by Sandi Gamble
The fundamental lesson she taught from the beginning was survival.
“Do you see these?” she would say to me, lifting my hand to touch the edges of a brilliantly green leaf. “These are the Eidenhorn. They carry good medicine within them.”
Aloe Vera. My first experience with the aloe vera plant was when I was three and fell, cutting my knee badly. Pressing a cloth on my leg, mother carried me to the woods where she came upon the aloe vera plant. She set me down and, as she broke open the plant and extracted its thick, milky sap, she reminded me of the lesson she’d taught me about the plant’s healing powers. Then she gently dabbed the liquid on my knee, soothing it.
The marsh mallow plant was used to ease colds and respiratory ailments. Gotu kola. Chamomile to soothe my belly when brewed into a lovely tea. Peppermint.
So much of the natural world was beneficial. She wanted me to know, and to recognize the beauty and benefit of these plants. In particular, she loved to have me identify and take the bloom of the Echinacea, crushing it into a paste or using it as a leaf to steep in hot water.
“Echinacea is one of the most beneficial plants in nature,” she taught me.
When I was older and able to walk, she made sure to point out not only the beneficial plants but also those that could be harmful if not used wisely. The more I came to understand the natural world, the more complex and fascinating it became. When I was a young child, I thought of plants as being good or bad, healthy or poisonous, beautiful or plain. But as I grew older, mother taught me that sometimes the danger with certain plants had less to do with their intrinsic qualities and more to do with other things.
“When you see these…” she told me, pointing out the sharp, orange-colored leaves sticking stiffly from low, bristled stems, “… steer clear of the path.” Then she looked forward and back carefully as if to make sure that the path was clear.
“Why, mother? Are they poisonous?”
She shook her head. “No, they are benign, neither good nor bad to humans. But they attract the low boar, and you do not want to be nearby when a low boar comes rooting for food.”
The lesson taught me that plants were, of course, valuable not just for their medicinal uses but also as food for humans and all sorts of animals. And sometimes it was not a good idea to be close by when animals were feeding. To demonstrate the truth of her statement, she made sure that I was close enough – though far enough away to remain safe – to see two low boars approach along the dusty path in search of food. They were ugly, horrid creatures. Their fur was dung brown with dull, grey highlights. Their eyes were beady and black, moving back and forth constantly. They had long, pink snouts with two horns on either side, as well as a horn in the middle of their foreheads. And, true to their name, they stood on four very short legs, so short and low to the ground that their round bellies looked as if they grazed the path as they waddled along.
“Watch,” mother whispered to me as we waited from our safe vantage point, upwind and behind a thatch of trees. “They have very poor eyesight and rely on their sense of smell, so they don’t know the other is nearby… yet.”
I shivered as I felt her arm instinctively tighten around me.
The two low boars approached along the path from opposite directions, both seeming focused on the plant and not on each other.
“The smell of the plant still overpowers their smell of each other,” she whispered. “But that won’t last much longer.”
Their sense of smell seemed completely focused on the plant, but then, when they were no more than thirty feet on either side of the plant, they both stopped at once. They tensed and suddenly looked uncomfortable. They craned their heads, snorting softly. Then, they began to paw at the dirt path.
Mother gripped my shoulder, making it clear that something was about to happen. She brought her face close to mine.
Suddenly, the two low boars let out pained, screeching howls and began to charge toward one another. Faster and faster, they charged. It was remarkable that they moved so quickly and nimbly. Their low, squat bodies seemed like blurs of muscle. Faster and faster until it seemed to me they reached full speed just as they crashed together, head to head.
The concussion and thud of their collision with one another seemed to compress the air all around me. It wasn’t until they bounced away from one another that I realized that I’d been holding my breath! I looked into mother’s eyes and saw a reflection of my own feelings – although she had likely witnessed a scene like this many times.
The air was electric with their violent determination to attack one another. They butted each other. They gored one another with their horns, spilling blood on the path, staining it a dark, red color. Each time they fell away from one another, they pawed the soft path and readied themselves to attack again. Over and over, they continued to ram one another until they were so numbed and stunned and bloodied that they wandered off in opposite directions, tottering on their short legs.
My eyes were wide after witnessing that event. My mother’s eyes were also filled with the fascination of the event. However, in addition to her feelings about the event, she was smiling knowingly. “Did you notice,” she observed, “that neither of the two boars ever got to feast on the plant.”
It was only when she pointed it out that I realized that she was right! In addition to being battered and bloodied, the two boars were still hungry!
“Cooperation, rather than conflict, would have seen them both satisfied,” she noted with a knowing smile.
Point taken.
However, as important as that lesson was, it was not the essential one. Survival was, after all, always the foundational lesson my mother was teaching me. She emphasized that point the morning she held me as we watched the two boars. “What I want you to never, never forget, the most important thing about this morning is to be always vigilant. Remember, if instead of one of those boars you had been on the pathway, the boar would have rammed you as violently and determinedly. And,” she went on, her voice dropping to a soft whisper, “I’m afraid, you would not have been able to batter back to a draw.”
She gave me a gentle nudge. Although she made her point with some gentleness, I understood what she was saying, and I took it to heart. Whenever I saw that plant, I looked carefully around me, and I made sure to stay clear of the path.
In fact, no empty path saw me approaching without being very wary and cautious.
For mother, nature was a living, breathing lesson – not just information. She taught me to recognize the colors of different flowers and to understand why those colors were so important, whether to attract buzzing bees or to deceive possible predators. She taught me how different kinds of leaves are able to hold moisture differently and how certain plants turn themselves to face the sun throughout the day.
She taught me to respect the differences in clouds that some portended violent storms while others were as benign as the fun shapes I conjured up in them. She taught me to read the movement of the breeze and to weigh the moisture in the air. I came to know, along with the sailors on their sailing ships, that a red sky in the morning was a warning of rough weather to come whereas a red sky at night was a delight.
I remember laying on the cool grass with mother, as she pointed out the shapes and constellations in the sky, one of my favorite pastimes. I remember asking her one time if she believed that there may be life out there on any other planet. Mother simply responded, “I believe there is, but we have not yet proven ourselves worthy of a visit.” And she let out a small laugh. To mother anything and everything was possible. “Although,” she spoke gently and convincingly, “many years before the purge a spaceship was said to have crashed in a place called Roswell in New Mexico. For many years it was rumored that the government had found two aliens at the crash site, one deceased the other was detained in a bunker deep beneath an area kept for such paranormal oddities. It was never proven.” And so just like that, we moved on to other things that mother had to show me.
; “Do you see,” she would ask me, “there, those three stars? That forms Orion’s belt.”
She pointed to other stars. “And there, Perseus, the Hero. And Ursa Major. Do you see there,” she went on, pointing to the heavens, “Ursa Minor.”
For a long time, I could not visualize the shapes and characters of the constellations, but over time I began to see what the ancients had seen in the night sky, a continuous play of characters and images. The stars seemed to come alive for me then. What’s more, mother taught me that the stars were of practical use in addition to how they enlivened the imagination. She showed me how to use the stars to find my way in the pitch dark night.
“If you pay attention to nature, you’ll never be lost,” she advised me.
She showed me how, by staying as still as the night itself, I could hear the crickets to know which direction to go in.
The education I received from my parents was not limited to the natural world. It included visits to museums to observe artwork or the history of inventions. I was fascinated by the displays in the museums. To see how people thought about religion and god so long ago was an eye opener, later I would learn how many wars were waged over this diety. God is no longer a part of our society which is probably why we live so peacefully. I could not truly grasp the concept of who God was and why people had so many religions, so I cast any thought of it aside.
And how they lived! It was in the museum that I learned how people in primitive times, in the early 2000s and before, managed their lives. So primeval, so challenging, so wasteful, no wonder the world as they knew it collapsed on itself, imploded. To say that humankind as a whole was to blame for the problems that escalated them to the point of no return is an understatement. Each person had a role to play, each person had a responsibility, as they still do now, but most were willing to let, but a few carry the whole burden for them.
As you can imagine, even at my young age, my parents were dedicated to my education. Being so dedicated, they would not, nor could not, rely on my mother’s insight alone. And while there were some formal tutoring sessions, so much of how I learned about the world was through play.
It surprised me to learn that the primitive understanding of play was that it was essentially frivolous activity, little more than a distraction during idle hours. We have come to understand that play is not only a very important way to learn but perhaps the most important way to learn. Remembering that survival – of both the individual and the community – is fundamental to everything I was taught, the lessons I gained during play took on exaggerated value.
By playing, I internalized lessons about teamwork and cooperation, lessons that were vital to how I grew up, as it was to all those I grew up with.
Play was relatively unstructured, which was, I supposed, the real definition of play. Whatever structure play took on was the structure those of us playing imposed upon our activity. We determined rules. We determined objectives. We determined the best or most successful way to achieve those objectives. We learned to win with grace and lose with dignity. We learned to communicate.
One thing we shared with primitives was a sense of longing for those long-ago days of play. When long days running about in the warmth of the sun, and days spent in what might have appeared to be activities without rhyme or reason was, in fact, providing the groundwork for all that we would become in the years to follow.
Sometimes play did benefit from some “facilitating” from an adult, someone to help articulate goals, rules, and successful teamwork. Play could also be an activity spent alone. Both outside and at night, when mother would let me spend time in the relaxation pod.
Primitives could only dream of something like the relaxation pod. Ah, even now the memory of the relaxation pod slows my heart rate and calms the racing of my thoughts. When I was young, it felt like it was the most natural thing in the world to settle myself into the cushions of the soft, reclining chair, place the cap brimming with electrodes on my head, slip on the bubble goggles and headphones and engage in a full, three-dimensional, multi-sensory experience.
Although it was called a “relaxation” pod, there were times that the experience I had while using it was anything but relaxing! One afternoon, I might experience the acceleration of gravity as I skydived from an airplane at twenty-five thousand feet. Another time, I might find myself deep sea diving or swimming with great white sharks. And other times I might find myself floating on those big, fluffy white clouds across a clear blue sky.
Whether my experience was adrenaline producing or relaxing, every aspect of it was real, from the sensation of gravity to the smell of the sea’s salt water. The Pod included both historical and modern activities, which was another way to open up my views on the world both as it had been, and as it was.
My parents were committed to my getting a complete education. In this regard, they stood out from some of their peers. Unlike many other parents, who chose to keep their children out of any formal educational environment until the compulsory age of sixteen, my parents had set very real goals for me, based on their own experience.
My father had become a successful professional, and he expected nothing less from me. “Not succeeding is not an option,” my father declared simply. “You will do at least as well as I have done.”
Even so, participating in a formal education like primitive Western society expected their four and five-year-olds to do, would have been barbaric! It wasn’t until the tender age of twelve, just as I began to develop the physical and emotional signs of pubescence that I was sent to a study center to learn the fundamentals of mathematics, Pulchran society studies, history and the structure of scientific inquiry.
Some of my parents’ friends could not understand my parents’ determination to send me for formal education at such a tender age. Neither could many of my own peers.
“Ugh, how can you stand it?” Penina, the red-haired girl who lived close by, asked after I had been attending the center for several weeks.
More than her words, I knew by the tone of her voice and the expression on her face that she was expecting me to find the experience tortuous. Although I felt a pull to answer according to her expectations, the simple truth was that I enjoyed the studies.
“I like it,” I said simply, shrugging as I skipped around her.
“You do?” she asked.
She made a face as if she’d bitten down on a sandwich with sand in it. “I cannot imagine…”
To me the rest periods in-between lessons when we got to play together were my favorite time, my skinny legs and arms had the lines of a child and no lean muscle. However, I ran and played with the boys as well as girls proving I was a genuine tomboy and quite the adversary.
“I would positively die if my parents forced me to do anything so horrible.” Penina retorted.
“But it’s not horrible,” I told her. “It’s really quite fun. And exciting, actually.”
There was a part of me that wanted to point out that of course, she couldn’t imagine… that was her weakness, a lack of imagination and curiosity. However, I already sensed that such a response was not only pointless but snarky and totally unacceptable.
For me, the studies were far from tedious. The truth was, I felt absolutely invigorated by my studies. Often, I wished I could go to more classes, not fewer. There were times when, even with the workload, I wished I was able to attend more than just the two days a week when classes were scheduled. The truth was, I did enjoy the material enormously. And it had nothing to do with the fact that these studies were designed to ready me for the selection test at the Military Academy. When it came to learning, I was fortunate to find the learning itself to be satisfying, absent any other goal.
The only way Penina and some of my other friends could even fathom my enjoyment of the classes was if they presumed me to be so slavishly goal-oriented as to want desperately to get into one of the premier academies – another goal they found hard to understand. Even so, however that factored into my parents�
� decision to send me to lessons, it had nothing to do with my own enjoyment. As much as I appreciated my parents’ ultimate goal in sending me to these studies, that goal hardly colored my enjoyment of learning which, as it turned out, I loved doing for its own sake.
An added benefit to the classes was that a boy who had grown up in the neighborhood was also in the classes. That’s right, Jace.
Living in the same neighborhood as Jace, we had crisscrossed paths many times during our hours of play and learning. As often as we were on the same side, we were on the opposite side in our games. Mostly, he was just another boy in the relatively large scrum of children who played together in our neighborhood. But as we got closer to going to classes, and I learned that he would be going as well, we spent more time talking, and I found him to be fun and funny, and totally interesting.
In class, we often studied together. It was then that we became good friends – although he said that he had always thought I was special. I was certain he was only saying that, though. It turned out that, in addition to enjoying our group playing, he and I both shared a love of learning – and sometimes the most esoteric things.
“Did you know,” he asked me one day as we walked in the hallway between classes, “that when a butterfly flaps its wings at one corner of the world, it causes a hurricane on another.”
I didn’t know whether to take this literally or figuratively.
That it might demonstrate a physical reality struck me as being odd. What would happen if there were butterflies at various places on the globe all flapping their wings at once? So I asked him if he thought that the observation was a literal one. That gave him pause.
“Hmm, interesting question.”
We went back and forth for a while, and it was the most remarkable give and take! I would say more than his intelligence in considering his positions and articulating them, it was his absolute pleasure at having the chance to challenge himself and me with the conversation. I actually think it was during this discussion that we formed our first, deepest bond. Jace was a remarkable person, extremely intelligent, focused and determined. As a child, he had enjoyed the way his mother and father introduced him to the world, just as mine did for me. But, like me, he sometimes felt lost and that no one else seemed to enjoy learning as much as he did. Like me, he depended on adults for his intellectual stimulation – or through his own devices. It wasn’t until we were engaged in our discussion about butterfly wings and hurricanes that he felt he’d found an equal.
