Lifelines

Every morning I make myself a smoothie. It’s an important part of my day. This morning’s smoothie was made with apple juice (fresh from the farmers market), yogurt (home made), huckleberries (fresh picked by our house), a banana, and …fresh cannabis leaf from my freezer.

I have obtained a medical marijuana card from my doctor, so I am perfectly legal. My days of being an outlaw are over, I’m too old. I have avoided cannabis for many years. The psychoactive properties started making me uncomfortable sometime in the late seventies, so I set it aside and not only stopped using it for myself but counseled teenagers against using it when I taught high school.

Here I am again, enjoying the magic of cannabis. Like so often in my life, I have come full circle. The raw cannabis leaf has helped my arthritis and general stiffness, improved my digestion and enables me to sleep full nights without waking. The improvement to my health in general is astounding.

Here in Northern California it’s pretty easy to get raw cannabis leaf from medical marijuana growers because up until now they have been taking it off the plant and throwing it into their compost. It turns out that even the male plants are beneficial when eaten raw, and they have been pulled up and thrown away for years. In our hurry to get high, we have overlooked one of nature’s most medicinally beneficial plants. It is right up there with camellia sinensis (tea).

I own a tea company, and I am struck with the similarities between cannabis and tea. In fact, cannabis makes an enjoyable evening drink, similar to tea. We call it “pot toddy.” Where tea contains caffeine and is generally stimulating, the pot toddy will smooth out your day and help you sleep soundly. When I first started making it, I added a teaspoon of dehydrated and powdered cannabis to boiling water and added mild and agave syrup. While that was a delicious drink, the heat of the water stimulated the THC and I got slightly stoned, which is a sensation that I don’t like, so I added the cannabis to the cool milk, and poured the boiling water in last which seems perfect. I sleep well and don’t feel stoned.

There are now a number of studies and books about the medical benefits of cannabis on the internet. I’m not a scientist;  I am  sharing a personal discovery. Having learned raw food preparation in the past couple of years, I’m comfortable with it, which helps with the raw cannabis leaf.  If I get enough positive feedback in favor of it, I will write a book about preparation of the leaf. If you live in a state where it is legal to use cannabis as medicine, I recommend getting a medical marijuana card and giving the leaf a try.

Sometimes it seems to me that we are making a mistake by looking at human beings as though we are at the top of the ladder. It limits our view of ourselves, our earth, and Spirit. What if every planet is a being, or every Galaxy? The other beings are looking at our Earth with great sympathy, shaking their heads, saying, “Poor girl, she has a terrible malady this time, I hope she can survive it. Those cancer-like parasites that she contacted are slowly killing her for sure, but maybe her immune system is strong enough to throw them off, or at least bring them down to manageable numbers.”

If this is even a remote possibility, we have to change our everyday thinking.  Karma may be real, or it may be a construct that we have come up with to keep us securely in the human realm. It’s not to say that we don’t want to be treating one another with grace and compassion, it’s just that we may want to be thinking bigger. If we are a great deal less important than we think, we might be able to lives our lives with more grace and less anguish.  Whether we get the dishes done or stub our toes might take on a new light.

I’d like to work on coming back as a planet, or a galaxy…or am I one already?

In most relationships there is a good guy and a bad guy. It sets a kind of balance. Sometimes partners will trade off who gets which role. My husband and I both want to be good guys all the time. That creates no end of trouble. Sometimes I slip into the bad guy role but it makes me resentful and angry which makes me even more of a bad guy.

It used to be that I was so good, there was no way for anyone to compete. That was before I met my husband. I’ve never met anyone as good as him.  I know that no one is all good or all bad, and that it only has to do with appearances, but that doesn’t help.

We are both looking for balance and read lots of books about Budhism, but it makes me laugh, because we are both hard-wired to strive toward goodness.That makes me kind of cranky,  to tell the truth.

My son has been helping me sift through the stacks of boxes of my mother’s stuff, mostly clothes and kitchen stuff. He has a lot of energy and is good at keeping me on track. He brought one box at a time out of the store room and had me go through the things. He set up three boxes to sort into: throw aways, give aways and keepers. He then divided the keepers into two piles: storage and immediately useful.

I put together a storage box and piled up turtlenecks, shirts and sweaters that I wanted to wear. My son is over forty, but still sometimes manages to make the word Mom into four syllables. He looked at the storage box that I asked him to put into the loft and said, “Mom, I’m going to put that box into storage and then when you die it will still be there and I’ll have to go through it.”

Next he looked at the pile of clothes that I was taking into the house to put away. “Are you going to wear your Mom’s clothes? That’s gross!” I looked down at the turtleneck and flannel shirt that I was wearing. “I’m wearing her clothes now. It’s not weird. It might be weird if you wanted to wear her clothes though.”

I can’t imagine doing a job this hard without him. We are blessed with our children. I know my mother felt the same way. I’m grateful for the gift of laughter that she left us with.

This morning I’ve had two cups of tea, which is my habit. I love tea, and drink it all day long, but those first two cups are the ones that get me going and stimulate my mind. It is foggy again on the Mendocino Coast, but I have high hopes that the sun will break through today.

Yesterday evening I realized that I have to accept the harsh reality that I have to cut back the growth in my yard. I’m a great believer in permaculture, and I seldom weed. I also seldom cut anything back. Last winter I realized that the blackberries were out of control and asked my husband to dig them up. He never got around to it, and now I don’t want to cut them back until we have picked all the fabulous blackberries that are developing on them. I will have lots of blackberries to use in smoothies through the winter and will be lucky if the vines don’t eat my house.

There are a lot of other things that I can cut back though and I’m looking forward to the exercise and the change. We have mountain lions where we live and I was reading recently that they use ambush as a means to catch their prey. Our yard is a perfect spot for a mountain lion ambush. I guess I’d better get to it soon. We have a huge cherry tree that probably measures about thirty feet at it’s widest part, and underneath it the thimbleberries have taken over, creating dense undergrowth. The chickens have done their best to trample the thimbleberries to no avail, and now I imagine a mountain lion hiding in there whenever I go into the yard. I think I’ll start there.

Time for a smoothie and another cup of tea. After that I will let the chickens out and attack the yard with some strong clippers.

The day before my mother died was my sixty-fifth birthday. The assisted living home where she lived called me to say that she was passing. I drove the half hour drive up to see her, knowing that I would have only a couple of hours to be with her before I was to join my friends and family at a birthday party. She had been dying for nearly a year and I had been to see her many times thinking that I was saying good-bye for the last time, but I knew that this time was for real.

She was no longer talking. She would take three shallow breaths and one deep breath and then pause and repeat. She had no energy to take my hand so I put my hand gently on top of hers. I told her I loved her and that it was my birthday. I thanked her for having me.

She had had no visions, no dreams, no visits from family or friends who had departed before her. There seemed to be no comfort for her, or for me. This was all a great surprise because she had been a Unity Minister and had at one time taught Transcendental Meditation, and had a strong sense of God and Reincarnation. I kept asking if she had seen anything interesting or unusual, and she said, “Nope, everything’s blank.”

As I sat beside her bed, I slipped into a reverie. I found myself walking up a gentle incline with a little girl with a big smile, sparkling blue eyes and ringlets in her brown hair. I recognized her immediately as my mother, having seen lots of pictures of her all my life. We were having a wonderful time on a bright sunny day with blue sky above us and flowers in full bloom all around us. There were hummingbirds and butterflies visiting the flowers and I saw a creek flowing beside the path.

My Mom had suffered from an unquenchable thirst for weeks, so I thought she  still might be thirsty. We stopped at the creek,  splashed our faces and drank the cool clear water. When I was a child my mother took me camping in the mountains where the water was pristine. I still remember the feel and taste of that water, and that’s what the creek was like where we stopped. As I straightened up after drinking, I wondered what the little Emily would be wearing, and I saw that she didn’t have a stitch on! She was laughing and dancing with her arms up in the air, wiggling her little butt, and then she broke away from me and ran away laughing.

At that point, my reverie was interrupted by a phone call, and there I was sitting at the bedside of an ancient woman who could no longer talk or laugh, or breathe easily. I knew that she was already on her way. Soon after, I took my leave and drove to my birthday party. On the way I stopped to get helium balloons. I picked one very special white one with glitter stars for my Mom.

After the party, I took a card that said, “You Make a Difference” and on the opposite  side wrote, “God Speed Emily.” Then I tied the note to the balloon outside and let it go. We watched it go until we couldn’t see it anymore. It was the best that I could do.

My Mom died at 7:00 the next morning. She had the good grace to wait to pass until after my birthday. Bless her.

Our hens are about half grown, although they seem huge already to me. They have just discovered our deck and decided that they want to make it home. This is a problem, because just this year I have turned it into extra living space for us. We have a little love seat, a number of chairs, a table with umbrella, and a bed, also with umbrella.

I love my deck. I would rather spend time out there than almost anywhere. The air is fresh and cool, often with a slight breeze that moves our huge wind chimes and creates the most serene music you can imagine. We have little bird feeders next to the bed for gold finches and chickadees and the feed there all day. Hummingbirds come in to taste the nectar from the wild fuchias, the sweet peas and the roses. In the evenings we can lie on the bed and watch the birds go to bed and the bats come out and on a clear night there are more stars than you can imagine.

The hens haven’t discovered the bed yet, but soon they will, and I’m pretty sure it will be their favorite place. I think this because of my experience a few years ago with ducks. We raised four ducks and they became quite tame. We loved them. Their only real job was to keep the bugs down in the garden and to be cute. They performed beyond expectation in both categories. One day we came home and found the ducks in the living room. In those days we left our back door ajar so that the dog could get out if there were an emergency. The ducks figured out how to open the door and walked right in, with the dog. We chased them out, but from that time forward the ducks came in regularly. We could tell they were inside because of the quiet. It’s a strange thing and something I have observed in the chickens as well, when the birds are doing something they know they shouldn’t, they become beyond quiet. Now that I think of it, children do it too.

Dear Mom:

Yesterday was the 4th of July. We went to the parade in Mendocino, as we have every year since the early seventies. It was packed in town, and the day was unusually hot. Peter played drums on a float and swing dancers danced along behind them.

It was a far cry from those earlier years when the parade was sort of a joke and Cat Mother played on a flat bed truck with the kids playing and dancing on the truck with them, and the rest of us dancing along behind. Remember how they used to play and then go out to the Headlands so they could keep on going? The parade was so short then it would go around two or three times so that people would know it was actually a parade.

I couldn’t go to Friendship Park this year, but I heard it was packed as usual. I went back to Albion right after the parade, where the farmers market was in full swing and I opened the tea house in case anyone wanted to come by and taste tea.

I had gone to the Reunion at Big River Beach on Saturday and seen a bunch of former students from my days teaching high school and invited them to come by. Sure enough, about eight of them showed up which was wonderful. I’m so glad I didn’t stay in Mendo.

After the tea house, we went to a pot luck at our neighbors. I think they asked us at least in part because they are taking care of a little dog who loves our little dog. Anyway, the dogs played and had a swell time with a great meal and good company. We left in time to put the chickens in before dark.

At the party someone told us that a friend would be setting off fireworks from a boat around dark, so we drove down to the Ledford House to watch them. It was a beautiful clear night and there was a sweetness to the display, like it must have been in days gone past when neighbors entertained neighbors in the best way they could. It filled my heart to be there on the deck with my friends and neighbors cheering for the goodness of the night.

Today was foggy for the first time since last weekend. We had a good long hot spell, which was great because it rained well into June this year. We needed it. All of the gardens are behind this year, but doing quite well because of all the water.

This year is different for my garden because our chickens are in it. They eat everything in sight, right after they trample it. I have a little greenhouse that they aren’t allow into, and every time I go in they sneak in right behind me. They are so quiet they tip me off. All the rest of the time they cluck and talk, but when they come into the greenhouse they don’t make a sound. Today the cat followed me in as well. Once they were all in, they had trouble deciding who should leave first. Finally it was two chickens, then the cat, then the other four chickens, reluctantly.

I hope things are good for you, wherever you are. I love you and I think about you often.

My Mom died the last day of May, 2010. She was ninety three years old. We didn’t get along well for most of my life, but the last fifteen years of her life, we patched up our relationship and built a friendship that was precious. We spoke on the phone almost every day until she became too ill and deaf to talk on the phone anymore. Those phone calls were her greatest gift to me because I was able to share my life with her.

We spoke for anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour. I saved up stories that I knew she would love about the birds that came in to our feeders, the gardens, our cats and dogs, my husband and my various creative endeavors and any funny stories that I could come up with.

After she died, it was that sharing that I missed the most, so I started a journal writing letters to her. Every journal I have written in the past has been filled with negativity, but this one was so positive that I told some folks about it and it was suggested that I put it into a blog. While the letters to Mom will not directly pertain to tea, they may be entertaining for anyone who likes to drink tea and read about an interesting life.

If you find this entertaining or interesting, please send me comments and feedback.

There is nothing better than a cup of tea. Whether I enjoy it alone by the fire or on a beautiful morning outside or with friends, it is always a thing of joy. That’s why I started the tea company. All of the other stuff (the business end of things) is just so I can turn people on to a good cup of tea.