Twelve Month Photos
Dear friends,
Many of you know that I have been foraging for wild edible and medicinal plants for many years now. This intuitive path of self and external discovery has led me to the practice of medicine.
As the years have passed, I have been searching for a form of medicine that is complete, and rigorous—yet outside the realm of Western allopathy as well as the institutionalized system of insurance based healthcare. Not to say I distrust the kind of medicine most familiar to us, but to say that I have found a holistic approach, meaning the addressing of environment, person, spirit, and mental-emotional body, to be more helpful (though often slower and harder) than the pharmaceutical or Western approach.
Medicine is as complex as people, which is to say, the most complex something can be. So there is no right way of doing things, to the exclusion of all other possibility or options. And yet, my winding path eventually led me to Chinese Medicine—specifically a historic form based on classical texts and documents compiled in the Han Dynasty, about 1500 years ago.
The information in these texts is complex, and the modern medicine called Traditional Chinese Medicine, is a distillation of this information. Overall, TCM leaves out the “why” behind many of the concepts, diseases, and theories, and is therefore a highly efficient and effective means of diagnosing and treating people. However, with the “why” being left out, the “whole human” is often also left out in the cold, as without an understanding of the nuance behind the concepts, disease goes only partially treated, or is mistreated. In short, the patient might appear to improve, just to come back with other symptoms later on—very much like Western medicine. In other words, the symptoms someone presents with end up being pushed around in a circle, ad infinitum, if the disease trigger (root, or cause) is never fully comprehended.
Because of this, some scholars and practitioners have seen value in returning to the classical texts, to fully understand where the concepts behind one of the oldest forms of medicine come from.
I have recently enrolled in a program to become a practitioner of the healing arts, specifically Classical Chinese Herbalism and external therapies. It is based on the study and understanding of these ancient concepts, and their application in the modern day.
For the most part I am focused on my studies, and therefore have been trying to find a flexible way to work as I travel 4 hours back and forth to school each month. The last two months, the intensives have happened twice—so that’s 4 trips in the last two months. As you can imagine, the cost adds up after awhile. This school is out of pocket, with no loans offered, so I am paying for it as I go.
I am offering some prints for sale, not only because of my need for cash, but because I am happy with the arrangement of them, and sharing them as a project. This is me saying “images and beauty still matter.”
You can view and buy the photos here:
https://twelvemonthphotos.cargo.site
If you just want to donate, you can do so here.
Thank you for reading about my journey. I hope some day to offer my services to the world, to help us all move in directions that coalesce with beauty and health.
Sincerely,
— Hudson