In the days of old, the village doctors were elder women, and quite a few utilized the knowledge of hedge witches who knew all the plants of field and forest. For an immune system boost, crush a mixture of equal parts (1⁄2 cup each) rosemary, lemon peel, lavender, and the petals of red roses. Place the crushed herbs in a sealable colored glass jar filled with almond or sesame oil, ideally twelve ounces. After seven days on a windowsill, exposed to both the sun and the dark moon, strain and place the infused oil into the jar. Speak this chant aloud:
In this dark moonlight, I will see
That I release anything that ails me.
With the wisdom of the crones of old,
All the blessings of this world unfold.
You now have a hearty supply of homemade healing oil to use in the bath, or to rub on your pulse points: temples, wrists, backs of knees, and behind the ears. As soon as you feel slightly rundown, one application should make a difference. Be sure and whisper thanks to the hedge witches who passed down this sacred healing knowledge.
I think I've gotten sick four times in the past month.
There was that first cold, at the beginning of December: standard issue yuckiness that forced me to take a couple of sick days. (Since I've just come back from maternity leave, my sick days are in short supply, so it was a tough decision.) Then, when I was on the mend and just clearing out some chest gunk, I felt the telltale prickle in the back of my nose again. For a few hours I refused to believe it. Surely a just and loving universe wouldn't allow me to come down with a second virus while I was still getting over my first? But that's the sort of thing that happens when you have young children, and by the next morning I felt awful again.
Erin Lale
Fellow faculty at Harvard Divinity School posted an open letter to Wolpe in response to his article. It's available on this page, below the call for p...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. The Wild Hunt has a roundup of numerous responses on its site, but it carried this one as a separate article. It is an accoun...
Erin Lale
Here's another response. This one is by a scholar of paganism. It's unfortunately a Facebook post so this link goes to Facebook. She posted the text o...
Erin Lale
Here's another link to a pagan response to the Atlantic article. I would have included this one in my story too if I had seen it before I published it...
Janet Boyer
I love the idea of green burials! I first heard of Recompose right before it launched. I wish there were more here on the East Coast; that's how I'd l...