My Natural Medicine story: Wolfsbane

So over @naturalmedicine, we're having a contest concerning our own personal story as to how we became involved with the concept of Natural Medicine itself. There are many ways to look at that, considering that Natural Medicine encompasses virtually any action that isn't bought over a countertop somewhere.

Natural Medicine can be art, it can be exercise, it can be writing, it can be gardening, it can be sex, it can be bird-watching, for goodness sake. It can be anything done to achieve physical, mental or spiritual health. And it builds. Like any skill practiced and refined, it leads to other skills, other approaches, an ever-growing attitude of self-sufficiency. This is my opinion of it, and why my own customized gif involves the skull of a great beast. For me, natural medicine is more of Salt & Sweat... But that's just me.

So how did I get started on all of this? Well, it started with Werewolves, ofcourse.

I've always been the macabre sort. From my earliest memories, I was always interested in the Supernatural, in gods and fae and magic of all sorts. And back when I was just barely out of kindergarten, I was going to speech therapy in the mornings before school, because I would enunciate W's rather than R's. Given my undiagnosed Asperger's, it was pretty hard to get me to do the homework part, because even back then, reading and arithmatic caused me anxiety. But if there was one thing I wasn't at all shy about, it was monsters.

They sweet, frankly beautiful speech therapist noticed that my eyes would always stray to The Crestwood Monster Series, more commonly known as "the black and orange monster books".

We made a deal. If I would work extra hard and power through my lessons quickly, then we could spend the rest of the time looking through those books together. It was the perfect way to learn reading and speaking for me. And my favourite of all was The Wolfman.

The full film is available on youtube (ahem.)

That poem, from above captivated me. What was Wolfsbane? Was it real? Most importantly, WHERE COULD I GET SOME?

Wolfsbane is another name for Aconite, one of the most deadly plants in the world. (I'm rather glad I didn't find any. Aconite is sometimes used in Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine, but it's much like toadstools: If you don't know what you're doing, you can end up real dead, real hard. So it's best to be avoided. But that is what started me off on the idea that there were many uses for things in the natural world which modern America was quite ignorant of. And I wondered, if this is out there, what else must there be?

I've spent my life looking into mythologies, researching (but never really putting into practice) all sorts of things involving herbal remedies and the traditions that make use of them. And it all started with an attentive teacher and Good Old Horror films. <3

Wildings to the Wild,

Silas Danois