Ghost Pipe, Relational Remedy

Spending time in the green world is a necessity for me. There is always something new showing up in the forest. After such a long dry spell, the rains have awoken the Ghost Pipe, or _Monotropa uniflora_, pictured below. This plant lives by tapping into the nutrients flowing between tree roots and vast fungal networks that are constantly exchanging material and information. It arises from the detritus of the forest floor, delicate, pure, and white, a flowering representation of the communal teachings of the natural order. As a medicinal herb "(Ghost Pipe) powder has been employed in instances of restlessness, pains, nervous irritability, etc., as a substitute for opium, without any deleterious influences. " according to _King’s American Dispensatory_from 1889. Emerging from the juncture of the fungal and plant networks, we find this plant with the ability to soothe the static of misalignment, to organize the confusion where distinct systems meld together.

I have always been drawn to the realm of herbal medicine. I grew up knowing the plants. In my family, we picked and ate weeds (purslane), plucked wild grape leaves to roll into stuffed grape leaves, and dried aromatic kitchen herbs to eat when the fresh ones were gone. The scent of thyme has always brought tears to my eyes. One herbalist friend thought that this scent might be an ancestral connection to the women gathering the wild thyme from the mountains in the Middle East, which I know my aunts and grandmothers had done.

Although we live in a time where more information than ever is being exchanged at light speed, is so easy to become overloaded, and feel disconnected. Fortunately, there are remedies for these times..the practices of yoga being one of them. How can we be fed rather than depleted by the energies that surround us? For me, yoga has a way of flowing into all of my experiences, illuminating the relational way of the web of life.