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Anemone berlandieri

3/5/2016

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w i l d c r a f t e d
A n e m o n e
t i n c t u r e
Anemone berlandieri -- also called thimble flower -- is one of the cool weather ephemerals I have always anticipated with the greatest excitement.  Its emergence heralds both the beginning and the end of our all too brief Central Texas Spring.  A low dose botanical, these unassuming blossoms are extremely potent and must be used with great care.  Taken in doses too large, they can dangerously depress heart rate and respiration.  However, when used skillfully, this delicate flower offers unparalleled relief from generalized anxiety, panic, and acute sensory overload.  It is particularly indicated for highly sensitive persons.




Taken in a tense moment, Anemone works to dramatically deepen respiration and noticeably relax the muscles in the face, neck and shoulders.  It replaces freneticism and shakiness with a sense of solidity and helps to quell nervous tension and tearfulness.  Our native Texas Anemone is also a favorite menstrual medicine.  It brings circulation to the womb and acts as an emmenagogue to bring on delayed menses, particularly in cases of fatigue, overwork, depression and generalized tension.  It is also a useful antispasmodic, helping to relieve menstrual cramps.

Anemone is a plant which teaches us to soften around the edges when longstanding emotional pain or stress has taken shape as rigidity of both body and mind. It is an ally for the journey finding renewed interest in life and openness to human connection when these things are of little interest due to trauma, loss, or overstimulation.

A very strong medicine to be used with great care in doses
​ranging from one to thirteen drops, up to four times daily.

O r d e r    Y o u r s    H e r e



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Ocotillo

2/22/2016

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O c o t i l l o
a medicine tale

My fascination with Ocotillo began long before my formal introduction to its medicine. I was seventeen and on the first real road trip of my life, traveling through the unending expansive beauty of West Texas alongside my first Love, Jake. The spindly limbs of Ocotillo punctuated every rocky hillside and flat expanse that marked the increasingly spare landscape as we headed toward Big Bend. Her brilliant red flowers were in full bloom and her spines, though not at first detectable, spoke to me of something exciting and unknown. After this first encounter, many years passed and I thought little of Ocotillo, desert sentinel, enchantress of the lonely places.

And then, quite by accident, I moved to New Mexico five years later, landing just an hour's drive of her northernmost range. Drawn toward her, I traveled South to Truth or Consequences to soak in the hot springs and revel in her beauty – so fierce and foreign to me. More time passed. I moved farther North, from Albuquerque to Taos, and my life looked different, quieter, sadder. My partner, the man I lived with and loved, he and I took a long long trip through Arizona, driving fast down winding highways lined with Palo Verde and towering Saguaros, then North through the Redwoods of California, and finally to Southernmost reaches of Washington where Wild Roses grew so thick they threatened to overtake the roads.






It was on this trip that I first harvested Ocotillo. We baked in the midday Sun, my body weak from the heat as we gathered her purple-tinged new-growth and slept upon the Earth amidst the desert flora and ferocious ants. I squatted at dusk, pounding her thorny limbs between two rocks. I peeled her sticky bark from the cylindrical twig of a bone around which she grew. We tinctured her parts in vodka and nestled the jar safely into my basketful of sweaters. When we returned to New Mexico, our relationship ended – an ending as strong and blunt and disorienting as the vodka in which our medicine sat macerating. I fled south, shattered into one thousand bits of myself, but still somehow intact. I did not cry until I crossed the threshold of Mountains just South of Albuquerque; the mountains that meant leaving, really leaving.

I moved back to Austin, my home. To be with family, to rest, to grieve, to gather myself back to wholeness. That tincture we made together sat on my shelf in the dark, untouched and unacknowledged for many Moons. I returned to New Mexico on a road trip with my friends and saw the Ocotillo again. I wandered about the stark hillsides where she grew and told knowing tales of her medicine to my dear friend, Asia. Looking her straight in the eye as I spoke, and with little awareness of what I was doing, I reached down to the earth to retrieve a stone from the base of an Ocotillo that had called me to it. I lifted a brilliantly faceted druzy smokey quartz from the red dirt and we admired it in equal states of amazement.

  
When I returned to Texas, the rains came with me. I lay awake at night for fear of flooding. I lit all the candles in my home and put I record after record on the turntable to fill the room with some semblance of warmth. My sprawling apartment was submerged in a darkness that brought with it an eerie kind of beauty as the rain quickly turned to a river outside my door. It was then that this medicine came to me – this medicine of smoke and darkness and flowing waters. I rifled through my many jars of herbs to produce a quantity of Ocotillo flowers I'd asked a friend to gather for me. These, I learned later, were harvested by him and his girlfriend on their first date – a fact I would later come to hold like small treasure, an emblem of hope. I covered the scarlet blossoms he'd mailed me in Mescal – my favorite . When they were ready, I combined the smoky spirit of my friend's first love with the sharp and caustic tincture of bark and endings that my previous partner and I had gathered on our trip. To this I added a quantity of smoked alder sea salt, sticky brown piloncillo sugar, the flower essence of Ocotillo, and finally – my prize – the smoky quartz I'd found in the desert. In the dark, this alchemy came together, in the dark, this alchemy heals.

When the elixir was complete, I began taking a single drop a day. It was potent and unctuous and everything I like about herbal medicine. Immediately I began to feel movement in my womb. Old stories. Old, old stories. So many things pushed beneath the surface, by me, by my family; nameless shapeless, watery and mercurial unknowable tales began to whisper themselves to me. I grieved day and night until my sheet were wet with tears and tiny capillaries around my eyes ruptured. I screamed so violently that I am truly shocked my neighbors did not call the police. Grief became my teacher and my task master. It takes up a lot of space, as it turns out.

Through it all, my womb felt full and heavy, but there was movement where before I'd found only numbness and stagnation from the pain of my own deeply personal heartbreaks, compounded with the shadowy past I'd inherited. Slowly, I noticed my stories about my body and my sexuality beginning to change shape. Through all this crying, my body felt somehow more like home, like there was more room for mein it, all of the sudden. I felt settled within myself in a new way; at once more and less vulnerable. It was as if I'd previously only existed from my navel up, preferring to act as though I had no belly and barely acknowledging my lower half, let alone my womb or the sexual centers of my Being. The seat of my awareness became lower, more grounded. It felt damned good. I felt safe, perhaps for the first time in my life. And as a woman in this culture, that is no small thing.

Since about the age of fifteen, a major point of sadness and frustration for me, has been my seeming inability to reach orgasm.  And I will spare you the graphic details, by saying simply, that it was not for lack of trying.  Despite my many attempts, I could not have an orgasm. Not alone not with a partner, not in a house, not with a mouse. I could not have an orgasm, Sam I am. I felt broken. And it's not that I didn't enjoy sex, but I felt like I was missing out on a truly fundamental piece of the human experience. 
Then one night in November, after roughly two Moons of working with this new medicine, two Moons of witnessing the old stories that lived within my body and sitting squarely in the grief and the discomfort – as if by magic, it happened. And then it happened again, and again. And, expectations aside, the experience of orgasm has become a deeply tender and healing aspect of embodiment for me.  Since this first experience I've continued to work with the Ocotillo Elixir on a daily basis, and have even returned once more to the desert to harvest her bark.

Through courting the medicine of Ocotillo, I've come face to face with my shadow and my shame, and all of the things I would rather not think about. But it needed to happen, because only through welcoming this pain have I been able to remember that pleasure, too, is safe and sacred; that eros truly is present in all things, when we feel secure enough within ourselves to experience the world directly through the body. It takes an incredible act of surrender to live life from the inside looking out, rather than the outside looking in – and this surrender has been her greatest gift to me.

…




Ocotillo puts us back in touch with our wild instincts. For those who have experienced trauma, sexual or otherwise, and have lost their sense of agency and self ownership, or perhaps never known it to begin with – there is no better remedy. Ocotillo helps you to reclaim your creative power and your right to truly feel. It is a plant which governs the fluids of the body as well as the fluidity with which we move, and move through the world. Ocotillo is the newly installed gatekeeper, minding the dams which have held back your tears for too long and allowing them to flow like rivers full with Salmon once more.



When we feel stuck in life, like we've reached some invisible roadblock in the path, it is often due to repressed memories, unprocessed emotion, stagnation of the Spirit. Without careful attention, these things accumulate within our bodies and our hearts, the pressure growing ever greater and as it fills us by turns with a peculiar mixture of grief and anger, anxiety and restlessness. Ocotillo is a plant which goes straight to the root of our discomfort, in order to find resolution once and for all and to leave us feeling spacious and at ease in the world, once more. She is a plant who teaches us to dance gracefully with our shadow; to embrace the darkness of grief and wade through murky waters of long forgotten pain.





Ocotillo stokes the creative fire which lives within the womb, belly, and sexual centers, returning Eros to our world, renewing sexual vitality, and re-awakening the body to the electric sensations present in all of Life.  Her medicine invites you to speak your truth without apology, to stand your ground and stand up for who and what are important to you.  She reminds us how to reclaim our bodies, our time, and our pleasure as belonging solely to us and no one else.  Her medicine aids us in deconstructing the stories we tell ourselves about our bodies, our sexuality, and our respective pasts so that they may soften and take new form as we move toward blossoming.
She is particularly indicated for low vitality, lack of appetite, feelings of constant overwhelmed, a tendency toward emotional outbursts, and general sense of stagnation in the womb or pelvis.


Order The Ocotillo Elixir Here



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Place your hands over your womb or your belly or some other part of your body where you sense there is at once, power and vulnerability. Just make contact part of your being. Invite it to relax. To really relax.  Invite it to take up space, to spill forward. Let go of gripping. To just let go.  Make a conscious effort to release the tension you may unconsciously regard this part of your body with. Sit with this softness. How does it feel? Wildly uncomfortable? Familiar? Arousing? Terrifying? This is all valuable information.


And now, yourself listening to the language of your body, to the sensations and images that arise from within, ask yourself these questions...




What can I do to create safety for myself,
for this part of my body?

What do I need that I am not getting?

How can I ask for it?

What do I truly long for, even if it scares me to want it?

How can I make space for this longing?


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On Loving What Is

1/24/2016

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A • M E D I C I N E • T A L E
​
I spent a recent morning wandering about my favorite wooded creekside, offering Prayers and Pearls to the Waterfalls, Songs to the Stones, the Smoke of Tobacco and Rose petals to the Juniper Trees which asked for it. I gathered Yaupon Holly, and searched high and low for Oyster Mushrooms, revisiting all of the fallen logs and decaying stumps I'd gathered them on previously. Determined but having found none, my hunger for lunch began to eclipse my hunger for the Wild. Just as I prepared to leave the forest, I came upon this huge stump, filled with pliable and fragrant Reishi [Ganoderma sessile].

As I knelt down in the soft duff to greet and ask permission to gather the glistening Reishi, I was reminded of how important it is to release expectations surrounding the form that medicine takes. You never know what gem you may stumble upon when you're open to simply receiving Life's gifts as they appear.

It is rare that I set out to harvest any one thing in particular, preferring instead to allow myself to be guided toward those medicines which call to my Heart, rather than my Head. Finding the powerfully medicinal Reishi, when I'd been single-mindedly searching for edible Oysters reminded me of this teaching, which extends far beyond fungi.

When our prayers and longings are answered, they often don't look quite as we'd expected or hoped. But I think that's okay. And, I am totally certain that the intelligent force which graciously brought these gifts into our lives is infinitely more mysterious and wise than we could ever comprehend with the mind alone. We must trust the form in which life delivers to us, the gifts of our Medicine, and we must do it not with the Head, but the Heart.

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What such gifts exist in your world?

How can you honor and embrace them exactly as they are?

​H o w    c a n    y o u    c h o o s e    t o    l o v e    w h a t    i s ?



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In California

1/17/2016

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p r e s s

p l a y






C A L I F O R N I A ❤️



When we travel we fall in Love. Not only with the people we meet but with the land which holds us and guides our journey. On the day after Christmas I boarded a plane to California with no plans for what would happen once I arrived. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made. The California Coast welcomed me with connections I could not have anticipated and a spontaneous itinerary that I couldn't have planned even if I'd tried. In less than a week I made my way from Santa Cruz to Mendocino and back again, finding myself in the arms and homes of so many dear friends along the way.



The crashing Ocean sang to me, a song of the Earth I'd never heard before, and my Selkie heart leapt toward her in recognition. The emerald groves of Redwoods remembered my name and greeted me with a familiarity as warm and real as any of my human relations. California knows me and her voice echoes still in my being. I look forward to returning to honor and deepen my intimacy with this Land in 2016. Stay tuned for more details and a full schedule of plant walks, medicine making classes, Full Moon ceremonies, and other very special new offerings. Big and beautiful, wild and healing things are on the horizon. Thank you for holding me so sweetly California.





A major highlight of the trip was the opportunity to spend some time with my Ninety-Five year old grandmother!  She walks faster than I do, writes memoirs at a prodigious rate and is in truly excellent health.  Her advice for a long and healthy life?  Good genes and martinis.


In addition to the time spent with my human Elders, I savored the time spent held within the ancient Redwood forests. There were many moments along the journey that felt as though within a dream. Gathering fallen Usnea and Fir as I walked slow through the moist cold air surrounding the trees, stopping to marvel at mushrooms growing along the rain-softened path.











how good it was

to return to that

ancient embrace













The final morning of 2015 was spent in a dewy daybreak petal meditation, crouched before the calendula and borage and reflecting on the year's end in Rachel + Catherine's Winter Garden.


I can't imagine a better way to have welcomed the new year. My heart was full of love and deep peace and my belly was full of delicious wild mushrooms. Many thanks to Vicky and Hannah for your generous hospitality and to Ayana for your truly enchanting friendship and epic array of foraged fungi. Dancing my way into 2016 with y'all was just the Medicine I needed.



On the first morning of 2016 I awoke in the aptly named Sunrise Cabin atop a wild + high ridge over looking a tremendous valley.






On New Year's Day, I resolved to dissolve. The overcast and icy day made for a truly special warm water meditation -- a ritual that I hope will become a tradition for all New Years to come.








From Mendocino, I headed back down the coast toward Santa Cruz where I was united with more wise Woman friends and had a personal audience with the Ocean, herself.












I am captivated by the beauty of the Ocean; by the violence of waves crashing against rocks, waves crashing against rocks. The Ocean has something very important to say to say to us, though her churning message is spoken in a language that has no words, and has been forgotten by most.









Mornings in the garden with my deep + fierce friend Khalsa.



Each time I am met by this old friend she works her magic on my womb.  Through her tender and tough touch, she reaches the places in my body that have endeavored to solidify into something other than soft and supple flesh.  During her the treatment she gave me, on the floor of her Santa Cruz bungalow, I saw visions of desert temples, obscured by wind and sand, but more lovely than I can describe and oh so close at hand.  It was a feeling of returning to the most sacred and unimaginably beautiful place within myself -- the Temple within.  If you have the opportunity to receive Mayan Abdominal Massage or any kind of healing touch surrounding your womb, I hope you will make space for it and for the healing it can unfold. 



T h e    m e d i c i n e    y o u    n e e d    w i l l

a l w a y s    f i n d    y o u ,    s o m e h o w .












In many ways, I never wanted this trip to end.  I could have gathered Redwood and Fir and Yerba Santa and Marigolds forever; sat and stared at the Ocean for days.  But as my journey drew to a close, I was happy to make one last stop.  Early in the morning, Khalsa and I set out to wind through the misty shrouded Emerald Forest toward Bonny Doon, where we visited Kelci to sip Chamomile Tea and luxuriate in the Wonderland of her hillside Garden.




As it turned out, the end of this trip, didn't feel like an ending at all.  It felt more like a beginning -- a deepening love affair with a new place and a ripening in the many friendships I was able to cultivate and tend to during my time there.  I will be back soon, and I hope, I hope that you will take me as I am.


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The Ancestors

1/6/2016

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​My great grandmother was Malke Schluger and it was she who taught me that ancestors often communicate in strange ways. She died when she was 96. I was no more than 9. We called her G.G. – for great grandmother. I can discern the scene of her memorial now, though with some effort. Her shelves were emptied of the delicate tea cups she treasured, her ancient, sweet smelling volumes of hebrew and yiddish had been packed away or passed on along with family photos. All the pieces of her life were gone, except for a small handful of items which lingered, no one quite knowing what to do wth them. I remember the smell that permeated her home. It was the smell of burnt pots and the staleness of age. I don't remember what I felt then. Curious, perhaps. I wandered off from my family to trace my small hands along the edge of her bathroom counter and sit alone in her closet, studying the articles of clothing which remained. Many years passed and I rarely thought of her. When I did, I saw her as the young girl who came to this country from Ukrain, barely sixteen and totally alone.

In the last few years I have found myself periodically overwhelmed with an anxiety that seems to come from nowhere at all. It is a feeling that I will have to flee at a moment's notice and that I may lose everything I own with no warning. It makes me nervous just to write it. For a long time I didn't know where this fixation came from. Each time I left my house, I made peace with the possibility of losing all the things most precious to me, and each time I returned home, I felt relieved and surprised to see that the windows were unbroken, the doors still locked.

My great grandmother, Malke, was robbed numerous times throughout her life and as a young woman, was forced to leave her home in Buznevetsia. As a result, she had an obsession with knowing where her purse was at all times – an idiosyncrasy so pronounced that it has woven itself into our family mythos. This persisted into her later years and became a terrible problem when her memory began to wane. She would hide her “pocketbook”, as she referred to it, and immediately lose any recollection of where she'd put it. She absolutely refused to leave the house without it. After countless hours on their knees, searching beneath couch cushions and behind bookshelves my relatives had had enough. At the suggestion of a family friend, my grandmother sewed a small key-finding device into the lining of her mother's purse so that it could be easily located using a remote control. This proved a good solution, though she continued to find evermore unlikely hiding places. When Malke died in 1999, she was cremated. We buried her ashes in her purse.

When this feeling comes, this anxiety that does not belong to me, I have learned to I speak her name, over and over – a mantra to welcome and honor her Spirit. The feelings quiet and I am filled with comfort and a subtle sense that she is present within me. I didn't understand all of this until last Summer and it happened quite by accident.

Last May that I made a Pilgrimage to the redwoods and where I spent a week in the company of five hundred other women. There were countless small shrines among the ancient trees, flowers laid carefully upon the forest floor, mossy offerings of hair and stone carried across many hundreds of miles. A sense of timelessness filled the space between all of us, our feet bare upon the earth, our voices softened, trusting that we would be heard. It was ceremony to simply be there.

One afternoon, nearing dusk, I found myself in those woods, standing before a cavernous redwood stump, hollowed out by time to form a chamber large enough for many people to gather within. I was alone and something drew me into the darkness that lay within the tree. The walls formed by the inner bark were covered with photos and keepsakes left by other women. It was a shrine to honor all those who had passed into the next world. With little awareness of what was happening, I was suddenly kneeling on the ground, my forehead and palms pressed the Earth. In a state of deep peace and surrender, I wept effortlessly and the spirit of my great grandmother filled me. She spoke in a language that had no words, explaining the way in which she had been trying to communicate with me. The foreboding sense of loss I had inherited. I understood.

It was a singular experience and one I have tried to honor in the months since. Our ancestors live inside of each of us, and most of them truly wish to be of service. I leave photos of her out now. And try to create space for the messages she shares with me. So much is inherited – wisdom and fear, passion and grief, memories and smiles, and the subtlest of mannerisms. Though we may, at times, feel worlds away from our living relatives, no matter how painful and complicated our relationships with them may be – somewhere in our bloodline there are Ancestors reaching across time and space to make contact and offer us healing. Recently my great uncle has sent me stories he dictated while my great grandmother was still alive. In reading them, I see and understand many aspects of my personality, my tastes, the plants and animals I feel a natural connection to. It is healing to know where I came from; to see myself reflected in generations passed, when I come up empty handed in searching for such traces in my living relatives. The more we can understand the experiences we have inherited from those who came before us, the greater compassion and gentleness we can afford ourselves. Be curious about the past, and remember also that one day we too will become the ancestors.

In every thing that you do, in every choice that you make—take the time to ask yourself, how will this effect my children's children, and theirs after that, and on down the line for as far as you can reach through time and space . It is a great many challenges and atrocities we have inherited. May we be the ones to once again leave this world filled with more beauty, more love, and more meaningful connection to bless all our relations as they walk their paths, in hopes that they will do the same for all generations to come.

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Click Here To Learn More About
The Importance Of Connecting
With The Ancestors

a n d

Read On To Meet Two
Of Our Favorite Preparations
For Invoking The Medicine
And Magic Of The Redwood


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Redwood Elixir
with Quartz Crystal Essence

The Redwood connects us with the timelessness of Life on Earth. It re-sets our inner clock to the ancient rhythm of the forest & the trees. "Old As Time, Old As Time," is the refrain heard in the gentle rustle of Redwood boughs. The medicine of this tree has a profound ability to heal long-held and inherited grief, particularly as it relates to loss of home, loss of place, loss of way of life. It is a valuable remedy for connecting with one's own ancestral roots as well as finding communion and harmony with the Spirits of the Land where one lives. The greatest gift offered by the Redwood is sense of ancient support, one which exists beyond time or space.  It's effect is at once grounding & enlivening, making it a choice companion for meditation and tasks that require both careful focus and relaxed attention.  We recommend enjoying a single drop of our Redwood Elixir directly in your mouth to savor the flavor of the forest and ancient Earth.

This Elixir is made from an alchemical combination of the green Spring tips of old-growth
California Redwoods [Sequoia sempervirens], the essence of six truly special quartz crystals,
rich amber wildflower honey, and the patience of many Moons spent infusing...


Visit The Apothecary To Order Yours

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Wildcrafted
​Redwood Oil


Something familiar, implacable and warm, comes to mind each time you catch a hint of our Wildcrafted Redwood Oil.  It is the scent of memories; of hazy honeyed Summer days and crisp cool Autumn mornings. Those moments when everything around you feels somehow more alive, illuminated from within.

Redwood Oil encourages circulation to the periphery of the body and offers such sweet relief for cold hands and feet as well as other areas of stagnation in the body.  It dissolves patterns of muscle tension and makes the perfect all over Autumnal anointment.  Use it to gently massage your breasts for a grounding and deeply nourishing nightly ritual.  Rub generously onto belly and womb to connect back through time and space with your grandmother's grandmothers.  Add a splash to your Winter bath, rub it into your honey's beard, wear it like perfume, and use it daily like the profound medicine that it is.

Made With // Ethically Wildcrafted California
Redwood,  Organic Olive Oil + Vitamin E Oil
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Visit The Apothecary To Order Yours



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on the last day of autumn.

12/21/2015

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​Smoking roses and tobacco, this is me, clad in silk and heavy tapestry, barefoot on the steps beneath a winter grey sky. The clouds form a blanket hanging low and at last I've carved out a length of solitude sufficient to return my knowing Soul to me. There are so many layers of tender tears to unravel, each one a dewy spiderweb glistening beneath the small wet weight of its own allowing. The last year has aged me tangibly though in ways that I suspect are not visible to most. A layer of grey widens beneath my tawny blond hair, I wake slower and listen more. I don't take things personally. I feel as though nothing belongs to me. That is how I like it. I burn Juniper and Sweetgrass for my Ancestors and I listen for their wisdom. There are so many things to remember when you are an adult human, so many bills and voicemails and endless petty details. There is another remembering that comes with age too though, which eases the freneticism of the first. It's a remembrance of the Self that comes through the steady passing of Time and the weathering of great loss; it comes through truly grieving and then allowing peace to enter you once you are emptied of it. It is a good thing to dissolve. It is a good thing to be reconstituted anew. Perhaps this is the teaching of the Winter Solstice--that as the Sun returns day by day, we too return to the Self and to our own light. This is me, smoking roses and tobacco on the stoop, this is me, barefoot and crying old tears softly.
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The Scent Of Sex + Death

12/12/2015

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t h e • s c e n t • o f
S E X + D E A T H
Paperwhites have marked the nearing of the Solstice and the New Year for as long as I can recall. My mother planted dozens of them each year to place around our home and to give as gifts. My family does not have many traditions, so this small gesture is one I have carried with me since leaving home; each white bloom a cause for celebration.

A few days ago, I shared my delight in its widening blossoms with my Apprentices. Their reaction to its scent--which to me is heavenly--was surprising. One wrinkled her nose, saying that the flowers smelled of decay, of death. The other spoke of childhood memories, of Springtime in Mississippi and new blossoms that scented the air.

This smell--interpreted through the lens of both Life and Death--is found in other plants as well, the Hawthorn in particular comes to mind, and Datura in her own way. It is a smell of birth and decay, of sex and of death. It is a perfume most appropriate for this Season, when the light is waning and the Earth has returned to itself; the time when we await the return of our Beloved Sun. I am drawn to these medicines, these flowers which communicate the Fullness of both Life and Death; for it true that each is contained within the other and through embracing this mystery that both can be honored and appreciated fully. Long live the Paperwhite, sentinel of the cyclical way of the world.
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