Once upon a time Shamana Flora and I were camping in this beautiful canyon way up in the sky in New Mexico. We woke up one morning to find everything covered in a few inches of snow, and more still falling. It was beautiful, but after a while we started to think that we’d better leave while the van could still make it out. So off we went, through the storm, barely making it through a road closure and then ending up stuck at a truck stop in a little town, waiting for the snow to stop.
Jesus was there. He came up and asked what I was crocheting, and what Darcy was reading. Then he showed us his hoe. It was his tool because he worked with the earth, he told us, the whole time rubbing his hand with an onion. He was using an onion and some garlic to get the poison out of his hand, because earlier he had been showing the onion method to a man with hands all curled up from arthritis, and he thought that some of the poison had gotten into his hands. That’s a risk you take when you’re Jesus, you know.
Darcy and I were totally on board with getting your medicine from the earth. We had a long conversation about people taking the minerals out of the earth and how that’s depleting the minerals in our veggies and our bodies. Here we diverged. Jesus believed God had given us the gold and silver and oil to take out of the earth. It said so right in the bible! He pulled out a college chemistry textbook from the sixties and started showing us relevant parts. He would say things like, “you see two hydrogen and an oxygen make water! God made it that way and he made the gold for us to take out of the earth!”
At that point he noticed that his hand was starting to pop out in a rash from the onion, and he became very excited. “See, you see that?! It’s pulling out the poison so I can see where it is! Now’s the time to use the garlic on it!” He pulled out his garlic and started rubbing it on the red bumps. “Oooh, it burns. It’s getting out the poison.”
Darcy, one of the quietest, gentlest people you’ll ever meet, finally said “I think it might be that the volatile oils in the garlic are burning you.” It was a great moment.
Then we cooked miso soup with nettles and eggs in the Smart Mug while we drove the rest of the way back to Colorado.
Oh, did I mention? Jesus was a vegetarian.
When you said that Jesus introduced you to his hoe, I thought you were gonna make some Mary Magdalene joke or something 🙂 This post reminds me of when I was a child – bee or other insect stings would prompt my mom to reach for a garlic clove, cut it in half, heat it in a skillet, and apply it as a mini poultice. My mom was raised in Mexico, so I grew up learning the Spanish names for these home remedies. Ajo for bee stings or a hot “tea de canela” (cinnamon) or gordolobo (cudweed) for fevers. My grandma and aunts would use marijuana soaked in cane alcohol as a poultice for arthritis – they swore by it. I like your blog, Tara. I am too lazy to start one of my own. At the end of the month I will be sleeping in my van. No more apartment for me. Your blog gives me hope. Keep up the good work. Lizzie (Dubyagal)
i remeber that! What a snow storm that was…what a drive…and jesus too!
🙂