Plant Medicine

Before I had a chance to convey the latter half of my soulful weekend, another weekend was upon us, with equally upbeat activity. This past Saturday I happily joined the first of a two-day Michigan herb walk with Darryl Patton, a master herbalist and significant figure in the landscape of American plant medicine. Darryl is an amazing guide of the time-tested techniques and pharmacopeia of Appalachian folk remedies. He practices “a component of traditional folk medicine that embodies American self-reliance and creativity, which is still evolving today,” according to his book Mountain Medicine. This work honors his teacher Tommie Bass, one of the last of the old mountain herb doctors and an inspiration to a generation of young herbalists. "The ability of a bark, leaf, or root to transform the body in a positive manner,” says Darryl, “is a mystery that serves to daily rekindle my passion for the natural world."

Hunting, gathering and working with medicinal plants for the past 31 years on Lookout Mountain in the Southern Appalachians, Darryl made the thirteen-hour jaunt to Saugatuck with his wife Jane encouraged by his student, naturopathic doctor, and head of Ladyhawk Nutrition, our own Maggie Conklin. Maggie’s write-up for the weekend claimed our focus was on twelve herbs, six on Saturday and six on Sunday – Poke, Plantain, Mullein, Sumac, Chickweed, Yellow Dock, Squaw Vine, Bee Balm, Solomon Seal, Nettles, Joe Pye weed, and Sassafras. But once the walking encyclopedia Darryl opened up, it was a non-stop botanical schooling.  We learned multiple uses for each herb, eating several and drinking herbal teas.

Part Southern gentlemen, part backwoods badass, Darryl sported a T-shirt claiming The First Rule of Gun Safety: Carry One. His pickup’s license plate read SECEDE, bordered with a Southern Cross. He taught us how to make a fire using nothing but a cotton ball and ashes, drawing from his experience as a primitive and wilderness survival expert. My Native American teacher Phil was what the Lakotas call a Wicasa Wakan, a Holy Man. But there’s another healer, the Pejuta Wicasa, the man whose expertise is in plant and herb medicine, Darryl definitely embodying the spirit of that class of Medicine Men. High class I might add, as no matter how big a deal people make of certain leaders and spiritual men, I always pay attention to how these guys treat their wives. Darryl passed my secret little test, being as sweet to Jane as a sprig of Angelica, taking her hand on each of the wooded walks. Reviewing my scrawl of endless notes – Service Berry flowers as a coolant for fevers, French Mulberry as effective a bug repellant as DEET, Bitter Herb containing more Vitamin C than a lemon, etc. etc. etc. – I’m in awe, awakened to a new awareness of the love and the medicines that surround us, as well as their ability to restore mankind to spiritual wholeness. 

The Home Practice Program

I enjoyed a great little weekend of spiritual practice, inspiring a couple posts on both my teacher John Ashbrook's quarterly class and Shinzen's Home Practice Program. Kicking it off on the Friday night 10 p.m. to midnight call, Shin's monthly weekend home retreat allows easy access to his colorfully engaging approach to sitting practice,  as people from around the world meditate via conference call. After my weekend experience, I’ll be doing these with regularity, as, according to Home Practice Program site, the improved consistency of practice increases the likelihood of exponential growth, home delivery enables extended retreat time without the expense of travel, and Shinzen’s variety of imaginative offerings foster broad and deep psycho-spiritual transformation. Five independent programs are offered each practice weekend, each organized around different focus techniques, with special themes offered regularly, such as managing physical discomfort. The good news too vis-a-vis Shinzen's somewhat elaborate dialect used to map the inner world is that each month includes one or two programs that require no previous experience whatsoever.

Friday night’s focus explored a phenomenon called Don’t Know Mind. “There’s this idiom,” Shinzen opened with, “the biggest idea I know, which is the merging of contemplative practice and science in a mutually evolving relationship.” Naturally fostering one another, this dynamic fusion unifies the past while offering a bright future to the human species. In Shinzen's world, “The Spirit of Science” is what should inform the efforts of a modern mindfulness teacher. Don’t believe anything not based on logic. Be precise, be nuanced in your presentation. We then defined the phenomenon of Don’t Know Mind – that is, the urge to know something – and structured a scale based on this state's presence, absence and intensity.  Shinzen cited the three dimensions of mindful awareness - concentration, sensory clarity and equanimity - and instructed us to apply them accordingly, focusing on the presence or absence of Don't Know, detecting any and all subtle changes be it visual or somatic, and cooling out with a level-headedness around whatever arose. We stretched up and settled in, monitoring spontaneous levels of Don't Know Mind for almost two hours, with Shinzen offering sporadic but encouraging guidance. "Stay with that. The longer we work, the deeper we train,"

Don't Know Mind is the source of Zen Koans, riddles in the form of a paradoxical questions like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?", inner inquiries used to gain intuitive knowledge. Having equanimity with muddle or confusion is the basis of an extraordinary new kind of knowing, discovered independently in three different cultures. The Tang dynasty of China's Don't Know Mind was also the ancient Greek's skepticos "epoche" as well as  the Christian monks' and nuns' "Docta ignorantia" of the middles ages. Shinzen pointed out that in general, the more we learn the more questions we have, thus Don't Know is always bigger than Do Know.  Matters turn over and over in our minds, as we at best ponder and at worst obsess over the things we care about. Cultivating an awareness of the prevalence of Don't Know then allowed for  experiencing a sense of freedom or tranquility in its absence, the working through of mental drivenness also nurturing one's natural wisdom function. Enjoying the energetic bump as I scribbled points for this piece in a notebook by candlelight, I thought, 'This is exactly what I should be doing with my Friday night.'

If you're interested in checking out The Home Practice Program, go here to learn more and join in on the next virtual gathering, usually the second weekend of the month, scheduled for August 10th-12th. 

Harry Dean Stanton Steps Into The Light

Are you a fan of Harry Dean Stanton? Old and new devotees alike should know the Actor, Icon, Musician, Repo Man, and Seeker left for the world of the Spirit on September 15th, 2017. Prior to his passing, however, Harry Dean made some great movies, his final on-screen role as Lucky released last year, the opening scene pictured above. Lucky, according to the film's write-up, tells the story of a “90-year-old atheist and his struggle against encroaching old age. The film depicts his coming to terms with his own mortality, as he searches for enlightenment."

I fortuitously caught Lucky in Holland this winter at the Knickerbocker Theater, a cool little western Michigan community cultural center. I’d had a thing for Harry Dean as some people do, especially after reading an article upon his death focused on his life as a seeker. “Enlightenment is the only thing that matters” was his quote, pictured sitting on a zafu meditation cushion, kneeling on a zabuton, smoking a cigarette with a long, dangling ash. When Harry Dean Stanton as Lucky appeared up on the Knickerbocker’s old-school marquee, I was IN. I don't quite get the film's aforementioned descriptor, as I can’t recall much that'd have me labeling Lucky an atheist, although he clearly wasn’t a religious man, What I did note to be a spirituality-focused exchange occurred between Lucky and the fellow war veteran Fred, played by Tom Skerritt, their interesting but muddy dialogue over apple pie slices in a scene in a small town Texas diner being the inspiration for this article.

Connecting over shared, horrific combat experiences, Lucky listens intently to Fred, Stanton's focus fueled by a real-life WWII stint at Okinawa. “I still think about those people on the islands hiding in caves afraid of us, the Japs telling them we there to rape and kill them all," croaks Fred. "I remember this little girl. She couldn’t have been more than seven, in rags. She saw us comin’ I guess, outta no where, outta the hole, and.. she had this beautiful… smile on her face. It wasn’t a façade, it was coming from somewhere inside of her… from the center of herself." Fred continues: “Good Lord. In that shit hoie. It stopped us in our tracks. Here we were, covered with shit, with pieces of people, I swear I couldn’t see one tree left standing, and she’s grinning from ear to ear. So I said to my Corporal, I said “Look here, we have someone who’s happy to see us.” And his response was: 'She’s not happy to see us. She’s a Buddhist and she thinks she’s going to be killed. And she’s smiling at her fate.' When I think about that little girls face and that beautiful smile, in the midst of all that horror and how she summoned the joy. They don’t make any kind of medal for that kind of bravery.”

I don’t think this exchange made some profound, original spiritual truth. In fact, I found it a bit muddled, maybe in a similar way to this post about my love for Harry Dean Stanton. My point was to clarify the (somewhat) discussed notion here that one of the goals of spiritual practice like Buddhist meditation is to develop such a dynamic inner connection that eventually the most horrific external events – warfare, loss, the death of others as well as ourselves – effect us less and less. As I'm fond of reminding people - if purification practice can strengthen us in the face of the real biggies -  like our shared destiny to one day not even exist - imagine how it might assist us in the struggles of daily life. My teacher John Ashbrook says it this way: “When you’re at peace within, you’re at peace without.” And on that note, RIP HDS.