Learning to ID plants: the tried and true vs apps & the internet

'Apps' for everything, even meditation .. follow the link if you dare. I don't think I've ever seen a a sillier insult to the ancient wisdom of meditation - or to the intelligence of the 'consumer' (there's that word again!) - than that one.

And people who should know better, like the ever-annoying "functional medicine" guru Chris Kesser, actually promote such nonsense with a straight face.

When he links to that (particularly hateful) meditation app even as he recommends that his readers reduce their usage of technology, should we take it as irony? Or lip-service? I can't tell the difference any more.

The wisdom of Native American Medicine

The mystique of the wise Indian Medicine Man fascinates many of us, especially in contrast to our materialist culture. From Hollywood movies to the "shamanistic" practices taught on the internet, we may be offered tantalizing glimpses into the spiritual basis of these practices but rarely are we given anything like a realistic portrayal of what real Native American Medicine might entail.

Today I happened to trip over this moving video on youtube (of all places!). In a mere 3 minutes or so, it reveals an aspect of Native medicine that I consider to be one of the most wise I've ever seen. If we adopted this into our own health care systems, be they standard medical practice or alternative healing, how much better off could we be?

A course in every day miracles

(or, how to get the most out of my ramblings)


Judging by the stats for this blog (if you can believe them) and the emails from readers, we seem to have a few newcomers here.

That's led me to look through older posts on the blog with an eye to what has already been covered, and then back to the stats to see if those posts are being read. They're not, they're buried. So from time to time I think I'll link you back to them. For some of you this will be review, but if there is one thing I have learned it is that review is essential. I still do it, especially in winter, and even though as I read my old text books I can practically recite certain passages by heart, something I have forgotten or perhaps never quite absorbed will pop out at me.

One thing my readers know about my writing is that I tend to go off on tangents. They're useful things, those tangents, so I want you to pay attention to them. But sometimes they lead me astray and there are blanks in the posts that shouldn't be there.