What’s in a name?
What should one call a blog about everything? Believe me, I spent a long time contemplating that question before the first post was even written. I’m the kind of person who starts a document with an outline, and then a detailed outline, and then bullet points for each section of the detailed outline before I even start writing the content. (Maybe I’d have started a blog sooner if I hadn’t felt like I needed three months of detailed content up front?).
The first posts would, of course, address 1) why I wanted to start this project in the first place, and 2) what it would be about. These were ideas I’d been mulling over since long before making the decision to go ahead with this idea. But it was the many changes in my thinking that happened during the COVID years that finally gave me the impetus to push play.
One of the most palpable consequences of the COVID years was the effect on how we experience time. In 2020, everything was immediately and dramatically slowed down from its prior pace, which for many of us had been habitually frenetic. But in spite of moving slowly, those months of lockdowns and restrictions and homeschooling and zooming moved by as a blur for so many of us. Looking back, the years of pandemic came and went with what I can only call an interminable swiftness.
[As a side note: Everyone in the world experienced COVID in a unique way, and how it felt for you is doubtless inflected by where you live, how old you are, what your family looks like, your overall economic security, your access to healthcare, whether you or your loved ones were personally affected by COVID before we had good tools to control it, and many other things. I want to be transparent about my experience, because I know my experience was easy in a million ways and challenging in really only a few. For many others, their time was tolerable but exhausting; for others it was smothering; for still others catastrophic. I can only relate my own experience and the experiences of the people whose stories I have heard. But I hope I can relate to the experiences of others with a healthy dose of empathy and sensitivity. From that perspective, I know that some of what I have to share of my own experience may be painful; my experience was one of growth rather than loss, and I know many of us were not that lucky. But this is my own experience and it’s the one I have to share.]
One thing that was part of my experience, and of so many people, was learning how much it meant to be able to gather together, and how starkly we all felt the want of it once we couldn’t anymore. We all have the stories, based on our unique circumstances, of when and with whom we finally, gingerly, carefully, in some cases fearfully, but still joyfully, decided to gather for the first time after long separations. Some of us had pods we kept close with the entire time. I can’t tell you how grateful I was for mine. Some of us kept it to solely remote contact for a long time. It was a hard thing to contemplate not seeing close family for so many months and milestones. But we did it. And learned what it means to us all to be able to simply gather.
Gathering is also an important part of what it means to be human. The earliest modern humans and their ancestors were hunters and gatherers; while a lot of emphasis was historically placed on the “hunting” part in terms of what enabled humans to evolve, plenty of research suggests that gathering - a role played primarily by women - contributed significantly to the diet, health, and migration patterns of early humans. Even when an increasing number of cultures became agrarian, the great diversity of plants used by people all throughout time were of medicinal, spiritual, practical, and culinary import. They continue to be; but industrialization of agriculture and climate effects have reduced the diversity of plants that most of us have access to. In the last several decades, many of us have lost the lore and tradition that told us the myriad ways plants could be used.
The cover of the book “Woman the Gatherer” by Frances Dahlberg
I was trained as a medical anthropologist, and spent a lot of years studying what made us human. Now, I am also an empiricist at heart, with a side degree in epidemiology, and am not among those who believe that plant-based medicine can replace pharmaceutical approaches to healthcare in most or even many instances. But there’s much that has been left untested in the natural world, and many effective pharmaceutical approaches emerged from natural medicinal traditions. In any case, plants can improve our well-being in ways that fall short of out-and-out curing diseases, if for no other reason than because they taste good, remind us of home, and warm our hands in a cup of tea.
Gathering isn’t just how generations of women nourished and healed their communities. It’s also the very human act of understanding the value of what we find in nature. It doesn’t take a huge leap of intuition to recognize the connectedness we can feel by happening across a cache of wild berries and eating them from the vine. Gathering, to me, evokes a wisdom about and a respect for the value of nature to our lives. I am undeniably a neophyte, but hoping this journey into a new home will give me an opportunity to cultivate some wisdom of my own and to use this venue to amplify the wisdom of those I learn from.
