Falling In Love, Yet Again
by Josephine Laing
I fell in love last night. This was not the romantic type of love between two people that is so often ripe with the promise of sexual union. Nor was it likely to be the chummy light sort of connection that men so often share which is typically based around a common interest or activity. No, this was much deeper than that. This was that amazing woman love, one of life's great delights. We are so blessed to be able to jump into that wonderfully all encompassing feeling that only women friends seem to be able to share.
I had been in the Co-op, getting some groceries a few days before, and as I wheeled my little cart past the bulk herb section at the back of the store, there was a young woman there, busy with the herbs. She was long and tall and quick to smile and very apologetic, having six or seven jars of herbs out and occupying most of the counter space. I just needed one herb, goldenseal, the queen of healers. And I squeezed out a little spot to scoop and fill my measured amount of the fine golden powder. The young woman was discussing some of the properties of the herbs that she was purchasing with one of our co-op regulars who said, "You two should meet." So, we introduced ourselves. I was curious what she might be concocting with such a great variety of plant healers. With a little flush of embarrassment and that quick and furtive smile, her arms flew up in confession as she exclaimed that she didn't know anything really about herbs, but that she wanted to learn. My kind of girl! So, I shared that that was exactly how I got started.
And so it was, and in that very spot, the back wall of the Co-op, some twenty or thirty years ago. I had purchased a similar variety of roots and sticks and powdered leaves, getting about a dozen different herbs. And they sat in my cupboards for a number of years, tentatively coming out from time to time for a trial run. And one of those first herbs was goldenseal root powder, the very herb I was buying the day that I met lovely young Paige. Goldenseal has since become such a love of mine that I carry a tiny jar of her most helpful golden powder with me in my purse. (Please be sure to consult with a naturopath before using any natural cures.) Though she has many uses that I won't take the time to list here, I will say that goldenseal is perhaps my primary first-aid herb. I have found goldenseal to be very effective for packing wounds, especially deep wounds, to help stop bleeding and to prevent infection—like after tooth extractions. Goldenseal also soothes the sting and pain of injury. And, she is great, I mean really great on burns, even bad ones like second degree. One friend of mine liberally sprinkled a badly burned foot with goldenseal powder. She then placed her foot in a light weight plastic bag to keep it dry and then submerged it in a pail of cool water until the pain subsided. She kept it clean and dry and wrapped it daily with fresh sterile gauze, and reapplied the goldenseal powder from time to time. With this as her only treatment, the wound was largely healed in four days time.
Our healing herbs which slowly and steadily support and build the body have had their value diminished in western culture. This is not unlike us women who have also had our values diminished in preference for the more masculine view of asserting ones self physically into the other's realm, both in the culture and in healing practices. But here, with the herbs, I digress, because this story is not about the love that women can feel for herbs though we can and often do so, it's about the love that women can choose to let themselves feel with other women. All we need to do is to be bold and let ourselves love ourselves enough to reach out and request them.
So, back to Paige, my new love. Here was this beautiful, lithesome, budding herbologist standing before me and sadly, I was running late and had to dash. So, I said, "Why don't you come with me and Frank to the movies Wednesday night?" We had planned to see "MissRepresentation" at the Fremont Theater. It was a special showing to benefit the Women's Legacy Fund, presented by the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. This film is a deeply meaningful and well crafted documentary about how women are misrepresented in the media to the detriment of everyone who is exposed to this culture of ours. It showed interviews with young people who are totally fed-up with the whole body image baloney that Hollywood and advertising companies continually spew forth influencing young minds into believing that this is the ideal. By using some unattainable, airbrushed and photo-shopped images of women for commercial purposes, they create a trite and mindless value system along with massively widespread feelings of inferiority and debased self-worth especially among the young women of the world, who are continually slammed with this imagery. And it stunts the minds of our men too, crippling them to an emotionally juvenile state. And because the women have been so debased and thus dis-empowered, the men get to lead. This leaves our world dismally in the hands of an adolescent masculine mentality. And it's not good for any of us, male or female. We don't need any more self-loathing. What we need now, more than ever, is self-love. So we've got to stop that so we can change the way we think.
I'm reminded of the Nestle boycott in the 1970's. Nestle was making infant formula for the third world, which was nutritionally deficient and they knew it. I stopped purchasing Nestle products then and there. And peer pressure was a big part of the boycott. People would say, "Why do you want to support them, don't you realize that they are killing babies?" Nestle had to back paddle for years to regain consumer credibility. And I don't think that they ever fully recovered. We women are responsible for 86% of all purchases made in this country. I could see something like the Nestle boycott happening again in regards to all of the media and advertising companies which cast women in a trite or unattainable light. It's no wonder to me that years ago I spontaneously stopped shopping in regular stores and abandoned T.V. altogether, because it is truly pathetic out there. I came away from the movie feeling that this film should be required viewing in every school in the nation. Even better, let's make sure it is seen by our sons and daughters throughout the western world, or wherever our television and film advertising media promoters reach their many tentacled and prying hands.
So, after the movie, we were all excitedly talking about the importance and timeliness of these ideas while we drove another friend of ours, Mary, to her home. Mary had fallen in love with me right after we met, too. She shared with me later that she had first realized this when she got to see the pure joy that I feel while dancing. We had been at a Midsummer Night's Dream party together, a magical garden affair where fairies and musicians abound. Our dear mutual friend Susan creates this event at her home every year for all of us to enjoy. This was Mary's first time coming and she was so delighted to see me, a woman with a less than perfect body size and shape, having so much fun twirling and reaching and lunging to the music, that she fell in love. She has told me twice now that she thinks that a picture of me dancing should be in the margin of the dictionary, next to the word joy. Isn't that a great compliment. Naturally, I welcomed this love and invited her to slip into the warm bath of friendship and women's circles that help to make up the really fun part of my weekends and evenings. So now, Mary and I get to spend a lot of good time together which we both love. Easily in her fifties, Mary admirably and exclusively uses her bicycle for transportation. She does this for many reasons: exercise, carbon footprint, expense, etc. Since it had been raining off and on that day, I had called and invited her to join all of us, and had offered to give her a ride.
Meanwhile, to my delight and surprise, I discovered that Paige lives only a few doors away. So, after we had returned from dropping Mary off, I offered to walk Paige home. She sweetly slipped her hand into mine. She had made and was wearing knitted palm mittens, allowing her fingers to be free. And off we went. As we passed it, I pointed out one of the gardens I help with on the corner. It has seven baby fruit trees, all in their third year now, with most of them starting to give a little fruit. This garden also holds one of my prides and joy, a fifty foot long sidewalk herbal apothecary. Mixed in with a variety of common landscape perennials there are about twenty different medicinal plants all growing between the sidewalk and the lawn. I pointed it out as we happily chatted away. Then, a few steps further on, Paige stopped and looked up at the sky. And there, we both were surprised to see a beautiful white ribbon undulating it's way across the sky, like an aurora borealis, magically getting brighter and brighter before our eyes. Within a moment or two, the quarter moon emerged from behind the moving cloud revealing her mystery to us and we giggled with delight.
Then we were at her front yard and Paige showed me their raised garden beds, all ready to go with amendment and baby plants in containers. I couldn't believe my eyes. Here was truly a young woman after my own heart. I felt like Mary had. Falling hard and fast. Then Paige took me by the hand again and led me around the corner of the house, ducking under the branches of a low hanging tree and there opening before me in the moonlit glow was a gigantic parklike lawn, ripe and potentially ready for a garden full of fruit trees. Yippee! (Landlord and tenants permitting, of course.) Paige thought it sounded like a wonderful idea. And she led me to a lone, mature fig tree whose sweet abundant fruit plopped softly into our hands, bringing the luscious taste of late summer to our night softened lips.
But, it didn't stop there, beyond the lawn was a giant fully mature mother oak tree, in all of her majesty, boughs spread wide and high and low, heavy with acorns and with a deep litter of her leaves blanketing the rain softened earth. Tentatively feeling our way among her roots in the dappled moonlight, Paige led me beyond the tree, to one last patch of lawn. In the center was a low meditation deck, a work in progress, being made free-form by one of her roommates. There it was, right in the middle of this little private lawn, snugly nestled between the oak and Garden Creek, bathed in it's own patch of moonlight. Simply magical. We laid down on our backs, head to head, on the damp wood and laughed and spoke of life's mysteries and the many promises of our human evolution and of the golden age of peace which I feel sure that we are all on the verge of entering. And both of us could truly feel it in the deepest part of ourselves in that moonlit, rain-washed, star-clad night air.
I found myself sharing with Paige some of the details of a talk that Frank and I had recently heard by an intriguing man named Lee Carroll. Did you know that twenty years ago, all of the countries in South America had dictators? I didn't realize this, until he mentioned it. And then, Lee reminded us, that they all now have presidents instead. I think that's a pretty good sign. Don't you? Despite immediate appearances, it seems to me that we are steadily heading in the right direction. The Berlin Wall fell. No one saw that coming. The internet has helped us to become close with everyone around the world. How extraordinary is that! Even corporations, in their mad dash for profits, now know that generally speaking, war is bad for most businesses. And now we are opening our eyes even wider to the need for women's values and views in our culture and how we've all suffered for the lack of them.
And there is still even more good news, which is happening now, the end of the Mayan calendar, is not just a one day thing, it's a thirty-six year shift, and we are already eighteen years into it. The ancient Mayans understood, and so has a recent award-winning quantum-physicist, that time is not linear, but is actually a circle. And the Mayans indicated that certain key moments on the circle of time allow for huge potentials in human evolution. This thirty-six year span of time is not only one of those moments, but it's the one that they thought held the highest potential for the development of human consciousness. And amazingly enough, there are more people on the earth right now than there have ever been on the earth through all time. In other words, we have all shown up for this big shift.
Astronomically, very recently, our solar system has aligned itself in the same plane as our milky way. Now, that's a pretty amazing thing. And last December 21st, on the winter solstice, we had a total lunar eclipse which meant that our moon was lined up with our earth, which was lined up with our sun, all on the same plane with the rest of the planets in our solar system, which have lined up with our galaxy, the milky way. Many astronomers feel that this was a significant part of the big event that only happens every twenty-six thousand years. They call the process "the precession of the equinoxes." And this precession is what the astronomers and creators of ancient calendars (Mayan, Vedic, Toltec, Druidic, Aztec, Egyptian) were heralding. Alignment. Not the end of the world, but a big shift in how we view the world, our sun, our solar system and our galaxy.
And I see this alignment with these heavenly bodies as if it's an alignment of ourselves with our mother and father creators, majestic and beautiful, all worthy of our love and respect. My feeling is that this time is here with us now to help us move beyond our current world view, which I think is not unlike one that an infant has at the breast, squalling to suck it dry, loving the mother, but completely oblivious to the mother's own identity, balance and needs. What I see is that we humans are finally leaving our childhood and gaining our maturity. And it feels really good to be growing up. It's what every child yearns for, to eventually have an adult relationship with their parents.
So Paige and I felt that all of this was truly worth celebrating and we couldn't hold back our laughter as we laid there wiggling with our arms and legs held high up into the night air with glee. And our sounds of pure joy rang throughout the neighborhood. Together we summoned forth that unstoppable nectar of joy, ever able to arise from the depths of womankind. We are the bringers of life after all. And I've heard it said that a joyous woman controls the energy of the universe. Haven't you ever noticed how a joyous woman turns heads, no matter what her age or body type? Everybody wants some of that good stuff. It's love, it's life! It's why we are here, to find and give forth our joy.
So, naturally, Paige's young male roommates, hungry to share in what we had, were waiting on the back stoop to greet us and give us warm hugs when time called us away from our magical hour. And I've been dying for a free moment to sit down and call her for two days now, ever since I fell in love. And why not? Why not fall in love with the joyous girl who is diving head first into herbs?
And for that matter, why not love the guy who used to pump the gas into my little truck with a smile? Why not love our selves and our lives and the whole world. Why hold back when there is so much love to be shared in the world and so much love to be enjoyed?
Ram Dass says that the doors to love open from the inside. Meaning that we, ourselves, hold the lock and key, and that anytime we want to, we can open the doors to our hearts and let the love flow. So, I say, "Set yourself free! Follow your heart where she leads you." Be bold and let yourself jump into love all over again like my friend Mary did, and like me, with someone that you've just met. And let your own laughter ring from the boughs and clouds in the dark of night, just like Paige and Mary and me.
© 2012 Josephine Laing
I fell in love last night. This was not the romantic type of love between two people that is so often ripe with the promise of sexual union. Nor was it likely to be the chummy light sort of connection that men so often share which is typically based around a common interest or activity. No, this was much deeper than that. This was that amazing woman love, one of life's great delights. We are so blessed to be able to jump into that wonderfully all encompassing feeling that only women friends seem to be able to share.
I had been in the Co-op, getting some groceries a few days before, and as I wheeled my little cart past the bulk herb section at the back of the store, there was a young woman there, busy with the herbs. She was long and tall and quick to smile and very apologetic, having six or seven jars of herbs out and occupying most of the counter space. I just needed one herb, goldenseal, the queen of healers. And I squeezed out a little spot to scoop and fill my measured amount of the fine golden powder. The young woman was discussing some of the properties of the herbs that she was purchasing with one of our co-op regulars who said, "You two should meet." So, we introduced ourselves. I was curious what she might be concocting with such a great variety of plant healers. With a little flush of embarrassment and that quick and furtive smile, her arms flew up in confession as she exclaimed that she didn't know anything really about herbs, but that she wanted to learn. My kind of girl! So, I shared that that was exactly how I got started.
And so it was, and in that very spot, the back wall of the Co-op, some twenty or thirty years ago. I had purchased a similar variety of roots and sticks and powdered leaves, getting about a dozen different herbs. And they sat in my cupboards for a number of years, tentatively coming out from time to time for a trial run. And one of those first herbs was goldenseal root powder, the very herb I was buying the day that I met lovely young Paige. Goldenseal has since become such a love of mine that I carry a tiny jar of her most helpful golden powder with me in my purse. (Please be sure to consult with a naturopath before using any natural cures.) Though she has many uses that I won't take the time to list here, I will say that goldenseal is perhaps my primary first-aid herb. I have found goldenseal to be very effective for packing wounds, especially deep wounds, to help stop bleeding and to prevent infection—like after tooth extractions. Goldenseal also soothes the sting and pain of injury. And, she is great, I mean really great on burns, even bad ones like second degree. One friend of mine liberally sprinkled a badly burned foot with goldenseal powder. She then placed her foot in a light weight plastic bag to keep it dry and then submerged it in a pail of cool water until the pain subsided. She kept it clean and dry and wrapped it daily with fresh sterile gauze, and reapplied the goldenseal powder from time to time. With this as her only treatment, the wound was largely healed in four days time.
Our healing herbs which slowly and steadily support and build the body have had their value diminished in western culture. This is not unlike us women who have also had our values diminished in preference for the more masculine view of asserting ones self physically into the other's realm, both in the culture and in healing practices. But here, with the herbs, I digress, because this story is not about the love that women can feel for herbs though we can and often do so, it's about the love that women can choose to let themselves feel with other women. All we need to do is to be bold and let ourselves love ourselves enough to reach out and request them.
So, back to Paige, my new love. Here was this beautiful, lithesome, budding herbologist standing before me and sadly, I was running late and had to dash. So, I said, "Why don't you come with me and Frank to the movies Wednesday night?" We had planned to see "MissRepresentation" at the Fremont Theater. It was a special showing to benefit the Women's Legacy Fund, presented by the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival. This film is a deeply meaningful and well crafted documentary about how women are misrepresented in the media to the detriment of everyone who is exposed to this culture of ours. It showed interviews with young people who are totally fed-up with the whole body image baloney that Hollywood and advertising companies continually spew forth influencing young minds into believing that this is the ideal. By using some unattainable, airbrushed and photo-shopped images of women for commercial purposes, they create a trite and mindless value system along with massively widespread feelings of inferiority and debased self-worth especially among the young women of the world, who are continually slammed with this imagery. And it stunts the minds of our men too, crippling them to an emotionally juvenile state. And because the women have been so debased and thus dis-empowered, the men get to lead. This leaves our world dismally in the hands of an adolescent masculine mentality. And it's not good for any of us, male or female. We don't need any more self-loathing. What we need now, more than ever, is self-love. So we've got to stop that so we can change the way we think.
I'm reminded of the Nestle boycott in the 1970's. Nestle was making infant formula for the third world, which was nutritionally deficient and they knew it. I stopped purchasing Nestle products then and there. And peer pressure was a big part of the boycott. People would say, "Why do you want to support them, don't you realize that they are killing babies?" Nestle had to back paddle for years to regain consumer credibility. And I don't think that they ever fully recovered. We women are responsible for 86% of all purchases made in this country. I could see something like the Nestle boycott happening again in regards to all of the media and advertising companies which cast women in a trite or unattainable light. It's no wonder to me that years ago I spontaneously stopped shopping in regular stores and abandoned T.V. altogether, because it is truly pathetic out there. I came away from the movie feeling that this film should be required viewing in every school in the nation. Even better, let's make sure it is seen by our sons and daughters throughout the western world, or wherever our television and film advertising media promoters reach their many tentacled and prying hands.
So, after the movie, we were all excitedly talking about the importance and timeliness of these ideas while we drove another friend of ours, Mary, to her home. Mary had fallen in love with me right after we met, too. She shared with me later that she had first realized this when she got to see the pure joy that I feel while dancing. We had been at a Midsummer Night's Dream party together, a magical garden affair where fairies and musicians abound. Our dear mutual friend Susan creates this event at her home every year for all of us to enjoy. This was Mary's first time coming and she was so delighted to see me, a woman with a less than perfect body size and shape, having so much fun twirling and reaching and lunging to the music, that she fell in love. She has told me twice now that she thinks that a picture of me dancing should be in the margin of the dictionary, next to the word joy. Isn't that a great compliment. Naturally, I welcomed this love and invited her to slip into the warm bath of friendship and women's circles that help to make up the really fun part of my weekends and evenings. So now, Mary and I get to spend a lot of good time together which we both love. Easily in her fifties, Mary admirably and exclusively uses her bicycle for transportation. She does this for many reasons: exercise, carbon footprint, expense, etc. Since it had been raining off and on that day, I had called and invited her to join all of us, and had offered to give her a ride.
Meanwhile, to my delight and surprise, I discovered that Paige lives only a few doors away. So, after we had returned from dropping Mary off, I offered to walk Paige home. She sweetly slipped her hand into mine. She had made and was wearing knitted palm mittens, allowing her fingers to be free. And off we went. As we passed it, I pointed out one of the gardens I help with on the corner. It has seven baby fruit trees, all in their third year now, with most of them starting to give a little fruit. This garden also holds one of my prides and joy, a fifty foot long sidewalk herbal apothecary. Mixed in with a variety of common landscape perennials there are about twenty different medicinal plants all growing between the sidewalk and the lawn. I pointed it out as we happily chatted away. Then, a few steps further on, Paige stopped and looked up at the sky. And there, we both were surprised to see a beautiful white ribbon undulating it's way across the sky, like an aurora borealis, magically getting brighter and brighter before our eyes. Within a moment or two, the quarter moon emerged from behind the moving cloud revealing her mystery to us and we giggled with delight.
Then we were at her front yard and Paige showed me their raised garden beds, all ready to go with amendment and baby plants in containers. I couldn't believe my eyes. Here was truly a young woman after my own heart. I felt like Mary had. Falling hard and fast. Then Paige took me by the hand again and led me around the corner of the house, ducking under the branches of a low hanging tree and there opening before me in the moonlit glow was a gigantic parklike lawn, ripe and potentially ready for a garden full of fruit trees. Yippee! (Landlord and tenants permitting, of course.) Paige thought it sounded like a wonderful idea. And she led me to a lone, mature fig tree whose sweet abundant fruit plopped softly into our hands, bringing the luscious taste of late summer to our night softened lips.
But, it didn't stop there, beyond the lawn was a giant fully mature mother oak tree, in all of her majesty, boughs spread wide and high and low, heavy with acorns and with a deep litter of her leaves blanketing the rain softened earth. Tentatively feeling our way among her roots in the dappled moonlight, Paige led me beyond the tree, to one last patch of lawn. In the center was a low meditation deck, a work in progress, being made free-form by one of her roommates. There it was, right in the middle of this little private lawn, snugly nestled between the oak and Garden Creek, bathed in it's own patch of moonlight. Simply magical. We laid down on our backs, head to head, on the damp wood and laughed and spoke of life's mysteries and the many promises of our human evolution and of the golden age of peace which I feel sure that we are all on the verge of entering. And both of us could truly feel it in the deepest part of ourselves in that moonlit, rain-washed, star-clad night air.
I found myself sharing with Paige some of the details of a talk that Frank and I had recently heard by an intriguing man named Lee Carroll. Did you know that twenty years ago, all of the countries in South America had dictators? I didn't realize this, until he mentioned it. And then, Lee reminded us, that they all now have presidents instead. I think that's a pretty good sign. Don't you? Despite immediate appearances, it seems to me that we are steadily heading in the right direction. The Berlin Wall fell. No one saw that coming. The internet has helped us to become close with everyone around the world. How extraordinary is that! Even corporations, in their mad dash for profits, now know that generally speaking, war is bad for most businesses. And now we are opening our eyes even wider to the need for women's values and views in our culture and how we've all suffered for the lack of them.
And there is still even more good news, which is happening now, the end of the Mayan calendar, is not just a one day thing, it's a thirty-six year shift, and we are already eighteen years into it. The ancient Mayans understood, and so has a recent award-winning quantum-physicist, that time is not linear, but is actually a circle. And the Mayans indicated that certain key moments on the circle of time allow for huge potentials in human evolution. This thirty-six year span of time is not only one of those moments, but it's the one that they thought held the highest potential for the development of human consciousness. And amazingly enough, there are more people on the earth right now than there have ever been on the earth through all time. In other words, we have all shown up for this big shift.
Astronomically, very recently, our solar system has aligned itself in the same plane as our milky way. Now, that's a pretty amazing thing. And last December 21st, on the winter solstice, we had a total lunar eclipse which meant that our moon was lined up with our earth, which was lined up with our sun, all on the same plane with the rest of the planets in our solar system, which have lined up with our galaxy, the milky way. Many astronomers feel that this was a significant part of the big event that only happens every twenty-six thousand years. They call the process "the precession of the equinoxes." And this precession is what the astronomers and creators of ancient calendars (Mayan, Vedic, Toltec, Druidic, Aztec, Egyptian) were heralding. Alignment. Not the end of the world, but a big shift in how we view the world, our sun, our solar system and our galaxy.
And I see this alignment with these heavenly bodies as if it's an alignment of ourselves with our mother and father creators, majestic and beautiful, all worthy of our love and respect. My feeling is that this time is here with us now to help us move beyond our current world view, which I think is not unlike one that an infant has at the breast, squalling to suck it dry, loving the mother, but completely oblivious to the mother's own identity, balance and needs. What I see is that we humans are finally leaving our childhood and gaining our maturity. And it feels really good to be growing up. It's what every child yearns for, to eventually have an adult relationship with their parents.
So Paige and I felt that all of this was truly worth celebrating and we couldn't hold back our laughter as we laid there wiggling with our arms and legs held high up into the night air with glee. And our sounds of pure joy rang throughout the neighborhood. Together we summoned forth that unstoppable nectar of joy, ever able to arise from the depths of womankind. We are the bringers of life after all. And I've heard it said that a joyous woman controls the energy of the universe. Haven't you ever noticed how a joyous woman turns heads, no matter what her age or body type? Everybody wants some of that good stuff. It's love, it's life! It's why we are here, to find and give forth our joy.
So, naturally, Paige's young male roommates, hungry to share in what we had, were waiting on the back stoop to greet us and give us warm hugs when time called us away from our magical hour. And I've been dying for a free moment to sit down and call her for two days now, ever since I fell in love. And why not? Why not fall in love with the joyous girl who is diving head first into herbs?
And for that matter, why not love the guy who used to pump the gas into my little truck with a smile? Why not love our selves and our lives and the whole world. Why hold back when there is so much love to be shared in the world and so much love to be enjoyed?
Ram Dass says that the doors to love open from the inside. Meaning that we, ourselves, hold the lock and key, and that anytime we want to, we can open the doors to our hearts and let the love flow. So, I say, "Set yourself free! Follow your heart where she leads you." Be bold and let yourself jump into love all over again like my friend Mary did, and like me, with someone that you've just met. And let your own laughter ring from the boughs and clouds in the dark of night, just like Paige and Mary and me.
© 2012 Josephine Laing