I promised you the secret to the most amazing burn medicine ever, but before I get to that little nugget of scintillating wonder, I want to take a moment to talk about particles.
Not the physics type, although there are probably bountiful ways in which this all connects, patterns replicate themselves after all, big and small. No, I am talking about the fragments of your Self that you leave behind.
Not so much leaving behind, but that keep you plugged in with certain people and places. Threads of connection snaking around the globe.
This is the flip side of travelling so much, you leave pieces of your heart everywhere, held by precious friends, like a trail of glittering stardust in your wake.
Grief has tugged at my heartstrings these days, not badly, but there, gently caressing me into a sort of daze, a case of between-worlds stupor.
And I watch it, as it stalks my thoughts.
Today the sea spoke of power.
Waves peeled along the wide, deserted beach of white sand, gnarly sea grapes and scattered coconuts – all reshaped by Irma.
Hurricane Irma is a marker everyone on the island seems to measure things by, a distinct before and after that drops regularly into conversations.
There is still a lot of trauma being carried here. I wonder, for how long?
The waves are forceful. They are thick, chunky and yet peel elegantly along the long length of the beach. Perhaps big is beautiful after all.
We play as we take our time to enter. Greeting the waves as they come in, feeling their movement in and out.
Slowly moving ourselves deeper in until we are moving into the wall of waves, or them into us, just before they break over our heads.
Every time it was the same. In and out.
Light and power pouring through the particles of me, hair flying backwards in the flow.
Then head breaks, I drink air, eyes streaming, until another comes.
I face it full frontal, legs dug in like a spartan at the shield wall.
The waves are feeding me power and I let it pour through me.
And then the flowing out begins.
And I realised that I give back through my heart.
We breathed this way for some time, together. Wave coming in, pouring through me to touch the beach and then coming back through my heart and out.
Always in and out, give and take.
Circular breathing.
Do not fear or grieve the pieces of you scattered like sand in the sea, the waves seemed to say. You are not broken or fragmented into tiny pieces lost on the current, you are actually bigger, spreading, growing, into deeper connections. This is not a bad thing.
My heart smiles.
Nature speaks to us all the time.
I will have to tell you about getting seriously lost in the forest the other day, just at sundown. Not the most sensible thing to do, I agree, but sometimes we need to be tested.
So, Potatoes.
That’s the big secret.
I discovered this in an old Natural Medicines book. It claimed that potato juice has been used with great success in hospitals in India for burn victims.
Huh, who would have thought such a humble root could be so versatile.
I had never heard of this remedy and naturally decided I had to try it the next time a suitable incident presented itself.
Which didn’t take long because I am always burning something in the kitchen, either myself or the food – usually the food, much to Eli’s great displeasure.
At first, I would coat my minor burns in the peels of the potato. It still stung like crazy but it did do the trick on light burns and you can keep cooking without the burning sensation when near heat. I hate that.
Now I generally grate the potato and squeeze out the juice into a bowl, adding an ice cube for the chill. It’s just easier than dropping peels everywhere and is more effective.
The potato juice seems to seal off the burn so you don’t get that raw skin, in fact you don’t get the blister at all, it just seals over really quickly. It’s quite amazing.
My brother had a full hot water bottle burst on his feet one winter in France, soon after we first moved there back in 2015. He had serious burns all over his feet and ankles, he really should have gone to hospital.
At least that’s what everyone else thought.
He carried on for about 3 days, business as usual, hobbling, gingerly in sandals, until his feet started getting infected and I had to step in and force him to let me treat them.
I cleaned his feet three times a day at first, with salt dissolved in hot water and left to cool. This was brutal, yes, I know, but the infected areas needed cleaning properly. They demanded brutality.
In fact, his whole feet, both of them, needed cleaning properly to get the embedded dirt out of his wounds, which, don’t forget covered all of both his feet.
That first clean must have hurt like f%@k. I certainly didn’t hold back, but got stuck in there to scrape the dirt out before new skin grew around them and deeper infections set in.
No mercy.
After this, I soaked his feet in potato juice and then applied an ointment I made from local honey, cocoa butter, olive oil and a little bit of beeswax.
His wounds were too raw and infected to stay exposed for long, and they were too tender for bandages. So, the ointment, thickly applied, would provide some form of protection.
3 times a day I cleaned his feet and applied the various treatments.
After two or three days, I stopped the ointment.
After another day the infections were better and I could just bathe his feet in potato juice morning and night.
Two or three days later I stopped all treatment and advised him to apply aloe for further healing. I don’t think he ever did.
He had no scarring and no problems walking on his feet.
Potatoes – I don’t know what it is they do but it looks like they promote rapid healing of the new skin, so it seals off the wound without any blisters.
Potatoes are the big secret.
The unlikely miracle makers of the kitchen.
It still hurts like the dickens, as my grandmother would say. But it heals quicker, and you don’t get any of that lingering pain you usually do with burns or that irritating sting when the blister eventually bursts exposing the raw skin below.
Just make sure you break up the starch that hardens at the bottom of the bowl every once in a while to get the full benefits.
I think it’s a winner.
I would love to hear what you think.
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