Matthew is my favorite herbalist poet. 
We are creating a book of his poems and my virtual quilts. 
Slowly. 

But surely. 
Perhaps he's been reading my posts on the tricky tomato ashwagandha. 
Or perhaps we have a stronger psychic connection than we realized. 
Here's his latest offering. 
Enjoy. 
~ Susun

--
Ashwagandha
by Matthew Becker

​

Memory serves us best, and most
meaningfully, when it becomes an
accomplice to our individuation and
unique vision.

​

When memory becomes a metabolite
of essence, rasa, our soul juice, we feel
an integrated and aesthetic sense of
completion that foresees a holy dissociation 
from the collective will.

​

Memory can be either a parlor trick or
a spiritual redemption, the choice is
ours, and the stakes are high.

It is easy to forget who we are, it is
more difficult to remember who we
forgot.
 
Society doesn't ask too much from us,
just that we slit our wrists and let our
essence drip out, slowly, into the bleached
and unforgiving sands of normalcy and the
prepackaged sorrows of willfully forgotten
selfhood and internalized rhyme.

​

Oh well, society says, 
with a smile,
easy come, easy go.

​

And we are scattered amongst
last night's rain and ashes.

​

Ashwagandha is a potent and effective
rejuvenative herb that works on the levels
of blood, essence and psychic restoration.
Ashwagandha is nourishing food for
our memory's individuation, and contains
within it, each person's ability to discover 
their driftwood patterned identity, the swirl
of nature's imprint on the creative aspects
of their soul.

​

A common consensus asks us to conform.

​

A light in desire's river says, no, I don't think
so, you are witnessed, and cherished, by the
sisters of wind.

​

In the oldest language we know of, proto
indo european, rasa means our sap, our
life force, mediated by substance, and by
presence.

​

In sanskrit it also means taste, and it
is in this sense that ashwagandha is
understood to be a rasa herb, it gives
us, through physical and psychic 
nourishment, a taste of ourselves, a
taste of our pure, ravished beingness.

Not our store bought selves, nor our
mediated selves, but the unblemished
memory of our driftwood, cloud dust,
river patterned selves that will not
compromise or promise to forget.

​

Ashwagandha is a really effective grounding
herb because when essence and blood are
restored we can feel our own interiority as a
throbbing participation, a steely clairvoyance,
a solid ball of light.

​

This is the nature of subjectivity, which
is the blessing of rasayana, the path of
rasa, the separation of us from external
concessions.

​

Ashwagandha encourages subjective
memory, which is the true basis for an
orderly rapture.

​

Objective memory demands that we account
for many worlds of meaning, most of them
fake, ridiculous or irrelevant.

​

Subjective memory asks us to pay
attention to nothing but our own warm
and mesmerizing inbreathed awareness,
and so memory becomes an accessory,
after the fact, to our graceful swindle.

​

When we rely on our subjective memories
and creative forces, we are stealing the
established king of emptiness's hold over
us and taking his crown for our own.   
Ashwagandha, when taken over time, 
elevates the personality, not a dividing
of realty, but a exaltation of it, a joining
of psychic strands into the cosmic weave.

​

Transcendence is the natural result of a
finely tuned and deeply felt inner world,
and a nervous system that is hotwired for
unspoken and unresolved incandescence.

​

Unspoken because essence is at its core
a separation from words and attitudes.

​

Unresolved because memory, in its 
subjective state, does not certify or
proclaim, it experiences and it absorbs.

​

Memory, when under the spell of engaged
and integrated essence, is the intensification
of experience, the acceptance of a world that
dreams only of us.

​

I am truest to myself when 
I find the world within me,
I am truest to the world when
I find myself, everywhere.

​

The true and abiding cause of
loneliness is missing ourselves.

​

When our mind disengages from our
poetic vision and the intoxication of self
revealed rhapsody, we look outwardly,
and with increasing alarm, for the fires
that we should have lit at home.

​

It is rasa, essence, that allows us to feel
ourselves, collect ourselves, and hear our
own flamboyant cogency, in the pulsating
darkness of memory's light.

​

Loneliness is a function of asking the
wrong questions, and of answering the
wrong questions.

​

When we are in that peculiar state of
self fulfillment, which is rasa's calling
card, we accept no questions that haven't
been prescreened by the silent elves who 
are our envoys to the inner vales of our
redemption.

​

And we ask no questions that have as 
their answers the acceptance of a dream
that is lesser then our own.

​

Ashwagandha can turn loneliness on 
its head, after a few months of regular
use, we may find ourselves wanting to
be alone, wanting to dive deep into our
pulsating beingness, feeling a romantic,
almost seductive pull inwards, eros as a
patterned and creative beauty.

​

Just as each piece of driftwood has
its own patterns, its own engraved 
sensuous cosmicity, as each swirl of
cloud restates the final denouement 
of the wastrel and bliss saturated galaxy,   
so too do we become each cherry blossom
as it falls.

​

And yet we are separate, and complete,
yearning and clinging, each separate
lullaby of ours, is the universe's song.  -  M