It's not just about plant medicine, but diet:
The Mood Cure about dietary additions to make to cure mood problems a person may have such insomnia, depression, nervous tension. By reputation alone I have bought this book, and from my personal experience of being transformed from changing my diet from a really depressed overweight man. It's a dry read but the point of it is that changing a mood will lead to better results.
This is no mere self-help book. Its a guideline to understand moodiness and how our moods can affected by lacking something in our diet.
The Poison Path:
The Dale Pendale Pharmako series is about the narcotic herbs and chemicals people have used. It's our relationships with poisonous plants through his own personal experience. The importance of the book to me is to understand the dark. He writes, "There are plant people. I know many this is the poison path. This is not for a plant person."
I am a plant person but Dale Pendale amplifies his point to say, "You need to understand moon medicine as much as solar medicine." Now you may have lost him now. But what he does in this series is mix science with poetical language and subjective experience.
I'm looking for a connection to the natural world, and in order to understand it and I need to understand the darker plants in the world as well as the lighter ones.
The Dark Side:
The path in shammanistic tradition is looking for an otherwordly experience through this substances. For anyone with an understanding of a person who uses narcotics, its clear they are not taking them to understand reality but as an escape. Pendale recognizes there is nothing novel in this approach.
The three books series goes through more and more intense drugs and is somehow able to balance poetry science objectivity stories from people and
his own personal experience. His medicine is lunar medicine which I'll say is boundless. This is different from solar medicine which I'll sum up as grounding. This is oversimplification, but I quickly want to move to the point which is: in order for myself and people to understand our relationship to the planet we must understand both.
We can understand the addiction to coffee, cigarettes, alcohols just as much as we do with the harder stuff mentioned in the book beyond the good and evil, but as substances native people used in ritual experiences.
The Healer's Path:
Like I said, I am a plant person looking for medicinal and I'll call them friendlier plants to myself. This Spring I'll be harvesting wild plant. Korea has many plants that we don't have where I am from. Gaining as much knowledge about the local fauna is important. I wish to learn from them but finding a guidebook in Korean is useless to me until I understand the language. I found this book being sold in England by an herbalist society. It concerns 150 commonly used medicinal plants. This is a good start.
The Forrager:
Ancestral Plants is a wild forraging guide from a forrager and botanist from Maine. Unlike most botanist, he wild harvests his own food from the wild including ones familiar to everyone including wild rice, and maple sap. Most books are really good at identifying a species of plants but doesn't explain how to use them. This is more focused as a how to guide once you've harvested the plants. The focus is on New England folliage but I know some sister species exist in Korea, and I wish to understand more than just Korean plants if and when I return to America.
I am reading these books from different perspectives that have a good insight on the natural world and our place in it. I feel that at 28, I have many years to learn this path. It's not as immediately beneficial as a MA in TESOL would be but its ulimately much more important for my happiness.
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