsfoot, Jack in the pulpit, elderberry, plantain, heal-all, jewelweed… It’s amazed me to discover, with each changing season, more and more medicine growing on this less than 1 mile stretch. Any ailment you can think of this camp road has a cure for.
The thing is, medicine isn’t the only thing that grows in this type of soil. The other day, I bent down to pick a particularly beautiful specimen of heal-all and ended up pulling up the three-leaved villain, poison ivy, with it. I’ve never had a strong reaction to that particular weed, but I took a few steps and grabbed a piece of plantain to rub over my hands just in case. That’s nature’s secret really, poison and the antidote tend to grow from the same soil.
It’s no different with humans. The toughest times bring out both the best and the worst in society. We’re definitely seeing it now, but I believe it’s what you look for.
I will admit that when we first moved here, I missed the ease and normalcy of suburban sidewalks. It was easy to see the gravel, the inhospitable soil, the swamp, the poison ivy. It’s all we noticed at first. With time, we started to see everything else, to notice the hidden blessings growing in unexpected places.
We need to look at the best that is happening in the world right now. We need to find the medicine -the antidote to the poison growing right beside it. I truly believe it is there if we’re willing to look. That’s where we need to put our focus, so we can learn to heal instead of focusing on the poison.
Truly excellent.mom