Chances are if you grew up in a small town in New England in the 50s or 60s, the families on either side of your home were cousins and the ones next to them were second cousins. You probably flowed in and out of each other’s homes, shared transportation, tools, food from your gardens, clothing, and helped each other with errands and problems of various kinds. It was a natural way of life back then. There was not much stress and anxiety that accumulated because the neighborhood provided the antidotes. There was always someone available to lend a hand, a tool, an ear, or an hour or two of their time. Community events reinforced connections and sense of belonging. There was a spirit of working together to sustain families and the neighborhood.

DISCLAIMER

Do not treat the information contained here as a prescription, it is intended as a resource of knowledge for you. Do not use any herb that you cannot positively identify, be it from the wild or your garden. When in doubt you should purchase your dried herbs from a reputable herbalist and seek treatment from a qualified practitioner. 

Syrups 

Syrups are generally sugar or honey-based preparations that are used to make herbal medicines more palatable for both adults and children (honey should never be given to a child under the age of 2). 

In these economic times... It seems like everywhere we turn an event, a thought or theory is prefaced with “in these economic times.” It’s as if our world exists solely for economics and money. We are faced with the reality that there may not be enough money for the “things” our world has created and that ultimately, money is no longer enough.

Fourth graders. A batch of fourth graders showed me the road I want to travel on. I had been involved with an organization called Character Counts. It is a fantastic volunteer program, where one goes into a school classroom and talks about the pillars of character. I would often, enthusiastically, ask the kids what the pillars were, because I could never remember. The pillars of Character Counts are trustworthiness, respect, responsibility, fairness, caring, and citizenship. Each month was a different pillar. I so loved doing this that I never planned what I was going to say, to the kids. Often I felt like a channel, what to say just came.

FEAR Sucks!

Why are so many people running away from things that aren’t chasing them? 

– from the back cover

An exile for 50 years from the land where he has served as spiritual and temporal leader for many lifetimes, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet said in a recent interview that “Wherever you find happiness, that’s your home.” 

Doug “Ten” Rose can surely relate. After 35 years of hitchhiking around the US, Ten recognizes more fully than many of us that happiness – and home – is not a moving target after all. Ten chronicles his astounding journey, on both inner and outer levels, in his new book Fearless Puppy on American Road. 

As spring blooms into warmer weather we look forward to spending more time outside. Most of our pets can’t wait to get outdoors too. They ache to run and play in the yard, sun bathe in the grass and breathe fresh warm air as they reconnect with Spring’s Mother Nature. When we open our homes to our pets, it doesn’t necessarily mean we have to also open our homes to the pests that are attracted to our pets. We can live in harmony with our natural enemies like fleas and ticks and others by learning to control them and our environments. We’ve had a lot of questions about flea and tick control with the warm months ahead and hope this information is both informative and helpful for our fellow pet lovers.

Many people have dreamed of living in an intentional community, but have gone away discouraged when they found they were not getting what they wanted, including myself. However, I do believe that many more people can find what they are looking for in community if they had the right tools for group process. After much thought and study, I have come to the conclusion that a higher rate of success can be achieved if a group establishes at the beginning that the process itself is more important than the goal. If all can hold the goal very lightly, then it actually has a greater chance of happening. The tools that I have come to identify as being most useful to group process are: “allowing,” meditative consensus, and conflict resolution techniques. At some point in the future I could even see that “allowing” by itself, might be sufficient. I will go into more detail about these processes towards the end of this article, but for now my focus will be exploring the above tools with a group. These tools can be used in any cooperative venture, and my hope is that I will one-day work with a group to establish an intentional community using these or similar tools – remembering the process itself would be the main thing.

So distant have we humans become from our wild natures that many of us can barely imagine a reciprocal connection with an untamed animal. Peering into the vast gap that seems to separate us from “wild life,” we may feel awe or primal fear. Yet what often predominates is a heart-longing – to somehow know these mysterious beings and to let them know us. We instinctively seek relationship but don’t know how to create it.