Sweet paste

I took these photos some weeks ago on my way to an ayurvedic clinic called Neo Pharmacy. I got interested in this one particular doctor because of the way my friend described him. How he is a man of few words and how he quietly and firmly "heals from inside" with the herb powders and ayurvedic pills.

With his simple gestures the doctor made it very clear that neither my questions nor my explanations were needed. He simply took my hand, felt the pulse, then quicly checked my eyes and tonque. Nothing extra. Everything required was clearly coded in the pulse, eyes and the coverings of my tongue. It seemed that for him words would have been some kind of an unwanted decoration, nothing substantial.

I have been to his appointment for four times now. After the awkwardness of the first time I have started to like him. He is so quiet and inexpressive. And most importantly, the paste he described me to eat twice a day is ahh so sweet and tasty. It distantly reminds me of a Finnish candy. I am happy to eat his medicine and so I keep returning. What is it doing to me, I really don't know.

As I eat the sweet healing paste (only one spoonful at a time!) my tongue keeps whispering memories of sweet liquorice. Memories of tastes and smells are obviously well stored in the unconscious mind as important factors of past experiences. Sweet liquorice, together with salty liquorice, would be in the top five list of my favourite homely tastes. With blueberries and strawberries, they would easily lead me for an imagenary trip to blue lakes, fresh forests and summer cottages.

While chewing the paste, I have been thinking how the background or the homeland culture is affecting us. How we have inhaled it, swalloved it, taken it inside of us, most of the time without realizing what is happening. We have been nourished by it, and shaped with it's help. Quietly it has settled inside us, and become a part of who we think we are.

With the memories of whatever sweet candy we had back home, the cultural background has kind of melted in us. Like a companion you just can't get rid off, it happily travels with us where ever we go, no matter how far we go. But as we change the surroundings and go to a different place and taste some new flavours, we can, at least sometimes, see it all more clearly. Recognizing the silliest attachments, seeing what we have grown to feel familiar with and what is yet to be learned. And then the new settles in. Sometimes just painting the surface with a different colour like a frosting, sometimes mixing the whole thing deep down.

I think for the first time in my life, I have forgotten that I am actually taking a medicine while eating the medicine. It's the sweetness, but it might also be that I really don't know anything of the whats and whys of that medicine. I don't even know what it is called, other than the sweet paste. My visits to that doctor are almost surreal. I think I will remember the fellow patients in the waiting room, the old magazines I was trying to read while waiting and the awkward cartoon curtain that separates the doctor's appointment room from the rest of the clinic. That curtain is kind of spooky and, at least for my eyes, pretty ugly. But it catches the attention. Those weird cartoon images have definitely already got a little spot in my memory, sharing the space with the important taste/smell memory of the healing paste. And together they'll blend to the background, to my unconscious mind, soon becoming something old, something familiar, a little detail of my past.