Herbal Humor, Week Five

Herbal Humor, Week Five

I missed the last half of class this week because of my meningitis, but the first half of class was ripe for herbal humor.

1. Upon reviewing last week’s notes on immune health in order to find some tips to help me heal from meningitis, I found Bridget’s remedy for almost anything, except that I had written it down wrong. I wrote, “at the first sign of a cold or flu, mix 2 tsp honey, 2 tsp apple cider vinegar, and 1 cup warm weather.” Obviously, in case you plan to use this, it was supposed to be warm water, but maybe this says something abut how I feel l heal best.

2. I walked into class, and already a group of people were gathered on the floor around Bridget’s TV watching a video called Sacred Psychoactives, which Bridget and her friend Kimba created together. Kimba played therapeutic music during the video while Bridget read soothing meditations, all of which began with, “Can you float through the universe of your body?”

3. This week we were discussing common ailments, using the five element theory of Chinese medicine as our aid. The five elements within the five element theory are fire, earth, metal, water, and wood. “As you all must remember from first grade,” Bridget said. “The earth began as a big fiery ball.” I know I went to a very conservative Christian first grade, but this is not a commonly-taught creation theory in public school, is it?

4. “All you have to do is believe in yourself,” Bridget encouraged the class. “I have a neighbor, and every time I see him, he salutes me and yells, ‘I am going to be the first gay Jew on Mars!’, and then he goes on his way. And I figure, he’s young, why not? Why can’t he be the first gay Jew on Mars? He certainly believes he will be, and he is proactively telling himself that and building equipment in his backyard that is going to be able to fly him to Mars, so I figure, why not? That’s all you have to do. Believe in yourself.”

5. Bridget: “People who predominantly have the wood element in them are judgmental. They make judgments about people based on their appearance, for example. Like when Tom and I go to the gas station. I think every time Tom and I go to the gas station he gets approached and asked if he has any pot. It’s because he has long hair. Wood people just assume that a long-haired man who lives in Boulder carries pot with him. But Tom doesn’t smoke pot. He just says no, tells them they are wood people, and we go on our way.” [Commentary: If I approached someone for pot, and he told me, “no, I don’t have any. You are a wood person,” I would assume he had smoked all his pot, not that he did not smoke it at all.]

6. Bridget: Our daughter Rainbow was home for the holidays from Hollywood one year, and she was sleeping in Tom’s office. I was reading the paper, and the paper had a feature on the medical offices that burned down in Boulder. Do you remember that? The combination of essential oils and cleaning products the massage office was using caused a fire. So, I read the article, and then I went outside and put it in the recycling bin, and I came back and my whole home smelled like smoke. Well, good job, Bridget, I thought, you’ve honed in your psychic skills too well. You were reading about a fire, and now you have started one. So, I search around for the fire, and I didn’t see it, so I started going around to the neighbors and asking them if their house was on fire, but everyone told me no, so I came back to my house, and searched around some more, and I went upstairs where Rainbow was sleeping, and sure enough it was on fire. Luckily, I was writing a book on herbal first aid, and so I knew some tricks for putting out a fire and – oh, I should rephrase that Rainbow was sleeping in the room during her stay, not during the fire – well, I just dragged the burning mattress down the stairs, through the front door, and onto the street and then I ran back upstairs and put out the fire, so by the time firemen got here, there was just really nothing to see. But don’t buy halogen lamps. They are dangerous."

7. “If you want to calm your children,” Bridget said. “Try chanting to them. Chanting can even calm you, but it is wonderful for children, too. Pick any chant. You can choose a Christian chant, a Jewish chant, a Buddhist chant. Any old chant. Except I don’t really like satanic chants for calming children. I mean, we don’t really want to align ourselves or our offspring with Satan, do we?”