A • M E D I C I N E • T A L E
I spent a recent morning wandering about my favorite wooded creekside, offering Prayers and Pearls to the Waterfalls, Songs to the Stones, the Smoke of Tobacco and Rose petals to the Juniper Trees which asked for it. I gathered Yaupon Holly, and searched high and low for Oyster Mushrooms, revisiting all of the fallen logs and decaying stumps I'd gathered them on previously. Determined but having found none, my hunger for lunch began to eclipse my hunger for the Wild. Just as I prepared to leave the forest, I came upon this huge stump, filled with pliable and fragrant Reishi [Ganoderma sessile].
As I knelt down in the soft duff to greet and ask permission to gather the glistening Reishi, I was reminded of how important it is to release expectations surrounding the form that medicine takes. You never know what gem you may stumble upon when you're open to simply receiving Life's gifts as they appear.
It is rare that I set out to harvest any one thing in particular, preferring instead to allow myself to be guided toward those medicines which call to my Heart, rather than my Head. Finding the powerfully medicinal Reishi, when I'd been single-mindedly searching for edible Oysters reminded me of this teaching, which extends far beyond fungi.
When our prayers and longings are answered, they often don't look quite as we'd expected or hoped. But I think that's okay. And, I am totally certain that the intelligent force which graciously brought these gifts into our lives is infinitely more mysterious and wise than we could ever comprehend with the mind alone. We must trust the form in which life delivers to us, the gifts of our Medicine, and we must do it not with the Head, but the Heart.
As I knelt down in the soft duff to greet and ask permission to gather the glistening Reishi, I was reminded of how important it is to release expectations surrounding the form that medicine takes. You never know what gem you may stumble upon when you're open to simply receiving Life's gifts as they appear.
It is rare that I set out to harvest any one thing in particular, preferring instead to allow myself to be guided toward those medicines which call to my Heart, rather than my Head. Finding the powerfully medicinal Reishi, when I'd been single-mindedly searching for edible Oysters reminded me of this teaching, which extends far beyond fungi.
When our prayers and longings are answered, they often don't look quite as we'd expected or hoped. But I think that's okay. And, I am totally certain that the intelligent force which graciously brought these gifts into our lives is infinitely more mysterious and wise than we could ever comprehend with the mind alone. We must trust the form in which life delivers to us, the gifts of our Medicine, and we must do it not with the Head, but the Heart.
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What such gifts exist in your world?
How can you honor and embrace them exactly as they are?
H o w c a n y o u c h o o s e t o l o v e w h a t i s ?
