Herbal Recall: How to Howl at the Moon and Remember Our Blood Evolution
Herbal Recall: How to Howl at the Moon and Remember Our Blood Evolution
Hey you! You on the phone!
Yeah, you – the talking ape with that Johnny Bravo Elvis curl, staring at a Buck Rogers’ handheld computer, scrolling cute puppies, political spam-smack, tight pants Tik Tok videos. Are you happy?
For the money, you should be. As Americans, we spend more time, hutzpah, and sweaty cash pursuing happiness than any place on Earth. As Ruth Whippman points out in Quartz, the Happiness Industry is a 10 billion dollar cow – comparable to the bright lights of Hollywood – and our eyes are glued to the screen like a Clockwork Orange eyeball rehab marathon.
But we’re not really happy, are we?
American happiness has hit record lows. In a recent Gallup poll, just 38% of people say they’re satisfied, measured across 29 different measurements. That’s quite a crash from before the pandemic, when 48% of Americans reported satisfaction.
We just can’t seem to get the Rolling Stones out of our heads. It’s a perpetual trend and a downwardly spiraling problem. The General Social Survey has been tracking our satisfaction progress every year since 1972 – and the happiness trend is on a clear downward slide, from 1988 to the present.
How did we get here? We’re tied down by computers and our phones, popping pharmaceuticals like every flavor Jelly Bellys, disconnected from our neighbors, chlorophyll, and the bright blue sky.
It’s time to come down to Earth – get back to the herbs. We’ve lost our connection to nature, our natural instinct, our blood evolution. It’s time to get back to the garden.
Living Science Fiction on 420SmokeBluntz Personal WiFi
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing inherently wrong with technology. Computers help us be safer and healthier, make it easy to see a doctor from anywhere. Digital technology and lightning-fast A.I. improve drug technologies and whipped up life-saving vaccines in the eye-of-the-storm of a global pandemic, saving millions and counting.
All those 1’s and 0’s, humping away like an amoeba Caligula orgy in a digital petri dish, also make it possible to Facetime Grandma from another galaxy light years away, i.e. from your California living room to her plastic-covered sofa in Iowa. Technology is living science fiction on the 420SmokeBluntz personal WiFi of the stratosphere.
And yet digital connectivity – that screen in the palm of your hand as you read this – has severed our interconnectivity to real, actual lived experiences, each other, and the natural world.
Counter-intuitively, the more connected to technology we’ve become, the more disconnected we are from each other and the sadder we’ve gotten – especially for young people. Social media has been categorically linked to increases in depression, particularly among young girls and women. Being addicted to screens negatively impacts all levels of our health, especially when it comes to happiness.
Sad baby-faced emojis rain down like men in Homer Simpson’s favorite road-trip mixtape. People don’t hang out in person anymore – they hang out online. It’s fake and disconnected, robs us of real human relationships, and digitizes the incarnated soul as we reflect in the Gorilla Glass nothingness of our screens.
Be honest. When was the last time you had a real conversation, in person, away from your phone, and smiled and laughed together with someone? We’re all long overdue – for each other, not to mention the Earth, Sky, and Garden.
Happiness is Love – Love is All You Need
Harvard researchers followed the lives of 268 men for over 70 years, from the time they graduated college until their last waking breath, with the question: What does it take to be happy?
The answer was simple: Love.
The happiest people had strong family ties, close, personal friendships, and rich love lives.
“Happiness is love. Full stop,” the study’s lead scholar and Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant summarized in his book Triumphs of Experience.
Those in the study who were most depressed and suffered loneliness late in life, not to mention obesity, dementia, and alcoholism, were the ones who didn’t connect.
The Beatles were right: “All you need is love. Love is all you need.” When asked later in his years if Love itself was really enough, George Harrison emphatically answered, “Absolutely.”
Back to the Garden: Let’s Howl at the Moon
We need to get back to the campfires, the songs, the storytelling – we need to get back to the garden.
Because not only are we lonely for each other, but we’re also disconnected from nature – the dirt of the Earth and the blue of the Sky.
Reconnecting with nature makes us kinder, gentler, and happier to be around. Studies show being connected with nature makes us happier, more attuned to people, higher on life with an open mind.
In short, nature helps us be better people. It makes us more connected and down to be part of the tribe again.
The purpose that inspired Bear Blend is this need to reconnect to the herbs and each other, to our ancestral traditions, return to the kingdom of nature. Our forefathers and mothers were rich in herbal wisdom. They lived and breathed herbs for happiness, for healing, for spiritual connection and ceremony. Somehow we’ve forgotten that. We’ve slipped off our history and blood evolution.
Sadly, people don’t use herbs the way they used to. People used to put mugwort in their wine all the time. Absinthe was traditionally brewed with wormwood, it’s content rich with a psychedelic herb. That herb has since been bred out of wormwood. They don’t let you use it in absinthe anymore.
The herbs are being bred out of our lives. Bear Blend’s mission is to save the herbs. That’s our goal, our reason for being. We want to save the herbs and remind people that herbs can be used in a galaxy of different ways.
Take some friends (or your family, or your family of friends) and go for a hike. Camp under the stars, munch some mushrooms, and be reconnected to the stories. Roll some Bear Blend around the fire, and pass to the left. Smoke herbs and remember natural tradition. This is our birthright, our blood evolution. We’re here to put down our phones and reclaim it together.
Let’s howl at the moon. Listen closely and see if it hollers back. It just might. The call of the wild reminds us to come home and dance under the stars with the tribe we call Humanity.
Mathew Gallagher
Wordsmith Specialist
A freelance writer for hire, Matt Gallagher is the face and voice behind Web Copy Magician. He enjoys Bear Blend as a tea to spiritually reconnect with nature and the therapeutic wonders of chlorophyll.
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I so agree with you…add barefoot walking into the mix…grounding is everything…essential oil blends rubbed into feet will enter every cell in your body..check out the book ’12 essential oils from the bible. Our prime minister intends to stamp out smoking altogether…sending you love from Devon, South of Britain. SharieX