Herbal Wisdom: Top 5 Juliette de Bairacli Levy Quotes
Juliette de Bairacli Levy is a legendary healer and one of our greatest muses and teachers of herbal medicine.
I find great inspiration and refuge in her words of wisdom. She is no longer with us, however her knowledge and experiences continue to inform our path through many of her timeless books such as Traveler's Joy, The Complete Herbal Handbook for the Dog and Cat, and The Complete Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable.
Today, in honor of her contributions to veterinary medicine, I want to share my top 5 favorite Juliette de Bairacli Levy quotes.
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"There remains in every human soul the love of the wild and the wilderness, and this feeling is yet stronger in animals."
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"This sort of living, the traveler's life, has a fascination, and I can well understand the Scholar Gypsy choosing his life pattern and way of study, and having known it wanting no other. This learning from the earth and from the people who work the earth or travel it, is of endless discovery and interest, and is like making a collection of beautiful things of many kinds. I found far more than the herbal knowledge which I sought, from the nomad people. I hope I also learned their simple laws of honesty and morality, and health and hardiness, and how to live without much dependency on shops, to live rough and to be happy every day of primitive being."
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"When I was a child and thought of travel it was always of the slow nomad manner. Therefor when I was old enough to leave home and plan my own travels, it was the nomad way that I wanted to follow. There were to be no plane flights taking me to distant lands within a few hours. I preferred daily plodding, covering distances not much farther than the flight of a winged seed. I wanted to use small ships, and horses, and have my hounds along with me. When, centuries ago, the Gypsies made their first mysterious appearance into the world, they came on horseback, their possessions carried in traveler's packs on their backs and the rest worn as part of their clothing, so that they were like flower bulbs of many layers, with their rich and gaudy clothes and cloths and their tapestries wrapped around their bodies."
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"As the life of the horse is in his legs, so the life of the traveler is in his feet, and good care should be taken of them."
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"It seemed to me so completely wrong, this acceptance of inevitable disease: why should all domestic animals, as well as human children, be so afflicted with disease, while other creatures - for example, wild birds - remain almost totally immune? Surely the root cause lay in the hands of man?... I soon began to admire everything that was wild: the shining health of wild ponies and wild deer which I met within the uninhabited parts of Europe, where I used to stay whenever possible, always inspired me, as did the health of the wild plants in contrast to the cultivated ones. I have never found blight on a wild rose: but just think of, and contrast them with, cultivated roses, which frequently suffer a multitude of diseases. To keep my own life and the life of all animals in my care - dogs, cats, goats, horses - as close as possible to Nature then became a campaign of paramount importance to me; and the resultant good health of my animals, my children and myself has been sufficient reward for any trouble involved."
