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So I made a visit to an herbalist to talk about my health, and I’ve started to brew teas made of dried leaf (or maybe bark or maybe flower—can’t remember now) and I’m realizing that I haven’t touched the plant matter with my fingers. I’ve stuck my nose in the tiny brown paper bags (waiting for some jars to arrive in the mail) and sometimes there’s a fragrance and sometimes not much of one at all. I get a feeling when I touch each bag. I had a feeling meadowsweet might be helpful, for example, even though I prefer a bitter taste to my tea. Who are they? Who are these plants?
And already I am running home from school to be with my roots and barks and leaves and pour water in a cup whereas before the lure was putting my feet up and readying a big plate of food, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For you astrology fans: I have Saturn in Taurus. I was bound to make friends with Mother Earth eventually, some way, some how. (Oh here’s a link to my Saturn book.) Saturn always takes her sweet sweet sweet sweet sour sour time. We can’t finish our life here—on this earth—without learning the lessons of Saturn.
It’s the first week of school and I’ve had butter with my breakfast, leftover dandelion tea, some fresh coffee (not too much! I’m trying to cut back) and a list of things to-do. Rain has been predicted for the morning time. I can hear it amidst the music of cars whooshing by and a faraway ambulance siren and surely that brick wall from the new brick building across the street from me is speaking its truth. I have watched—and listened to—that building go up for years now. Alas, this dandelion tea has made me sleepy.
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This week’s Freud is last week’s Freud. I’m still thinking about his paper The Unconscious, which has Freud, once again, arguing stubbornly for the existence of the unconscious. How can it not be? Of course it is so, he seems to be saying over and over, stubbornly prepared for his many detractors, then and now. Repression destroys nothing; it only buries. It’s all there. The traces of perception are never truly gone.
“How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious? It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious.”
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Yesterday before class, I ran into two classmates sitting on a bench. They’d been talking about the weather. She—the one I’ve known the longest—offered up a fact: She recalled how much I dislike the heat. At the time I didn’t think much of this detail of the moment—so inconspicuous—for the conversation spun to other matters, but now I recall it as I think about eating a clove of garlic (to support a health blood pressure.)
So. I am known, by some, for this small thing—and is it a small thing?—a preference in the weather. Might someone, someday, say: I knew Aliza. She hated the heat. She loved the cold. She imagined herself in the great cold climates, surrounded by seal and maybe walrus, like the goddess Sedna. Maybe.
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I’ll leave you with this, dear reader, the idea that suitable lights—as Freud wrote—make it possible for us to discover our “permanent traces.” Psychoanalysis is one suitable light. Tarot is another, as I say in my new book (which you can pre-order here!).
Alright. To be continued…
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