Hello and welcome readers! Long time no read, eh? Sorry for the one post and run that happened last time. I've been dealing with some illness, fatigue and personal issues, but TODAY I feel the need to WRITE!
Today I would like to discuss the word Holistic and its connotations. Recently (as recently as 2months ago) a friend of mine and I started going to a Holistic Mom's meeting. At first we thought "Oh My God" a place were we're not going to be looked at strangely and have like minded conversation, YIPPEEEEE
Here's the Holistic Mom's
National Website: http://www.holisticmoms.org/?gclid=COWV2pfozKkCFRHGKgodkiaXNg
Then we got to the first meeting and it w
ent well aside from having to defend our home state, which is
Oklahoma isn't a very good state for going Green, even though we're country and backwoods and use homemade solutions for damn near everything, or eating Organically, even though you can't travel through a town without seeing umpteen farmers stands or a local butchering store where you can just walk in your cow/pig/deer/ho
g to be butchered and taken home to Mama for cooking, or doing much of anything really but the host wanted to start a Holistic Mom's Network chapter for Southern OK for like minded moms such as she.
First meeting went surprisingly well, even if there was some OK bashing going on. Me and my friend defended our state and even gave them options for buying fresh and organic vegetables aside from shopping the local Walmart. We left that meeting full of optimism and goodies, hopes for meetings to come.
Our second meeting didn't go quite as well
as the first, lol. First let me say that for me and my friend to get to the meeting we have to travel 2.5hours away from our homes to do so until we get more members that live in our area it’s a bit of a travel.
Our second meeting was supposed to be over Green Cleaning and we were supposed to make our own cleaners with vinegar and water and a little essential oil for fragrance and antibacterial purposes. (Lavender is a good antibacterial and calming too) We were all supposed to bring spray bottles a
nd the host would bring some supplies for u
s to use. Well that got scrapped because our meeting place got moved from the Library's annex building to the library proper in one of the meeting halls and the host was told that we couldn't have liquids in the library. Well we get there and she was told by the head librarian that the hall we were using had a kitchen and yes we could have brought our liquids if we wanted.
Well bummer to late now we were already gathered and ready for a meeting of minds. I sat my 4 year old dd down with a few books (from the library) and told her that she needed to be quiet because we were inside a library and libraries
we're places where everyone used their quiet voices.
My friend had her 1 year old with her and set her up with a snack and her learn to walk toy along with some other quiet toys.
The other member had her 2 girls with her who were around the ages of 5 -7. The girls while cute and very polite proceeded to run circles around their mother and shriek inside the library. Where was their mother you ask? Well she was right there. She never said a word about her girls running around the library playing tag/chase me or what have you. The only time she bothered to reprimand her children was to tell the o
ldest to stop interrupting our conversation.
The whole meeting didn't last more than 30mins. The host gave us all some typed pages that had some ingredients on it for the green cleanser. We talked about ways that we already clean green, and that was pretty much it. Oh yeah plus the
One thing we did talk about was that the word HOLISTIC is pretty much a 4 letter word here in OK mostly because its associated with Chanting
hippies, lol. I didn't understand at first what they we're talking about because I had yet to encounter anything or anyone with bad connotations on the word Holistic.
The host and my friend started a discourse about the bad responses they've been getting on the word Holistic and me and my friend discussed it later only to not that it’s really the bad connotations associated with the word Holistic that people in our area are put off by. Why there's a bad connotation on the word Holistic, I have no clue. Probably all the drugs in the 60's and 70's, lol.
My friend told me about the responses she received on Facebook when she first posted about the Holistic Mom's meeting. She got a response that stated "yeah, I have a cold, why don't you put hot rocks on me and chant it away" or some such nonsense. The other responses she got mostly dealt with the fact that she's a Nurse so being Holistic is pretty irony for a "pill pusher", lol.
Her response to the naysayer’s was to po
int out that Green living or Living Old school was the cheapest and best option for her family. For example they cloth diaper their baby girl and by doing so save more than 2hundred dollars a month on diapers. They've recently started using cloth wipes as well and that saves them another 25-50 dollars a month.
You'd think it costs them more on the laundry front but really and truly it doesn't they do the diapers and wipes along with the baby's other laundry the only extra attention the diapers receive is that they're pre-rinsed with vinegar in a pre-wash cycle. I think their total water bill is around 60-70 dollars a month.
Not only that but in going to this Holistic
Mom's meeting I've realized that most of the things I do (that is how my Granny did them when I was little) is exactly what they're talking about.
The only time we go to the doctor is if there is a persistent fever I can't get rid of with Green Tea, Asprin, Motrin, Croup tent, and Eucalyptus steam.
My dd usually only goes to the doctor for her yearly checkup. I had my first antibiotic in more than 5 years a few months ago.
When I was little we never went to the doc
tor except for serious things like the Flu or broken bones or something.
For a cold my Granny would give me "Broom Weed" tea (which I’m telling you is some nasty stuff man N.A.S.T.Y.) but it did the trick. Scary looking stuff too. Because broom weed is a weed with yellow flowers with long stick like stems and you stick it in a pot and boil it then add honey and a teaspoon of spirits and drink, (ew ew ew ew ew blech, nasty*shudders*) but it did the trick usually a couple doses of that stuff and you we're cured.
Here's a website if you want to see it.
http://plants.usda.gov/java/profile?symbol=AMDR
YUCK!
Not only that but when I was little we had a garden, and chickens and never had to go to the store for veggies or eggs or chicken. We went to the store for things like sugar, flour, beef, and pork (unless someone killed wild hog). We never bought fish or crawfish, as we had very nice ponds for fishing and crawdad fishing and my granny would send my brother and cousins fishing and send us girls crawdad fishing.
jams, trade pies and jams, eggs and vegetables, with neighbors who had plum trees, or peach trees, or pear trees.
This is what they call living holistically, but this is what we call Living.
It's not that Oklahoman's don't want to LIVE GREEN or LIVE HOLISTICALLY it's just that's not what we call it. We say "well that's how my Mama did it" or "My Granny raised all her kids like that and it worked for her" or "This is the way I was taught to do things" and we continue to do it that way.
Once taught it can't be untaught its just the way things are and when you live 30mins or more from the nearest town, grocery store, or store period, you tend to get along with your neighbors and do for yourself.
Because that's basically what Holistic living is its DOING for yourself and your family in the cheapest and less modern intrusive way possible. It’s doing the way grandma did it and passing down traditions.
If they would present it that way for Oklahoman's then we'd get more members as is my friend and I aren't sure how the next meeting is going to go or if we're going to stick around for many more meetings. The women are nice but as usual our Oklahoma tendencies come back to us and we're thinking "we already do most of what she's talking about, and anything else we can look up on the internet or ask a grandma, why are we driving more than 2 hours for a half hour meeting?"
Holistic isn't a 4 letter word though it does have 4 letter connotations, it's simply Living Traditionally.
Are there anyways that you all live traditionally? Have you thought about going Green? What things have you done or thought about doing to go Green? Is going Green or living Holistically or Living Traditionally anything you ever want to do or try?
