Why Herbs Are Magical

Many herbs have powerful and highly focused effects on our bodies. Lily of the Valley strongly stimulates the heart muscle and is therefore useful in heart failure. Sage tea will rapidly dry up milk production and can prevent a lot of pain when infants are being weaned. The connection between our needs and what herbs can provide is stunning. It reminds us that we are part of a natural web, which we ignore or abuse at our peril. The art of herbal medicine is in understanding these living beings: plants and human and how they relate with eachother.
 
Understanding a herb is not fundamentally about knowing which chemical constituents it contains or what its pharmacological action is on the human body. The living plant has a personality or essence. It has its own, totally unique, way in which life-energy is expressed. To know a herb we need to use our senses fully: smell it, touch it, look at it in its natural environment, taste its various parts and so on.
 
As living beings, herbs transcend any scientific analysis of their parts, just as a human being is more than the different types of tissue which make it up. In this sense a herb is magical because its real nature is understandable only by combining intuition with study not by academic knowledge alone.
 
Our ecosystem and ultimately Gaia, the living world, is like an organism, of which we are a part. Perhaps we think of ourselves as the brain of the planet. If so, the brain needs to wake up to the rest of its body. While the brain has been dreaming, the body of nature has fallen ill. It is imperative that we re-connect with the rest of nature and learn how to relate to it more sympathetically. The remarkable gifts of medicinal herbs are all around us. What a waste it would be to ignore them in favour of chemical drugs.
 
Our ultimate illness is our aloneness. Sickness on the planet has come from us denying nature and forcing ourselves away from it. The medicine, in the broadest sense, is to make peace with nature: eat organic, use herbs to heal and tread lightly on the earth.