Living Pharmacy

CIIS, SF, California, Spring, 2015

We all arrive at time to the parking lot of the university. I was 24 and was studying a course in traditional medicine called “Living Pharmacy”. I started the program without really knowing what to expect. The university was far from home in a semi-rural area in Mexico City. People from all over the country would gather there to study the medical properties of plants, the traditional ways of knowing, and the way to cultivate and prepare medicine.

There were so many different types of people and personalities in the program, people that lived such different realities in the same country that every time I went I felt excited and shy at the same time. There were doctors, curanderas, housewives, dj’s that cure there siblings and friends, girls that grew up in rural areas and were studying in the university apart from their families since High School, old men, and all sorts of different people that I never had the chance to interact with before. And there was me, that never in my life had been in contact with nature or agriculture before.

The course was very dynamic, we would have field trips, ground work, theory classes and experimental ones were we would make essential oils, medical soaps and all sorts of things.

That Sunday we were going on a field trip. As I was saying, we all arrive at time, so 9:15 we were already in our way. We went in the car of the professor, an old red Ford truck that had benches in the back part of the car were at least seven or eight people could sit.

The first stop we made was to a Moctezuma Cypress or Ahuehuete forest. Ahuehuete means “old men of water” in Nahuatl. The Ahuehuetes are old trees of Mexico that are considered sacred for the native people. They are beautiful, big and very amazing trees. The forest has a path were you can walk through and my professor told us old mythical stories about them, the medical properties they have, the way to treat them and cultivate them, and also how the great projects of man could be actualized like this forest dreamt by a an ancient king. At the end we had to walk alone in silence, and if we wanted he invited us to talk with this ancient beings. I walked and I talked for the first time with a tree.

The journey kept going and we were heading to an organic chamomile plantation, the way was longer so in this part of the trip the conversation in the car benches began. We talked about everything: about life, studies, traditional medicine and the different aspects of our country. Two girls that were students of agriculture in the university and myself were leading the conversation. We all had a lot of curiosity for the life of the other. One had been born near the pyramids of old Tenochtitlan and the other in a pueblo near Oaxaca. Both of them grew up in families that grew their own food, had some animals at home and when needed went to the curandera for some herbs to cure their diseases. They love their home, but there were no schools that they could attend there so they had been in Chapingo University since they were 15 for High School. They liked school, the programs were very complete and they learned a great amount of sciences. The University also provided them all sort of opportunities, like studying abroad or visiting different Mexican towns, but they also felt the loneliness of being away from home for so long.

As for me I came from the city, I grew up always in the same house, study in a private university near home, got married, divorced, and before that day, for me the food I ate came from the supermarket and the medicine I took came from science, provided only by doctors and pharmacy stores. The whole idea of a living pharmacy was very far away from my life. Our lives were so different. They knew the source of things and I didn’t. I just knew that I needed to find my way back, where, I did not know, but there was something that I needed to recover. I knew that.

When we arrived to the chamomile fields I could not believe it. In front of me were fields filled with white, yellow and green. All that was before my eyes was chamomile flowers. The smell was strong and beautiful. My senses and even my heart were more sensible that usual. I have never been in front of so many living flowers before.

My teacher told us the strategy plan for that work field, the plans for the uses they would give to the plant that was growing and the medical properties of the flower. I could feel his love and knowledge for plants, his deep connection with them. He let us pick all the flowers that we wanted because it was only the first flowering of the season and it was not going to be used, in the second one much more flowers would be available and it was then when they hire people to help them harvest.

I started walking around and felt ecstatic, “so that’s the earth”, I thought. I was in the home of the tea I used drink to sleep and calm myself with. I was In front of the plant that cures my stomachache and my eyes. Chamomile stop being just a product, now, in that moment I saw how it was a living being: growing, evolving, giving itself to the world. It was a really complex being, it had its seasons, its own relationship to the water, to the sun and to so many different organisms, and not only that: it started just from a seed!

It was so incredible, so beautiful, so real. I felt the growth, the time, and all the mystery that was involved. I have never had such a poetic experience with the land, with the plant world, with life itself. I felt something shifting in my eyes, in my soul. Life was getting bigger.

I was collecting all these beautiful flowers and cannot help but think about healing, about sharing. I wanted to bring all my family, friends and students of the city to see it. To show them how great the world was, so we could all together remember where our food comes from and were our healing was. Because back there I just knew that both were in the earth. The nourishment of our bodies and the medicine for our souls were there: in the soils, in the land and in our connection to the whole web of life that we have forgotten.

I was remembering and I wanted them to remember with me. Life was so abundant, and so amazing and so much bigger that our human world, which seemed sufficed by inert thoughts, that think mostly about inert stuff.

Thinking about it makes me remember the weight of the flowers in my bag, the smell of my house when I put them to dry and the feeling, that sense of freedom and peace that I got when I remember where I came from. I just started to realize that I came from a living, sensitive, amazing process of life, that was unfolding and that needed to be remembered.

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On our way back to the university a very special woman filled us with stories about her experiences in different pueblos. How for example in Aguascalientes, women rule the house and the family and in order to be respected as one you have to gain your place in the kitchen. How the group of women gave you first the role of killing and cleaning the chickens, then in cleaning and serving, until you prove to them your commitment and gain your place and their respect. Only then they will tell you their delicious secret cooking recipes. She told us how these women are strong and wild with a great sense of humor and lots of character. How in the parties they enjoy watching the men and children eat their food and how they dance to the music with joy and laughter; how they are bounded with the earth and posses this deep practical knowledge of making life happen.

She also told us about how in some other pueblos in San Luis Potosi, some old ways of thinking still prevail and how an illness is consider more or less bad depending on if you could or couldn’t perform your social task. So is not an individual experience that of being sick, it indeed happens to the family and sometimes to the whole community. For them having flu is sometimes consider worse than cancer, because of how it affects your performance in the task that you have.

But my favorite story was that the word ”apapacho”, that I use a lot in my life and family actually means caressing and comforting another person by hugging them, came from an old serious healing therapy used by the “Nahuas.” The healing practice of “apapachtl.”

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Almost at the end of the trip we stopped at a cornfield and my professor took the opportunity to teach us how to recognize the strongest corn and choose the best seeds for the next season. While explaining I asked him what were the seeds of corn, and the whole students turned to look at me. They did not understand how I did not know which was the seed of corn. But I didn’t, I did not know. Then we, them and I realized a part of society, that in that moment I was representing, is far away from the earth, from the land, from nature. I did not feel ashamed for myself, nobody told me before, how could I know… but I felt a deep sadness for the whole “civilized” world that like me had lost its relationship with the earth and did not know its way back; its way back home. After that day I never came back to the way I was before.