Queen Chamomile & being boring & not knowing

Dear friends,

Last weekend, I had the delight of attending a dear friend’s young person’s bat mitzvah. It reminded me how beautiful and sweet and simple it is to sing together, and how when you don’t know the words (and even sometimes when you do!) there’s always a “yi di di” available (how does one spell “yi di di”—I have no idea).

The Torah portion that the bat mitzvah youth read was one that listed, in exacting detail, all of the gifts that each tribe brought to a ceremony—even though each tribe brought exactly the same gifts. The Rabbi talked about this, how scholars consider this careful listing to be a type of diplomacy, showing each to be equal and the same, but also special enough that each needs to be listed. The work of diplomacy, the Rabbi said, is boring. More boring than war, but more important.

This really moved me, because I am, in some ways, in a “boring” phase of my life. By choice. I’m doing the boring work of rebuilding my nervous system, and to me, it is the most important work.

To my surprise, one of my long-time favorite herb friends, chamomile, managed to overwinter in my garden this year (something I did not know was possible this far north), and has already been blooming so much that I’ve dried a lot of her blossoms.

Chamomile is considered by many to be a boring herb. It doesn’t taste like a lot, it’s a little bland and sweet. It’s gentle, and that gentleness often gets perceived as weakness or ineffectiveness.

Chamomile is actually one of the most most-used and powerful herbs in my cabinet. It can be used effectively on everyone from babies to the very ill to the elderly. It benefits everything from the digestive tract to wound healing to insomnia to anxiety to pink eye to inflammation to beauty. You can drink chamomile tea, make a tincture from it, make a poultice from it, add it to salve, make an herbal vinegar hair rinse or add it to skin cream. Who’s boring now?

Chamomile can also be found almost anywhere in the world, in the most basic of grocery stores. I’ve drunk cups of chamomile tea while traveling, used the warm tea bags on my eyes or on cuts. Your grandma probably had chamomile tea in her cupboard, and your grandma was right.

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My favorite herbal remedy for yeast infections is thanks to chamomile. Make an infusion of equal parts chamomile and rose petals, and steep for 10 minutes covered. Strain out the herbs and add enough tepid water so that you have a warm sitz bath (enough to sit in a tub with the water up to your hips). Make sure it’s not too hot, you’re putting tender bits in there! Sit in the sitz bath for about ten minutes, or until the water has cooled. Repeat once or twice (that’s usually all it takes for me). (If you have a sexual partner, have them do the same, or else they’ll just give the infection right back to you.) Gentle and soothing, this not only supports the tissues that are inflamed and irritated, it also address the infection itself.

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I understand the impulse to dismiss what is gentle as not powerful, but those are not the same at all. If you’ve been reading this substack for a bit, you know I feel strongly about the stories we tell ourselves and others, and the power of being a simple, boring potato.

In true boring potato style, I’m still gathering on Saturday mornings to sit and write together (free! open to all!) at Looky Here. In other writing news, this week, I have an essay out in Write or Die magazine about the challenges of trying to write about something when it feels impossible to write about it. (With the one disclaimer, this was written a while ago, in a very very different moment in my life. We’re doing well now, amazingly, luckily, well.)

Excerpt here, with cat pic for company:

The grey tabby curled up in the basket in the window. Fairy lights strung around the seventeen-year-old’s bed and a rainbow silk cloth above it. The wooden shelf, the clear plastic bin with needles filled with saline, heparin, green caps, alcohol wipes. The lace white curtains found in a free bin. The buckwheat pillow, covered with a heating pad. The body pillow with a blue heathered cover. Another heating pad. A purple fuzzy cat bed.

Maybe we could propose a project for the leadership center about disabled and chronically ill leadership, she wrote to a colleague, who replied, I would love to but I’m totally swamped. And they were. The stories needed to be heard, the leaders deserved to be recognized and funded, and everyone was so fucking tired.

She wanted to propose a project where disabled and chronically ill leaders got to take a nap and then smoke a joint and eat some snacks and cry together and not explain a damn thing.

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She appreciated the author’s description of chronic illness that gets very very bad, being like Alice falling through the looking glass, falling into an upside down world where many things appear the same except nightmarish, clownish versions of themselves.

Except that Alice didn’t have to look out on all the people she’d left behind, didn’t have to talk to them and answer their Monday questions.

She was as disappeared as Alice, but much worse than that, because she was also still right here.

(read the rest of the essay here)

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Well, this has ended up taking me so long to write that a whole other week has passed! I went to a beautiful dance performance done by a local experimental dance company, and before the show, the director said to the audience, “We want you to question what you’re seeing and why you’re seeing it. We want to increase our tolerance for not knowing and not understanding, because the world is confusing.”

I love that so much. The world is confusing, and often unknowable, or beyond our understanding. Our tolerance for not knowing, not understanding, feels like it has gotten smaller and smaller (I know mine has), and how quickly this feeds our fears and hatreds and pain. This feels, to me, like another type of “boring,” necessary work.

And here is an always timely poem from Bob Hicok, shared by Only Poems, “Make Oatmeal cookies not war.”

Thanks for spending time here with me, friends. Til soon.

Yours in the not knowing,

Adrie