Campo Juju

Watch this Portlandia clip:



I can’t hear exactly what Candace (Fred Armisen) replies when Toni (Carrie Brownstein) asks her what she’s drinking. The best I can decipher is “campo-juju...something-something-something...tea”.

Does that not look like what I’m drinking today?

Today’s blend is nettles and red clover that I wildcrafted (meaning I picked them in a field and dried them next to our hot water heater, much to my husband’s consternation); lemon balm from my garden (technically originating in my neighbor’s garden but that’s lemon balm for you); and red raspberry leaves from an herb shop that looks not entirely unlike Toni and Candace’s establishment. The jar is vintage peanut butter, and the straw is one I picked up backpacking in Argentina. Say it all sexy like an Argentine tango instructor, “una bombiiiii-sha”.

Ugh, that’s all so annoying.

Still, I love my Campo Juju Tea. “Campo” means “field” in Spanish. “Juju” means energy in hippie (and a few other things in West Africa, but I’m sticking with the Californian dialect here and skipping over the issues of cultural appropriation). That’s exactly what I experience using herbs: taking in the field’s energy. It’s good stuff.

Toni: “Addiction isn’t funny.”

Candace: “Sure it is.”

When I was in early recovery, which is to say I’d decided to get my sh…stuff together but still had no idea how to do that, I took a women’s health class at Shakti Rising. We learned how to make Campo Juju tea, and other equally strange-looking herbal preparations.

One of the first sessions was a field trip to an herbalist’s garden. There we were, a dozen young women in varying stages of detox and grumpiness; the garden’s lush beauty in sharp contrast to our scorched inner selves. Our instructor asked us to meditate with a lemon balm bush; to smell it, touch it, draw it, and ask it for its wisdom. This did not seem like it was going to help me reclaim my sanity, but I did it anyway. Then we came back together to reflect on the depth of the experience and affirm each other’s insights, naturally, and to make lemon balm tincture.

Tincture. That’s plants in booze. I could taste the mojitos already. This was my kind of recovery program! Our instructor pulled five liters of vodka from the trunk of her car and explained how lemon balm soothes the nerves. It's great for cranky babies and kids, as well as cranky grown-ups. All this craziness actually would help us reclaim our sanity.

Then she showed us how to make a tincture: fill a clean jar with chopped up bits of plant, pour 100-proof vodka over the top, put a lid on it, and hide it in a cupboard. Shake it every so often to mix it up a little. In six weeks time, strain the liquid. Take a teaspoon or so in a little water.

That was seven years ago. When we moved into a new house this winter, I smiled when I found a little bit of lemon balm creeping under the fence from the neighbor’s yard. Lemon balm is like that. She will find you when you need her. Now, in summer, she has taken over the width of my flowerbed. She is eager to share herself. My son and I made lemon balm tincture this past new moon, which we will decant on the blue moon later this month.

Kids and vodka, gotta love it. That part was almost as funny as my visibly pregnant self going to the on-base military liquor store at 10:00 AM to buy two liters of vodka and nothing else. Bless her heart, the cashier averted her eyes.

If addiction isn’t funny, recovery sure is.

I'm with the Homos, Et al.

This picture is floating around Facebook. If you can overlook the apostrophes, you’ll probably find yourself on the list somewhere. So tell me, why do you love the devil? (sarcasm)

The first thing I thought when I read this list was, “My people!” or more accurately, God’s people. Whether those of us listed love the devil or not is debatable, but I know for sure that God loves each and every one of us, right down to the sports nuts. And God also loves the person who printed this sign. Mothers love all their children.

The second thing I thought was “That’s the church I want to go to – the one full of homos, Et al!” That church does exist. It is a growing movement of faith as more and more Christians recognize that following Christ means, you know, actually loving people. If that church doesn’t exist yet in an actual building in your community, you can still go to that church in your heart and in your interactions with friends, family, neighbors, co-workers, and strangers. There’s a lot of power in saying “Hey, I’m a Christian and I don’t think you’re damned to hell.” Trust me, people will be shocked. You can even extend that grace to yourself if you haven’t already.

This list doesn’t contain the word “sin” but it’s fair to assume it was implied. Here’s my three-part understanding of sin:
1) It’s anything you do that puts distance between you and the divine,
2) It’s not what you do it’s why you do it, and
3) It’s an action, not a person.

Example: Drinking a soda just now has me feeling a little wired and disconnected from my body. That’s done more damage to my spirit than the lie I told my son this morning about the TV being broken so we can’t watch it today. I don’t think I lost points for the soda or the TV. God loves me anyway, just because.

When we come to accept that we are worthy of love just for being who we are, and in spite of what we have done, eventually we move beyond whatever’s in the past (AKA forgiveness). When that happens, we may even find that we choose to think about why we’re about to do something and act in ways that bring us closer to the divine.

Words like “repent and believe in Jesus” sting because they divide us into dirty, un-repentant listeners and speakers who are somehow cleaner than the listeners. What a lie. (Hello, “liars”, you’re about two-thirds of the way down in the right-hand column.) Every moment of every day we are all (ALL!) working through how to choose thoughts and actions that bring us closer to our divine nature. And every day we all screw that up in 100 big and small ways. So every day we all have the chance to chose to forgive ourselves and others, or not.

Now close your eyes and pray this prayer with me, “Jesus, I know...” Ha-ha, just kidding! No seriously, close your eyes, put a hand over your heart, take a deep breath, and just feel how much you are loved. Now go do something to share that love with your self and with someone else.

Yours Truly,
A loud mouthed woman…who was formerly a drug-using drunkard and spouse-beater...and who has occasionally engaged in thievery, lies, gambling, perversion, and idolatry...and who will probably always be a highfalutin, new aged, liberal, semi-pagan feminist and freeloading recipient of government services.

What’s the first thing you thought when you read the list?

Toy Guns, Real Spears

A while ago some mom friends and I were talking about our young sons’ fascination with gun play. By "gun" I mean toy guns as well as sticks, fingers, spoons, and dolls; all of which make formidable weapons in the hands of an imaginative little boy (or girl, let’s not leave them out). On days when mommy’s especially tired, these make-shift guns always seem to come complete with semi-automatic sound effects.

Now, I'm a born and bred blue state pacifist. And I’m a military wife. Should I ban gun play entirely or take my boy to the shooting range? Both seem reasonable to me.

Before becoming a military wife, I thought I had nothing to do with war. After my husband enlisted, ok now war's a little closer to home, but he has a desk job. It's not like our family is really part of war.

Or are we?

Are you?

In the military being "the tip of the spear” means fighting on the front lines. Hoorah! Nobody takes the metaphor any further. A battle cry is more exciting than complex political discourse. Spears have handles. People hold the handles. They look around and decide when it’s time to throw spears, and at whom. It’s complicated; at least as complicated as what my son encounters on the playground.

My husband, my son’s daddy, is part of the handle of the spear. He and all the other support personnel make combat happen. Before a squadron deploys, they pack their gear. It looks like a line of ants carrying crumbs. A pile turns into pallets, nailed closed and loaded onto trucks. Some relative of mine was a quartermaster (a supply guy) in the Civil War. He kept a log book of all the food and all the candles and all the blankets that went through his shop on their way to the battlefield. A blanket is not a weapon, but wrapped around the shoulders of an exhausted soldier it becomes part of war. An object; a plaything, for example, is not "good" or "bad". Context is everything.

Who’s holding the spear? Look down at your hands. It’s me and you and all the rest of America. It may only be the tip that's bloody but we are all involved. How can I ban gun play in my house when I'm part of a real live war that has - on all sides - taken countless lives and left many, many more to live with wounds of the body, mind, and spirit? Or is that precisely why I should ban it?

Is it hypocritical to deny my son a plaything when he's imitating reality? After all, I let him have a toy broom. That’s somehow different. I don't want him to play with guns in the same way I don't want him mixing imaginary martinis. Some stuff is only for grown-ups.

As grown-ups, maybe it’s time we find something else to play. If war is made up of small actions and small objects, then so is peace. It’s not about what to ban, it’s about what to encourage. It’s time to make a really big deal out of how awesome it is to plant flowers, bake muffins, pet the dog gently, and kiss your parents good night. Let’s pile those small things up in our homes, and send that convoy off into the world.

What small thing can you do today to put down the spear?

And if you have kids, how do you deal with gun play in your family?

First Post Ever

This blog has been asking me to write it for several months now. For a long time I hesitated to make it real because I like it best I feel least scared when things are clean and systematic. I make spreadsheets to decide which socks to order online. My pantry is pretty much organized by taxonomy.

Logically then a "good" blog will hit a set of related keywords that appeal to a specific target audience. If it's a mommy blog, I shouldn't write about spirituality. If it's a spirituality blog, I shouldn't write about politics. If it's a political blog, I shouldn't write about food. Unable to decide on one topic about which to write, my de facto decision was not to write at all. That’s kind of like the best contraceptive advice I ever got as a teenager: If you don’t decide which method of birth control to use, you’ve decided to get pregnant.

Indecision was a cover-up. Under it, I believed that doing nothing was better than doing something and doing it wrong. This belief was a great way to keep my authentic self invisible. Family, spirituality, politics, and food are just a few of my authentic self's tags. She hasn’t yet discovered them all. And she certainly won’t be content to explore just one. Here, she can have/be them all. You too. There is enough space here for all the tags that are attached to us, as well as new ones we collect along the way.

I really wanted the best name ever for this blog. The.Best.Name.EVER. After closing my eyes and asking the universe to reveal a name, all I heard was "Bridges over Intersections". Not being a structural engineer or anything, I think it's kind of lame. But that's what I got. That was the message over and over. Bring ideas together. Make connections. Build something useful. Ok. Guess God's not feeling as ethereal and fairy-like and earthy as I wanted. Divine utility, that's what we're going for here.

Then I started thinking about all the bridges I've lived near. There's been an iconic bridge nearly everywhere I've called home. The background image here is a blueprint from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. It's the Best.Bridge.EVER. to represent this blog. Opened in July of 1940, the whole thing collapsed in a windstorm that November. It was rebuilt stronger and more resilient. That's perfect!

So here it is, a blog that's good enough to be called perfect even when it's nothing like what I imagined it should be.

Beliefs can paralyze us as often as they motivate us to act. What belief paralyzes you today? Are you ready to let it go? What are your authentic self’s tags?