Cutting Through the Fog of Illusion

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

-- William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other"

With the arrival of high summer, the haze and humidity of the sweltering heat hitting so much of the northern hemisphere have brought something strange and sinister with them. The air has felt heavy with a fog of illusion and delusion that pervades everything, making it hard to see ourselves and each other clearly.

To be sure, all of our hearts have been weary for a while with the grief of genocide, of burning forests, of heating and rising oceans, and with the struggle to find ways to walk with compassion and integrity within a culture that seems to militate against their every expression. But there is something different in this moment. Nearly everyone I know seems to be struggling with self doubt, with the ghosts of familiar fears, with old and new heartbreaks, real and imagined, and with a sense of overwhelm.

Even the wisest and clearest-eyed people I know are having a hard time identifying what exactly is happening right now — but every one of them describes the same sense that something is clouding our individual and collective vision.

And so I am doing what I always do when human answers to a vexing problem elude me -- I am turning to the plants around me: Calamus, Yarrow, and Rose, to help me cut through the illusion.

— Calamus (Acorus calamus, feileastram cumhra) grows in mucky, muddy places. Its fiery rhizome sends up tall, graceful, sword-like, aromatic leaves that were strewn among the rushes spread across the floors of medieval churches so that they might release their sweet scent whenever worshippers stepped upon them. It was among the Calamus “by the margins of pond waters” that Walt Whitman found the courage and the clarity to speak his vision of wild love, writing bold words that could only come bring forth:

Here by myself away from the clank of the world,
Tallying and talk'd to here by tongues aromatic,
No longer abash'd, (for in this secluded spot I can respond as I would not dare elsewhere,)

Whitman’s experience echoes understandings of the plant’s medicine from ancient traditions. In Ayurveda, Calamus is said to “scrape clean the subtle channels of the mind,” and one of the plant’s names in Sanskrit is “vacha” which means “voice.” Taoist medicine speaks of the plant’s ability to clear dampness that “mists the orifices of the heart.” As I write in The Silver Branch and the Otherworld:

“[In classical Chinese medicine, the] watery heart yin represents the heart’s capacity to take in information from the world: it is nourished by beauty. The senses are spoken of as the “orifices of the heart.” The fiery heart yang represents our capacity to express ourselves.

 “When we are overwhelmed with sensory and emotional information, the heart yin can overwhelm the heart yang, clouding the senses with a fog and first obscuring and then drowning out the fire of expression. Think of the heavy, dull feeling that lingers in your head after being in a noisy, crowded store with bright fluorescent lights in December. Intense memories—sensation and emotion reexperienced outside their original context—bring their own fog, cutting us off from the experience of being present here and now. They can distort our perception of current events and prevent us from responding coherently.

“[ . . .{ Calamus [. . .] clears the waters of the heart by reigniting the heart yang. Its sweet scent engages the senses, its bitterness grounds us and activates the enteric nervous system that processes the sensory information coming in from the fascia of the entire body, and its pungent heat focuses the mind and senses and stimulates circulation to the brain.”

For years I have carried Calamus tincture with me to take in situations where emotional overwhelm causes me to lose speech — sometimes a few drops will do it, sometimes I need a full dropper. In Ayurveda, Calamus is traditionally infused in oil and inhaled nasally a few drops at a time. Recently I have adopted the practice of sleeping with Calamus root under my tongue — which has brought greater clarity of thought and vision in both the dream world and in the first hours of the morning.

— Yarrow (Achillea spp., athair thalún,) which is blooming everywhere in fields and along roadsides in Maine right now, brings a different kind of vision. It helps us see through illusion by looking beneath the surface at the patterns in the world. Eating fresh Yarrow flowers as I walk the land at twilight each evening, watching the Fireflies emerge, brings me into a kind of waking dream state where the world reveals itself to me with a paradoxical lucidity that too often evades me during the busier parts of the day.

— Rose (Rosa spp., rós) invites to truly come to our senses through our senses — the scent, the color, the smooth touch of the petals, help us soften into openness. The medicine of the plant cools the fires of reactivity. And we come back to the beauty that insists on blossoming into the world amidst the horror, and the understanding that beauty itself is truth.

I will be sharing more about all of this this in my online class this Sunday for the Otherworld Well Hedge School. As always, there is a sliding scale option available to make the class affordable to most, but if you are feeling called to the class and cannot afford even the low end of the sliding scale, e-mail me at otherworldwell@gmail.com and I will register you. Otherwise, register at https://otherworldwell.com/.../herbs-for-dispelling-illusion

Photo by J.F. Gaffard, Autoreille, France, CC BY-SA 3.0 <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/>, via Wikimedia Commons