Let me say the awkward part first, standing up, before you find it somewhere else and think I was hiding it.
Ras Ezra is a character. A made man. The yard he sits in was built. The face you see was drawn.
What was not made is what he carries. Jamaican bush medicine — grandmother medicine — kept by women who never wrote a book and never got a page like this one.
The man was made so the telling would not stop.
Everything he says comes out of what was actually kept, said close to the way it was actually said. And where nobody can prove a thing, he tells you nobody can prove it. That rule is the whole reason to keep reading.
You are allowed to hold that against me. Most people, once they sit with it a minute, would rather have been told.
You came to this page to find out if I am worth anything.
That is the right thing to come for. Most people buy first and ask after, and then they are ashamed to ask at all.
So ask. The whole answer is on this page, and the part you were most worried about is at the top, not buried down at the bottom where a man puts the things he hopes you get tired before you reach.
Read it slow. If it does not sit right with you, close the page. Nothing here is going to follow you out.
What I say here comes out of a yard in Jamaica.
Not a school. A yard. A woman with a fire, a pot, and about forty plants she could name in the dark, in the rain, at four in the morning.
She wrote nothing down. Almost none of them did. It went from a mouth to an ear, in the yard, one person at a time, and only when somebody came and asked her to her face.
That is why it never reached you. Not because it was hidden. Because it was slow. It could only travel as fast as a person could walk to the gate.
And a good half of it is already gone. The women who kept it died, and what was in their heads went in the ground with them. Nobody stole it. Nobody banned it. It just was not written down in time.
What is left is left because somebody sat on a step with a notebook while there was still somebody to listen to.
My work here is translation. That is the whole job.
Something was said in patois, in a yard, to a person standing right there who already knew what the plant looked like. My job is to put that in plain English for a woman in Ohio in February who has never seen it growing.
Translation means three things, and no more than three.
Out of the old words, into words you already use.
Out of "a handful", into something you can measure in your own kitchen with what is in your own drawer.
Out of a plant that only grows there, into something on the shelf at your grocery store — or into nothing at all, when there is no honest swap for it.
That last one happens more than you would like. Some of what was kept cannot cross the water. When there is no honest translation, I say so on camera and we leave that one where it is, in the yard, and I do not sell you a cousin of it and hope you do not notice.
I am not fixing anybody. I could not, and I would not know how. I am moving words from one shelf to another shelf, and telling you where the words came from so you can weigh them yourself.
I think I know some of what your day looks like.
Two in the morning at the window, and nothing even hurts. Just awake.
Four in the afternoon, the sock came off an hour ago, and the line it left is still sitting there in your leg.
The bottom drawer in the kitchen with six bottles in it, and two of them you cannot remember buying.
Getting up out of the chair with a hand on the arm of it, and that half second where you wait to see what the knee is going to say about it.
Somebody young asks how you are doing. You say fine. Because the true answer takes eleven minutes and they have got four.
If none of that is you — good. Close the page. It was not written for you and I am glad.
If some of it is you, stay for the next part. The next part matters more than this one.
Now hear this part slow, because it is the part most people were never told.
It is not laziness. Nobody lazy gets out of bed at two in the morning and stands at a window.
It is not that you did not try. Those six bottles in the drawer are the proof that you tried. Every one of them was a day you decided not to give up on yourself. That is a good drawer. That is not a shameful drawer.
And it is not a bill coming due for something you did thirty years ago. Bodies do not keep books like that.
Here is what it usually is.
Almost everything you were handed came off the internet, or off the back of a bottle, or out of a magazine. General instructions. And a general instruction is written for the middle of everybody — for a body that does not exist anywhere in the world. Yours is not the middle of everybody. Yours is yours.
And nobody ever sat down and told you WHY any of it was supposed to work. So when a thing did not work, you had no way to tell which thing had gone wrong. Was it the wrong remedy? The right remedy at the wrong hour? The right remedy that needed six weeks, and got nine days?
You could not tell. Nobody gave you the piece you needed to tell.
What you have got is an information problem. Character you carry around with you. Information you can be handed, and then you put it down.
You should know a man by what he will not do. So here is my list. I hold to it, and you can hold me to it.
I will never tell you to stop, skip, cut down or swap anything a doctor put in your hand. Not one pill. Not one day. Not "just try this first and see." If anything I ever say sounds like that, then I said it badly — throw that one out and keep taking what you were given.
I will never call myself a healer, a doctor, a nurse, a practitioner, or a nutritionist. I am none of those things and I never was. I am a man who was told things and writes them down straight.
I will never tell you I took it and it fixed me. I am not standing here as a patient. There is not one word on this whole site of me saying what a remedy did inside my own body — and the day you see me start, that is the day to stop trusting me.
I will never use the word cure. Not on a page, not in a video, not in a message back to you. It is not my word to use.
I will never put a clock on you. No timer on a page. No "tonight only." Nothing here gets more expensive because you took two days to think, and nothing runs out because you were busy on a Tuesday.
I will never frighten you into it. I am not going to tell you what happens to you if you wait. I do not know what happens if you wait — and neither does any man who tells you he does.
I will never answer a medical question in the messages. I do not know your body, your history, or what else is in your cabinet. That answer has to come from somebody holding your file, and I am not holding it.
I will never sell you a plant I will not name, or a mix I will not list out on the label, every item of it.
And I will never take down a correction. I have got things wrong. When I do, the wrong one stays up, and the correction sits right underneath it with the date on it. Take the wrong ones down and a man is only ever right in public — and a man who is only ever right in public is not telling you everything he knows.
That list is my method. It is not a promise about what a leaf can do for you. It is a promise about what I will not do to you to get you to try one.
Three notes, and I have to tell you what they are before you read them.
Nobody sent me these. I wrote them out myself, to show the shape of a note that is worth putting on a page. They are marked so that nobody can mistake them for somebody's word later on, and no real person is standing behind any of them.
[PATTERN] "Day nine. It was not the night I noticed it — it was breakfast. I sat down with my coffee and thought, I did not stand at the window last night."
[PATTERN] "The sock line is still there when I take them off. But I can press my thumb into it now and it comes back up before I finish counting to five. It used to still be a dent when I got into bed."
[PATTERN] "Everybody else tells me it works. He is the only one who told me when it would not, and who ought to leave it alone. I read the whole page twice because of that."
I am showing you my own examples instead of somebody else's word, and I would rather do that than dress up three sentences and let you think a woman wrote them.
When real notes come, this is how they will stand here. No names under them. No towns, no photographs, nobody's face. And not one of them goes up without the person saying in writing that it can.
If a note ever shows up on this site with a full name and a smiling picture under it, you come and ask me where I got it.
For people who already have something of mine. All of this is logistics — nothing here is about whether a remedy works.
"I paid and nothing came."
Look in the spam folder, then in Promotions. That is where it is nine times out of ten. Still nothing — write to the address on your receipt, say what you bought and what day, and a person writes back. Not a robot.
"Do I have to make an account?"
No. There is no login on this site. Nothing to sign up for, no password to keep, nothing for you to lose.
"Is it a subscription? Will it charge me again next month?"
No. One payment, one time. There is nothing on this site that renews, and nothing that quietly starts up again in ninety days.
"I opened it on my phone and the letters are small."
Put two fingers on the screen and spread them apart — that makes it bigger. Or open the same link on a computer. The paper itself is set in large type on purpose, and that is not an accident.
"I lost it. New phone. It is gone."
Write and it gets sent again. No charge, no questions, and no limit on how many times.
"Can I print it out?"
Yes. It is made to be printed. Plain paper, both sides, black ink is fine.
"Can I give it to my sister?"
Print her one. That is what it is for.
"Am I going to get messages every day?"
No. Some weeks one. Some weeks none.
"How do I stop the emails?"
One link at the bottom of any of them, one click, and it is done. No survey, no "are you sure", and it does not take three days.
"I would rather talk to a person than read a page."
The address on your receipt. Write it in your own words. It does not have to be tidy and it does not have to be short.
Before you go, look at what is not on this page.
No price. Nothing on it is for sale.
No button. There is nothing to click but the way back.
No box asking for your email.
No photograph of me holding a bottle up next to my face.
No letters after my name, because I have not got any.
No badges. No "as seen on." No number of people helped.
No clock. Nothing on this page changes price tonight, and nothing runs out while you are thinking.
That is not modesty. That is the point of the page.
A page that wants something from you cannot also be the page where you decide whether to trust me. So this one wants nothing. You can walk out of here having given me nothing at all, and that is exactly how it was built.
One more thing, and it does not get made shorter to fit the page.
Nothing on this site is medical advice, and I am not a medical professional of any kind. What is written here is traditional home practice, told to you as tradition — not as treatment. None of it has been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and none of it is meant to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.
Keep taking what your doctor gave you, exactly the way it was given to you. Before you add anything at all to it, ask your doctor or your pharmacist. Plants and pills do meet each other inside a body, and your pharmacist can check that for you at the counter in about two minutes, for free.
And ask first — do not start anything out of this yard — if you are pregnant or nursing, if you have trouble with your kidneys or your liver, if you are on a blood thinner, on diabetes medicine, on blood pressure medicine, or if you have got surgery coming up.
If something hurts in a way that is new, or bad, or that will not let go of you — that is not a yard question. Go and be seen. Today.
And the same goes for a cut or a sore that has not closed in two weeks, even if it does not hurt you and even if it does not look angry. Especially then. There is nothing in this yard for that one, and I am not going to invent something so you stay here another month. That is a doctor this week.
That is all of it.
The gate stays open. Nothing here is waiting on you.
Give thanks.