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Today I finished reading The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a book about the author’s time with a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco. The book has its ups and downs, becoming boring at times with the attention payed to the parrots’ every action, but, overall, it’s a good read.
Wise Woman Herbal: Healing Wise is an excellent book written by Susun Weed, one of those shifty feminist witches. She begins the book with an examination of what she sees as the three different healing methods: the scientific method (who’s motto is “your body is a machine, you broke it, and now must be punished” and who’s symbol is a line), the heroic method (who’s motto is “you broke the rules and must suffer the consequences, repent” and who’s symbol is a circle), and the wise woman method (who’s motto is “accept the illness and learn what good it has to offer” and who’s symbol is a spiral).
After analyzes the three methods and their healing practices in depth, she moves on to describing 7 herbs – common weeds that can be found in the crack of any sidewalk, in any city – but she doesn’t just devote a page or two to each. Instead, each “green ally” receives special devotion in its own chapter, and she introduces and teaches about them in wonderfully unique ways.
Obviously the book is written from the female perspective, for the female, but, as a male, I didn’t find that hindered the book for me in any way. (Though it does show how even the most seemingly free-thinking people can be boxed in by our culture and it’s duality, but that’s another discussion).
I highly recommend the book for everyone. Even if you have little interest in herbs or healing, this is a book to have on your shelve for battling the common cold. No id check required.
Gregory Tilford’s From Earth to Herbalist, which I purchased with my herbal kit, is an herbal field guide that “challenges us to reconsider our roles as herbalists, to go beyond health care consultant, medicine-maker, wildcrafter, and gardener/farmer to become earth-steward”. It combines the two roles of field guide and medical resource in one book that has managed to show me a new, “earth-conscious” way of looking at plants.
Reading it at MutantFest, all I had to do was simply adjust my gaze in order to locate most of the plants mentioned in the book. A great learning experience.
I recommend the book for anyone interested in herbal medicine.
Robert Young Pelton’s Come Back Alive is a pun on survival guides. At least, that’s what I thought when I picked it up. As it turns out, the books makes fun of most other survival guides, but takes itself seriously – slightly disturbing, as most of his advice is questionable. It focuses on urban survival (driving, crime, etc) and, of course, war zones, forsaking wilderness survival for another time (or perhaps I just glazed over the wilderness sections, knowing they wouldn’t hold much of value).
It’s written in the same dark humor found in DP, so I would recommend it for fans of RYP, but only as entertainment.
Providence is Daniel Quinn’s autobiography. Though it obviously differs from Ishmael, a work of fiction, I kept feeling that while reading Providence, I was reading what that book would be, had it been narrated by Ishmael.
The book tells of Quinn’s 50 years leading up to writing Ishmael, from growing up in the Great Depression, to studying as a Trappist monk under Thomas Merton, and his eventual rejection of Christianity and its god.
At one point, Quinn describes what he experienced as a Trappist monk when he was allowed to go outside for the first time in three weeks:
I turned and faced the sunshine, and the breath went out of me as if someone had punched me in the stomach. That was the effect of receiving this sigh, of seeing the world as it is. I was astounded, bowled over, dumbfounded. Everything was burning. Every blade of grass, every single leaf of every single tree was radiant, was blazing -- incandescent with a raging power that was unmistakably divine. I was overwhelmed. In a single second of this, of seeing this truth, tears flooded my eyes and poured down my face as I walked along... What I was seeing was reality, was the world as it actually is, every moment of every day.
What struck me so about this, is that the passage describes something akin to what I experienced after opening my eyes after meditation in the arboretum upon Sehome hill – though more of a white radiance than raging flames. Perhaps there’s something to that, no?
The book is a recommended read for fans of Quinn’s other works.
The Spell of the Sensuous is a mystical trip into the heart of animism. Magician David Abram bridges the questioning of Civilization with a look at traditional Shamanism – the “ecological dimension of the shaman’s craft.” From the first paragraph of this text-book of Deep Ecology, I was hooked. Abram’s claim is that, as humans, we have cut off contact with the non-human world, and that this is a deadly way to live. He waxes poetically on the emergence of the phonetic alphabet, analyzing that as the act that severed our connection with the sensuous, feeling world.
It is an amazing book that with every word tears away the veils of perception – shows you the world in a different light. I’ve read it twice now. Once, I started it before leaving for Thailand, and finished it there in the North. And again I picked it up towards the end of my trip and completed it upon return. It has carried me on my journey, There and Back Again.
The following was written 7-15, in Sukhothai
5:52PM I’ve finished Black Elk Speaks, as told through John Neihardt by Nicholas Black Elk, which I also purchased in Chiang Mai. I enjoyed the book as a history of the Lakota people and an insight into Native American spirituality, through the eyes of a Shaman and Warrior. It’s strange that a book written in 1931 can seem so new, even today.
What struck me most was Black Elk’s vivid memory of his past. He’s able to recount so many details, and has so many tales to tell. Yet after his people are slaughtered at Wounded Knee, he has nothing else to say. As if living the way of the Wasichus ended his life – all a downward spiral of no significance from there on.
The following was written 7-12, in the garden of my Chiang Rai guest house.
3:45PM Ralph Blum’s The Book of Runes I found faded and worn, buried deep in a used book store in Chiang Mai. It is “a handbook for the use of an ancient Oracle: the Viking Runes”. It tells of their meaning and ways of their use. They are not so much a form of divination, of future telling or fairy-tale magic, but a challenge to look into yourself. By using the runes in search of an answer, you find your own interpretation and project what you already know, but perhaps do not wish to express, onto the stones. Their symbols, sounds, and arrangements seem almost arbitrary. Still, I must question it.
In The Spell of the Sensuous (which I will have to comment more on later), David Abram spends a great deal of ink on the impact of writing, particularly phonetic, with our experience of the world. He proposes that systems such as ours, where the sounds and the symbols themselves bear little to no resemblance to anything of the sensuous world, serves to cut us off from the that world – he assaults (with the alphabet, of course) this the same way Daniel Quinn assaults agriculture. Seeing the runes through these animist eyes, one wonder why they’re to be used as an oracle. Question their validity. Their symbols have no reference to the natural world, nor do their sounds. This unlike, for instance, the Hebrew aleph-beth, the first letter of which meant ox and looked like an ox. Indeed, Odin happened upon the runes one day while torturing his own body – attempting to transcend the sensuous, and thus the whole of the natural world. From my limited understanding of the runes and their origins, I must be skeptic of their use, even if it is unimportant. I would prefer a more natural gateway within.
Still, a good read. Recommended for those who are interested in a Western version of the I Ching or Tarot cards.