Matthew Becker: Herbal Medicine and Poetic Vision

Matthew is a practicing herbalist, teacher and writer. He lives in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, where coyote goddess call down the moon, and mountain lion gods call back the dawn, where white ospreys soar, tangled in stars, how softly they sail.

STAIRCASE
BY MATTHEW BECKER

By the time I was fifteen I disliked school so much that I made it a point of honor never to go. That did not sit very well with my mother. She was a school teacher and very strict about me attending class. When she told me I must show up everyday, I nodded and said of course. But my internal response was, I don't think so Jack, good luck with that.

On school days I would leave in the morning, hang out in the park or wander the streets, then come home after three o'clock as if I'd been at school the whole day.

But there were winter days when it was simply too damned cold to spend 6 or 7 hours outside. I lived on the 5th floor of a 14 story building, and on those frozen days I would climb the staircase to a landing just above the 14th floor. There, nobody would see me, I was gloriously alone. I would just sit quietly all day.

Spending so much time there with nothing to do, I became acquainted with silence, and the deeper silence beneath. I would listen as the floors below me vibrated with people bounding down the stairs, the taut, tired voices of my neighbors receding into the street. I was acutely aware of the subtle sadness that came from their unmet dreams, like a soft mist that hid behind their darkened windows. In my neighbors footsteps I could sense the regret that drove them and haunted them, the pain of their untended lives. In those truant mornings I learned a little bit about hearing things that might never be spoken of.

Then one morning, as I sat and listened, something happened, something very spooky. The atmosphere changed, I was suddenly alert, and nervous. I felt myself surrounded by a veil of wild, bracing stillness, as if the boundaries of my own self had been expanded, let loose, to listen, and to learn.

With my own ears I heard weeping coming from the very walls and banisters of the staircase, deep soulful weeping, full of grief and inconsolate loss. Fragments of lost desire that seeped up from the restless souls of the forgotten ones who had cried out their sorrow in their tiny rooms and lonely apartments.

As strange as it sounds, the whole building had become a divine tuning fork, reflecting like Indra's net, a tapestry of the sad and the broken. And through an unspoken and unexplainable love, the building had absorbed our pain because it knew it was too much for us to bear alone.

As the haunted, whispering vision ebbed away, then in the silence I heard something else. Something that flowed out of the very concrete and steel that had protected and sheltered me, when my own parents wouldn't. It was the chiming of my own heart and heartbeat in the very railings and doorknobs. And in that crystal diamond rapture I heard the sounds of endless oceans, and the warm grasses, and the night winds that had carried messages of wondrous lands beyond, all the places where my heart was cherished and safe, had come to meet me, echoing, in the iron and the cement. The building had heard and collected all of my dreams and wishes, and was showing them to me, and I saw them shine.

I had grown up in crowded New York never sure that I had a friend. Now I was sure. The building I had grown up in was my friend and my teacher, teaching me lessons about people, and about myself, that I would never, ever forget.

I learned that everything is alive and listening. And that everything is a part of us.

At 3:30 that day, my mother asked me, how was school today? It was great I said, I made a new friend, I can't wait to go back again tomorrow.

In this world
Dreams cast a shadow
In the jade flowered mountains
My dreams are a rose,
The stars and the night
Are the dreams of plum blossoms
And the skylark will tell me
What the dragonfly knows. - M