Category: Plant Stories
The Multitudinous Tulsi
Summer is the domain of the manifold. In spring, I find I can delight in every flower, the succession of blooms feels manageable, comfortable, familiar. But by midsummer in Appalachia, the flowering is so fierce, so frequent and so diverse, I simply have to throw up my hands. I will never be able to…
Finding your Solar Power
Summertime is like a linen sheet left out on the line— highlighted, outlined and defined by the omnipresence of sunshine. It sets the poppies aglow and warms the strawberries to ripeness. It pops open the peonies and lights the bowl of our days like porcelain. Enlivening and inciting, the sun is the very definition…
When Nettles Smoke
I saw the smoke out of the corner of my eye, like a cigarette, pitched low to the ground and still smoldering. I was out alone, sunning myself at my favorite swimming hole, luxuriating in the richness of a hot day in early May. But in a flash I was up, eyes scanning the…
When Violets Speak
I first moved to these mountains in spring. Early spring, when things are still raw with beginning. It felt fitting. I had left behind my entire life in New York City— my relationship, my community and career— to start anew in Appalachia. I brought only what would fit into my car, leaving space for…
Pine + The Dreamtime
Every year is a cycle of living and dying, and every transition is medicine. In winter we approach that beauty of endings. As the cold pushes life back to the roots, the land enters a kind of dreamscape. A stretch of consciousness that carries us into death, and then beyond. (And could this year’s winter…
Tending the Embers: Chaga + The Creative Spark
In winter we stir the embers. A motion of both caretaking and stoking, a gentle coaxing and potent remembering of that which lights our fire. Every winter, as color fades from the outer world, we are invited to journey into the vibrant tableau of our deepest self. To rekindle our inner colors with a…
Tatterdemalion: The Juniper Tree
Two winter’s ago a bit of mycelial magic reached out and touched me. Through the webs of the internet, and the crossing lines of one apothecary parcel and a hand-stamped bundle of written tales, I met one of my dearest friends and ever-source of inspiration in my life: Sylvia Linsteadt. We all hear stories…
Courting Mystery: Tulsi + The Technicolor Moonrise
The medicine of my world is fed by many streams— plants, flowers, stones, spirit and dreams. The most profound healing in my life has arisen from the ocean-like concurrence of all these streams. This piece is an homage to the whirlpool that it, itself, the healing. This time last year I was officially diagnosed…
