Herbs and Spices and Everything Nicest in the Sky-Kissed Smokies
He Sang, and the Twang of His Language Rang With Truth and Power and Love
AN HONOR TO CALL HIM COUSIN, THE HOPE TO CALL HIM FRIEND
Through two happenstantial routes,I found out that today is Shakespeare’s birthday and nearly let this divert me from my final intended ‘Earth Day’ piece, in order to consider things literary, the big bungling hungry hope I have to present the stories as huge as “Hamlet” or as guttural as “Othello,” which so regularly emanate from my life’s miasmic fringes. Inevitably, such cultural ruminations as these will show up here, because this commitment to STORY is beyond my capacity to deny. However, my right ear’s revolt, compounding the disintegration of a couple of molars in the past little while, returned my focus in this posting to the fellow to whom I’ll eventually introduce folks.
To alleviate the pressure and pain---whatever combination of cocked up cervical spine, congenital wax build-up, and infection are at the root of it---in my ear, I turned to a good friend, who is a pharmacist and herbalist, for “ear candles.” They are an ancient and amazing technology for melting and siphoning off earwax, which in aspect appears like a bad joke from Groucho Marx’s TV show, as if one were igniting the side of the head. My friend and client, Ismet, he of family money and NGO dreams, dropped in as I was about to begin the conflagration, and I asked if he had ever seen such a thing, expecting him to gape in awe at this crazy Yankee about to light up his face.
“I have seen dis many times,” he began without particular emphasis, “but only by very wise old men in de highest mountains” near the Pakistani village from whence he has come. And I remembered the wise old man---who has the mien of a thirty something in spite of his sixty Winters---about whom I had intended to write. His story, and the context of the mountains from which he hales, is crucially important, especially since another fellow from his environs---Eric Rudolph---will soon have a prominent place in the daily grind of news grist into somethink akin to our view of ourselves and our belief in what we’re capable of becoming.
Doug Elliott is to the mountains of Western North Carolina what the King of the Faeries was to “A Mid Summer’s Night Dream,” the spirtual core and venerable prankster who can create meaning and possibility from the frenetic chaos of the ongoing and unstoppable moment. He helps people who need advice about health and nutrition, counseling everyone who comes to him seeking succor, from cancer survivors to afficianados of natural childbirth to wandering journalists who wish long life since eternity appears not to be available as an option.
His capabilities as a singer and songwriter are in the realm of Jim Reeves and Hank Williams, his voice and tone between the two of them, although his constant insistence on a consciousness that includes notions of responsibility and love-as-a-cosmic-necessity---as opposed to a dagger in the derriere or a harrowing of the heart---has precluded the corporate media acceptance that would otherwise guarantee him great wealth or fame. He writes songs that annex ancient Native American legend, that recapitulate the myths of his own forebears, that sum up and present as a counterpoint of hilarity and drama the many millenia of plant-lore and social wisdom we still have not completely trashed, in spite of the thuggish Pharmaco-Industrial-Complex’s and various other self-serving ‘Complex’s’ most fervent efforts.
In addition to counselling and singing, he farms and practices as close to a self-and-family sustaining existence as is possible in this day and age. He and his wife and his children can and put up and create magical elixirs from the common and cultivated product of mother’s fecundity. His son, like him slender and tiny and tough and quiet and wise, in particular amazed me with his poise and openness, in spite of the nosy and didactice monster from Atlanta who poked and pried into his life and his daddy.
Doug brings all of these qualities together---of Jefferson, Jesus, Marx, and Buddha---at festivals that the marvelous mystery of the Smokies makes inevitable and popular and frequent. He leads people from around the globe on little nature walks---to feel the fat belly and lean musculature of our only earth, and to learn a bit of the big picture and basic facts of what is out there for us, if only we’re willing to pay attention.
He offers up the nutritive qualities and delicious taste of dandelions in one moment, then spins a yarn about how to use bark for purposes mundane, bizarre, and fantastic all at once, closing with a meditation on the perfection of the planet right now, for all of us, if only we’ll see it well enough to trust each other and ourselves and recognize the abundance available in simplicity and the power potential of balance
Barking the wares of the Dandelion Institute, the slogan of which is “Eat ‘em Don’t Weed ‘em!” Doug continues, that the whole plant is useful as food and medicine; he rues the effort to rid ourselves of such a beneficent botannical companion. He sings,
DANDELIONS, THERE MY FAVORITE FLOWER....
DANDELIONS, THERE GOOD FOR YOUR LIVER...
EAT 'EM ALL UP THEY'LL MAKE YOU JUMP AND SHIVER...
DANDELIONS, THEY'LL MAKE A LONG LIVER OUT OF YOU.
He closes with a suggestion of blowing the seeda and making wishes, “FOR MONEY, WORLD PEACE OR LOTS OF SWEET KISSES,” before juxtaposing the wisdom and balance of a vinegarette salad of vitamin-packed weeds with the increasingly impotent lethal efficacy of cancerous herbicidal ideology.
As he creates a “berry basket” in front of our eyes from Poplar bark, he speaks of a tale that one of his “mountain-man” friends recently conveyed. He begins the story by noting that the finishing touch on the beautiful, pack-like “berry basket” requires only Hickory bark lacing, which “LOOKS LIKE LEATHER, I KNOW,” but which he promises us consists only of tender strips from the Hickory tree, for thousands of years one of the stalwart supports of Native cultures in this area of the world. Doug narrates, in a voice as mellifluous as the wind tearing at the late Spring canopy, of hunting a bobcat with dogs, of one of the hounds disemboweled by the cornered cat. The hunters find a hickory sapling in the dark, to save the wounded animal.
“THEY STUFFED HIS GUTS BACK INSIDE AND SEWED HIM UP WITH THAT BARK. AND THAT DOG LIVED! NOW THAT STORY'S TOLD AS TRUE, I DON'T KNOW 'CAUSE I WASN'T THERE, BUT IT DOES SPEAK TO A CERTAIN FLUIDITY WITH THE ENVIRONMENT, THE ABILITY TO USE WHAT’S RIGHT AT OUR FINGERTIPS IF ONLY WE’RE AWARE OF IT, THAT WE'D ALL DO WELL TO THINK ABOUT.” The ‘oooh’s’ and ‘ahhhh’s’ from the audience, at the guts and salvation in this interlude, are as genuine as the palpable sense of grace and worship that follow around this beautiful, humble man.
He closes with a paean to plenty and miracles. “YOU KNOW WHAT A PLANT EATS, DON’T YOU? EATS DIRT AND SUCKS LIGHT, THEN GROWS EVERYTHING ON EARTH WE NEED, FROM THESE GIANT TREES TO THE HUMBLEST WEEDS, ALL OF IT FEEDING US AND KEEPING US ALIVE IN WAYS WE CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE. WHAT A MIRACLE!!” Our sense of weakness and poverty isn’t natural, any more than grandiose expressions of ‘king-of-the-world’ power are natural.
Our natural state is one of curiosity, of seeking, of love and compassion, unless we avert
such core characteristics to serve the single-minded, short-sighted, power mongering of the few families who own and control nearly everything on this gorgeous green orb. Western North Carolina is one of the repositories of life and hope still capable of gracing even the cynics visage with a grin. Doug Eliot is only one of the magicians there, but he is indeed an elven king we need to recall when Erik Rudolph appears as the true voice of the Appalachians instead.
Stay tuned for more about Sir Eliot and some of his royally common kin. For today, “that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”