St. John's Bridge
(One way to get back to where we were . . .)
I saw a meme the other day.
It said, “Their real task is to spread hopelessness, because where there is no hope, there is no serious resistance.” That floored me. It made so much sense with the way I’ve been feeling. Who are “they” that spread the hopelessness? Many ideas come to mind: The media, crooked politicians, angry people who feel empty inside . . . So many awful possibilities.
And yet hope hasn’t been destroyed, has it? In the history of mankind, regardless of how brutal things became in certain eras or regimes, hope never completely faded away. Sometimes it had to hide for a short while. Sometimes it masqueraded as contemporary opinion while hiding coded words in its language. Heaven knows I’ve done a bit of that myself, and when I do, I am confident that he with ears shall hear.
The natural world continues on
absolutely unabated by the Circus, formerly known as the media. It was time to pick St. John’s Wort again for the medicines I make. The small bottle on the right contains St. John’s Wort oil from 2021, the middle bottle contains St. John’s Wort tincture from 2021, and the bottle on the left is the new bottle I mixed up yesterday containing fresh St. John’s Wort flowers and vodka. This will be 2022’s tincture. I’ll pick more in a few days and turn them into 2022’s oil.
St. John’s Wort is an extremely valuable medicinal herb, also known as a noxious weed, especially in California, where you are not even allowed to buy, sell, or plant the seeds because it already grows everywhere and they consider it to be an “invasive” species. I always have to giggle when I hear that.
The bright red color you see is an indication of the hypericin amount in the plant, and hence the potency of the formula—the redder, the better. St. John’s Wort is well known as an antidepressant, and many studies have been conducted showing that it actually works as well as SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) doctors prescribe. Except it’s not an SSRI, and it doesn’t have the side effects of an SSRI. How does it work? It could be because it makes more neurotransmitters available in your brain, which improves your mood. People have been using it successfully for a