City Smudge

Power In A Name

I really appreciate the power wielded by creative language. A tired, ostensibly exhausted idea can readily assume vibrant new life when couched in novel phraseology. For example, Alfred Wegener’s academic observations regarding the strangely precise fit of distant coastlines were dismissed as crackpot geological minutiae until the catchy moniker of continental drift began to pry open hitherto sealed provinces of ivory-towered minds. Similarly, few venues for mass entertainment were considered duller and more passe than puppetry until the genius of Jim Henson created Muppets and birthed a wildly popular reinvigoration of the art. The fact is that we usually tend to think in words, so an original verbal approach can open remarkable vistas of understanding. Thus, the power inherent in a name should never be undervalued.

Power To Aware Urbanites

What does my concern with denominative power have to do with Lucky Six Farms White Sage products? As it happens, quite a lot! Recently, a customer noted that she was fond of designating our hydrosol simply as City Smudge, because it consistently produced the same intensely purifying effect as a smudge stick but within a typically streamlined urban environment. Indeed, ubiquitous smoke detectors and high-keyed spaces so typical of today’s condos and apartments often partner poorly with the characteristically thick fumes generated by smudge sticks and cones. Consideration for others, including the elderly and infirm, who may reside in close proximity also demands an alternative to traditional forms of White Sage ritual. However, hydrosol may be productively used for identical ends in the very same urban environments. City Smudge is a perfect description of hydrosol in such contexts.

Creative Power Knows No Bounds

Although our products - certified organic White Sage essential oil, hydrosol, smudge sticks, cones, and whole leaves are wild-crafted according to the most venerable traditional principles of Earth-centered cultivation, their usefulness is not confined to familiar processes and places. We believe respect for the past never precludes a wholehearted embrace of present realities. In this way, the love and compassion we bring to our work can infuse every condition where wise and aware customers find and emphasize the best humanity has to offer.

By Alan Beck

Neglected Knowledge

The Hidden History Of Essential Oil

Essential oil has been distilled since pharaohs ruled ancient Egypt, yet a great deal of its modern history - a history including provocative clinical findings - has been ignored. Like many other fascinating areas of knowledge suffering similar neglect, essential oil’s action on the human mind and body carries profound implications for our understanding of and approach to holistic health. Serious research in this area was first undertaken by a group of professional chemists and perfumers in France before the turn of the Twentieth Century. Today, few have even heard of the vanguard work undertaken by the Gattefosse Group in Saint-Remy de Provence. Named for its founder and leading light Louis Gattefosse, the Group was determined to follow up on a series of reports published by the Pasteur Institute that had documented strong antibiotic properties of essential oil.

Essential Oil As Remedy

As World War I approached, administration of the Gattafosse Group passed into the hands of Louis’ son Rene-Maurice. When during the summer of 1910 a lab explosion and fire seared his hands and arms so badly that gangrene rapidly set in, the 29-year old scientist desperately decided to put some of the Group’s findings to a critical test. He later asserted that a single wash of lavender essential oil had not only stopped the potentially lethal condition in its tracks but also allowed rapid healing of his injured limbs. During the notorious influenza outbreak of 1918, Gattafosse claimed positive results for preventative gargles and eye/nose drops compounded with essential oils. Today, most medical practitioners are quick to summarily dismiss his observations, but actual double-blind experiments addressing the validity of his results are conspicuous only by their absence in the established clinical literature.

Traditional Essential Oil

In view of the above, I can only lament our generally short-sighted approach to potentially anomalous or upsetting scientific findings. As statesman and commentator Edmund Burke ruefully noted, “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Of course, we at Lucky Six Farms make no health-related claims for our wildcrafted, certified organic White Sage essential oil, hydrosol, smudge bundles, cones, or whole leaves. However, it is a fact that Native Americans have made use of this aromatic plant since ancient times. We are proud to acknowledge our intimate connection with it.

By Alan Beck

  

Our Measure Of Truth

Science As Dogma Versus Science As Tool

Lamentably, post-modern society has narrowed its notion of truth to the proclamations of science. Although the font of scientific investigation has flooded us with innumerable benefits over the preceding three centuries, I contend that its dogmatic allocation of universal truth to itself alone - truth sorely needed for us to live fully - is misplaced at best and spurious at worst. How can I defend such a heretical view, a perspective which in today’s intellectual environment is regarded as the zenith of superstitious irrationality? To answer, let me briefly review the methodological purview acknowledged by science itself as the proverbial gold standard of truth.

The Inherent Limitations Of Science

Of necessity, science must confine its work solely to phenomena meeting two fundamental preconditions: 1. They must, at least in theory, be publicly replicable and verifiable, and 2. They must, as least potentially, be so orderly or regular as to be fully quantifiable. Any and all phenomena failing to meet both criteria are omitted from scientific consideration a priori. Now as we review the sum and substance of our lives as they are actually lived, that is the vast, colorful array of situations confronting us daily, how many of these subtle, mercurial, existential facets conform to that inflexible scientific template? How much of ourselves are publicly replicable and quantifiable? In fact, we quickly realize - as did virtually all pioneering scientists - that science is an ideal tool for researching certain exceptionally circumscribed areas of reality. Thus, it simply cannot generate, and was never conceived to stand in for, any comprehensive picture of the totality of our existence.

Science At Lucky Six Farms

We at Lucky Six Farms are pleased to use the findings of science but refuse to be used by them. Our philosophical horizons transcend the instruments we employ and the numbers they reveal; we know from ample testimony that our customers feel the same. Our wild-crafted, certified organic White Sage essential oil, hydrosol, smudge bundles, cones, and whole leaves are considered vital adjuncts of traditional ceremonies large and small, ceremonies honoring a universe much larger and more vital than one consisting wholly of, in Ken Wilber’s prescient words, nothing more than “frisky dirt.”


By Alan Beck

Mystic Figures Redux

Number Six Resurgent

Owning to the tenacious erudition of an anonymous correspondent, I cannot resist the temptation to proffer yet a few more fascinating metaphysical tidbits concerning the number six, a topic briefly treated in one of my prior posts. Readers who recoil at anything redolent of math, numerology, or the more academically respectable discipline of arithmology may want to sign out now, although loyal devotees of the late Martin Gardner’s alter ego Dr. Matrix will probably find a hard time closing their browsers. With respect to how my colleagues and I regard the following information, let me simply assert that we who proudly bear the moniker of Lucky Six Farms never mistake intellectual curiosity for credulousness. As duly noted in my previous blog entry, the ostensibly anomalous juxtaposition of the adjective “lucky” with the number “six” has justifiably prompted many inquiries and inspired much historical research.

Number Six Is The Redoubtable Hexad

Sometime in the middle of the 4th Century CE the renowned Neoplatonist Iamblichus penned his Theology of Arithmetic, purporting to express, albeit in sharply succinct terms, key Pythagorean concepts pertaining to the sacred Tetraktys, i.e. the first ten numbers. In this document, the number six - termed the Hexad - comes in for extraordinary attention. In particular, he observes that six is the very first perfect number: its factors (1, 2 & 3) can be added to yield six again. In addition, every one of those factors is also a prime number, divisible only by unity and itself. Serious mathematicians have since found the investigation of co-relative prime and perfect numbers to be an enormously fertile field for advanced study that remains quite far from exhaustion even today.

Further, Iamblichus points out that the number six occupies the central position of a completed Platonic Lambda, the legendary geometric/arithmetic construction first described by Plato in his Timaeus. With these august sages, too, we can fully appreciate that the familiar cube symmetrically apportions two sides to each of our three spatial dimensions - height, width, and depth - thereby displaying exactly six sides in a wonderfully solidified token of aesthetic perfection.

Six Is The Number Of Health

The foregoing observations, however, pale into insignificance when contrasted with Iamblichus’ ultimate conclusions about the number six. Thus, he notes six may alternately be called “health” or even “panacea,” since it creates the most fundamental triangles. Stated another way: if perpendiculars are appropriately dropped from the sides of any triangle, six subsidiary triangles may be formed. And we may confidently name six “Thaleia” because it harmonizes so many different things, plus it is allotted the first portion among all numbers in the generation of soul! In light of such matters, then, our title of Lucky Six Farms is no mystery but actually a humble understatement. Certainly, my colleagues and I strive daily to produce White Sage products which live up to that ideal.

By Alan Beck

 

Turning The Wheel Of The Year

Weather Sets The Mood

Our weather, in the stark but lovely shadow of Madre Grande, is never just ordinary. Spring and summer are marked by long weeks of cloudless skies. The sun’s face then is uncompromisingly radiant, so by noon even large boulders are seared to the point where they are painful to touch. Such climate creates an archetypal high desert so familiar to those who explore the American southwest. But there is a slow, primordial rhythm at work behind the scenes, a planetary yin and yang which becomes obvious only as the wheel of the year revolves past its zenith. Fall sets in suddenly, so precipitously in fact, that even savvy residents are caught unaware. In the course of a single day, our weather turns sullen, dark, and cool.

The Weather of Reminiscence

In September, we wake to a pea-soup fog so thick a paltry distance of twenty feet recedes into infinity. Creepy dampness, reminiscent of a haunted house rather than a bright desert, fills every nook and cranny of what was, only hours before, clear, crisp openness. Our thoughts respond appropriately, of course, moving into realms of past foibles and triumphs, recollecting actions taken in the heat of the moment that have long  banked into lifeless embers. As night descends, the atmosphere becomes stranger still. Unmoving fog weighs down the land with palpable moisture, embracing us in its crypt-like, stygian depths. Without a bright flashlight, travel outdoors is impossible, for we are now blind as those eyeless fish who spend their days endlessly swimming through subterranean pools.

Our White Sage Energy Transcends The Weather

Our fields of organic White Sage, the pride of Lucky Six Farms, must also lie quiet in this eerily silent interregnum, like the other indigenous life-forms. Initiates into the Mysteries of old knew this liminal time well, for the fulcrum of the year reminds us of the frightening darkness into which we all descend, steadfast in our faith of renewed life. Although winter has not yet begun, we are confident of the invisible, vibrant stirrings just beneath the soil - and of the carefully stored fruits of our labor. Our work insures that the heart of the White Sage spirit, the very essence of purifying energy, never vanishes. It remains accessible across even the bleakest horizons for those who know and care.

By Alan Beck

  

Aromatherapy In Three Easy Lessons

Simplicity in Intent

Although inherent in aromatherapy, simplicity often gets lost in the shuffle. Books, pamphlets, lectures, and reports needlessly complicate what should be fundamental. Stated in its most basic form, aromatherapy confirms the age-old observation that certain scents retain the capacity to generate exceptionally powerful effects on our mind-body complex. Marcel Proust, among a host of other authors, documented how a single seemingly ordinary aroma called back a veritable avalanche of emotion-laden memories and associations. We have all experienced similar encounters with evocative smells - sometimes even with fragrances that ostensibly have never been experienced in this life! Given these facts, we can employ aromatherapy without compromising the simplicity of its operation.

Simplicity in Means

Aromatherapy works because our sense of smell is more primordial than either vision or hearing, the two senses usually deemed most critical for seamless function within our ramified post-modern society. In the insect world, for example, smell reigns supreme, governing all aspects of matters as diverse as colony organization or finding a suitable mate from miles away. Thus, scent and only scent is key to aromatherapy’s success. Whether we apply gentle heat to essential oil, burn a small amount of dried herbs, spray a hydrosol, or simply work in proximity to a fresh aromatic source, we will perceive a benefit. What is important here, however, is not to mix too many scents together at once. A single, well-proven aroma is often more potent than a hastily compounded, overly eclectic mix.

Simplicity in Product

Finally, use products from a vendor that has established a solid reputation for quality, purity, and environmental concern. An excellent choice would be certified organic White Sage aromatics from Lucky Six Farms. Because White Sage has deep Native American traditional roots as a uniquely purifying aroma, it can be utilized in a wide range of aromatherapeutic contexts, both for individual and social purposes. White Sage also offers those merely curious about aromatherapy’s ultimate value to test things out for themselves.

By Alan Beck

The Truth About Anointing

The Universal Role of Essential Oils

 For thousands of years, essential oils have played crucial roles in rituals conducted worldwide for both material and spiritual elevation. Societies East and West have viewed the process of anointing or unction as forging definitive passage between mundane and celestial realms. I could cite countless examples: the Bible makes more than 180 references to essential oils, always carrying emphasis on the intrinsically precious character of such substances. The term “Christ” itself is usually translated as “the anointed one.” No European monarch would think of being crowned without undergoing visible anointing into a state of acknowledged sovereignty via essential oil.

Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain societies regard unction in a similar light. Specifically, the practice of abhisheka, the exact equivalent of anointing, has traditionally solidified the notion of transcendent empowerment. In many Asian esoteric sects, essential oil is believed to convey the very essence of initiatory power from teacher to student. Thus, the nucleus of all such rituals must include first blessing and then touching sacred oil. Newly elevated rulers and high officials also receive full cultural sanction only through formal unction.

The Special Quality of Essential Oils

When a belief retains currency through an incredibly diverse array of peoples and thought patterns, I believe more than mere coincidence is at work. This is certainly the case with ideas surrounding - and actively promulgating - the anointing process. In addition, we find each type of essential oil consistently associated with particular permissions and powers: each embodied the concentrated essence of certain energies. For example, at Lucky Six Farms we are intimately familiar with the profoundly purifying and cleansing properties of White Sage, properties that have been venerated and utilized by indigenous Tribes for longer than anyone can remember.

Our Commitment to Lucky Six Farms White Sage Essential Oil,

Although our White Sage essential oil has a wide variety of uses, from aromatherapy diffusion to dilution for liniments and salves, we never lose sight of its fundamentally sacred character. This is why we insist on growing every plant organically with love and respect for the remarkable energy channeled through it. Those who try our White Sage essential oil are therefore taking part in a universal earth-centered tradition whose meaning is as vital today as it was at the dawn of history.

By Alan Beck