August 14

​I am invited by two older women to join them in their searches for mountain herbs.

I can recognize the gentians and edelweiss but many of the plants are unknown to me. For those with the knowledge there is a lucrative side-line in gathering and drying mountain herbs. They will bring them back and sell them to middlemen for export to the herbal remedies industry in Europe and the United States. My new friends tell me what to gather and which parts to keep – the roots, leaves or flowers.
 
I still have time for my daily walks with Great Grandmother. I tell her that the lessons she and her friends had learnt are very hard ones to live with.

People do not like to live with uncertainty about what is most important;

we look for simple explanations of cause and effect in understanding the pathways of our lives;

​we find it difficult to accept a sense of incompleteness in the working out of what we think is fair and just.
 
’Of course they are hard’ says Great Grandmother. ‘That is why we create the idea of gods to help us on our path.

​On our yearly journeys up here we accepted and sought help from all the gods and goddesses we found on the way. It does not mean we reject the idea of the universal god we have been brought up with. But we opened our hearts to other pathways to belief. We learnt not to turn away from any source of help’.