Positive Possibilities Falling In Love...Yet Again by Josephine Laing I fell in love last night.  This was not the romantic type of  love between two people that is so often ripe with the promise of  sexual union. Nor was it likely to be the chummy light sort of  connection that men so often share which is typically based around a  common interest or activity.  No, this was much deeper than that. This was that amazing woman love, one of life's great delights.  We  are so blessed to be able to jump into that wonderfully all  encompassing feeling that only women friends seem to be able to share. I had been in the Co-op, getting some groceries a few days before, and as I wheeled my little cart past the bulk herb section at  the back of the store, there was a young woman there, busy with the herbs.  She was long and tall and quick to smile and very apologetic,  having six or seven jars of herbs out and occupying most of the  counter space.  I just needed one herb, goldenseal, the queen of  healers.  And I squeezed out a little spot to scoop and fill my  measured amount of the fine golden powder.  The young woman was  discussing some of the properties of the herbs that she was  purchasing with one of our co-op regulars who said, "You two should  meet." So, we introduced ourselves.  I was curious what she might be concocting with such a great variety of plant healers.  With a little  flush of embarrassment and that quick and furtive smile, her arms flew up in confession as she exclaimed that she didn't know anything  really about herbs, but that she wanted to learn.  My kind of girl!   So, I shared that that was exactly how I got started. And so it was, and in that very spot, the back wall of the Co- op, some twenty or thirty years ago. I had purchased a similar variety of roots and sticks and powdered leaves, getting about a dozen different herbs.  And they sat in my cupboards for a number of  years, tentatively coming out from time to time for a trial run.  And  one of those first herbs was goldenseal root powder, the very herb I  was buying the day that I met lovely young Paige.  Goldenseal has  since become such a love of mine that I carry a tiny jar of her most  helpful golden powder with me in my purse.  (Please see my Natural  Healing Disclaimer and Warning posted in my Positive Possibilities column before using any natural cures.)  Though she has many uses  that I won't take the time to list here, I will say that goldenseal  is perhaps my primary first-aid herb.  I have found goldenseal to be  very effective for packing wounds, especially deep wounds, to help  stop bleeding and to prevent infection like tooth extractions. Goldenseal also soothes the sting and pain of injury.  And, she is  great, I mean really great on burns, even bad ones like second  degree. One friend of mine liberally sprinkled a badly burned foot  with golden seal powder.  She then placed her foot in a light weight  plastic bag to keep it dry and then submerged it in a pail of cool water until the pain subsided. She kept it clean and dry and wrapped  it daily with fresh sterile gauze, and reapplied the goldenseal powder from time to time.  With this as her only treatment, the wound  was largely healed in four days time. Our healing herbs which slowly and steadily support and build  the body have had their value diminished in western culture.  This is  not unlike us women who have also had our values diminished in  preference for the more masculine view of asserting ones self  physically into the other's realm, both in the culture and in healing  practices.  But here, with the herbs, I digress, because this story  is not about the love that women can feel for herbs though we can and  often do so, it's about the love that women can choose to let  themselves feel with other women.  All we need to do is to be bold  and let ourselves reach out and request them. So, back to Paige, my new love.  Here was this beautiful,  lithesome, budding herbologist standing before me and sadly, I was  running late and had to dash.  So, I said, "Why don't you come with me and Frank to the movies Wednesday night?"  We had planned to see  "MissRepresentation" at the Fremont Theater.  It was a special showing to benefit the Women's Legacy Fund, presented by the San Luis  Obispo International Film Festival.  This film is a deeply meaningful  and well crafted documentary about how women are misrepresented in  the media to the detriment of everyone who is exposed to this culture  of ours.  It showed interviews with young people who are totally fed- up with the whole body image baloney that Hollywood and advertising  companies continually spew forth influencing young minds into believing that this is the ideal.  By using some unattainable,  airbrushed and photo-shopped images of women for commercial purposes,  they create a trite and mindless value system along with massively widespread feelings of inferiority and debased self-worth especially  among the young women of the world, who are continually slammed with  this imagery. And it stunts the minds of our men too, crippling them to an emotionally juvenile state. And because the women have been so debased and thus disempowered, the men get to lead. This leaves our  world dismally in the hands of an adolescent masculine mentality. And it's not good for any of us, male or female.  So we've got to stop it. I'm reminded of the Nestle boycott in the 1970's.  Nestle was making infant formula for the third world, which was nutritionally  deficient and they knew it.  I stopped purchasing Nestle products then and there.  And peer pressure was a big part of the boycott.   People would say, "Why do you want to support them, don't you realize that they are killing babies?"  Nestle had to back paddle for years  to regain consumer credibility.  And I don't think that they ever  fully recovered.  We women are responsible for 86% of all purchases made in this country.  I could see something like the Nestle boycott  happening again in regards to all of the media and advertising  companies which cast women in a trite or unattainable light. It's no wonder to me that years ago I spontaneously stopped shopping in regular stores and abandoned T.V. altogether, because it is truly pathetic out there.  I came away from the movie feeling that this film should be required viewing in every school in the nation.  Even better, let's make sure it is seen by our sons and daughters  throughout the western world, or wherever our advertising media, television and film promoters may reach their many tentacled and  prying hands.So, after the movie, we were all excitedly talking about the importance and timeliness of these ideas while we drove another  friend of ours, Mary, to her home.  Mary had fallen in love with me right after we met, too.  She shared with me later that she had first realized this when she got to see the pure joy that I feel while dancing.  We had been at a Midsummer Night's Dream party together, a  magical garden affair where fairies and musicians abound.  Our dear  mutual friend Susan creates this event at her home every year for all  of us to enjoy. This was Mary's first time coming and she was so  delighted to see me, a woman with a less than perfect body size and shape, having so much fun twirling and reaching and lunging to the music, that she fell in love.  She has told me twice now that she thinks that a picture of me dancing should be in the margin of the dictionary, next to the word joy.  Isn't that a great compliment. Naturally, I welcomed this love and invited her to slip into the warm bath of friendship and women's circles that help to make up the really fun part of my weekends and evenings.  So now, Mary and I get  to spend a lot of good time together which we both love.  Easily in her fifties, Mary admirably and exclusively uses her bicycle for transportation.  She does this for many reasons: exercise, carbon footprint, expense, etc.  Since it had been raining off and on that  day, I had called and invited her to join all of us, and had offered  to give her a ride. Meanwhile, to my delight and surprize, I discovered that Paige lives only a few doors away. So, after we had returned from dropping  Mary off, I offered to walk Paige home.  She sweetly slipped her hand  into mine.  She had made and was wearing knitted palm mittens,  allowing her fingers to be free.  And off we went.  As we passed it,  I pointed out one of the gardens I help with on the corner.  It has seven baby fruit trees, all in their third year now, with most of  them starting to give a little fruit.  This garden also holds one of  my prides and joy, a fifty foot long sidewalk herbal apothecary. Mixed in with a variety of common landscape perennials are about twenty different medicinal plants all growing between the sidewalk  and the lawn.  I pointed it out as we happily chatted away.  Then, a  few steps further on, Paige stopped and looked up at the sky.  And  there, we both were surprised to see a beautiful white ribbon  undulating it's way across the sky, like an aurora borealis,  magically getting brighter and brighter before our eyes.  Within a  moment or two, the quarter moon emerged from behind the moving cloud  revealing her mystery to us and we giggled with delight. Then we were at her front yard and Paige showed me their raised  garden beds, all ready to go with amendment and baby plants in  containers.  I couldn't believe my eyes.  Here was truly a young  woman after my own heart.  I felt like Mary had.  Falling hard and  fast.  Then Paige took me by the hand again and led me around the  corner of the house, ducking under the branches of a low hanging tree  and there opening before me in the moonlit glow was a gigantic  parklike lawn, ripe and potentially ready for a garden full of fruit  trees.  Yippee!  (Landlord and tenants permitting, of course.)  Paige  thought it sounded like a wonderful idea.  And she led me to a lone,  mature fig tree whose sweet abundant fruit plopped softly into our  hands, bringing the luscious taste of late summer to our night softened lips. But, it didn't stop there, beyond the lawn was a giant fully  mature mother oak tree, in all of her majesty, boughs spread wide and  high and low, heavy with acorns and with a deep litter of her leaves  blanketing the rain softened earth.  Tentatively feeling our way  among her roots in the dappled moonlight, Paige led me beyond the tree, to one last patch of lawn.  In the center was a low meditation  deck, a work in progress, being made free-form by one of her  roommates. There it was, right in the middle of this little private  lawn, snugly nestled between the oak and Garden Creek, bathed in it's  own patch of moonlight.  Simply magical.  We laid down on our backs, head to head, on the damp wood and laughed and spoke of life's  mysteries and the many promises of our human evolution and of the  golden age of peace which I feel sure that we are all on the verge of  entering.  And both of us could truly feel it in the deepest part of ourselves in that moonlit, rain-washed, star-clad night air. Frank and I had recently heard a talk by an intriguing man named Lee Carroll.  Did you know that twenty years ago, all of the  countries in South America had dictators?  I didn't realize this, until he mentioned it.  And then, Lee reminded us, that they all now have presidents instead. I think that's a pretty good sign.  Don't  you?  Despite immediate appearances, it seems to me that we are  steadily heading in the right direction.  The Berlin Wall fell.  No one saw that coming. The inter-net has helped us to become close with everyone around the world.  How extraordinary is that!  Even corporations, in their mad dash for profits, now know that generally  speaking, war is bad for most businesses.  And now we are opening our eyes even wider to the need for women's values and views in our culture and how we've all suffered for the lack of them. And there is still even more good news, 2012, the end of the  Mayan calendar, is not just a one day thing, it's a thirty-six year  shift, and we are already sixteen years into it.  The ancient Mayans understood, and also so has a recent award-winning quantum-physicist,  that time is not linear, but is actually a circle.  And the Mayans  indicated that certain key moments on the circle of time allow for huge potentials in human evolution.  This thirty-six year span of time is not only one of those moments, but it's the one that they  thought held the highest potential for the development of human consciousness.  And, amazingly enough, there are more people on the earth right now, then there have ever been on the earth through all  time.  In other words, we have all shown up for this big shift. Astronomically, very recently, our solar system has aligned  itself in the same plane as our milky way.  Now, that's a pretty  amazing thing.  And last December 21st, on the winter solstice of  2010, we had a total lunar eclipse which meant that our moon was lined up with our earth, which was lined up with our sun, all on the  same plane with the rest of the planets in our solar system, which  have lined up with our galaxy, the milky way.  Many astronomers feel that this was a significant part of the big event that only happens  every twenty-six thousand years.  They call this event "the precession of the equinoxes." And this precession is what the astronomers and creators of ancient calendars (Mayan, Vedic, Toltec,  Druidic, Aztec, Egyptian) were heralding.  Alignment.  Not the end of  the world, but a big shift in how we view the world, our sun, our  solar system and our galaxy. And I see this alignment with these heavenly bodies as if it's  an alignment with our mother and father creators, majestic and  beautiful and each worthy of our love and respect.  My feeling is that this time is here with us now, to help us move beyond our  current world view which I think is not unlike one that an infant has  at the breast, squalling to suck it dry, loving the mother, but completely oblivious to the mother's own identity, balance and  needs.  What I see is that we humans are finally leaving our  childhood and gaining our maturity.  And doesn't it feel good to be growing up.  It's what every child yearns for, to eventually have an  adult relationship with their parents. So Paige and I felt that all of this was truly worth celebrating and we couldn't hold back our laughter as we laid there  wiggling with our arms and legs held high up into the night air with  glee.  And our sounds of pure joy rang throughout the neighborhood. Together we summoned forth that unstoppable nectar of joy, ever able to arise from the depths of womankind.  We are the bringers of life after all.  And I've heard it said that a joyous woman controls the energy of the universe.  Haven't you ever noticed how a joyous woman turns heads, no matter what her age or body type?  Everybody wants  some of that good stuff. It's love, it's life!  It's why we are  here, to find and give forth our joy.  So, naturally, Paige's young male roommates, hungry to share in  what we had, were waiting on the back stoop to greet us and give us  warm hugs when time called us away from our magical hour.  And I've  been dying for a free moment to sit down and call her for two days  now, ever since I fell in love.  And why not?  Why not fall in love  with the joyous girl who is diving head first into herbs? And for that matter, why not love the older man who used to  always pump the gas into my little truck with a friendly joke and a smile?  Why hold back when there is so much love to be shared in the  world?  There is so much love to be enjoyed!   Ram Dass says that the doors to love open from the inside. Meaning that we, ourselves, hold the lock and key, and that anytime we want to, we can open the doors to our hearts and let the love flow.  So, why not set yourself free?  Follow your heart where she leads you.  Be bold and let yourself jump into love all over again  like my friend Mary did, and like me, with someone that you've just  met.  And let your own laughter ring from the boughs and clouds in the dark of night, just like Paige and Mary and me. Josephine Laing As an eco-feminist and a practicing medical intuitive for the past 25 years, Josephine Laing sees the emerging role of women in our culture as an essential element in our human transformation away from the dominator model of society into a golden age of peace which celebrates life in all of it's astounding creativity and diversity. Positive Possibilities Natural Healing Disclaimer and Warning by Josephine Laing I need to make sure that everyone understands that I am not a licensed physician.  I have not had any official training nor am I  certified or licensed in any form of alternative or complimentary healing arts services.  However, I am a person who has done years of  personal research and one who has had a fair amount of experience  with natural healing materials and methods. And, I am glad to say that I have been granted the right within  the First Amendment of our Constitution to freely share my  experiences and express my viewpoints on all matters of public  concern.  So I take the liberty to do so here in hopes that it may  help you as it has helped me.  However, pharmaceutical companies and  medical groups have made it so that I must legally give you the  following WARNINGS: Any healing modality, including standard western medical protocols in addition to natural therapies, can cause harm rather  then the benefit you seek.  Just like medications, sometimes herbs,  foods, or other natural substances can cause allergic reactions or  they can have side effects which can be dangerous.  After all, some  individuals have been injured or even killed by ingesting  strawberries or peanuts.  So please understand that any of these  natural healing suggestions that I write about may be potentially  dangerous, or even lethal for healthy people and they may especially  be so for people who are ill.  Thus before you begin any healing  modality, I need to ask you to please consult a Medical Doctor. In addition, if you have been diagnosed with a disease, or if  you are ill, I must, for my own protection, insist that you Ask Your  Doctor First, before attempting any natural healing programs that I  may refer to in these articles.  But please remember that due to  their lack of experience and lack of education in natural healing  methods and herbal medicine, most Medical Doctors will probably  attempt to discourage you from trying these natural therapies. I would also like to mention that Naturopathic Doctors, Doctors  of Chiropractic and Doctors of Oriental Medicine are also licensed  physicians.  They are typically trained in a variety of healing arts  and natural healing modalities often including homeopathy or  herbology.  I have personally availed myself of the services of all  three of these types of complimentary or alternative doctors and have  generally found them to be kind, knowledgeable, patient,  understanding, dedicated and very helpful. Josephine Laing