One of the most important ingredients in healing of any kind is one too easily discounted or overlooked. Drawing us to herbalism, filling us with purpose, and activating our lives’ formulas is a distillation of hope from the stretch and reach of plants as they sprout and spread. Their active elements not only survive seemingly insurmountable heat, but are vitally transformed by it—purified and propelled. It’s at the very heart of any kind of healing work, as we’re impelled by empathy and concern to hope for the best results, for reductions in suffering, for the fastest and longest lasting recoveries.
With the medicine of hope, we feel certain that health is possible even when most threatened or compromised, certain that there are endless preventive possibilities to consider and restorative options to choose from, that there are heretofore unseen avenues for addressing what’s ailing—that there’s some alternative means for aiding whatever is un-whole or hurting. Without hope, we’re more susceptible to debilitating self-doubt, to disheartening projections and discouragements, to imagining we’re unqualified to do an accurate evaluation, let alone make the needed difference when it comes to the health and wellbeing of other people, of the society we’re each a part of and the natural world that absolutely everything is dependent upon.
Understandably discouraging are the swelling number of horrific reports in the news and on social media from health impacts to politics and climate change. As a result, many of us increasingly fall prey to an imagined powerlessness, as if there were zero options or avenues to take. You might hear friends talk about facing some “hopeless situation” or another, a health condition or a personal predicament for which there’s no possibility of remedy, improvement, or escape. And yet such framing can be both misleading and disempowering, even as perilous challenges do indeed abound. Think about it: in its truest sense, hopelessness can only exist to the degree that we’ve opted to hope less.
The cure for the deflating feelings of hopelessness is, of course, “hopefulness,” another term that’s largely misunderstood. It doesn’t mean expecting things to get better. Expectancy is more a matter of passive and even blind optimism, but there’s no absolute certainty when it comes to health outcomes, no matter how insightful an assessment, or how powerful the therapy, or how well chosen the herbs. More beneficially, hopefulness is a state of proactive caring and envisioning in an uncertain and ever-changing world. Hope is a need and desire to make things better, calling for our personal purposeful aims, responses, prescriptions and missions. It’s what we aspire to, and thus what we each in our own ways work towards.
I’d love it if after decades of publishing about herbal actions in Plant Healer Quarterly, I was equipped to recommend the exact best plants for any issues you ever encounter… but I honestly cannot. Instead, my hope is that you will never stop learning, experiencing, and amending; never stop making an effort to heal and be healed! I hope that no matter how frightful or stressful world events become, you too will keep hoping—basing your daily life decisions not on what you think may be impossible, but rather, on making more possible the most healthful and wonderful results.
My wish is that your individual attempts to serve and aid, that your insights and experiences, insights and determination, resolutions and results bring you profound daily joy and deep satisfaction, and that some portion of this world benefits from the blessing that is you. You can call this a magical wish, one that for as long as it takes we shall give our all to making come true.
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