Adventures after healing

 

When a Yanomami shaman was asked how they had got from highly poisonous plant to medicinal treatment when trial and error would have been repeatedly deadly, the shaman simply replied: "The plant told me."

But within our materialist 'western' perspective listening to plants is at best a metaphoric exercise in projection, rather than a simple, if challenging, craft of imagination, perseverance and of the plant's grace.

This was not always so, nor is this an indigenous practice for which you need to travel far, except perhaps in one's willingness to slow down, slip down and listen carefully. 

In Kassabova's new book, she travels back once more to her native Bulgaria and to one particular valley, that of the Mesta river, and its surrounding mountains to pick up the traces of the traditions of herbal medicine and weaves them into a haunting picture of lives lived enfolded within community, an encompassing nature and souls' journeys after illumination.

History, as so often, has not been kind to these communities not least to the Pomak - Muslims of Slavic origin - persecuted as the Ottoman Empire collapsed, by the Communists for not 'fitting in' and by the banditry like predations of that mafia infiltrated state that succeeded Communism's fall. But they are nothing if not resilient - and if many have split lives - laboring in wealthier countries of the EU or in the UK - with periodic settlements back home, some manage to sustain themselves within older traditions of agriculture, pastoralism and the collection of wild herbs (of which Bulgaria remains a major exporter); and, on the tourism such traditions attract.

Kassabova places these traditions of healing within wider circles of reference -  for example alchemy and its search for wholeness (rather than gold) and the Bogomils - seekers after a liberating perfection - noting how traditions have mingled and how the dominant religious traditions of Christianity and Islam have been infiltrated. 

We meet a wonderful cast of characters that inhabit, partially or wholly, an animist world, that is full of persons, some of whom are human, and many of which are plants who are beautifully described and their specific healing potentialities outlined.

But healing, of course, is not simply a physical quest, it is dependent on the psychological states, and spiritual intentions you bring to it, a point repeatedly stressed, and diversely illustrated, by the people she meets and the stories they relate. And, nothing, of course, is ever guaranteed - we remain in the time slapped world where love can be crucified and the Buddha eaten by the hungry tiger. 

The deeper backdrop is our continuing depredations on the more than human world - our appetites consuming outwards what perhaps the author suggests is a compensation for the wholeness we fail to find within - and this failure is, at heart, finally a metaphysical one. Our fantasy is that we live, briefly, as islands of accidental consciousness wrapped in bundles of skin, the only one's gifted with true agency and speech when, in truth, we inhabit an animated world that teems with opportunities to listen, a listening that might be the beginning of healings into renewing wholes, not unwounded, but better able to carry our wounds as blessings.