Honoring the connection between People, Plants, Land and Spirit
Here you will find a weaving of spirit and medicine stories; and tales of friendship with the Allies — the plants who teach us. I will share thoughts of stepping softly on the planet that I love, along with what I have learned from and about the herbs; and of making medicines from the earth. I will offer recipes that nourish, and strategies for healing hurts; and for reconnecting our deepest selves to the Green World that holds us.
Come, visit my world beyond the Rose Gate.
The words we choose as we think about things matter. Our thoughts, and how we frame them, both reflect, and help us define our belief systems. When we let someone else create the relevant stories in our lives, we cede our power over to them. Now at a time when we have done that en masse in the area of our health, we are as a nation, the sickest we have ever been, and more so than any other industrialized nation, in spite of spending more per capita on health care than any of them. The cultural story that has been most co-opted in modern times is the story of Medicine — things that connect us to Life, and heal us deeply.
Have you ever danced with abandon on a carpet of grass, while birds sang and clouds scudded by in a blazing blue sky? Did you feel the flowing medicine of being connected to all the life around you? Have you ever opted to enjoy downtime with a cup of tea, instead of taking drugs for a tickly throat, and felt the medicine of tea, and warmth and quiet pour through you? Two days ago in an organic food store, a conversation that began with smiles between two strangers, ended with a hug as we acknowledged the Spirit Medicine that had just connected us, through a conversation. Kindness between two people is incredible medicine.
Herbalist Susan Weed talks to us of “Seven Medicines” that speak to diverse wellsprings of healing. (1) My own list is similar, and the wells of what heals us are deep: Story Medicine, Spirit Medicine, Earth Medicine, Plant Medicine, Energy Medicine, and more. Your list may vary depending on your background and beliefs, but what is important is that we have a list, and that we acknowledge that there are many kinds of medicines that we can engage in for healing. Any of them can be potent enough to shift the course of illness.
Medicine was not always a commodity. Before the creation, funding and monetization of the AMA and our current medical system in the USA, non-drug medicines were primary. But in making health care a commodity instead of treating it as a fundamental human right in our country, the role of the “other” medicines was deliberately diminished, cultivating a culture of dependency, where patients were told they should rely exclusively on doctors and drugs for their physical well being — and that that was the only well being that mattered!
The Story Medicine of early “doctor shows” and endless drug commercials worked, for awhile. Now, what passes for health care in our country revolves around symptom control at best; and at worst, is a system for fixing parts piecemeal, and generating repeat business. It is a revolving door of symptom relief using drugs or surgeries that cause further damage, where the patient pays dearly each time. Compassionate and skilled doctors are at the mercy of an infrastructure bent on maximizing profit, and uncaring or greedy doctors are allowed to thrive in our “health care” system.
The question surfaces: “Would we need so much palliative care if we ate and lived in alignment with foods and cycles that our bodies already know?”
Drug-and-Machine medicine is sometimes lifesaving — but there is always a price to pay, in one domain or another. This can be fiscal, in debt that can be devastating and life changing for an entire family, or in organ failure caused over time by a drug that eases a challenging symptom at the expense of damaging an organ. Or it can be from collateral damage caused by a necessary intervention, such as when my appendix burst. Then, surgery and very strong antibiotics probably saved my life. The price? $10, 000; and I had to rebuild my microbiome, that precious colony of extraordinarily diverse organisms that live in our intestines and are collectively part of our digestive, endocrine and immune systems.
True medicines help us deepen our connection to our bodies,
and to the forces that maintain its life.
Rest 
and herbs were once prescribed first, and the role of simple foods and clean water were paramount in nurturing health. People cultivated time apart to be in silence with their own thoughts. The medicine of aligning to the earth, sun and moon in their cycles were so important that personal and cultural life revolved around them. Attuning to Spirit played a role, and yes, there were miracles sometimes, from all of these.
The way of Earth Medicine is not just about taking this herb for that symptom. The deeper work is in aligning with the foods and plants our bodies evolved with, to nurture health, and restore health when it is lost. Symptoms are our bodies way of talking to us, and we can allow them, and focus instead on what’s causing the symptom. When we heal the root cause, the symptoms frequently diminish, or cease on their own.
Story
Medicine can help us align with our inner knowing about our body’s capacity to heal. Food and Herbal Medicines nourish deeply, giving the body what it needs to heal itself and maintain health. Spirit Medicine reminds us that we are greater that the physical self that we see, and are a part of all life. And what of Nature Medicine? How are we not nature? Sitting or walking in nature reunites us with the environment that we came from, and that our cells remember. There we are connected again with signals from all the life around us that energize our bodies and spirits. This is so reviving that it is incorporated into the healing systems of Japan and other countries.
We do not need permission from anyone to choose the medicines we need. What Story Medicine do you tell yourself about your body and it’s ability to heal? Your cells sing a story of vitality and regeneration — Listen! Can you hear? What are your other best medicines? Are you connected to the earth through foods and herbs your body loves? Do you sleep enough? (It is one of the most profound medicines, reducing the risk of heart conditions, gut permeability and so many other illnesses!) When is your sacred time – your time apart for reflection and spirit? What comforts you? How do you connect with the heart flows of the people in your life? All of these bring potent healing.
As you heal with food, herbs, sleep, energy, inner work, or just time aside for the pampering comfort of a warm candlelight bath, you will surely find yourself needing drug medicine less… and less…
Welcome friend, as you return to the First Medicines.
Remembering them is a little like coming home.
1. http://www.susunweed.com/herbal_ezine/January05/healingwise.htm
T
he winter birds are gone now, and the daffodils poked their infant green into the light of the grey days sometime around the last new moon. It often happens this way — a hard freeze, a night of no moon, then sudden stiff green tips barely seen in the near frozen dirt, and a burst of excitement — a sigh of relief even — in knowing that the cold will give way to green again.
The robins have returned. They came in right before the big freeze, and I think we lost a few. More than birds perhaps, from the smell of decay that comes from between the wooden fences that are back to back behind our yard; some small creature fallen to the cold. But everywhere there is life too, and this morning I heard the robins for the first time since their return.
February sits on the cold fence between the inner work of winter and the sunny, wind-lashed exuberance of spring. Part of me longs to linger by the fire, in inward spaces of medicine spirals and planning for the year. Winter holds for me a depth that is hard to describe. It is a place of deepest knowing of self, sometimes in hard ways, and of nourishment and heady magic. In some ways it is like walking between the worlds for a whole season; a place where the heart can be healed, and seeds of transformation fall on the fertile essence of spirit, waiting….
It is hard to leave those deeps. But we are long into winter now, and its hold weakens as an urgent energy tugs at my heart with the longer light, two months growing now. I too, am on the fence, in a tug of war between the firelight cocoon of still dark iron-cloudy days, and the imperative of buds on the trees, where the ravens have also returned. They all risk the wrath of winter’s last word, defying the waning chill, and leaden clouds, but there is no resisting the call of new life; not for them, not for me.
For a week twelve seed packets have rested on my altar, absorbing my love and gratitude. They are this year’s medicine, all plants that grow in my state. The medicine will come from watching them grow, and delighting in each new leaf shoot. It will come from the care given, and the teas, tinctures and ointments gifted by the plants, and from the process of making all those too. Some of these additions I could easily find in fields and woods here, some not so easily — they hide. But planting seeds is a pledge to the future, and a rainbow bridge of relationship to the plants we love.
Spring wins the tug of war. My prayer plant has new shoots, telling me it is time to begin my starters. The fire fades as I take up my packets on this very cold day, trusting the voices of the daffodils and tree buds, that is it time.
Honoring:
Eclipta…Self Heal…Motherwort…Lemon Balm…Saint John’s Wort…Lobelia…Gravel Root…Burdock…Bergamot…Violet…Nettle…Pleurisy Root…
And giving them welcome.
Coming to Imbolc this year is a little like waking from a dream that began at Solstice. It has been a year for inner work, but then, winter has always held some of that for me. It is in the places of ebb, of darkness and softness, of sitting wrapped in a cushy blanket by the fire with a cup of tea in the dim light of the cold days, that I prepare for the busy activity of the year to come.
But this year was a little different. Interleaved with moments of quiet, there was an acceleration of sorts. It began as a building sense of pressure in the weeks before the recent lunar eclipse, when the energies of the alignment called many of us forward, to expansion. For weeks I noticed thoughts and attitudes that no longer serve bubbling up to be released, even as I gathered into my heart the threads of new magic that are sparkling their way into my life.
Now there is a pause after this recent snap of bitter coldest winter, when seeds think of waking, and some trees are already in smallest bud. The work of the Eclipse is done, and the magic begun then will unfold amid sun, rain, and new weavings of light, as the gardens of spirit and earth grow in tandem.
Herbalism is never separate from the cycles of seasons. The more we are connected to the plants, the more we are connected to what sustains them when they grow, or sleep or die. The cycles of sun, moon, day and night are the rhythms of life that our cells are attuned to, and our cultural disconnect from that world has left us longing for what it gives us when we align with it. Working with plants or animals makes those rhythms real to us, and we know again that our own ecologies are part of larger ones. No matter what our cultural lens, the sacred points on the Wheel of the Year are, for many herbalists, their way of keeping pace with the earth. There is meaning at each point in the journey.
In the ways that I know through my ancestry, Imbolc is the feast of Brighid, Keeper of the Sacred Fires, and of the healing waters. Today I will light three candles to celebrate this time of winter’s end: One for the fire of the hearth, the place of food and community. One for the fire of the forge: this year that was the Eclipse, a not-gentle fire of transformation where so much promise was seeded. And one for the fire of inspiration, the poet’s song that calls to our creative hearts to abandon the theater of “power-over”, and manifest the new in life affirming, collaborative ways.
As our world changes and we navigate terrain that is laden with the emotional and cultural debris of the failing paradigm, we are immersed in transformation whether we will or no, and it is time. But Brighid’s other gifts are those of the hearth, of food shared, and there is compassion there for all those on the journey with us. And of inspiration — our ability to breathe life into something greater than we have today, and to create from our deepest selves something far more wholesome than what is dis-integrating around us.
I am thinking of you, my companions on this journey, as I sit by my fire, drinking a tea to nourish spirit and nervous system after the unusual intensity of this deep winter. I’ll share my tea with you. It is relaxing and rejuvenating, and holds the promise of intentional dreaming.
Hawthorn – 3 parts leaf and flower or rough equivalent of berry elixir
Scullcap – 2 parts,
Lemon Balm – 1 part
Mugwort – 1p
cinnamon – just enough to warm and gently spice
Use 1-2 tbs per cup of tea in a glass jar or teapot.
Boil water, but let it sit for a minute once it has boiled. (Scullcap’s virtue is destroyed by boiling water.) Pour over your herbs; cover and steep for at least an hour. Rewarm if desired, and add a little honey – this one is a little bitter, but oh, so nourishing.
Hawthorn heals the heart on all levels, physical, emotional and spiritual. Scullcap is healing to nerve tissue and promotes relaxation. Lemon Balm is relaxing too, and eases sadness if we are in a struggle about letting go of old patterns. And Mugwort, ahhh. It is a tonic nervine with a bitterness that both grounds us and moves energy, making room for what we want to embrace in our lives. Cinnamon brings the formula together, and adds flow, while warming the mixture. I hope you will enjoy it, as we enter the dance of freeze and thaw that is part of February’s pattern, and emerge from winter’s darkness into the promise of the year.
We are alive because of our relationship with the Plantae. On this full moon of October, the Hunter’s Moon, my thoughts go out in gratitude to a kingdom of beings upon whom we are wholly dependent for our breath and our food: The oxygen-givers, the medicine givers. And to the community of earth keepers, wise women and others who are engaged in Remembering the ancient connections, one plant at a time.
