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Mustard – Form and Function

As an emotional state Mustard is a kind of depression which waits, unseen, for an opportunity to surface. Its origins will have been in the past, buried deeply, even beyond memory. By looking at the natural history of the plant we can conclude two things about this. One, that the darkness which clouds the ‘light and joy of life’ comes from within the earth; it is born of past experiences, karma if you will, which the individual carries as unresolved material, the un-germinated seeds. To use another analogy, it is like the psychological baggage many of us carry, filled with we know not what. The second point is this: the Mustard plants only develop at a time when the field is left empty, the soil bare. The Mustard state follows disturbance of the settled pattern of life (ploughing) and only takes root in the mind because there is some inactivity in the will (an empty field). It is for this reason that Mustard is alongside Honeysuckle and Wild Rose in the sequence of discovery – Nora Weeks puts Mustard there and so did Bach, in the group for Not Sufficient Interest in Present Circumstances.

Mustard, then, is an opportunist pattern of interference, a form of possession, which takes up residence only because of the weakness of the host. This idea is hinted at by some writers who speak of dark forces overshadowing the soul, of separation and a fall from grace. The image of an empty, ploughed field or even upturned earth, invites such thoughts. There is something unnatural about land devoid of all plants and today, when farmers spray fields with weed-killer, before planting and ploughing, we must wonder as to the effect on the psyche of the planet. Eradicate all plants from a field and what will then enter? The psyche of the planet may be too abstruse a concept but the complex relationships of plant to earth, of biodiversity and subtlety in thought are the very things forced under by the bulldozer of materialism. The farmer increases his yield at harvest by removing unwanted competition from weeds: charlock hardly grows in arable land today. But does its extinction as a species leave us less protected from the ‘cold, dark clouds’ of depression?