Tag: herbal medicine
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…
You Contain Multitudes
Each lifetime contains multitudes. A multicolored collection of insights and experiences. A many-hued menagerie of dusks and dawns. Each lifetime is not just one thing, but many. Like a field that blooms in wildflowers and golden grass from spring to fall. And each one of us is not just one thing, but many,…
What’s in my Medicine Bag?
Whenever I travel I always pack a medicine pouch. Over time this has evolved. From bandaids and salves to flower essences, stones and talismans. As the years flow by my very definition of medicine changes, grows, and transforms. From the sturdy resiliency of the western medical breastplate, to the more ineffable healing of…
Matrilineal Magic
There is a thread that runs through the long tapestry of time. A line that connects us back to our grandmothers and great grandmothers and the lineage of womyn who came before. On a loom, each downward string is called a warp. Like time, these warp strings are the backbone that holds…
Summer’s Fullness
On the other side of the strawberry moon, after the late spring blossoms of Beltane and the thick pulses of Hawthorn blooms arises a season that weaves itself around the helm of a single word – fullness. At this point in the season the full arrival of summer is undeniable. Roses are spilled…
Winter Pearl Diving
Today is Imbolc and winter has reached its fullest depths in our blue-hued mountains. Here in Southern Appalachia we don’t get the same thick quilts of winter-hewn snow as our neighbors farther to the north. Instead, we are tucked in by the frost that touches the early chickweed and the amber fountains of summer’s…
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…
Autumn Melancholy + Saturnian Journeys
It is late October, and the peak of the Equinox has come and gone. The fields are golden with constellations of butter-colored squash and dried corn, and every day the light grows dimmer. In the wheel of the year, autumn is a time of both extravagant wealth and liberating death. As the days curl…