It was a bit of a surprise to learn that a flower known as Brazilian Verbena that has been growing in our place is an herb with deep roots that extend to various cultures which include ancient Egypt, India and the West. It’s coolest connection is with Brazil, barely a week after the visit of Professor Paulino from the Amazonia region in Brazil.
The herb has numerous uses including the calming of nerves and activation of the lactation glands. It is known as the herb of the cross for religious reasons that I seriously doubt ever happened. But that is in the past. Our interest in the plant has to do with its signaling to connections of the future across cultures, and more specifically to the indigenous & Kilombo communities in Brazil. We are delighted to have a herb of the Cross that will hopefully calm and activate the lactation glands of our various cultures in a bid to calm our nerves from centuries of abuse. Incidentally, we have another Brazilian plant which symbolizes the persistent oppression that seems to always reinvent itself. The most vicious form of that oppression is food. The shrub of Brazilian Black pepper is a beautiful shrub but it is also invasive. It has been relatively contained and I am wondering if the app identified the shrub correctly. I didn’t plant the shrub and my parents must have planted it many years ago. How they acquired it and why they planted it will remain a mystery.
What is not a mystery is the world in which we live today is governed by a global system that is invasive and parasitic towards the human rights of the masses. Fewer things symbolize that unjust system than our food and our relationships. That is primarily the cause of sickness and wars. I am of the view that our stomachs are the dumpsite for all of our folly. Plants and animals absorb all the negative energies we emit through industrial processes and chemical farming. We then ingest the same and reflect health effects that mirror our environment. Primitive accumulation of wealth, more mining of natural resources like oil, not even the invention of faster gadgets can turn this futile tide. We have to cross over to a more sustainable and human existence.
Being Black and educated is a tough affair. I almost wish to be blind to keep me from seeing certain things. One of those things are the illusive justice that Africans continue to experience in the most subtle way that allows them to celebrate the shadow of other people’s justice as though it is their own. The problem of justice is complex and it takes more than racial and cultural tones. It comes layered and sexed. Women and men don’t experience injustice. Yet some think that the problem is the other sex, all the while the puppeteer is busy robbing them all. The divisions of color are equally the same. Blacks dream of living the same life as Whites only to realize that the goal post has long been moved by the time they get there. How else do you explain an increasing gap between races even as the economy grows. It doesn’t seem to occur for a minute that the whole system is gamed. The power gap between the races get wider even as more Blacks gain entry into hitherto White fields. Those in power use the power to increase the gap between them and the rest. Those who are behind look at each other and blame each other for their situation.
The situation is not too bad as long as you go along with it and act like you don’t see. Being a coward pays well in that kind of system. To be African and to wish for change is a complex affair. I often think of the God of the Christians who kills his own son so that man can be saved. In fact, one of the tests of faith in the most important religious guide is willingness to die not for man but for God. A martyr dies for God but God does not die for man. Man is dying in droves. I have often felt like Black martyrs who like Jesus say crucify me that this suffering may come to an end, but I am rebuffed by many who seem to believe that their salvation can not come from anyone else other than a White person. It matters not how those who come in the name of the various prophets rob and mislead the masses. The way of the book is the one and only way. Nothing else can suffice.
The quest for justice seems like the story of the overcoat in the story by Nikolai Gogol. In the story Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is a low level clerk working for the government. He was in dire need of an overcoat to shield him from the bitter cold. Since he earned very little money working for the government, it took him years to save enough money to buy an overcoat. He was so proud of himself that he couldn’t wait to wear it out to a party for his coworkers. On his way from the party that night, his coat was stolen and he ended up dying from cold. Such is the nature of those who yearn for justice in a world that they complain of but one that still gives them so much meaning and pleasure. Thinking about the complex web of subterfuge is looked at as boring. Like Bashmachkin, the most likely outcome is much of the same. I therefore stand to the side and watch even as I whisper to keep from annoying the oppressed too much that they might slain me. Maybe the only hope is that the masses will suffer enough to realize that the pain is too dense to be wished away or tolerated. How does one trust a government that comes up with endless amounts of money for wars but is hard pressed to keep its books balanced. The government borrows for the sake of a few but the masses are stuck with the debt.
I have therefore settled to farm and create a space of salvation of our stomachs. Maybe, just maybe, just food might do the magic and remove the vail. Anyone who can convince a person who is eating toxic food and claiming to be living life to stop eating against their best health and wealth can do anything, including taking them to heaven.
Our heaven is the farm. There are few places left where one can be a steward of the earth, a healthy stomach and healthy emotions. I am reminded of the best name of any character in Russian literature. That name is of a character in a short story by Leo Tolstoy entitled Where Love is, God Is. The main character is a shoe repairer working in a room in a city. The room is a basement with a window that allows one inside to see the feet of those walking by the street. The shoe cobbler had been repairing shows for so long that he could identify the people walking across the window by their shoes. He could tell a foreigner by simply looking at his shoes. The character was named Martin Avdeitch. I love the character because like him, I can identify aliens by the way they eat the same way Martin could identify members of his community from their shoes. The good bit is that the story is not about shoes or food. The story is about poverty and loss of family. Martin had lost his wife and son, making him an angry man. When Martin was later introduced to the Bible, he read it with the hope that God would help him. Martin later realized that by loving his fellow man, he could find the peace he was seeking.
The only small problem is that they poverty and death that was bothering Martin in early Russia taken taken the form of food and the poverty of food have extended to become the poverty of reason and logic. In that confusion, just food has become alien and old fashion. That means what is love has been turned into hate. The end result is a fiat world where most of the relationships and food is fake. I have now become an alien and many look at me in an odd way when I act with love for self and others in the manner I consume and serve food. But in other more mundane matters, much care and love is expressed that would make those in love with humanity, and just food jealous. I mean, how does someone take a birth twice and change his clothes twice but eat food that makes his stomach so dirty three times a day? Very clean on the outside with expensive makeup, apply foundation so that the makeup can stay on and then spray their arm pits so that they can smell like love and justice to their fellow man. In that kind of world, I am an alien. In fact, I am like a the lady character that Martin interacted with in the story, that character was an old woman who hawked apples around town. Martin called him Babushka. I am not sure if the Russian use that word out of respect or in a dilatory way, but in the West, calling some like me an old woman or anybody for that matter is not considered a compliment. In our culture, you don’t get old as you age, you don’t get older every successive birthday, only an alien can think so. Whether I am considered an alien or even a Babushka, I will love and grow just food. Anything else is Russian roulette.
In the meantime the bees are having a ball falling in love with Spice of the Cross and this is something worth celebrating. Whether those that have turned their stomachs into alien spaces will cross to the side of justice or I will die waiting, I am at peace.