The Flu

I have this picture of myself in the future, being the crazy lady that makes concoctions out of weeds that heal what ails you.  The one that everyone comes to when they are sick and modern medicine utterly fails them.  I'll be out in my garden with a wide-brimmed hat and rockin high heels, cutting herbs and flowers for my brews.  Then the vision gets a little theatrically witchy with a black, smoking cauldron and creepishly long red fingernails. *shivers* Holistic healing has a bad rap in my brain I guess.  Regardless, I am very interested in botany and herbal medicine.  As I said before, I believe that God has given us what we need in nature; we just need to know how to use it.  So I check out books and order books, and determine I am going to learn everything there is to know about plants and their healing properties.  I ordered two books on this very subject a couple of months ago; but the post office seemed to think I needed a lesson on patience...they aren't wrong...and just recently delivered them to me.  A few days later, we got the flu.  And I mean, WHAM! we had the flu.  It was bad.  I would have called 911 at one point when I was at home without the Jarhead and deliriously feverish...except that my daughter had decided to give my cell phone swimming lessons earlier in the day and drowned it.  In the toilet.  Thankfully so; I would have felt like an idiot calling 911 because I had a fever...even though it seemed perfectly reasonable in that moment of boiling and fire and molten lava and everything else that can be categorized as hot. 

It would seem that those books on, you know, holistic healing, would have been a God send right about then.  But instead of reading them I layed motionless, sprawled out on the couch for three days, trying to recall the words in my will. 

The Jarhead affectionately calls me "drama queen." 

Now that I am back to good health and spirits, I have had a chance to take a look at those books I bought.  One is called The Green Pharmacy: New Discoveries in Herbal Remedies for Common Diseases and Conditions from the World's Foremost Authority on Healing Herbs.  I love this book.  It has a wide variety of ailments in it, including...the flu and fever.  *sigh*

The other book I am not so sure about.  It seems like a fine resource, but despite it's claims on the back of the book, the ingredients in it's Healing Tonics are far from "common."  I think it may very well come in handy for me someday, but I feel it is a bit over the top for me right now.  I mean, I don't even know how to pronounce Fo-Ti (Ho Shou Wu) - let alone what it is.  The part I love about this book, is the glossary of herbs in the back, along with their properties and uses.  Fo-Ti (Ho Shou Wu) didn't make the cut however, so I remain in the dark on that one.  The author also includes a list of resources for ingredients, which comes in great handy for "lost" people like me.  And since I am way too curious to let it go, since writing the above I Googled Fo-Ti (Ho Shou Wu)...I can't help myself.  It's a plant.  Duh. 

Back to that lesson I need on patience, I have been feeling so on edge lately!  I just want so bad to skip the clock a bit and be settled in our own home, on our land, our farm.  I know beyond a shadow of a doubt there is a purpose to this time, right now, right here, and I don't want to idealize the future so much that I miss out on the present.  I think it almost invariably happens to people used to a military lifestyle; we get close to that 3 year mark and start itching for what's next.  I wonder, how will I adjust to being settled...forever?  Is it going to be easy to stay in one place for a long period of time, or am I going to start getting fidgety 2.5 years in?  Only time will tell I suppose. 

For now, I pray for patience.  *sigh*