Only Humanity Can Augment Humanity - A Quotation from M.N. Hopkins

Only humanity can augment humanity.  AI can never and will never be up to the task.

© 2018  M.N. Hopkins

An Insight from Magnus Ericsson

Please click on the image to enlarge it for easier reading.

©  2018 Magnus Ericsson

Being A Medium & Precautions To Take - The Wisdom of Omraam Mikheal Aivanhov

Being a medium - the precautions to take "You sometimes meet very sensitive people and highly sensitive mediums who are in a deplorable state because they have no means of defending themselves against astral entities. It is good to be sensitive to the invisible world, provided you first exercise judgment and will-power. To make contact with the invisible world, you must abandon yourself, one way or another, to the influence of spirits.  But not all spirits of the invisible world are favorably disposed towards human beings. Some take advantage of defenseless human beings and deceive them, use them and steal their energies. And after a while, these poor souls are completely exhausted and disoriented. It is not enough to feel an attraction for some aspects of occult sciences. A genuine master will tell you to wait the necessary time and to prepare yourself. The day they consider you to be sufficiently purified and strong, it is they who will unveil the truth, and then everything you wanted to see or know will become accessible to you." Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

Homemade Calendula Salve Recipe

CALENDULA SALVE

Slow Living Essentials,   19 April, 2011

After my recent satisfaction with making some homemade comfrey ointment (salve),  I took the advice of Lisa  and gave some homemade calendula salve a go. 

Making it was very similar to the comfrey salve, although this time I employed the use of the slow cooker to infuse the petals and oil. I also tried a double infusion this time, which I had been wanting to give a try.

Calendula Salve

300ml olive oil (or other vegetable oil to your liking)
dried calendula flower heads (I used 2 generous handfuls)
30g beeswax, grated

As I had a ready supply of dried calendula petals grown in our garden over the summer, I opted to use them up.

The oil and a generous handful of flower heads and petals were placed into the slow cooker on 'low' heat and left for around 4 hours. As the flower heads were thoroughly dried, there was no splattering in the pot caused by moisture, like there was with the comfrey ointment. 

After four hours, the oil was sieved and returned to the pot with a fresh handful of dried flowers. This was left to infuse on 'low' for another four hours. As my slow cooker is really old (!), and doesn't get up to the hot temperatures that slow cookers of today seem to do, I was pretty confident that the oil would be safe in there and not overheat, ruining the infusion and possibly burning.

After the second infusion, the oil was again strained and the grated beeswax was added and allowed to melt into the oil before pouring into a clean salsa jar. It was left uncovered until the mixture had set, which took around 15-20 minutes. Oops, I forgot to add, I also added about 4 drops of lavender oil while the beeswax was melting, both for fragrance and soothing properties.

We started using the salve straight away. I have been rubbing it on all of my 'dry' bits - feet, hands, fingernails, while the 9 yo has been applying it to her sore ears where she seems to often get skin irritations. We have both seen an improvement in just this short week we have been using it. Of course, the other two suddenly 'discovered' hidden scratches and cuts that needed some homemade medicinal love....

Source:

http://slowlivingessentials.blogspot.com/2011/04/calendula-salve.html

Perfect Peace - A Prayer Put To Music Video Creation

Youtube link:       https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=Tit7aP-ftpY&feature=autoshare


A prayer put to music...a beautiful video creation.

Peace out and enjoy.   I can recommend that you listen to this before bedtime and you may find yourself having some sweet and inspirational dreams.

Mike

A Time Is Coming - A Quotation from St. Anthony

I think that perhaps that time has already arrived.

Saint Anthony the Great

(251-356 AD)

Saint Anthony (or Antony) the Great, "star of the wilderness" and "father of all Christian monks," is a greatly beloved figure of the ancient Christian world. Though he was certainly not the first Christian to leave the cities for a life of solitude in more remote areas, Antony stands prominently as the hugely popular father of the important Desert Father-Mother movement in upper Egypt. The movement soon spread this eremetic (hermit) and cenobitic (communal monastic) form of deeply meditative, very austere, and psychologically rigorous Christian spirituality over to Palestine, Syria, Greece and beyond. Not long afterwards, the movement crossed the Mediterranean sea to Italy and thence to much of Europe.

White Pine Medicine Home Remedies

White Pine Medicine

Milk & Honey Herbs Blog,   22 January 2018

White Pine (Pinus strobus) is one of my first and dearest plant allies, and extremely abundant here in the Northeast. My hope is that the monograph on it below will encourage you all to get to know this fantastic bioregional herb and incorporate it into your herbal repertoire! Read on for a full description of this plant, harvest methods, medicinal uses and a recipe for White Pine Cough Syrup. Enjoy!

Eastern White Pine (Pinus strobus)
Family Pinaceae

Part Used:  Needles, Resin/ Sap/ Pitch, Inner Bark. I prefer to work with the needles and thin twigs together, as pictured
Habitat:  Very widespread in Massachusetts and New England.  Woodlands, forest edges, yards, parks, old meadows. Found all along the Eastern seaboard from New Brunswick to northern Georgia, east to the Great Lakes region and Appalachians.
Cultivation:  No need to cultivate this one- it’s very abundant!
Description: An evergreen and the tallest tree in the Northeast, they can reach at least 180ft in height.  Their long, slender needles (2-5 inches long) grow in bundles of 5 needles....a good mnemonic device for ID is there are 5 letters in the word "white" and 5 needles per bundle. They grow pine cones that can be quite large-4-7 inches long- and are often covered in resin.   Bark is light brown and heavily grooved in older specimens and smooth and brownish-grey in younger trees.  They commonly reach 200 years in age and can grow to be over 450 years old.
Herbal Ecology:  White pines are the characteristic “old field” species in New England and are known to form even-aged stands in open areas that are left to return to forest.  If you see an even-aged stand of white pine there is a good chance that in the distant past that area used to be pasture- a neat plant for “reading the landscape”.  It is tolerant of virtually every soil type in New England from wet and boggy to dry and sandy, and frequently establishes itself after all manner of disturbance.  The older trees are moderately fire resistant due to their thick bark.
Collection:  The needles can be collected anytime they are green, which is pretty much all year, including winter.  In the fall they do lose some needles- some turn yellow and fall, while others stay green and intact- it is best to wait until after this fall shedding to collect. The needles, as well as thin twigs may be harvested together (see pic above). Harvest the tips of the branches. Even better, collect dropped branches from the forest floor after a storm for the most sustainable harvest.
Taste: slightly Sweet, slightly Bitter, Sour (needles)
Energetics:  Warm, Dry
Constituents:  Vit C (needles), many different acids in needles, essential oils (including terpenes, monoterpenes, sesqueterpenes), resin, starch (and more....)
Herbal Actions:  Expectorant, circulatory stimulant, mild diuretic, pectoral, immune stimulant

Medicinal Uses:  Specific for respiratory and bronchial complaints, especially when wet and cold in nature.  A tea of the needles, or the needles with thin twigs included, is helpful to promote expectoration and removal and thinning of mucous from the lungs. Use for coughs, colds, bronchitis, laryngitis, croup.  Warning- White Pine can be quite stimulating to coughs, so if the cough is dry and spasming in nature it can exacerbate these symptoms. It's best in this case to combine with more moistening and/or anti-spasmodic herbs in this case (see White Pine Cough Syrup recipe below for a balanced recipe). The needles are widely known to be extremely high in Vitamin C and are a great addition to a tea for the common cold or as a winter immunity tea.  Once used to treat scurvy!  They are actually reported to be 5x as high as oranges, per volume, in Vitamin C! A deficiency of Vitamin C can also negatively impact the adrenals, as well as the integrity of tissues in the body, and one way I've worked with White Pine in my practice is as a bioregionally abundant and inexpensive source of Vitamin C, especially when combined with Rose Hips. Our locally bioregional species of Rose in Rosa multiflora. Of course Vitamin C is heat sensitive, but it is so abundant in both these plants that steeping in hot water as a tea still provides a great source of this vitamin.  The needles and twigs also make for a fabulous steam for congestion in the lungs.  The inner bark is the part that was offical to the Electics (the Herbal doctors of the late 1800's and early 1900's). and is very useful as an expectorant as well and can be decocted and sweetened with honey- best used after the infectious, feverish stage of a sickness has passed.  An old Eclectic recipe from Squibbs Materia Medica c. 1906 for a cough syrup combines the inner bark of White Pine with wild cherry bark (Prunus serotina), Spikenard Rt (Aralia racemosa), Balm of Gilead buds (Populus sp including Aspen and Cottonwood), Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis) , Sassafrass Rt (Sassafrass albidum) and chloroform and morphine sulfate! The pea-sized piece of the pitch can also be chewed to promote expectoration.  It is also a gently warming circulatory stimulant and I love making bath salts with white pine for a warming winter bath, and also for general aches and pains. It is invigorating and enlivening in nature, and the ample essential oils are quite immune-activating too. You can add oil to the bath salts to make it into a salt scrub, which can be very immune-boosting, as it stimulates lymph flow.  To support you lymph, take a palm-sized amount of the scrub and always massage towards the heart. Salt is of course quite detoxifying too. And the oil moistens our skin- our biggest organ of elimination and the biggest protector of our body- so giving it some medicinal, non-toxic love is always a good thing too! The sap has a whole host of topical applications including splinters, sores, boils, sore muscles and rheumatism, cuts and swellings and is sometimes mixed with butter or fat for this. To remove woody debris and bark from collected pitch, gently heat on low and strain. Sap dissolves readily into warmed oils to be added to salves. It contains “abietic resins” which stimulate topical circulation, inflammatory response  and the “foreign body response”- meaning pus and fluids will build up much more quickly on a wound that is dressed with pine pitch.  BUT the other side of the coin is that one moves through the healing process much faster and avoids infection.   It's quite important to note that the Eclectics learned of the medicinal properties of this North American plant from indigenous peoples, including the Algonquin, Chippewa, Ojibwe, and likely many more.

White Pine-infused Honey. Cut needles small and add to raw honey, warm lightly to infuse into the honey (do not heat to a boil), then put into a jar and let sit a few weeks. To use, eat by the teaspoon-full, or add to hot water for instant tea. May also be made simply by adding to raw honey (without heat) and letting infuse a few weeks. No need to strain the honey, use it with the needles still in the honey!

To read the entire article, please click on the link provided below:

Milk & Honey Herbs Blog