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| Finding Healing in Native Plants and Nature, Oakleaf Fleabane |
This post is not about seeking empathy, it is about the healing power that nature offers. I want to tell you how my time spent with Florida’s wilds, native plants and wildflowers has provided me with so much healing. Even so, there is no scientific proof of healing by native plants presented here. Instead, I hope to share how spending time in Florida nature convinced me in no uncertain terms, that ‘no matter what, everything is ok’. Not only does this reassurance carry powerfully healing but an appointment with native plants can be much less expensive than doctor’s office fees. Give me native wildflowers, leaves and berries any day over any bottled pill or closed door examination room.
Medical studies have well documented the ability of nature to possess strong healing power to manage all types of disease. Spending time outdoors in our native ecosystems can help us maintain and strengthen health, no matter the level of our malaise. Healing energy emanates from the sky, earth, water, fire, minerals, wind and air we breathe but especially from native plants in their historical settings. We do not have to import, buy or order nature’s healing. We can rather just go for a walk in our local natural areas to freely receive substantive plant magic.
Since grade school we’ve also been taught that plants are extraordinary because they take in carbon dioxide, water and dirt then ‘eat’ sunshine and then synthesize healing and complex medicinal substances. Through trial and error based use, Homo sapiens have developed skills in applying the healing power of the plants for millennia. Beyond the medicinal alkaloids and compounds that plants photosynthesize however there also lies another important modality in nature, that power of healing for ‘heart and spirit’.
Other terms could be used here too, such as; positive aura, spiritual help, earth energies and transformative power. Through my time spent hiking into, studying, photographing and sharing Florida’s wilderness, native plants have become some of my best friends and have helped me navigate some serious health challenges.
I do appreciate all the real and virtual hugs and love sent over the years and will always continue to accept those, for human touch heals so effectively also. Now I want to pass along what I found for free and hope in doing so I could maybe help even one other person navigate a life difficulty. There is power found in a short walk or sit down meditation along a trail somewhere in nature. It is good to share the joys of healing and the good power of native plants.
Shout out to all the amazing health care providers. You saved my life numerous times and for this I am grateful. The praise of the healing power of native plants is no slight to modern medicine .
Throughout the past decade I’ve had different parts of different body parts removed for tumors while surviving an aortic dissection where the main artery leaving my heart tore from the aortic valve down into my legs. Only part of it is fixed today. As I am still relatively young, I used to ask myself all the time, ‘why is this happening to me?’
After my dissection I couldn’t walk from the bed to the bathroom without help. But learning to walk again and chronic pain were easy compared to the PTSD lots of my doctors freely dished out. Words cut deepest. Honesty from the doctors will always be appreciated by me and I do not blame those physicians who were genuinely surprised I was still alive. But today there are few comments that could come from doctors that I haven’t already heard. At first I would cringe each time I heard a new version of the same iteration. Finally, after being inundated for a decade with dire predictions and still waking up each morning these words no longer caused a fight or flight response. Today I almost think of the words as just plain ill-informed blurbs of a doctor who really does care but doesn’t have the right words at hand when talking with me.
Over the past decade I could fill a book with quotes such as;
‘You are supposed to be dead’
‘No I can’t help you get your driver's license back because you are not supposed to be alive’ (kudos to Cleveland Clinic for their help in proving I was really alive)
‘If I didn’t see you sitting here and talking with me, but just looked at your CT scan I’d think you were dead, or on the operating table’
‘Your heart was covered in green slime, probably from your first open heart procedure’
‘How bad is the tumor on your kidney? Just imagine it’s a quarter to midnight and someone has a gun stuck into your forehead’
‘You could drop dead at any moment’
‘You need to wear a vacuum pump on your chest’
‘Don’t ever lift anything over two pounds’
And so much more.
Having doctors repeat words such as these over a decade can lead to hand wringing and lack of sleep and rotten moods. Usually it was worse at night when all the doctor’s words would torment me in unison. Enter native plants.
The beautiful part came when I found out how to move past some of those doctor’s words and accept the fact my body was going to be an ongoing challenge. About a month after I was released from my second open heart Judy drove me to Bulow State Park and we sat on a bench under the 400 year old Fairchild Oak. I poured out of my soul as I told her of the sadness I was feeling because at the time I truly believed I’d not live to see our two children who were teens, grow up to be adults. Thankfully, in more ways than one, they are beautiful grown adults now and out on their own doing well for themselves. During that visit I noticed those sad feelings were gradually growing less painful as I reached out and touched the heavy, moss covered outstretched limbs of Fairchild Oak . No way could I put my finger on the source of comfort at that time and even today I can’t adequately describe that deep sense of belonging to the earth. However I can emphatically say the sense of belonging and the feeling that everything was going to be all right was strongest there in the coastal maritime hammock, among all the plants that had grown there forever.
Over the years since I’ve spent as much time as I could soaking up this unexplainable but very real healing force from plants in their wilds. Each ecosystem and unique community of native plants here in Florida provides different modes of healing power for me. Interestingly, while I certainly ‘feel’ good energies coming from horticultural gardens of non-native plants, the level of this healing power my body felt while in a native plant community was and is always much stronger.
My undergraduate education is in biology so I usually don’t give much credence to theories based on ‘feelings’ or especially mythologies. I am a scientist who believes in facts and peer reviewed research. Quantum thoughts may provide somewhat of an explanation to this magical healing power, but I think that the resonance of well-being I feel when spending time with the native flora and wildlife around me has more to do with a subconscious level of familiarity nested down inside my ‘DNA’. My immediate ancestors and then my ancestor’s ancestors all lived lives surrounded by the native plants in the Appalachian mountain chain. Before then they foraged across the Central Pangean Mountain chain, within the ridges of Ireland and Scotland that were once connected to Appalachia. I’ve come to rely on that ‘deep, unexplainable and ancestral connection I feel’ with Florida’s native plants as an important part of my healing journey.
Native plants, such as the purple thistle, wax myrtle and the Fairchild oak and Carolina jessamine all make me feel at home, like a homecoming, right away, as soon as I walk into their midst. Being at home sure does beat listening to a doctor fumble with words in a small room with glaring egg-shell white walls. The feeling that, no matter what happens it’ll all be ok because I am grounded and part of something worthy and good and established makes home the place to be when feeling down or ill. Yes, there will be times when I still seek the interventional refuge of the hospital or ER. But when I do it is not soon afterwards that I am always ready to be back home. However, when out on the trail or in the swamps hiking with Judy, I feel no desire to rush back to the house, for I am home too in the wilds with healing plants surrounding me and wrapping me with their magical splendor. In the wilds I understand I am at home. I am where I came from and there is no better place to be. My body and my mind are then so healed.
Additionally, native plant communities give me much more healing energies than just the overwhelming feeling of being at home in peace. Some of the perspectives Florida wilds have introduced me to include;
Learning to look for amazing beauty and awe in smallness
Opportunities to challenge my art eye with new geometry
Learning of how birds, insects and other critters, including myself respond to colors
Recognizing from flowers, fruits, leaves and bark of native plants that humans didn’t invent the color wheel, Mother Nature did. I now see how a plant’s palette of hues defines art theory
How plants whisper audibly to me through the way winds caress their leaves and boughs and how my own wooden cane vibrates with tree whispers when run gently across their bark
Having more adventures and free spirited fun when out in nature than in the city
Being able to breathe easier and trace the subtle differences in scents, smells and plant aroma
Becoming familiar with different families of soils under my feet, which are entire living communities themselves
Watching parts of a huge eco-puzzle begin to slowly arrange themselves in patterns I could understand and want to reflect in my wildflower art
and so much more
Perhaps one of the most illuminating occurrences I’ve learned to recognize about the healing power of native plants and nature is that when I’m in the urban core, inside the house at home or at one of my doctor’s offices I pine for wind swaying palmetto fronds and the scent of vanilla leaf or the fiery blaze of Catesby lily and the crunching of sandy Coccoloba leaves under my sandals. The calls of ancient earth and endemic herbaceous flowering plants fill my dreams, both night and day. It is though heart strings really do exist and they are constantly pulling me back into the pitcher plant bog or hidden salty dunes or thick Fakahatchee green.
Daily, after morning coffee and as soon as we decide to head to the flatwoods my blood pressure and pulse subside from their caffeine and Type A personality driven peaks. Travelling down the highway with windows half down I breathe in ever so deeply, savoring the coumarin scents of freshly mowed roadside Andropogon, wild garlic and turkey tangled frog fruit.
Pulling into the state park vehicle area and placing our pass on the dashboard we both can hardly wait to lock up, strap up our fruit and snack filled backpacks and water bottles and head into the damp fields thick with Sabatia, Sarracenia, Yaupon and all types of Asters and grasses and bushes and trees and sometimes ticks. This lowland muck we hike in is where life once arose and where my ashes one day will return. All life here is an amazing cornucopia of free for the taking (pictures of) healing wonders.
With swallow tail kites gliding above and pileated wood-peckers calling out across the Aristida grasslands a deep sense of belonging envelopes me. I am home. The nursery down the street from our house has thousands of plants too, but they are horticultural strangers in a strange town. And although they are considered beautiful in their own right the fact is that I do not respond to horticultural imports in ways of deep soul healing as I do to native plants growing here in Florida’s wilderness.
After an afternoon of refilling our life’s energy centers with fresh oxygen, vitamin D from the sun, songs from birds and critters and intimate time spent photographing wildflowers we head back to the truck, tired but feeling younger and stronger. Back at the house we sort through our phone photos and share with others in our family, with friends and on the internet.
Later that night I will take my vitals like blood pressure and such and inevitably the results are all much better than those days we are running errands in town. Before my dissection my untreated blood pressure was averaging 140/90. With medication it dropped to 130/80 with a 90 pulse. Now, almost ten years later my medications are minimal and mostly formulated from flatwoods and swamp nature therapy. In 2019 I hiked at least 10,000 steps (five miles) each and every day. Today my blood pressure most days is 110/60 with a pulse in the 50s. I can honestly credit those regular hikes into the magical world of wildflowers and natives with my healing.
Too excited from being a first hand witness of nature’s grandeur I usually can’t sleep, especially when pondering brilliantly fluorescent purple hues on a tiny aster, oakleaf fleabane, Erigeron quercifolius. The diminutive native wildflower was growing across the edges of a shallow natural swale carrying a trickle of tannin stained surface water. On that day of all the wildflower images collected on my old iphone the blooms of this small plant shone the brightest, almost as though I could reach into the screen and touch them. The royal lavender, purple and yellow color displayed a vibrancy I’ve never seen in my life in a plant nursery or flower shop. A small diminutive ‘weed’ many times more attractive to me than all of the American Garden Club’s Plant of the Year recipients.
Sketches done I then rub my eyes. Time for dreaming of the flatwoods and all those pitcher plant hybrids. So much good healing native plant medicine today is available for us all; has been in the past, is there today and hopefully will be for future generations in the future.
