Pain relief, the doshas & lymph

It's a long story, but the short version is that I temporarily lost my writing space at the kitchen table. That's been resolved (inshallah) so let's get back on track, shall we? I missed you, did you miss me? When I don't write here, the emails dry up. I gets lonesome! 

lol.

This is a post I found half written in draft and finished today .. 

Here's another example of how different the treatment of pain from the herbalists' perspective is from what we're used to; there isn't really such a thing as an everyday, overall pain reliever - that I know of - in herbal medicine. It seems there's no equivalent to popping a Tylenol.

Medicine chest 4(b) - the 2nd bark (alder) as infused oil and tincture

I'm still just getting to know the tree medicines. Up until the last couple of years I've spent most of my time looking down at annuals and perennials, those green jewels that grow in my yard and in the many wild meadows in our rural area (including hay fields, there's a lot grows on the edge of a hayfield besides hay and hay fields aren't sprayed).

I wander into forests plenty often (with permission from the landowners) (mostly ..), but I do very little harvesting there. Many of the plants that grow on the forest floor of a mature hardwood forest tend to be rare so I leave them be. Mature trees are not easy to harvest from, they're just too damn tall for me to reach their branches!

But on the edges of forests, along streams, along bike paths and trails, there are trees young and small enough that I can (respectfully, carefully) harvest a young branch or some twigs. Young trees are often plentiful in cities, too, and if the area isn't a manicured park, there's no reason why urban folk can't branch out (lol, sorry) into working with bark. Wildcrafting in cities is perfectly acceptable practice.