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This months ~ FEATURED ARTICLES
	High Blood Pressure
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FEATURED HERBS
	Kola Nut
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FEATURED VIDEOS
	Pregnancy Nausea

A small Stone

Must many medicines be better than one?
Just now I saw someone again, deep into her second course of chemo
She tells me she was sicker than she could bear on the first course,
Now she is feeling better than she has in years
“I took my kitchen apart yesterday!” she told me, laughing with her self.
Just a simple tonic; Echinacea, Astragalus, Panax, Withania, Licorice
Nothing else added or subtracted
There are hundreds of friends I barely know
But these herbs are like brothers, loved, happy to lend a hand

Herbs have a magic in them
Elusive, mysterious, unknowable by rote or rite
Something that can change the visible shape of fate
And I fear that unless our knowledge eventually leads to its trust
We end up in our heads
Doing desperate measures
Making regimens, fasting the sick off their pleasures
Writing the names of herbs into elaborate programs, like footnotes no-one will read
Imagining them obedient servants who won’t notice the difference

It is we who lack, not the herbs
It is our fear and doubts that cripple our sensing,
Our quiet understanding that the life force is a river
Pressing, flooding against the dam
Only a small stone need be removed
The river can do the rest.

Published in : AVENA Journal of the New Zealand Association of Medical Herbalists Winter 2010

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